Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy by Rebecca Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

weren’t wealthy. When Louise and Teddy arrived in Tacoma in 1951, the Cowells were living in a modest house on Alder, just two blocks from 3009 North 14th, where Don and Bev Burr moved their growing family in 1955. By then, Ted and his mother, step-father, and Ted’s young half-siblings were living on South Sheridan, still in North Tacoma. Later they moved to N. Skyline Drive, not far from the suspension bridge across Puget Sound connecting Tacoma to the Kitsap Peninsula. The Cowells, meanwhile, had moved to N. Puget Sound Avenue, still near the university, and Ted would ride his bicycle back and forth. Despite Ted’s jealousy, he and his cousin John Jr. were good friends. But by the time he was a young teenager, Ted was spending a lot of time alone. He liked to roam on his bike. He liked alleys, and there were alleys everywhere in his former neighborhood in North Tacoma.
    Ted felt his mother married beneath herself. She came from a family that produced a musician, a college president, and successful business owners. They were from the east, and while the east had more than its share of towns that smelled, Ted didn’t remember them. Ted had always been proud of how his mother had excelled in high school, how involved she had been in school activities, and how well-liked she was. That was all before Jack Worthington or whatever his name was.
    When Ted and his mother first arrived in Tacoma, Louise found an office job, and not long after she went to a church social at Tacoma’s First Methodist Church, the same denomination that had asked her to leave the young adults group when her pregnancy came to its attention. But that was back in Pennsylvania, and now she had a new identity. It was never quite clear if this young woman was gamely raising her younger brother or a son whose father had died tragically in the war, or even worse, abandoned her. She was now Louise Nelson, and her son was Teddy Nelson.
    At the church she met John Culpepper Bundy, called Johnnie, a soft-spoken Southerner who had been a cook on several large ships during World War II. He was from North Carolina, and one of 12 children. He was cooking at a military hospital near Tacoma when he met Louise. They married just a few months after meeting in 1951, and Louise soon gave birth to a girl, then a boy, then another girl, then another boy, and almost overnight Ted had not only lost his grandfather, he had lost his mother to Johnnie and to four young half-siblings. His tenuous and confusing connection to Louise became even more fragile. For a boy who felt deprived and abandoned, it was enough to make him mad. In the final hours of his life, he would express confusion over the anger he felt toward his mother.
    From a young age, Ted was a snob. Johnnie wasn’t good enough for his mother. Tacoma couldn’t compare with the east coast, and it seemed to always lose out when compared with Seattle. It’s often said that the distance between Seattle and Tacoma is a lot more than 30 miles. Of the two cities, Tacoma should have become the bigger and more prosperous. It was the Pacific terminus of the Northern Pacific Railroad beginning in 1873. Tacoma’s Commencement Bay is a better harbor than Seattle’s Elliott Bay. Tacoma had strong unions and, as Rudyard Kipling wrote while passing through in 1889, Tacoma was “literally staggering under a boom of the boomiest.” A fire started by boiling glue at a cabinet-making shop had recently destroyed the entire downtown of Seattle, helping to level the playing field a little. Tacoma could, for once, lord its success with its port and logging over Seattle, which was now just “a horrible black smudge.”
    That changed again when gold was discovered along the Klondike River in Alaska, in 1896. Seattle became the “Gateway to the Gold Fields,” the jumping off point for thousands of prospectors headed to the Yukon Territory. It was Seattle merchants who equipped them for their trip.
    By the early 1960s, the city where