Fear Collector

CHAPTER 23

No one who lived in the Northwest during 1974’s summer of terror could ever forget the parade of missing girls whose photographs appeared on the front pages of all the newspapers in Washington. Before that summer, the people of Washington had assumed that killers did their evil for a purpose. To get money? To cover up another crime? Before that time, people had thought that victims carried some of the blame for their demise. They’d used drugs. They were prostitutes. The idea that a white college or high school girl could be stalked and murdered was beyond the comprehension of really anyone outside a psychology classroom or a police detective’s office.

The first of the murdered girls had disappeared from her apartment in Seattle. She was young, pretty. She had long hair parted in the middle. While she was the first of the known victims, at least seven more followed.

Daughters and sisters, just like Tricia, disappeared. Their screams were never heard. One by one. Girl by girl. Gone.

It was a long drive, better than an hour from Tacoma to Lake Sammamish State Park near Issaquah. Long after Ted Bundy was named as the suspect for the string of murders throughout the western United States, Sissy drove Grace out there. It was a field trip of sorts-the kind of excursion that they embarked on more often than those more typical of mother and daughters. Sure, they’d gone to movies together. They went ice skating at Sprinker in Spanaway. They even went to a mother/ daughter fashion show at the PLU campus. Many of their trips together, however, held a more specific purpose.

Sissy had to know what happened to Tricia. Wondering and waiting would never suffice.

They parked in the lot, their car facing the blue waters of the lake that had been the site of Ted’s most notorious and brazen kills. He’d abducted two young women, one after another, from the park in the middle of a hot July day in 1974.

Sissy led her daughter to a picnic table near the restrooms. A couple of kids played horseshoes a few yards away. A teenage boy yelled at his mother for telling him what to do. A radio played an old Beatles song. The weather wasn’t particularly great that day, but it didn’t matter to Sissy. She hadn’t brought Grace there for that kind of an outing.

“I came here with your father after we heard the news about Ted being arrested. I didn’t know where your sister was,” she said, looking up at the Cascade foothills behind them, “but I felt like we should honor the girls who came from here.”

Grace didn’t say anything. Her mother didn’t need her to respond. It was more about Sissy getting out the words and just letting them kick around in the wind until she was finished. It wasn’t that she didn’t value Grace’s input; it was that the endless loop of her obsession had no place for another person. There was no pause. Just a stream.

“He told the girls that he needed help. And they helped him. They had been raised by loving and kind parents. It was their kindness that attracted him to them. I know that. I know that as much as I’ve ever known anything. Kindness can be a weakness, Grace. Please listen to me. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want you to be harsh, uncaring. Not at all. I don’t want you to be indifferent to the needs of others. I just don’t want you to put anyone else above yourself.”

Grace nodded.

“Okay, I guess I understand,” she said.

When the words slipped from her lips they felt hollow. Deep down she knew that her mom did want her to put someone else above herself. Tricia. Her whole life was about her sister.

Sissy had brought a bag of stale bread and they walked to the shore where a small flock of mallards and one big white duck congregated. Sissy handed Grace a piece of bread.

“Break off small bits. You don’t want to choke them.” She stopped a moment and looked out at a water-skier zipping by a couple hundred yards away.

Grace met her mother’s gaze and she did what she’d been doing too much of lately-she read into it what her mom might really be thinking.

Did Ted choke Tricia?

Were the girls who disappeared from the park in 1974 aware of their fate or were they knocked unconscious?

Did they enjoy the summer sun on their faces like the water-skier that day?

Did they know their families had never, would never, forget them?

When Grace O’Hare was fourteen, her parents took her on a car trip to Utah. Coming from Washington State, where the landscape was dipped in green and splattered in blue, Utah’s vast vistas of orange, red, and salmon seemed completely otherworldly. The landscape itself suggested Mars. They’d played road games along the way-all but Slug Bug, because of the VW’s connection to Bundy. The stayed in motels with swimming pools, and one in Sandy that had a Jacuzzi-Grace’s first time in a tub of hot oscillating water.

“We need to get one of these,” she told her mother.

“If we don’t get to Granger tomorrow, we’ll all be in hot water,” her father said, with a laugh at his own pun.

Grace climbed out of the water and took one, then two of the thin white towels supplied by the Best Western. “What’s in Granger?”

“Meeting an old friend,” Sissy said.

“What old friend? Someone I know, too?”

Grace’s dad got up and went toward the gate around the pool and Jacuzzi.

“Someone who feels as we do about Ted, honey,” Sissy said.

Grace didn’t ask anything more. In fact, she felt deflated. The tone in her mother’s voice was familiar. It was if her vocal cords tightened and airflow was restricted. She spoke through lips held tautly over her teeth. Grace knew then that there would be no time in their lives in which her parents’ obsession would take a backseat to anything else. They were in a pinball game and every bumper they touched was the serial killer from Tacoma.

There was no getting away from Ted.

In August of 1975, after he’d murdered in the Pacific Northwest and moved on to kill in Colorado and Utah, Ted was arrested for the first time. It was the first instance that anyone back home in Seattle and Tacoma knew that the handsome stranger who called himself Ted was, in fact, named Ted. He drove a VW bug, too. That also fit what witnesses had told investigators that summer day at Lake Sammamish when two had disappeared. “Ted” had had his arm in a sling and asked several young women to help him retrieve his small sailboat from his car. One girl had refused because she’d seen that there was no boat and she didn’t feel comfortable getting in his car to “drive up to his parents’ house” to retrieve it. Two girls, whose only crime was the compassion they showed a man who asked for help, had agreed.

Their bodies were found on a mountain slope only four miles from the last place they’d been seen alive.

The detective who caught Ted in Granger had only done so after Ted refused to stop for a traffic violation.

Sissy started corresponding with Caswell Moriarty in 1977. She didn’t like to spend money on long-distance calls, but she never failed in having a book of stamps at the ready. She’d written to others over the years, too, but this man was a true believer in her cause. She needed that. She needed her husband and daughter to see it, too.

“See, I’m not the only one who knows that Ted killed Tricia,” she said more than one time when she needed to rally the flagging troops.

Caswell, or Cass, as his friends called him, was a pint-sized man with a walrus moustache and a swirl of molasses-colored hair. He’d taken medical retirement from the Utah Highway Patrol after blowing out his kneecap in pursuit of a jail escapee.

“The double irony here,” he said when letting the O’Hares inside his tidy house on the edge of Granger, “was that scumbag’s name was Ed Dundee. Welcome to my life.”

While her parents sat in the living room, Grace played with Cass’s dog, a small shivery creature named Taco.

“I took the file from the office. Made you a copy,” Cass said. “Figured you’d get more use out of it now than the authorities here. Florida’s got dibs on him. The SOB couldn’t have picked a better state to kill in, if you want the ultimate justice, that is.”

Sissy nodded, her eyes riveted to the eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white photograph of the objects Cass had found in the car.

“What did he say that ski mask was all about?” Sissy asked.

Cass shrugged and rolled his eyes upward. “He was a big-time skier, that’s what. Funny thing, no skis or poles in the car.”

They all looked down at the list, and the photograph that depicted each item in Ted’s arsenal.

“Handcuffs? What about those?” Grace’s father asked. Conner usually let Sissy do the talking, like she was the lead investigator and he was merely there to keep the ball rolling in the event that there was a slack moment.

“Dumpster diving. Yeah, that was his brilliant answer on that one. You know everyone talks about how smart he is, I’m not so convinced. I mean, think about it, who tosses handcuffs into the trash? Those things cost beaucoup bucks.”

And of course the next items, those were the ones that would send anyone with a scintilla of compassion into a panic at the thought of how they’d been used-a crowbar and an icepick.

“His depravity knew no bounds,” Sissy said. “I used to pray that he just strangled Tricia and killed her that way. I hoped that she could stare into his eyes and let him know that she was good, and he was a soulless piece of garbage. He didn’t do that, did he, Cass?”

Cass didn’t answer right away. He was one of the world’s foremost experts on Bundy and his crimes. Others proclaimed that designation, even kind of fought for it, as if there were some kind of honor in knowing evil better than anyone else. But he knew. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ted’s violence was never measured slowly. It was always a deluge.

“Sissy,” he said, “you’ve always known the answer. Don’t think about that. Don’t let what he did to your little girl live on like that. She’s at peace. It doesn’t matter how she got there.”

“It does to me,” Grace said, putting Taco down and stepping toward her mother and father. “I would like him to suffer more than my sister did. In order to do that, we have to find out what it was that he did to her.”

Cass nodded. “I understand, Grace. I really do. But there is no way someone without a conscience can be made to suffer. You have to be among the human race to feel, and Ted Bundy was one of those aberrations that come along every hundred thousand births. Maybe a million. He looked human, I’ll give him that. I’ll give him that some of the ladies thought he was easy on the eyes. He acted like he was. But really, it was an act. He was mimicking what others do.”

“Honey,” Sissy said, looking at her daughter, “I love you. I know that you understand.”

Sissy squeezed Grace’s hand and looked over at her husband.

It was a proud, proud moment.