Fear Collector

CHAPTER 25

Sometimes memories are manufactured. Sometimes it isn’t intentional. Grace knew that from cases she worked for the Tacoma Police Department. Manufactured memories were different from so-called repressed memories. Grace’s own life history had one. She had been only a small child when it happened, but it had been told to her so many times, it seemed real. Vivid. True. On June 8, 1977. Sissy O’Hare had braided her daughter’s damp hair the night before so she could have “wavy hair.” She dressed in her prettiest pink top with brand-new cropped blue jeans. It was a special day, the beginning of summer vacation. Sunlight poured through the open curtains and a robin pecked at its reflection on the glass, an occurrence that had brought more interest than annoyance to the O’Hares.

When the phone rang, Sissy set down the hairbrush and went to answer. Instantly, her cheerful demeanor fell like a stone tossed into a very still pond.

“He what?” She looked over at Grace, then turned away toward the window and the robin. The rest of the words came from her amid gasps, in a rapid-fire fashion that pelted the glass windowpane.

“No,” she said.

And then: “What time?”

“Did he hurt anyone?”

“Where did he go?”

“Why is this happening?”

“Why does God hate all of us?”

By then her mother was crying. Sissy let the phone fall into the cradle of the receiver. Her tears were twin streams, just moving down her cheeks and dropping onto the floor.

“Mommy,” Grace said, rushing to comfort her. “Daddy?”

Conner was away on a business trip.

“No. Worse than that, baby. Something terrible has happened.”

“Mommy?”

Sissy steadied herself, her hands finding the back of a dining chair. She bent close to her daughter and held her, and then pressed her lips to her ear.

“Do not be afraid,” she whispered. “Ted escaped.”

Later the “memory” would become more complete as the bits and pieces of Ted Bundy’s story emerged and filled her memory bank. Ted’s incarceration had been short-lived. He was transferred from Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, an hour away to the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, Colorado, for a preliminary hearing. Ted was full-on Ted then-the Ted he wanted the world to see. He was acting as his own lawyer and in doing so was granted special-and, ultimately, foolish-privileges. He was able to shed the shackles and handcuffs that prisoners wore-items he said that were not only prejudicial, but made it impossible for him to maneuver around the second-floor law library. Moments later, the Pacific Northwest’s least favorite son jumped from the window, landing on the ground and disappearing into the mundane spring day.

Later when she played the exchange between her and her mother, Grace escalated her vocabulary to concepts beyond her age.

“They’ll catch him, right?” she asked when her mother told her what happened.

Sissy had pulled herself together and looked into her daughter’s brown eyes and nodded.

“Yes. I think so. The police know that they can’t let him be free. No one is safe. They told me they have already set up roadblocks all around Aspen. He can’t go far.”

The next morning the Tacoma News Tribune ran a story on the front page:

IS TED BUNDY THE REINCARNATION OF HARRY HOUDINI?

That brought a memory, too. Sissy immediately called the newspaper and screamed at the nice girl who answered the phone, telling her that in no uncertain terms the paper was glorifying a monster and in doing so diminishing the unspeakable evil that he’d done to an untold number of women and girls.

“If he killed your daughter,” Sissy said, almost screaming into the phone after being transferred to the city editor’s desk, “I doubt you’d be writing headlines like that!”

The first week of summer had not been as Grace had dreamed it would be. There were no trips to Titlow Beach and the massive saltwater swimming pool there. Her mother didn’t take her to Point Defiance for the picnic that she’d promised for that first Saturday. Instead, they sat around the house staring at the phone and playing Chinese checkers for six days-six days in which her mother ratcheted up her obsession with the man she was sure had been her daughter’s killer.

Still later, when it came on the news that Ted Bundy had been apprehended again, it had not been because of fantastic police work. It had once again been a routine traffic stop that had been the suspected serial killer’s undoing. He’d been picked up in Aspen driving a stolen car erratically with a sprained ankle. He had stolen a rifle and taken maps, food, and whatever else he could get his hands on. If he’d had a grand plan, it was a failed and ill-conceived one.

No one knew it at the time, of course, but it wouldn’t be his last escape.

In Seattle and Tacoma, indeed all over the Pacific Northwest, pockets of people-law enforcement and civilians-were caught up in everything Ted. Sissy had her group of parents and siblings of murdered children and they were busy plastering photographs of Tricia and Ted on bulletin boards in supermarkets and telephone poles throughout Tacoma.

Under the black-and-white photos were six one-syllable words:

DID YOU SEE HIM WITH HER?

When news came that Ted’s 1968 VW bug had been recovered from the teen in Midvale, Utah, to whom he’d sold it, the O’Hares all brightened and braced themselves. Sissy considered the VW a “kind of mobile crime scene” and she was convinced that if Tricia had gone with Ted, it had been in that evil car. She was equally sure that if Tricia had gone with him, she had not gone on her own accord. She knew better than to get into a stranger’s car. When FBI lab technicians examined the car-literally every inch of it under a microscope-they managed to recover some vital evidence. Among the dust and debris of a car that had been all over the west, the lab collected a number of hairs matching two dead girls from Utah and Colorado; in addition to those samples, they found one that was certainly a match with Mandy Deirdre, the girl who got away.

The living witness, as she became known.

Mandy didn’t speak of what had happened often-that was one of the distinguishing markers of a real Ted victim. The wannabes, those who needed the attention, were always there in front of a reporter’s open notebook, or the camera of TV news crew. Mandy didn’t clamber to be in front of anyone. She had come through the darkness of what-if, and didn’t want to revel in it. Because of that genuine reticence, Sissy never phoned her to find out just what was going through her mind or if Ted had mentioned her daughter’s name. It seemed like too much of an intrusion. Mandy was lucky to be alive and that kind of luck didn’t need to be sullied by the curious, or even those desperate to know something. Anything.

In early October of 1975, potential Teds were placed in a row under the harsh glare of a jailhouse lineup. Mandy, all ninety-five pounds of her, did what no one had been able to do before. She fingered him as her assailant. There was no hesitation, like there often is when reality is thrown in a victim’s face. Instead, just the confidence of a young woman with the burden of stopping evil.

“That’s the police officer who stopped me,” she said.

Witnesses in Colorado made additional positive IDs of Ted as the stranger who’d been lurking around the high school where Candy Detrick was last seen alive.

Ted, it seemed, was charged with kidnapping Mandy and attempted criminal assault and, as they would always do throughout his life, his parents stood by him. Johnnie and Louise came up with the fifteen thousand dollars sought by the court and he was released to await trial in Washington.

Grace was a girl then, but she could never forget how her mother had reacted to the news that Ted had been freed on bond. That was the day they needed a new TV.

Sissy stood up from the sofa and yelled at the TV.

“Can you believe it?” she asked, her voice nearly a scream.

She picked up her husband’s trophy and slammed it down on top of the walnut console. She was so angry. So hurt. She didn’t shatter the glass, but the tube flickered and the picture faded to that measly pattern that came on the channels for which there was no reception.

It was the first time Grace had seen her mother be aggressive like that.

“Mommy, are you okay?”

“How could I be okay? How could any of us be okay? He’s out. He’s going to kill another girl. Mark my words.”

Grace unplugged the TV. Just in case.

Sissy went for her coat and an umbrella. The weather had been nasty for two weeks, sending a cold rain over the faded fall foliage.

“Mommy, where are you going?”

“Come with me. We’re going over to the Bundys’. I’m going to put them on notice. I don’t care what they say. I don’t even care if they call the police. In fact, I hope they do.”

Grace followed her mother to the car and climbed into the passenger seat. Sissy didn’t even wait for her to buckle up; instead she just put the car in gear and drove.

“I’m sorry about the TV,” she said.

“I don’t care, Mommy. Daddy might not be happy about it.”

“I’m sure you’re right. But you know what? He gets to go to work every day, away from the news, away from Tricia’s empty room. He doesn’t have to face the reminders twenty-four hours a day.”

Fifteen minutes later, they were at the Skyline Drive address where Ted had lived in his last year of high school. Police cars and a TV crew from KVOS were outside the Bundy home, a nice wood-clad house with small, almost eyehole, windows in front.

Sissy parked behind the news van.

“Looks like I’m not the only one with the need to talk to the Bundys,” she said.

Grace followed her mom.

A police officer stopped them.

“Are you friends of the family?” he asked.

Sissy shook her head. “No, I wouldn’t say friends.”

“What’s your business here?”

“I want to talk to Louise and Johnnie,” she said.

“So you do know them?”

“No. I think Ted murdered my daughter- her older sister.” She pointed to Grace, who just stood there saying nothing, taking in all the drama around her.

“I understand, ma’am,” he said, “But you don’t need to be here.”

“Is it against the law?”

“No,” he said. “It’s just that there’s no point in it. Ted’s not here. The Bundys aren’t coming out. We just want everyone to go away, leave them alone.”

“Leave them alone?” Sissy asked, he eyes popping. “They helped to make him into whatever it is that you want to call him. I think they should come out. They should face everyone and tell us why it is they want to support a murderer.”

“He’s their son. It just is the way it is. Please go home.”

Sissy stood there, her pant legs wicking up water from a mud puddle.

“How is it that I have to go home to an empty house, a room without my baby anymore because of him?”

The officer looked over at Grace, who stood next to her mother, shivering in the cold October air.

“Because you have her to think about,” he said, indicating Grace standing quietly next to her mom.

Sissy looked down at Grace, and their eyes locked. She noticed for the first time that Grace was freezing. She didn’t have a jacket or a sweater. She was shaking and her face was streaked with rain.

“Tell Louise I hope her son rots in hell, but before he does that, I want you-any of you-to make him tell me what he did with my Tricia! Do you understand? Do you copy?”

The officer seemed to.

“We’re together on this,” he said. “I promise.” He looked around the Skyline Drive house, the cars, the people, the media. The buzzing of people all there for a reason, but none greater than the woman and her daughter. If anyone deserved answers, he was all but certain, it was that mother.