CHAPTER 14
Grace Alexander had read every book written on Ted Bundy. In fact, true-crime author Ann Rule’s famous account of her friendship with Ted, The Stranger Beside Me, had been required reading when she was growing up in the family’s white and gray Craftsman home in North Tacoma. It sat on the shelf alongside first editions of Of Mice and Men, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The novels were genuine and undisputed classics, of course. Grace’s mother, Sissy, insisted that Rule’s book was on par with those famous tomes.
“A story like Bundy’s deserved the ring of truth,” she’d said one night when Grace was eleven and reading the book for the first time. “ Stranger is a choir bell.”
Later, Grace wondered about a mother who would have her not only read such a book, but discuss it as if they were having a chardonnay and Brie book club meeting.
What do you think motivated Ted to lie about things that weren’t even important?
Do you think Ted has any feelings whatsoever?
What kind of a mother was Louise Bundy?
Grace had immersed herself in Ted’s life. Given the circumstances of her birth, had there ever been another path to follow? It had all been ordained by heartbroken parents, who had lost their oldest daughter, their firstborn, to a phantom.
Grace knew how Ted had been born at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont, in November of 1946. His mother’s Christian name was Eleanor Louise Cowell-though later she was known only as Louise. Grace imagined what it might have been like for a young woman finding herself pregnant. Louise more than likely lied on the birth certificate that Theodore Robert was the son of an airman named Lloyd Marshall. While no one from her family ever gave voice to the rumors, some suspected that the pregnancy was darker than a mere casual relationship between a young woman and a serviceman.
Grace’s feelings regarding Louise were like wipers, moving back and forth over an oily windshield. Louise hadn’t set out to give birth to a monster. No mother does. Sometimes Grace felt sorry for her; other times, mostly because of her mother’s stories, she hated Louise. She had a vivid recollection of the time her mother actually confronted Louise when they were out shopping. Grace was eleven at the time. Louise, dressed in a plain cotton shirtdress and shoes that were so sensible they could easily have been worn to work on a factory floor, was shopping in the linens department of the Bon Marche at the Tacoma Mall. Sissy, looking for a wedding gift and dragging Grace along, spotted Ted’s mother from a table of marked-down china.
“Stay close,” she said. She set down the oh-so-slightly chipped platter, and walked over.
Louise’s eyes fluttered a little, but she offered no indication that she knew Sissy.
“I know who you are,” Sissy said.
“Excuse me?” Louise answered without really even looking up. Ted’s mother ran her fingertips over a piece of the fabric exposed through a small slit in its plastic wrapping.
Grace’s mother reached over and touched Louise’s hand.
She was trembling a little.
When their eyes finally met, Sissy saw something that she hadn’t expected to see.
Fear and recognition.
“I know who you are, too,” Louise said, finally and softly. “I know what you believe and I know in my heart that nothing I can say would make a bit of difference to you.”
Sissy O’Hare’s heart rate had accelerated by then. She had seen the picture of Louise on the night of Ted’s execution, the phone pressed to her ear, around her the simple furnishings of a hardworking couple’s life.
“Do you know anything about my daughter?” she said.
Louise tightened her grip on her purse and stepped back a little. She kept her eyes fastened on Sissy.
“I know what it’s like to lose a child,” Louise said, her voice a slight croak. “If I could ease any mother’s pain, I would.”
Sissy, who had imagined all sorts of scenarios had she ever had a moment alone with Ted’s mother, hadn’t expected that she would feel pity. She told Grace that’s just what happened. While it spun through her mind to shoot back a cold remark about how Louise couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to have her child missing or murdered by a monster, Louise had experienced a profound loss, too.
“I imagine that you and your family have suffered a great deal, too,” Sissy said, finally, and not without compassion in her heart.
A salesclerk interrupted the conversation.
“Can I help you two find anything?” she asked.
Both women shook their heads. Louise loosened her grip on the sheet set and put it back on the shelf. There was an irony to the younger woman’s question, of course. Both women had needed help in finding answers-Sissy, for the identity of the killer; Louise, for the reason her beautiful boy had turned into the worst kind of evil.
And yet, as her mother replayed that encounter with Grace when she was a little older, it was clear that she didn’t hold Louise responsible. Grace was in the middle of a social studies course at school that introduced the nature versus nurture debate.
“We don’t know everything about what makes a person evil,” Sissy said.
“That’s only partially true, Mom,” she said.
“If you’re thinking that Ted’s mother is a factor in what he ended up doing later in life, I think you’re overstating things.”
“She abandoned him when he was a baby, Mom.”
Sissy nodded. “Yes, but she went back for him. She didn’t leave him at the home. She loved him enough to bring him home.”
Grace pressed her mother. “She led him to believe that he was her brother.”
“Those were the times, Grace.”
“He never knew who his father was. His family had wrapped up his entire young life in lie after lie.”
Sissy knew where her daughter was going, and she knew that she was probably right. And yet, she debated her right then. Grace was smart, tenacious, and well equipped to do what Sissy wanted her to do above everything else. She didn’t say it out loud. She couldn’t. She didn’t want Grace to think that her own environment, her own upbringing in the shadow of Tricia’s murder, was artificial. The love between them was genuine.
Louise Bundy may have given birth to a monster, and she’d certainly played a role in the miserable trajectory of his life, but not all of it was her doing. Grace and her mother parted company on that. Sissy felt that there was such a thing as “a bad seed” and that Ted had been evil from the outset.
One time when Grace was a teen, a story about a young woman who grew into adulthood not knowing that her grandfather was in fact her father appeared on a TV talk show. The young woman had lived a life of crime, unable to resolve just why it was that everything she touched turned ugly.
“She was born evil,” Sissy said as mother and daughter pulled weeds from a garden bed under a beloved pear tree.
“Maybe she was bad because her mother hated her?”
Sissy stopped what she was doing.
“You mean, her mother’s hidden feelings were not so hidden? Is that what you are saying?”
Grace dropped a dandelion into an old galvanized bucket. “Think about it, Mom. If she was treated like she was garbage, like she was vile, maybe she would grow up to be that way.”
“A self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe?”
“I guess it might be. Maybe we can never understand what makes people do the ugly things they do. We try, though. Don’t we?”
It wasn’t the greatest mystery in the annals of crime, but it was one that Grace pondered over and over as she tried to understand the man who would have such an influence on her life. Ted was an obsession, one that had been passed on through her own personal history and the desires of her own mother. They kept coming back to this: Who was Theodore Robert Cowell, Ted Bundy? Really? Was he the son of an Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall? A sailor named Jack Worthington? Both were names that Ted’s mother had ascribed to the man who’d made her pregnant. Over the years, the Cowells suggested that Ted was the result of incest between Louise and
