“Oh and he had surgical gloves, too. Why did he need those?”
Both women knew the answer.
“I didn’t ask him, you know,” Daphne said, on a roll. “I just looked at the knives, the meat cleaver, the ropes and stuff he kept in his car and just accepted it. He even had a bag of women’s clothes. I just accepted his excuse that he was gathering things up to give to St. Vincent’s. I didn’t even think about whose clothing it might have been. It wasn’t mine. Oh, yes, he also had a wrench that he’d fashioned with a better handle for gripping. Today, of course, I probably would have looked for blood on it, but that was back then. Before CSI. Before serial killers, really.” She stopped herself and considered the obvious, her audience. “Ted changed a lot of things, didn’t he?”
There was undeniable truth in what she said. Ted had altered the way people looked at a man in need. In the Seattle Summer of Ted, he’d changed how safe a young woman felt walking in her own neighborhood. In the days before Ted, the only kind of footsteps that sent chills down a young woman’s spine belonged to a man who looked scary-a bum, a hoodlum.
Not a handsome young man in a suit jacket and wingtips.
“Were you ever afraid of him?” Grace asked.
Daphne turned away, her eyes welling with tears, though none fell. It was as if that one real break in emotion could be stemmed.
“One night we were in bed,” she began, her eyes still looking out the window. “You know, just saying that makes my stomach sick. Just the idea that I was in bed with a man who would rather have sex with a dead girl, a girl that he kills, makes me want to throw up. What was I to him? Just a placeholder? Nothing at all?”
Grace wanted the rest of the story. She’d talked to crime victims before. Hundreds of times. She knew that each word was like spitting out razor blades, but getting to the essence of truth wasn’t ever an easy endeavor.
“What happened, Daphne? Tell me,” she said.
Daphne nodded. “Right. We were in bed, as I said. It was late. I just woke up. It was like some kind of a strange feeling came over me and my eyes just opened. Ted was under the covers with a flashlight, Detective. He was under the covers looking at my body with a goddamn flashlight. And you know what I did about it? I mean, I was so mortified, do you know what I said to him?”
Grace shook her head.
“Nothing. I said nothing. I didn’t know what to say. I pretended that I hadn’t caught him, but the rest of the night I just laid there wondering why I stayed with someone like Ted. I thought maybe there was something more wrong with me than with him. There had to be, because what kind of a woman just looks the other way?”
There were millions of reasons, of course. She was in love. She was trapped in a relationship that she was unable to escape. She was like a lot of women back then, unsure of her own worth and whether her life was somehow diminished if she was a single woman. Grace offered none of those. Instead, she changed the subject, trying to give Daphne Middleton a break from her moment of realization that Ted had literally inhabited her nightmares, both awake and asleep.
“I know this is hard. And I am sorry. Really I am.”
“Thank you.”
“All right. Can I ask you about your hair?”
Daphne, now composed, nodded. It was as if she knew that one was coming. If she’d been the inspiration for the killings, why didn’t she look like it? Her hair was cropped, not long.
“Even if I wasn’t involved with Ted,” she said, “I doubt very much that I’d be one of those women with the same hairstyle they had in high school. You know the type. You see them everywhere at the market. I cut my hair short after the Ted stuff hit the news, but I would have anyway.”
“Was he fixated on your hair? Was that part of his obsession? You know, some people think that the hairstyle was so common back then that it couldn’t really be crucial for why Ted stalked the girls that he did. My sister wore her hair long, parted in the middle, too. When I looked at her yearbook, about half the girls wore some variation of that style.”
Daphne set down her mug and looked directly at Grace. Her eyebrows stopped moving and she spoke in hushed tones.
“I know. But I think so. I really do. I think that Ted was fixated on my hair. One time I told him that I was going to get a new haircut. Lots of girls were going shorter then. Girls on TV, girls in sports. Not everyone had to look like Jaclyn Smith.”
Grace didn’t get the Jaclyn Smith reference, but she’d look it up later online. She thought of the row after row of victims and their dark, long hair, parted in the middle. She knew from reading about Daphne that she’d had that look once, too.
She pressed Daphne for more. “Go on, what did he do?”
“He had a fit,” she said. “An absolute freak-out fit. It was completely over the top. It was almost like a tantrum. I remember him saying that if I cut my hair he’d go crazy and he might do something drastic.”
“Kill someone?” Grace asked.
“No. Don’t be silly, Detective. I thought that he was going to get drunk or something. Get on his hands and knees and beg me not to do it. He actually looked like he was going to cry. Ted had pulled that kind of stunt before-you know, acting like he was crying when all he was doing was pretending to be so, so upset.”
“So what did you do?”
“I didn’t cut it, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Daphne said. “No man was going to tell me how to dress or wear my hair. I made a decision a little bit later that Ted wasn’t the man for me. He wasn’t mature.”
“You didn’t think he was violent or that he would hurt you?”
Daphne shook her head. “I wish I could be as dramatic as some of those Bundy girls who got away from him-what are there now, about ten thousand who almost got murdered by Ted?”
It was a true statement, a kind of proof that Ted had morphed into Pacific Northwest folklore status like D. B. Cooper and Bigfoot.
“Probably,” Grace said.
“I just dumped him. I told him that he needed to grow up. And that was that.”
“How did he take that?”
“Not very well. He basically gave me the big FU. I honestly didn’t care. He was immature and he was creepy.”
There was at least one other question that never seemed to have the benefit of a decent answer. None that Grace could find. None that her mother could uncover. After Ted was released on bond in late 1975 and was awaiting his trial in Utah, he split his time between the house in Tacoma and Daphne Middleton’s place in Seattle.
The question was short.
“Why?” Grace asked.
Daphne nodded slowly. “Why did I let him stay with me? Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that a million times?”
“I’m sure you have, but why? Why did you? Did you think he was dangerous? Did you think that he would hurt you if you told him to get out of your life?”
Daphne fiddled with the stars around her neck again. “No, it wasn’t that. I would like to lay blame on the concept of a battered woman and the fear that makes someone stay close to the enemy instead of retreating. But that wasn’t it.”
“Then why?”
“It sounds so foolish, but it’s true. It was my own vanity, I guess. I think I thought that I picked him and it said something awful about me if I admitted to the world that I was going to bed with a killer.”
“But you were,” Grace said, coming very close to crossing the line. “And you did.”
“Right. Right. But seriously, the whole time I was with him, I was pretending. That’s what’s so messed up about it. I was pretending that I supported him, when all I was doing-I swear to God-was telling myself that he couldn’t have done what they were saying.”
“But you saw all those things that bothered you-the plaster of Paris, for example.”
