Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy (4 page)

By 2 p.m., nine hours after Ann went missing, the police had assembled a list of what the department called “known sex perverts, child molesters, exhibitionists, sex odd balls, and weirdos,” a list that would grow into the hundreds in just days. The detectives systematically began interviewing each one. There were dozens of reports during the day that raised the hopes of police. Some were about old incidents. A salesman had attempted to force his way into the home of Mrs. F___ about a year before, but left when she said her husband was home. There were dozens of stories about Peeping Toms, unknown cars in the neighborhood, and a teenage boy opening and closing a large, long-bladed knife as he paced the sidewalk. People called to report the odor of decaying flesh and mounds of dirt that seemed to have appeared overnight. When they dug, police found a decomposed cat or a calf that had died at birth.

Officers R. Baldassin and J. Vejvoda were assigned to interview Ann’s friends, Christine K___ and Susan E___. Both had played with Ann the day before. Susie had been at the Burrs’ for dinner, and then the girls went to Susie’s home. She told police that Ann didn’t seem any different than usual. The officers wrote, “Ann didn’t say anything about running away, or any trouble she was having.” Ann was invited to stay with Susie at the girl’s grandmother’s house, but called later to say that “something came up,” and she couldn’t go. The police asked Susie’s mother to talk to her daughter in private to determine if 15-year-old Robert Bruzas, the boy who flirted with Ann, had ever been inappropriate with the girls. Mrs. E___ spoke alone with her daughter and reported back that Robert had never taken advantage of the girls in any way.

Christine told them about the neighborhood nudist. Christine said that Mr. D___ was very friendly with the small children in the neighborhood. They went to his yard to pick plums from his tree, and he gave them candy. She said that on occasion Mr. D___ kissed their hands and put his arm around them. He patted their buttocks, too. Christine’s mother said she often had seen Mr. D___ walking in the neighborhood at about five o’clock in the morning. And she said he visited her when she was pregnant, bringing her a rose each day. On these visits Mr. D___ made comments such as “I like to see women pregnant,” and, “I think pregnant women are beautiful.” Other neighbors talked of seeing Mr. D___ nude in his yard.

Detectives Zatkovich and Strand were frank with Bev and Don: maybe Ann hadn’t cried because she willingly left her home with someone she knew. Could it have been a neighbor? A relative? A family friend? The Burrs began to make a list of names the police should check out.

The conversation kept coming back to Robert. They learned from Bev that Robert didn’t seem to have any friends of his own age. Bev told the detectives, “He spends time playing with kids out on his front lawn, but they are all younger. He is such a nice boy. He spent a lot of time watching Don build a patio floor in the back. And he told me that he thinks Ann is quite a girl, or his girl, or words to that effect.” Zatkovich and Strand made a note to talk to the teenager.

Bev admitted to the police that Ann may have known children or even teenagers in the neighborhood that she wasn’t aware of. If Robert flirted with her, maybe other boys did too as they passed by on their bicycles, on their way to paper routes or Boy Scout meetings.

Bev also mentioned Leonard A___, the piano teacher Ann had studied with for two years. Ann had a lesson every Tuesday, at 3:30 p.m. Just two days before she vanished, she had completed Book 1 of the
Eric Steiner Piano Course
. She was allowed to walk by herself the four blocks to Mr. A’s___ house on North Puget Sound Avenue. This was just one example of how relatives thought Ann was given far too much independence. She had been walking several blocks alone since the second day of kindergarten.

The police had no record of Mr. A___ ever being in trouble. When they went to his house he showed detectives his studio in his basement. He did admit to “disciplining” Ann a time or two. This would have puzzled Bev if she had heard his remark because Ann loved to play the piano, loved to practice, and was always prepared for her lesson. What could she have done that warranted “disciplining”?

As afternoon became evening, the police installed a phone recording system in the Burrs’ basement. It would record all calls, including the ransom demands police assumed would come. The most famous kidnappings in Tacoma history had not been random—they had been for ransom. There was just one problem. Unlike the families of the Weyerhaeuser and Mattson boys, Bev and Don Burr didn’t have any money.

STRANGERS—AND DON’S side of the family— thought Bev and Don had money. They didn’t, but Bev’s mother, Marie Leach, did. Nearly 50 years later, Bev would share a secret that not even her own children knew. Her father, born Roy Gleitz, had come west from St. Louis at a young age, changing his name to Leach. He first worked in a haberdashery in Seattle, but wanted to be his own boss. He moved to Tacoma and opened a small grocery store, building loyalty with his customers by keeping the store open seven days a week until 11 p.m. every night, even after he had crippling rheumatism. Bev’s father pretended to look the other way when the monsignor for the Seattle archdiocese, which included Tacoma, walked out the door without paying for boxes of donuts. Every day Roy Leach wore slippers with holes, but when he died in 1956, he was worth a million dollars.

So there was some truth to the rumor that Bev and Don had access to money. If they needed to, they could offer a ransom, but only with Marie’s help.

There
was
a Donald Burr in Tacoma who presumably had more money than Bev and Don, and he also had a nine-year-old daughter. Could she have been the intended kidnap victim? Donald F. Burr was an architect and lived in nearby Lakewood. Detectives Smith and Seymour contacted him just hours after Ann disappeared and met him at his office on Mt. Tacoma Drive SW. This Don Burr told the police the complicated story of the previous 10 years of his life. Originally from South Dakota, he had served in the Army in Europe during the war. In Austria he met a girl, Lepoldianna, nicknamed Poldi. They married, and he brought Poldi to America in 1947. Two years later, the Army recalled him and sent him to Korea. He was injured and spent a year at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, the same hospital where Johnnie Bundy, stepfather to a young boy named Teddy, was working as a cook. In May 1952, less than seven months before Ann Burr was born, Donald and Poldi’s daughter, Debra Sue, was born. When the girl was only six weeks old, Poldi insisted on returning alone to Austria for a vacation.

Young Debra Sue was taken to South Dakota to stay with her paternal grandparents. Poldi returned after three months. Her husband learned that she had met an older man on her way to Europe. Poldi lasted a week back in Tacoma, then fled to Chicago where her new lover, Emile Holliner, worked at the Blackstone Hotel, which was a fixture in local and national politics, best-known as the source of the phrase “smoke-filled room.”

Donald and Poldi sued each other for divorce, and he won custody of Debra Sue. Poldi never again tried for custody, and she had visited her daughter only two or three times since her birth. Donald F. Burr eventually married a widow, adopted her two children, retrieved Debra from South Dakota, and fathered two more children. There was lingering animosity because Poldi would not give the new Mrs. Burr permission to adopt Debra.

Debra did not know that the woman with the odd accent who sent her a $25 savings bond every year on her birthday was her mother. Donald told the detectives he planned to wait until Debra was older to tell her how her mother had deserted them.

The detectives were, of course, curious: would Poldi attempt to get Debra back by staging a kidnapping? Had she hired someone who had bungled things and taken the wrong girl, the daughter of the
other
Don Burr? A mother who had walked away from her daughter and taken the trouble to see her only a couple of times in nine years didn’t sound like a woman desperate enough to plot a kidnapping. Even her old friends in Tacoma laughed at the idea. They said Poldi didn’t care enough about her daughter to try to kidnap her. Donald told police he lived in an expensive home in the Tacoma suburb of Lakewood, and it could give the impression to a kidnapper that he had money. He was very concerned that his daughter might have been the intended victim. FBI agents in Chicago agreed to check out Poldi and Emile Holliner, who were now suspects in the disappearance of Ann Burr.

Donald F. Burr also told police about the numerous phone calls he received for the other family. One time the architect’s wife answered the phone and heard a man say, “Mrs. Burr, that husband of yours is going to get himself killed. He is a matinee lover, and he better stay away from my wife.” Then the caller hung up. Several other times women called and asked if Burr was going to “come down to the apartment.”

Donald B. Burr (the one who referred to himself as “just a lunch bucket”) did own some apartments. Bev had never liked Don’s side business. Tenants were always coming and going, and he had to spend his weekends making endless repairs. Bev was always a little scared when Don would go to collect the rents.

Detectives P.P. Schultz and J. Fitzpatrick got a list of Don’s former tenants, and decided to pay his current ones a visit. Those visited included Miss Ethel F___ , an elderly woman, and Mrs. Georgia N___ , who explained that her husband was in the county jail and on his way to the state penitentiary in Walla Walla to serve 20 years for “falsifying a report on food allotment program.” There were a couple of vacancies, and one couple was on an extended vacation to Idaho. There were also a Latvian couple with a young son, and a man separated from his wife. The officers picked up a trustee from the city jail, gave him a large lamp, and had him crawl through a trap door, a cellar, and the attic. There was no sign of Ann.

All the tenants were concerned over the disappearance of Don’s daughter and spoke highly of him. They did recall one incident, though. Don Burr had evicted “a colored family” after their son struck the son of the Latvian couple. Maybe there were some lingering bad feelings toward the landlord? When the detectives asked the elderly woman in apartment A about the episode, she barked that the boy who was slugged had it coming.

The police also wanted to check out people who had done odd jobs for Don, including a Negro (as African Americans were called in Tacoma in 1961, and sometimes even now) and his 21- or 22-year-old son who had done some painting at the apartment building shortly before Ann disappeared. Bev and Don found it odd that when the son came to their house to pick up his pay a few days later, he knew exactly which alley and driveway to turn into.

In her quest to try to help the police by giving them names of people to talk to, Bev told them of her suspicions of a neighbor she described as overly polite and insincere. The detectives wrote down the information, smiled to themselves, and dismissed her tip. They had more likely suspects to follow up with.

Bev, whose only dream was to be a novelist or a journalist, suddenly found her family on the front page of the newspaper. The early afternoon edition of the
Tacoma News Tribune
featured a small story. It said that eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr, daughter of Donald B. Burr and Beverly Burr, of 3009 North 14th Street, Tacoma, was found missing from her bed early that morning. “She is believed to be a possible victim of amnesia,” the story reported.

By the second edition, later that same afternoon, a huge headline on the front page proclaimed: “Girl, 8, Vanishes From Home—Chief Hager Calls For Wide Hunt,” accompanied by the photo the family had given police. In the picture, Ann, not usually demure, is standing alone, looking solemn, her hands together in front of her. She is wearing the paper lei, a headband, a blouse with short, puffy sleeves, and pedal pushers.

Det. Richardson talked to reporters about the parents. He said that Bev and Don had “held up well” until about noon from the strain of their worries. But as the hours passed without any word of Ann, there was increasing indication of apprehension. That may have been when sevenyear-old Julie saw her mother hysterical, endlessly searching through kitchen drawers, as if she had misplaced Ann like a serving spoon.

Everyone in Tacoma wanted to hear from the parents. How was the mother coping after the disappearance of her child? Bev was almost always the parent quoted in articles. She sounded hopeful. “She may show up any minute,” Bev said. “She might have walked outside and got locked out some way. She knew her phone number. If only we would get a call.”

A gaunt and sad Bev Burr was interviewed by a Seattle television station, which had made a rare trip out of the city, with a huge camera and lights, to record the search on black and white film. “Probably the worst has happened to our little girl. And, uh, I just hope they find her,” Bev told the reporter.

Bev would second-guess herself—and the police—for the rest of her life. “I should have let her stay with [a neighbor child] that night. Ann was so trusting. It was a big mistake. We taught her everyone was good. We didn’t teach them that people could be bad.” She had her doubts about the police, too. “I always thought they should have set up a roadblock, instead of asking questions, so many questions.”

Police did not set up a roadblock, maybe because Tacoma had dozens of entrances and exits, by land, sea, and air. There was wilderness to both the east and west, and there was water, a lot of it. Tacoma is on Puget Sound, a body of water with a complex series of islands, inlets, and harbors bounded on the north by Canada and surrounded by two massive mountain ranges, the Olympics and the North Cascades. It would be easy to disappear with a small girl.

Julie, Greg, and Mary were sent to a neighbor’s home for the day, so Bev and Don could speak candidly with police and so they could telephone family members.

Don’s younger brother, Raleigh, and his wife Sharon, arrived from the small town of Grandview, in eastern Washington. Although Raleigh was 12 years younger than Don, they were close. Don, Raleigh, and their sisters had grown up in Grants Pass, Oregon.