Costel Paslaru’s Reviews > The Stranger Beside Me: The Inside Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy > Status Update

Neither girl had broken nails, no damage at all to their hands that would indicate they had a chance to fight for their lives.
Pathologist Wood had been in practice for sixteen years; he had never seen anything like what he was seeing before him.
Rage, hate, animalistic mutilation. And why?

Karen did not remember anything either. She too had been sleeping when the man had hammered blows on her head.

"He (Ted) is the most cocky person I have ever faced. He tells his lawyer what to do. He arrives carrying armloads of books, as if he were an attorney himself. He sends notes to the judge and calls him at night. He refuses to talk to me or any other prosecutor."

Ted was quite intoxicated as he hugged me outside the tavern, and then disappeared into the misty rain. I would see him again, twice, after we said goodbye, but I would never see him again as a free man.

Meg was mortified, but she continued. "Sometimes, after I was asleep at night, I'd wake up and find him under the covers. He was looking at... at my body... with a flashlight."

His juvenile records were shredded, and they didn't know of his long-ago arrests for car theft and burglary. Meg hadn't told them that she knew Ted has stolen television sets, even while he was an honor student at the University. There was a great deal she hadn't yet told them.

Was the man they sought so highly motivated by sexual frenzy that he would need to seize two victims within a four-hour time span? It would seem that even the most maniacally potent male might have been exhausted and satiated after one attack. Why then would he return to the same park and take away another woman only four hours later?

In Seattle, in his offices at the Seattle Police Department, Captain Herb Swindler opened the sealed envelope I’d delivered from the astrologer. A slip of paper read, “If the pattern continues, the next disappearance will occur on the weekend of July 13th to 15th.” He felt a chill. It had come true. Twice.

Construction work was going on on each campus where the girls were missing.

Someone in the grip of a maniacal rage had found her asleep and vented that anger. Detectives could find no motive at all; the victim was a friendly, shy girl who had no enemies. She had to have been a chance victim, attacked simply because someone who knew she slept alone in her basement room, had perhaps seen her through a window, found the basement door unlocked.