by Erin Banks
Washington investigators had initially also looked at James Edward Ruzicka for at least some of the Washington murders. Ruzicka had escaped from Western State Hospital near Steilacoom, forty miles from Seattle, the same day Lynda Ann Healy had disappeared. He had also been reported as stalking the University District, not too far from Healy’s basement room on January 31, 1974. He was recaptured in March of 1974 in Beaverton, Oregon, but although he was charged and convicted of other crimes, he could be cleared of the Ball, Rancourt and Parks disappearances.
Another suspect was a fisherman, but once he returned to shore so police could interview him, they found that he had long hair of the wrong color that flowed down his back. This cleared him of all charges.
But there is another possible Ted-sighting, which Seattle writer & photographer Maria Ackley reported to police, who appeared unimpressed, refusing to send someone to the scene of a young man with his arm in a sling stalking her friend at Pike Place Market. Afterwards, Ackley called her husband Norman, a King County Superior Court judge, who summoned a detective there immediately. But the man had already disappeared in the crowd.
According to several Bundy contemporaries, he regularly offered free rides to students from various colleges, among them Evergreen. Similarly to Kemper, Bundy may have used those as a means of staying practiced, because as several instances (Lake Sammamish, Viewmont High etc.) show, he experimented with how to approach women in a way that wasn’t obnoxious or in which he seemed too eager. Likewise, we know he stalked several of his victims (Sparks, Healy, likely Hawkins, etc.), some possibly over years, so he may have put on his arm sling and leisurely trolled to grow more comfortable with how an injured person would move, act and approach women.
In October 1974, a man named Al Bricker and his fourteen-year old son came across a cardboard box while out riding their motorcycles near Taylor Mountain. The box contained women’s panties, bras and blouses. Bricker informed the police, but when he didn’t hear back from them for days, called once more, only to be dismissed.
He returned to the scene, finding that other motorcyclists had run over the box; its remains lay scattered all around. Bricker, disappointed and annoyed with law enforcement, left it be.
[Photos of clothes discovered at Taylor Mountain in 1975 unrelated to Al Bricker]
Half a year later, Seattle’s Nick Mackie issued a statement that police had followed up on thousands of calls and cleared 2,247 suspects, many of whom were named Ted. Sadly, Bricker’s tip was not investigated, and, despite knowing how incredibly hard the little “Ted Squad” worked, one can only wonder how many other tips were more or less inadvertently ignored throughout the investigative process, and for which reasons.
Did Bundy place the box there, did another killer, or was it just a regular person who inexplicably decided to discard of a collection female clothes in the wilderness? How many more Bundy-related or unrelated cases could have been closed, even decades later, had the items been retrieved and later tested for DNA? We’ll never know.
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Source: Richard Larsen – The Deliberate Stranger
Photos: Medium, Onlyinyourstate, Dark Crime Collectibles, Seattle Refined, Pike Place Market, Classmates
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