The Stranger Beside Me
contacts with the Republican Party. He was a precinct committeeman and would become more involved in the party work as the years progressed.
    To those closest to him, Meg was definitely Ted's girl. He took her to meet Louise and Johnnie Bundy in their rambling blue and white house in Tacoma, and they liked her. Louise was relieved to see that he'd apparently gotten over his disappointment over the end of his romance with Stephanie.
    From 1969 onward, Meg was a welcome visitor at both the Bundys' Tacoma home and at the A-frame cabin they'd built at Crescent Lake near Gig Harbor, Washington. Meg, Ted, and Liane often went camping, rafting, sailing, and took
    22

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
    more trips to Utah and to Ellensburg, Washington to visit Ted's highschool friend, Jim Paulus.
    Everyone they visited found Meg gentle and bright, devoted to Ted, and it seemed only a matter of time until they married. 4
    The Seattle Crisis Clinic's offices were housed in 1971 in a huge old Victorian mansion on Capitol Hill. Once the area where Seattle's richest pioneering fathers settled, Capitol Hill today has the second highest crime rate in the city. Many of these old houses remain, scattered willy-nilly among apartment houses and Seattle's main hospital district. When I signed on as a volunteer at the Crisis Clinic, I felt some trepidation about working a night shift, but with four children at home that was the only time I had free.
    Ted Bundy became a paid work-study student at about the time I became a volunteer. While I worked a four-hour shift one night a week from 10 P.M. to 2 A.M., Ted worked from 9 P.M. to 9 A.M. several nights a week. There were fifty-one volunteers and a dozen work-study students manning the crisis lines around the clock. Most of us never met because of the staggered schedules, and the circumstances that made Ted and me partners were purely coincidental. I have pondered on that coincidence in the years since, wondered why I should have been the one out of fifty-one to spend so much time with Ted Bundy. None of those on the phone were professional psychiatric social workers, but we were people who were empathetic and who sincerely tried to help the clients who called in in crisis. All of the volunteers and work-study students had to pass muster first during interviews with Bob Vaughn, the protestant minister who directed the Crisis Clinic and Bruce Cummins who had a Masters in psychiatric social work. Through the three-hour intake interviews, we had "proved" that we were essential!^ normal, concerned, and capable people who were not likely to panic in emergencies. It was a favorite joke among the crew that we must have our heads on straight or we wouldn't be there dealing with other peoples' problems. After going through a forty-hour course which featured 23
    24

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
    psychodramas with would-be volunteers answering staged calls which represented the more common problems we might expect, we were trained by experienced volunteers in the phone rooms themselves-allowed to listen in on calls through auxilliary receivers. Ted and I were trained by Dr. John Eshelman, a brilliant and kind man who is now head of the economics department at Seattle University.
    I remember the first night I met Ted. John gestured toward a young man sitting at a desk in the phone room which adjoined ours with only an arch separating us, "This is Ted Bundy. He'll be working with you." He looked up and grinned. He was twenty-four then, but he seemed younger. Unlike most of the other male college students of that era who wore long hair and often beards, Ted was clean-shaven and his wavy brown hair was cut above the ears, exactly the style that the male students had worn when I had attended the University fifteen years before. He wore a tee shirt, jeans, and sneakers, and his desk was piled with textbooks.
    I liked him immediately. It would have been hard not to. He brought me a cup of coffee and waved his arm over the awesome
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