Free Ted and Ann - The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy by Rebecca Morris Page B

the town’s minor league baseball team, the Tacoma Giants.
    When no trace of the girl was found, Det. Richard Roberts was asked what came next. “I just don’t know where we go from here,” he said. Tacoma Police Inspector Smith called it one of the most baffling cases in Tacoma crime files.
    On September 3, the fourth day after Ann vanished, the city did what Don suggested just hours after Ann went missing; it sent men to search the ditches being dug at the University of Puget Sound. Don had worried that it was a feasible place to leave a child’s body. The digging in question was in an area on the western edge of the campus, running along Union Avenue for several blocks between Adams Street and Washington Street. The five fraternities (to be known as the Union Avenue Housing), would be connected by an underground tunnel and would share a common kitchen, also underground.
    There’s no record of whether the police shared the bad news with Bev and Don. By the time they went to search the excavation sites, they couldn’t find any ditches with water. “At this time, all ditches are covered and the roads are open,” the police report noted. Traffic was driving over the spot where Don thought the body of his daughter might have been cruelly discarded.
    By Sunday, police had administered polygraphs to nearly 30 men and boys. One was 13-year-old Terry M___ , who lived about a block from the Burrs. A year before, Terry had been arrested for window peeping at the college and taken to Remann Hall, the juvenile detention center and school. What the police found especially intriguing as they took another look at him was that he liked to peep early, before 6 a.m. His family attended St. Patrick’s, he knew Ann, and his younger brother played with her. Terry had been to the Burrs’ many times, but claimed to never have been inside the home.
    Terry’s father was furious with the police. Just because his son had been picked up for peeping when he was 12, the police were trying to hang Ann Burr’s disappearance on him. Besides, the father said, window peeping is normal; a lot of boys do it.
    But the police were intrigued with all the questions the boy asked about the case. Terry asked them as many questions as they asked of him. Did they have any evidence? He mused over his own theories with the police: it must have been a prowler. Were the searchers wearing gloves? Not to preserve evidence, but in case they had to comb through raspberry and blueberry bushes which were so fierce in the Northwest they could rip your skin off? The police concluded Terry was just as good a suspect as anyone else.
    Detectives were going to the shoe stores in town, trying to track down a boy’s or men’s tennis shoe that matched the print on the Burr’s bench. They might have been Keds, but they had an unusual tread; that was their best clue so far. They withheld the information from the newspapers; a teenager, or even his parents, might hastily dispose of tennis shoes with an unusual sole.
    The police finally got 15-year-old Robert Bruzas down to the police station. “It had been brought to our attention previously that Robert associated more with the younger children than those around his own age group,” Detectives Strand and Zatkovich wrote. Robert had been a Tribune paper boy for the last 13 months, a substitute carrier before that, and he was also working at the college swimming pool two blocks west. They asked him about his friends (one was Terry M___) their ages, and if he had ever kissed the 17-year-old girl that he admitted liking. He said no. Robert admitted playing with Ann and the other young girls in the neighborhood, “probably because none of the boys around his age were in that immediate vicinity. Another reason was that he liked the children.” He told the detectives that on the afternoon before Ann disappeared, he saw her and her friend Susie as he was on his way to pick up his newspapers. Then, police gave him a polygraph. He