by Erin Banks

The Case

An unexpected rainstorm hit Tacoma, Washington, on the night between August 30 and
31, 1961. The Burrs, a Catholic family of six, had put their children to bed just after 8
P.M.
The storm awakened the parents throughout the night, as did their dog, Barney, who
kept barking at the storm in intervals until finally settling down.
Indeed, Barney had been barking through the night for several weeks, and whenever
they awoke, the Burr parents had heard noises outside as though someone were
sneaking around the house.
Neighbors corroborated that they had spotted someone peeping in the late evening.
Photo on the left: Courtesy of the Burrs; on the right: Beverly Burr, courtesy of
seattletimes.com

This night, however, the Burr’s eldest daughter, 8-year old Ann (*12-14-1952), had
taken her 3-year old sister Mary to the parents’ room. Mary had a broken arm and often
woke up at night, crying.
Beverly Ann (née Leach) and Donald comforted the girl for a while and then instructed
Ann to take Mary back to her room to try and sleep.
Shortly after 5 A.M. Beverly Burr descended the stairs of her home on 3009 North 14th
Street to find the living room window and front door wide open, although she and her
husband Donald later stated to police that both had been locked.  
Upon investigating her four children’s bedrooms, she discovered that Ann was nowhere
to be found.
She did discover that the garden bench had been moved from the back of the house to
underneath the window of the room Ann occupied with her sister Julie, other than on
the previous night when Mary had slept in the room with her.
Moreover, there was a footprint in front of the bench and in the back yard of the
property, too. Due to the heavy rainfall the night before, it’s unclear which size it
originally was.
The police report states it was a size 6 or 7 upon discovery.
Now starting to panic, Beverly began perusing the neighborhood but once it became
evident no one had seen her daughter, she and Donald called the police.
Police and the national guard combed the neighborhood, the case, which was
investigated as an abduction from the very beginning, was reported on by every single
news outlet large and small.
The detectives assigned to this case and who first arrived on scene were Anthony
Zatkovich and Theodore Strand.
About 1.5k people were questioned by law enforcement within the first two weeks of the
disappearance.
To help the police rule them out as suspects, the Burrs took a polygraph test, which
they passed.
Above: News clipping from the Tacoma Tribune. Left to right, Don & Bev Burr,
Detectives Zatkovich and Strand. Courtesy of Rebecca Morris.
To the right: Police academy photo of Zatkovich. Courtesy of findagrave.com

Don Burr insisted to ride along in a patrol car to help search for his daughter. And he
noticed a young man in his teens kicking up the mud at the construction site nearby.
While he may certainly have remembered correctly, Don did not assign any significance
to this sighting until many years later, when Ted Bundy was named as a suspect.
Only then did he insist he had “recognized” the killer, believing he may have buried Ann
at the construction site.
Perhaps, one may assume, to regain a false sense of closure after over a decade of
anguish.

Suspects

Long before Ann Rule first suggested Ted Bundy as a viable suspect, the police had
liked two males in particular for the abduction:

 One 15-year old Robert Bruzas (* 9-30-1945), who lived two doors down from
the Burrs and according to author Rebecca Morris allegedly spent so much
time with little Ann that she referred to him as “lover boy,” and he called her “his
girl.”
Being aware how much stock Morris puts into dubious Bundy wayfarers such as
Sandi Holt, I must recommend to take some of Morris with a grain of salt.
1964 High School Yearbook Photo of Robert Bruzas, courtesy of Classmates.com

Polygraph tests are known to be unreliable, yet it should be mentioned that while
Bruzas passed his second test, he failed the first one.
There are no records of arrest for Bruzas, he was never throughout his adult life
suspected of inappropriate contact with children and continues to live a quiet life with his
wife in Tacoma.
Keeping in mind that the majority of child molesters are never caught, the above may
not mean much necessarily.

The second suspect was Ralph Everett Larkee:

Additionally, the “neighborhood nudist” was cleared by police early on, as were known
sex offenders in the area.
A ransom demand was made by a man who turned out not to have anything with the
Burr disappearance and thus he was charged only with disorderly conduct.

Ted Bundy

Author Ann Rule was among the first who insisted upon a connection between Burr
and Bundy.
In her book, “The Stranger Beside Me,” she writes that that the boy had a paper route
that went right past the Burrs, and lived close by, although Beverly admitted that she
had never seen Bundy deliver the paper.
He lived “close by” in terms of measuring the distance by car – approximately 10
minutes – but 14-year old Bundy could

 not drive yet

Hence he would have either had to walk the distance – 1.2 hours – in the middle of the
night, or taken a bicycle which would have taken him about 20 minutes.
While the latter seems like a likelier option, the logistics of a bicycle abduction are
problematic, to say the least.
It was estimated that Burr was abducted briefly before mother Bev arose around 5 A.M.
but it is in fact unclear at what time of night or morning the girl disappeared.
Sunrise occurred around 6.27 A.M. — A boy walking with or driving a girl half his age
around on a Thursday while many shift workers and early risers may and would have
spotted them would have been spotted, and certainly, considering the era, stopped to
inquire what they were doing out and about at this hour.
That is, if Ann even went willingly. Had she not and Bundy would have had to render
her unconscious, his only option would have been to carry the girl if he was on foot. Or
transport her on the back of his bike.
The statement that Burr took piano lessons next door to Bundy’s favorite great-uncle
Jack Cowell, the latter of whom he frequently visited, is yet another Rule-ism.

Rule further claims that Ann followed Bundy around “like a puppy.”
The Burrs never corroborated that Bundy ever met or knew their daughter on a
personal level.
That a neighbor boy like Bruzas had access to Ann is plausible, but how would Bundy
have justified inserting himself into the little girl’s life?
Did Rule confuse Bundy with Bruzas perhaps? The intensity of Robert Bruzas’
interest in Ann Marie is strange, but the latter also spent much time at the Bruzas
home because she had bonded with his sister Frannie over their love for budgies.

Al Carlisle’s “speculative interview” in his book “I’m Not Guilty” poses further issues.
Although I appreciate Carlisle’s insight into Bundy’s psyche and his incredible body of
work, the decision to conduct an interview with basically himself and “speculate,” based
on his impressions, what Bundy WOULD answer to questions he usually avoided, is
unfortunate.
This passage has haunted the online Bundy community for years:

“… For a short while, he would be paranoid. When someone looked at him in a strange
manner, he would wonder if they suspected him. After all, he had a paper route there…”
2nd edition, page 147

Carlisle took this statement directly from Rule, not Bundy – as did Morris.

Psychology

In interviews with Dr. Al Carlisle, Bundy admitted to having begun withdrawing into
fantasy life early in life, around 8 years old.
These fantasies were centered around rescuing girls he had developed a crush on but
did not know how to approach or who rejected him.
As he grew older the fantasies grew more sinister; now he was imagining endangering
the young women in order to rescue them.
The next step, fueled by a combination of the consumption of True Crime Detective
Magazines, late night peeping and the violent atmosphere at home, Bundy crossed the
line to mentally harming the objects of his desire.
By 1969, aged 23, he began losing control in separating fantasy and reality:
He broke into a Seattle woman’s basement apartment he’d spied into previously,
jumped onto her bad and began suffocating her with a pillow.
The woman began screaming and he fled.
In the same year, Bundy had rented a cheap motel room while visiting his family before
starting at Temple University in Philadelphia.
His plan had been to overwhelm and rape a woman unlocking her room but he did not
succeed.
Lastly, Bundy walked up to women on the street, one unlocking her car and one
unlocking her front door, beating them over the head, escaping yet again after the
began screaming.

All of the above shows that Bundy acted rather clumsily in his early stages, and it took
years until being prepared enough to kill, emotionally as well as logistically.
So are we to believe that a 14-year old boy, who at that time harbored no murderous or
harmful urges yet, was a criminal mastermind bar none?
Who let vanish Burr without any practice or expertise, but afterwards he not only halted
his kill urge for over a decade but could not be equally successful as he started up
again?

A teenaged Ted Bundy

Did he or didn’t he? Things to consider

Bundy grew up in a home of seven. Indeed, mother Louise was pregnant with the fifth
child, Richard, during the time Burr was abducted.
She reported having woken up and walked around the house frequently throughout the
night.
Moreover, the Bundy children all shared rooms with each other which were located on
the first floor.
Even if Bundy had attempted to avoid Louise or waking the other members of the
family as he snuck past their rooms by climbing out of the window, would it truly have
been enough not to wake the siblings in the room?
On the other hand, Bundy allegedly did sneak out of the house “at night” to “run around
in the woods naked” as a teenage boy.

One commenter in one of our groups remarked,

“[B]oth [my parents] remember when Ann went missing. It was a huge deal. The Army
National Guard was storming the golf course, your back yard, the streets. They were
everywhere.
[…] Ask any Tacoma native older than 65 about Ann Marie, they’ll talk your ear off
about it!”
In her view, the fact that Bundy, while already incarcerated, denied knowing about the
Burr incident, is highly suspicious, and I would agree.
When Beverly Burr inquired herself, he responded with a brief letter of denial. But
respond he did:

He never responded to Eleanor Rose Naslund, however, and we know most certainly
that Bundy killed her daughter Denise.
Likewise, upon being given a wide array of names to ascertain whether Bundy had
murdered them, Bundy was truthful in his last days leading up to the execution.
Kathy Devine turned out to be William Cosden, Jr.’s victim in 2003. On the other hand
Bundy would have not had to confess to Lynnette Dawn Culver’s murder as he was
not even suspected in her disappearance.
There appears to be a pattern here. And thus his denial of Burr appears more credible.
 Detective Robert
Keppel's interview with Bundy

Alternative Theories

The case was immediately treated as an abduction but a classic abduction doesn’t
make much sense:
Barney barked at the thunderstorm, but not at the intruder.
Ann’s sister Mary had a light sleep due to her broken arm, kepy waking up. Yet she did
not observe anyone entering the home to violently take Burr from her bed.
And Burr would have made at least some noise. —
A child being awoken to perhaps find a hand over her mouth, would trash and gasp or
struggle for air; noise not to be underestimated in the dead of night where any sound is
amplified.
There is of course the possibility that the abductor incapacitated her before silently
removing her from the bed and home.
Did he drug her in some form? Push a pillow down on her face until she lost
consciousness?

Someone else in the group posited,

“[W]hat if this little one wasn’t a murder victim? [W]hat if she was taken and moved
elsewhere and was/is alive?
Elizabeth Smart came to mind and even though the circumstances of her abduction and
subsequent escape are much different, it was just a thought my mind was tossing
around.”

That is a fair question and police pursued a lead to a child trafficking ring in Canada for
a while, believing that they may have kidnapped and sold Ann.
The suspicion could never be proven.
Decades later, another woman claiming to be Ann surfaced but was found to be a hoax.

It’s truly unclear whether a murder had been the perpetrator’s prerogative. If the
kidnapper had been a young man she knew well, and who was possibly attracted to
children, perhaps he sought to sexually abuse rather than to murder.
If something went awry however, or he realized Ann might talk about the inappropriate
encounter, he may have snapped to relieve himself of the “problem.”
While discussing the case in the group, one commenter said she also believes the
abduction may have involved a pre-arranged meeting, which would be congruent with
some of the above ideas.
She believes that the perpetrator not only knew Ann and – due to the layout of the
crime scene – the Burr home, but that he may have offered or promised the little girl
something to coax her into leaving the house on her own rather than being forcefully
taken from it.
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A Concrete Issue (Pardon the Pun)

Many Washingtonians believe that Ann was embedded in cement at the construction
site.
In the 2010’s, there was a study conducted in the course of which pigs were buried in
cement, so as to study the delay and changes in decomposition.
Because decomposition involves gases and fluids, it creates air pockets, impacting the
structural integrity of the concrete, causing it to collapse over time.
So there is a relatively slim chance for Ann to be buried underneath the former
construction site, although we can, of course, never rule it out completely.

Author Opinions
Kevin M. Sullivan

“Well, when I was interviewing Bob Keppel years ago, he told me that he believed Ron
Holmes was Bundy’s “golden boy”, and the one he planned to confess all his crimes
to.

[…] In [a May 9, 1987] article Bundy speaks of a person “involved in a series of

[…] I interviewed Ron Holmes in his office in Louisville, and he reiterated to me the
very same story.
The argument, some have said, is that Bundy later denied having made the confession
to Holmes.
But this isn’t unusual for Bundy, as he did admit to crimes only later to deny them.
And more to the point (and especially to the point), these denials came after Bundy and
Holmes had had a falling out, which may very well have propelled Bundy into the
denial heard later by others.

“After luring the child from the house, the other person took the child to a nearby
orchard and strangled her and then probably raped her, Holmes said Bundy told him.
The Burrs, who have since moved to another North End neighborhood, said a former
neighbor maintained a small fruit orchard. The opened window found the day Ann Marie
disappeared faced the orchard and was on ‘the dark side of the house.’”

Tacoma News, May 9, 1987 article about the Holmes/Bundy interview

JT Townsend, True Crime author and journalist from Ohio, writes about his
impressions on the case in his article

“Ted Bundy’s First Victim? The Vanishing Of Ann Marie Burr.”

He permitted me to share what he had added to The Ted Bundy Research Group, a
“missing person” poster that Beverly Burr once provided to him in 2004 during one of
their interviews:
The case remains unsolved.
The Burrs adopted another girl a while after Ann’s disappearance and by all accounts
led a quiet life without further disturbance.
Don passed in 2003, Beverly in 2008.

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Photos courtesy of Tacoma Tribune, Seattle Times, Rebecca Morris, findagrave.com

Header image: Burr family.

Sources:
“Ted and Ann” by Rebecca Morris; “The Bundy Murders” by Kevin M. Sullivan; “The
Only Living Witness” by Stephen Michaud & Hugh Aynesworth; “Ted Bundy: A Visual
Timeline” by Robert Dielenberg (& silent authors); “The Stranger Beside Me” by Ann
Rule, The Doenetwork, Findagrave, The Charley Project, Tacoma Tribune, Seattle
Times.