The Stranger Beside Me Read Free

to ever glance his way. He was now a man without any past at all. Ted Bundy was dead. As all of his plans had been, it was a good plan. Had he been able to carry it out to the letter, it is doubtful that he would ever have been apprehended. Florida lawmen had homicide suspects of their own to keep tabs on, and crimes as far afield as Utah or Colorado held little interest for them.
    Most young4men, among strangers, in a strange land, with only $60 to their names, jobless, and in need of $320 within the month, might be expected to feel a stirring of panic at the unknown quality of the days ahead.
    "Chris Hagen" felt no panic. He felt only a bubbling elation and a vast sense of relief. He had done it. He was free, and he no longer had to run. Whatever lay ahead paled in comparison with what the morning of January 9th had meant
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    to him as 1977 drew to a close. He was relaxed and happy as he fell asleep in his narrow bed in the Oak in Tallahassee. He had good reason to be. For Theodore Robert Bundythe man who was no more-had been scheduled to go on trial for first degree murder in Colorado Springs, Colorado at
    9 A.M. on January 9th. Now that courtroom would be empty. The defendant was gone.
    ,
    The Ted Bundy who "died" and was reborn as Chris Hagen in Tallahassee on January 8, 1978 had been a man of unusual accomplishment. While much of his life had seemed to fit into the flat wasteland of the middle class, there was also much that did not.
    His very birth stamped him as different. The mores of America in 1946
    were a world removed from the attitudes of the '70s and '80s. Today, illegitimate births make up a substantial proportion of deliveries, despite legalized abortions, vasectomies, and birth control pills. There is only token stigma toward unwed mothers and most of them keep their babies, merging smoothly into society.
    It was not that way in 1946. Premarital sex surely existed-as it always has-but women didn't talk about it if they indulged, not even to their best friends. Girls who engaged in sex before marriage were considered promiscuous, though men could brag about it. It wasn't fair, and it didn't even make much sense, but that's the way it was. A liberal at that time was someone who pontificated that "only good girls get caught." Programmed by anxious mothers, girls never doubted the premise that virginity was an end in itself.
    Eleanor Louise Cowell was twenty-two, a "good girl," raised in a deeply religious family in northwest Philadelphia. One can only imagine her panic when she found she had been left pregnant by a man she refers to today only as "a sailor." He left her, frightened and alone, to face her strict family. They rallied around her, but they were shocked and saddened.
    Abortion was out of the question. It was illegal--carried out in murky rooms on dark streets by old women or doctors who'd lost their licenses. Furthermore, her religious training forbade it. Beyond that, she already loved the baby growing within her. She couldn't bear the thought of putting the child
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    up for adoption. She did the only thing she could; when she was seven months pregnant, she left home and entered the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont.
    The maternity home was referred to by waggish locals as "Lizzie Lund's Home for Naughty Ladies." The girls who came there in trouble were aware of that little joke, but they had no choice but to live out their days until labor began in an atmosphere which was-if not unfriendly-seemingly heedless of their feelings.
    After sixty-three days of waiting there, Theodore Robert Cowell was born on November 24, 1946.
    She took her son back to her parents' home in Philadelphia and began a hopeless charade. As the baby grew, he would hear Eleanor referred to as his older sister, and was told to call his grandparents "Mother" and "Father." Already showing signs of brilliance, the slightly undersized little boy whose crop