image of Ted and Ann book cover

Coming Fall, 2011

 

 

 

 

 

Ted and Ann

The Mystery of a Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy

 

by Rebecca Morris

 

 

 

Read an excerpt from the book pdf icon

 

 

 

 

Researching Ted and Ann

 

Rebecca Morris first wrote about the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr in 2007 for The Seattle Times. The story led to her friendship with Ann's mother, Beverly Burr, who Morris spent hundreds of hours talking with before Burr died in 2008.

 

Morris spent four years investigating the Ann Marie Burr case and encountered many of the same issues authorities had faced since 1961: there was no evidence, no witnesses, no credible ransom demand, and Ann Marie Burr's body was never found. By the time Morris was conducting her research, half the police report was missing, and many of the people key to the Burr case in 1961 were deceased, including two tenacious detectives who worked for decades, long after their retirement, to try and solve the disappearance of Ann Burr.

 

There were no arrests, but there were several suspects. They included a 15-year old neighbor boy; a child molester who killed himself before the police and FBI could talk to him about Ann; and an Oklahoma inmate who said he buried Ann in an Oregon field. Twenty-five years after Ann Burr vanished, as the Pacific Northwest was learning more about the world's most famous serial killer, Ted Bundy was added to the list. Was Bundy telling the truth when he told a hypothetical story about killing Ann and dumping her into a muddy pit?

 

Ted and Ann investigates fifty years of rumors, myths, facts and memories to solve the case described by Tacoma's chief of detectives in 1961 as "a handful of nothing – it was like grabbing clouds."

 

In addition to new details about Ted Bundy's childhood, Ted and Ann is about a city of great promise in the 19th century that by the mid-20th century had become what one writer described as "a boiling cesspool." And it is about two Tacoma families – the Burrs and the Bundys – and two mothers with a lot in common: each would lose her oldest child, the one with the most promise, in a horrific way.

 

Ted and Ann will be published by Dog Ear Publishing ($14.95) and as an e-book by Crime Rant Classics ($7.00).

 

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