Was Ted Bundy Behind 8-Year-Old Ann Marie Burr’s Disappearance?

A leading academic on serial murderers acknowledges it is possible that Ted Bundy, the charismatic killer who confessed to murdering at least 30 girls and women during the 1970s, was already active by the time he was a teenager growing up in Washington.

On August 31, 1961, when 8-year-old Ann Marie Burr vanished without a trace from her Tacoma home, Bundy was but 14. However, the boy who was known among his peers for his voyeuristic tendencies and proclivity for cruelty lived in the very same North End neighborhood. The teenaged Bundy also had a newspaper delivery route that ran right past Ann Marie’s house.

There’s been no sign of the missing girl since, and Ann Marie is presumed by authorities to be dead, though she has not been declared so legally.

Investigators believe the girl was abducted from her bedroom sometime in the middle of the night. Police revealed at the time that the kidnapper had left both the Burrs’ front door ajar and the living room window open.

Discovered outside on the ground beneath the opened window was a size 6 or size 7 shoe print, which, to some of the investigators, suggested that the perpetrator could have been in his early teens.

Bundy was arrested in Florida on February 15, 1978—five days after being named to the FBI’s Most Wanted List, and approximately four years after the start of his murderous, multi-state rampage. Police in Pensacola had stopped Bundy for speeding while driving a stolen vehicle, and officers in Tacoma perked up. But the prolific serial killer denied having anything to do with the 8-year-old’s disappearance, and claimed in a letter to Beverly Burr, Ann Marie’s mother, his “desire to harm” people hadn’t yet developed at the time of the girl’s disappearance.

Before his execution in 1989, Bundy confessed to killing 30 victims, though he was only ever convicted in three murders in Florida, for which he was sentenced to death. However, investigators were unable to identify all of Bundy’s victims and suspected him of killing dozens more.

The infamous “Campus Killer” also made repeated denials in prison letters he’d exchanged with the missing girl’s mother, Beverly, prior to his 1989 electric chair execution.

“I haven’t always thought it’s Ted Bundy,” Ann Marie's sister, Julie Burr, told KOMO 4 News during a 2011 interview. “There’s several suspects. I think my mother and father received more than one letter from [Bundy] but he in those letters always denied it.”

Detectives questioned over 1,500 individuals within the first two weeks of their investigation, including Hugh Bion Morse, 31, a former Marine who’d been suspected in the 1959 murder of 9-year-old Candy Rogers. Police could find no evidentiary link between Morse and Ann Marie’s kidnapping.

Robert Bruzas, 15, a neighbor who was said to be close with Ann, was briefly suspected after failing an initial polygraph test due to nerves; he passed the second examination. Then, in 1964, cops identified accused kidnapper Ralph Everett Larkee as a possible suspect in Ann Marie’s disappearance. Larkee died by suicide as police were closing in on his Oregon residence. No one has ever been charged in connection to Ann Marie’s disappearance.

Contact evidence that had been collected from the Burr home in 1961 was compared in 2011 to DNA evidence taken from Bundy during his incarceration. Unfortunately, a full DNA profile could not be developed from the trace evidence, and authorities were unable to link Bundy in any way to the crime scene.

Joseph Cillo, a retired trial attorney who teaches criminal justice at Saint Leo University in Florida, says that white male serial killers like Bundy almost always have “more bodies,” and further notes that Bundy spoke to officials in 1987 about his crimes.

“He says to them there are other [victims], ‘but I don’t want to talk about them,’” Cillo tells A&E + Investigation. “He claimed that they were ‘too close’ to where he grew up, and too close to his family. He said that, ‘They were young victims,’ but he never gave specifics, because at the end of the day, what is a serial killer? They are a control freak, and he wanted to control every situation.”

Cillo says that while Bundy was known to be a “mean-spirited” child, and was likely capable of committing the kidnapping and killing Ann Marie, he thinks it is improbable: “Unfortunately, for this young girl, she disappears—and granted, he was a young kid at the time—but all they have is the size 6 shoe, and that’s just about the right size for a person Bundy’s age [in 1961]. He becomes a suspect 17 years later, only because he was there at a specific time, but it’s so very circumstantial.”

According to Cillo, Burr’s father, Donald, would later recall having seen a teenage Bundy kicking dirt in a ditch during a drive across the University of Puget Sound campus. Both Donald and Beverly long suspected Bundy buried their daughter’s body somewhere on the university’s grounds.

Even if Bundy’s DNA had been a match to the trace evidence, “DNA can never prove you committed a crime, it just tells you the person was there.” Without Ann Marie’s remains, it’s impossible to know if she had been murdered, when and by what method, Cillo explains.

“Bundy loved to kill with his hands,” Cillo says. “He loved to strangle, and he couldn’t stop killing. He was addicted to it. If we knew, for example, that this little girl was strangled manually, it’d make a stronger argument for Bundy as the possible suspect.”

Additionally, Cillo questions whether an awkward, gangly teen could pull off a child abduction without leaving any trace.

“The door was ajar, the window was open and the parents said nothing in the room or on the table beneath the window was disturbed,” Cillo points out. “You want to tell me, as a younger person, that they were that careful, that nothing at all would be disturbed? It’s a possibility. But there’s a possibility there were a lot of teens living in the area at that time with the size 6 shoes.”