PARENTS ARE LEFT TO WONDER

Ann Marie Burr had straight blondish-brown hair, just like the 35 women and girls police believe died at the hands of Ted Bundy.

When she vanished from her home in Tacoma, Wash., Bundy lived just two miles away. Burr’s father swears he saw Bundy two blocks from his house that morning.

That was more than 27 years ago. Ann Marie Burr was 8. Ted Bundy was 14.

It sounds preposterous. Not even Bundy, one of the country’s best known serial killers, could have committed murder at such a young age. Or could he?

Last week, when Bundy’s execution date was scheduled for 7 a.m. today, police in Washington decided to try to question him about the disappearance or murder of women and girls in their state.

Tacoma police were intrigued enough by the circumstances of Ann Marie’s disappearance to ask a Washington attorney general’s investigator to interview Bundy about the case.

“It fits his style,” said Tacoma police spokesman Mark Mann. “It makes sense to check him out. He was in that area as a paper boy. The speculation was always that this girl might have been talked out of her house. We want to ask him.”

The investigator, Robert Keppel, asked Bundy about the case but got no answer, Mann said.

Donald and Beverly Burr, Ann Marie’s parents, are desperate to know if Bundy caused the tragedy that has haunted them since Aug. 31, 1961.

“All these years, we never really knew if she was dead, or held against her will, or what,” 61-year-old Beverly Burr said in a telephone interview from her Tacoma home Monday. “Even if it was a hideous death, and I’m sure it was, we would know. We could have a service for her.”

Ann Marie was the oldest of the Burrs’ four children. She was five days from starting the third grade. She was good at art and liked to design things.

Beverly Burr said the last time she saw her daughter was about 11 p.m. on Aug. 30. It was raining hard. The girl’s 3-year-old sister, Mary, started crying.

“She came into our bedroom and said, ‘Mother, Mary’s crying.’ But she said she would take care of her.”

Ann Marie’s mother got up at 5 the next morning. The girl was not in her second-floor room or anywhere else in the house. A first-floor window was open. Under the window outside was a bench. The front door was wide open. Beverly Burr said she had locked and bolted it the night before.

Mann said the only evidence police ever found was a tennis shoe print in the mud beside the bench. Because the shoe print and bench were both small, police concluded that a youth had taken Ann Marie.

Bundy lived about two miles away with his mother and stepfather. He had a paper route that took him near the Burr house, although not onto the same street.

The case was widely publicized, and more than 50 suspects were interviewed, Mann said. Bundy was not among them. The girl was never found and no one was arrested.

After the publicity waned, Donald and Beverly Burr moved to a different neighborhood and tried to resume a normal life. They raised their three other children and adopted a fourth.

In the mid-1970s Bundy became a suspect in the disappearance or slaying of several women in the Seattle area. Tacoma police and the Burrs also began to suspect him in Ann Marie’s disappearance, but he was not questioned until last week because he always had refused to talk about any cases in which he had not been charged.

Another reason the Burrs believe Bundy may have taken Ann Marie is the memory that Donald Burr cannot shake.

As soon as Ann Marie was discovered missing, Donald Burr went looking for her. The frantic 35-year-old father walked two blocks to the University of Puget Sound, where he saw a boy standing near a construction site. On the site was a small pond. Burr asked him if he had seen the girl. He said no, and Burr walked on.

Fourteen years later Ted Bundy’s picture appeared on television.

“My husband says he saw the face of Bundy in that boy,” Beverly Burr said. “He always thought he should have stayed longer. We wonder if our daughter was in that pond.”