Brenda Ball
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Brenda Ball
"as many as four heads"
By June 1974, as many as six young women had gone missing from Washington under suspicious circumstances. One of those who had disappeared was Brenda Ball, a young woman who was last seen outside a tavern in Burien. Almost a year later, her skull was found on Taylor Mountain, where serial killer Ted Bundy buried many of his victims.
Brenda Ball: The Washington Disappearance
On the evening of May 31, 1974, Brenda Ball went to the Flame Tavern, located at 12803 Ambaum Boulevard in Burien, near Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. A topless bar with a seedy reputation, the tavern was considered a rough place during the 70’s, and Ball was seen arriving alone. She watched the band play, and stayed until the tavern closed.
She was seen talking to one of the musicians at closing time, asking him for a ride, but he was reportedly going in the opposite direction, so was unable to help. The last time anyone saw Ball, was when the tavern had closed. She was spotted outside in the parking lot talking to a young man with his arm in a sling. It was the last time anyone saw Brenda Ball.
Her disappearance did not immediately raise alarm among her friends and roommates, mainly because of her adventurous nature and tendency to leave and take random trips, sometimes for days at a time without telling anyone. Her roommates noticed that none of her clothes had been taken, and started to grow concerned.
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They decided to contact her bank, and see if there had been any activity on her account. When they were told there had been no recent activity, they decided to call her parents, who lived in Kent. When Rosemary Arnaud heard the news her daughter was missing, she called police and reported her missing, some 16 days after she vanished.
Brenda Ball went missing during the early morning hours of June 1, 1974, and was seen wearing blue jeans, a turtleneck type top with long sleeves, a shirt style jacket and brown clog-like wedge-heeled shoes. She was described as being 22-years-old, thin, 5’3” and 112 pounds, pretty with dark eyes and brown hair that she wore long and parted down the middle.
Born on November 8, 1951, to Duane Kaye Ball and Rosemary Arnaud, Brenda was known as a “free, fun loving spirit”. She graduated from Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines, Washington in 1970, and shortly before she went missing, she was taking classes at Highline Community College. However, she reportedly dropped out roughly two weeks before she vanished.
By 1974, she had been living with two roommates in a five-bedroom house in Normandy Park, and her friends told police that she was, according to them, happy with her decision to drop out of school. Unemployed at the time, her friends said she began to “party a lot,” and on the night she disappeared, she told them she was going to thumb a ride to camp to see some other friends at Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park in the eastern part of Washington state that Memorial Day weekend.
An employee at the Flame Tavern did come forward to say they saw Ball in the parking lot, talking to an unidentified “good-looking brown-haired young man with his arm in a sling.” It is unknown when this statement was taken, but it is consistent with a similar report given to police about another young woman who went missing around the same time.
On the evening of April 17, 1974, a young man fitting the same description was seen loitering on campus at Central Washington State College, where he was using crutches and approaching young women to get assistance. That same evening, 18-year-old Susan Rancourt was last seen walking the college lawns before disappearing.
Other young women had gone missing under similar circumstances, including Lynda Ann Healy, Donna Manson, Roberta Parks and Georgeann Hawkins, who disappeared just ten days after Brenda Ball. Despite this rash of missing women, police did not initially link Brenda’s case with those of the other missing Seattle women.
Phyllis Armstrong, a friend of the missing Georgeann Hawkins claimed that on the evening of May 31, 1974, at 11:00pm, several hours before Brenda Ball went missing, she had an encounter with a man using crutches. Armstrong said the man approached her asking her for help carrying a can of gas to his Volkswagen Bug. She agreed to help.
When they reached the vehicle, Armstrong said the man asked her to get inside of it and push a button located underneath the steering wheel, starting it. She said that she started to get a bad feeling about the unknown young man, and after making up an excuse and apologizing she quickly got away. This gut instinct undoubtedly saved her life.
Brenda was older than the other girls, and her proclivity for taking off for several days at a time, made her disappearance from a seedy bar much less suspicious. For detectives, her case did not seem to have much in common with the other young women. As a result, no information about her disappearance was released until August 7th, when a statement was made by Lieutenant Richard Kraske.
He stated as Brenda Ball was “known to be gone from home for a few days at a time,” there seemed to be no link with the six other women who had vanished since January 31st. “The only possible connection,” Kraske said, “is that Brenda’s physical description was similar,” to that of two women who disappeared from Lake Sammamish State Park in July.
Those women, Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, were last seen talking to a young man with his arm in a sling, who had approached several women at the park that summer day, asking for help with his sailboat. He was seen approaching both Ott and Naslund, introducing himself as “Ted,” before walking away with each woman several hours apart. It was the last time anyone saw either woman.
Brenda Ball: The Taylor Mountain Discoveries
There was no further mention of Brenda Ball throughout 1974, and into the first few months of 1975. She had seemingly vanished without trace. Then, in March 1975, a discovery was made on Taylor Mountain by two Green River College forestry students who were searching in a thick wooded area, when they came across human remains.
A skull was found, lying among the damp, moss-covered trees. When investigators arrived, a search of the area uncovered more remains. Soon the craniums and mandibles from four people had been unearthed, along with various bone fragments and clumps of hair, girls’ clothing, jewelry, and other evidence.
Detective Robert Keppel wrote in his book, ‘The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer, “The dentition of the skull contained a pattern of silver fillings that were familiar to me. I had memorized the dental work detailed on [victim’s dental] charts and easily recognized the jawless expression of Brenda Carol Ball. My crude on-site identification was to be confirmed by a forensic odontologist three days later.”
“We photographed the cranium from all angles and measured its position to two temporary triangulation stakes. We carefully picked up the skull and preserved it in the position in which it was resting. Since dusk was setting in, we decided to wait until the next day to resume our search for the remainder of the skeleton.”
Dental comparisons were soon made and the skull found on the first day was confirmed as to belonging to Brenda Ball. The other remains reportedly belonged to Lynda Ann Healy, Susan Rancourt, and Kathleen Parks. All had suffered damage to their skulls, with Brenda Ball’s skull showing evidence of a fracture from a blow to the head.
Brenda Ball: The Ted Bundy Confessions
On March 18, 1980, convicted serial killer Ted Bundy agreed to a series of interviews with journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth. These interviews would serve as a way for Bundy to talk about his crimes, and give an in-depth perspective into the motivations for his killing spree that claimed the lives of, what detectives believed, were as many as thirty or more murders.
However, as Bundy had never been convicted for any of the Washington murders and disappearances, and not wishing to implicate himself in any crimes, he decided to talk about the victims in the third-person, giving his opinion of what he believed the killer had done to the young women.
With Ted Bundy on death row, convicted for the Chi Omega killings and the murder of Kimberly Leach, these interviews were his opportunity to talk about and essentially re-live a subject that fascinated him. Indeed, detectives were convinced that Bundy was obsessed with serial murder, with FBI agent Bill Hagmaier, who formed a special relationship with Bundy, later commenting about his almost reverence towards the act of killing itself.
On April 15, 1980, Bundy spoke about the murder of Brenda Ball. Keeping his words in the third-person perspective, which allowed him to speculate what the ‘killer’ had done to his victims, Bundy revealed the fate of Ball on the fateful June morning when she disappeared from the parking lot of the Flame Tavern in Burien.
Bundy claimed that the ‘killer’ may have changed his method when he chose Brenda Ball, by intentionally picking up a hitchhiker. With his previous victims all young college-aged women who disappeared from campuses, Bundy deliberately chose to divert attention away from this type of victim, by altering his modus operandi.
He claimed that one the evening of June 1, 1974, the ‘killer’ stumbled upon Brenda Ball by chance when she was looking for a ride from a bar. After taking her a ride in Volkswagen Beetle, Bundy said the two got chatting and he offered her the chance to go to a party back at his place, an invitation which she accepted.
In Michaud and Aynesworth’s book, Bundy said the following about Brenda Ball:
Michaud: ‘He’d take her home?’
Bundy: ‘Sure.’
Michaud: ‘It would seem terribly risky.’
Bundy: ‘If you live with someone. But he had his own house.’
At this time, Bundy was dating Elizabeth Kloepfer, but was staying a rooming house owned by the Rogers. When they arrived, Bundy seemingly offered an explanation why there was no party, and said Ball reluctantly agreed to go inside, owing to her intoxication. They continued drinking and the following sexual encounter was consensual.
However, he admitted the act itself did not gratify his desire for control and he felt the need to possess her after she passed out from the alcohol. He then strangled her to death. If Bundy is to be believed about the circumstances of Ball’s death, his version fails to explain the fracture to Ball’s skull after it was found on Taylor Mountain.
Part of his modus operandi was luring his victims through the use of a handicap, either a sling on his arm or crutches, and requesting help with putting books in his Volkswagen Bug. Once his victim was near his car, he struck them over the head with a crowbar hidden in the vehicles wheel arch. They were then handcuffed and bundled inside.
It is more likely this happened to Brenda Ball, rather than Bundy’s version in which they had consensual sex and he then strangled her. Bundy often gave conflicting accounts of his crimes, telling people different versions, most likely in an effort to withhold information on his crimes, so that only he knew the ultimate truth.
It would have been a risk to take one of his victims, still alive, back to his rooming house, and thus exposing himself to potential witnesses and possible capture. In his later talks with detectives, Bundy did make confessions, in which he admitted to taking part of his victims back to his room on 12th Avenue in Seattle.
During these later confessions, he told investigators that he cut off the heads of as many as twelve of his victims with a hacksaw, and according to Bob Keppel, Bundy revealed to FBI agent William “Bill” Hagmaier that once he kept ‘as many as four heads’ in his room. Some of his victims, such as Melissa Smith, was found to have had her hair recently washed and make-up had been applied.
Bundy told Bill Hagmaier that “if you’ve got the time, they can be anyone you want them to be”. Ted Bundy was fulfilling his fantasies with the decapitated heads of his victims, and using them for his necrophiliac desires. He also admitted to using the hacksaw to remove the victims hands, which he also carried around with him in a bag for several days.
Psychologists believed these were Bundy’s souvenirs, and that by carrying them around with him, he felt powerful because he was taking the risk of being caught. Bundy admitted to burning the head of one victim, Donna Manson, on the fireplace of his girlfriend Liz Kloepfer, commenting “Of all the things I did to [Liz], this is probably the one she is least likely to forgive me for. Poor Liz.”
On May 31st, Kloefper would later tell police about Bundy’s whereabouts on the night Brenda Ball went missing. Her mother kept a detailed journal, in which she recalled how Ted treated everyone to dinner at Pizza & Pipes. However, he seemed to rush everyone during the meal, which lasted only an hour and half. After they had all finished eating, he dropped everyone off at Liz’s house and told them he was going home.
“It was a Saturday night, and my parents came out from Utah. The tradition in the Mormon faith is that when you’re eight years old, you get baptized. And so I was going to have my daughter Molly baptized, and my father was going to do the baptism. We went out to dinner the night before, and Ted treated us all to pizza. He was in a big hurry to go after we were done with pizza.”
“The next day, he didn’t show up. He completely missed the baptism. He was probably two hours late. And after it was all done, he showed up at the church. I forget what he said was the excuse. Car trouble or something like that. I was mad because he was making me look bad in front of my parents. But, you know, never in our wildest dreams did we think he was out abducting people.”
Ted Bundy was executed on January 24, 1989, in the electric chair at Raiford. Shortly before his execution, Bundy made confessions regarding a number of unsolved cases, including the death of Brenda Ball. Her mother, Rosemary Arnaud, said that “Bundy’s death will be a relief only in the knowledge that he will never be able to kill again.”
Written by Nucleus
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