The Parkway Murders - Memorial Day 1969 revisited

By William Kelly

As it approached, Memorial Day weekend 1969 appeared to be like many other such holidays at the Jersey Shore, but before it was over, a horror and mystery would seep in, and while the horror has dissipated somewhat, the mystery remains.

It was the quiet Tuesday before the weekend when two teenage college coeds – Susan Davis and Elizabeth Perry, arrived on 9th Street in Ocean City in a light blue 1966 Chevy Impala SS – Super Sport convertible, their hair blowing in the wind with the top down.

They took a ten dollar a night room at 712 9th Street, a rooming house near the boardwalk owned and run by Walter and Franacis Syben. They spent most of their time on the beach and boardwalk, met and socialized with other college age kids who congregated there, not yet old enough to enjoy the bands and booze at the Somers Point nightclubs when the drinking age was 21.

a s I had just graduated from high school at the time, I probably served them slices of pizza at the counter of the 9th Street Mack & Mancos. They were good girls, raised with upper middle class family values, and only once did they have an older boy buy a six pack of beer and sat in the car and drank and smoked cigarettes with their new found friends. The highlight of their stay at the shore was the beach and boardwalk, but by Friday morning they were anxious to get on the road and avoid the holiday traffic.

So at four thirty in the morning they said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Syben, hugged them, promised to write, and got in their car and headed over the Somers Point causeway. They stopped at the Point Diner on the circle for breakfast but as the bars had let out at 3 am, the place was very crowded and had to wait in line. Eventually they got a booth near the door, and invited some college boys standing in line to sit with them.

The boys insisted on picking up their check, and the girls left the diner around 6:15 am. They drove around the circle, as a security guard getting off work saw the blue convertible leave the circle and pick up a hitchhiker, a young man, possibly with his arm in a sling, who got in the back seat. They sped off down Mac arthur Boulevard to the Parkway north, and the girls were never seen alive again.

They entered a horror that is hard to imagine, were dead within the hour. and now, over a half century later, it is still a mystery that some people think can still be resolved, if only the effort is made.

Sometime after 8 am that Friday morning a State Police Trooper on routine patrol passed the blue Chevy convertible on the north side of the road as he headed south on the Parkway, turned around at Cape May and at mile marker 31.9 – less than two miles from the Ocean City-Somers Point exit, he pulled in behind the parked blue car. all seemed normal, so he ran a license plate check and the car wasn’t reported stolen, so he considered it abandoned and had it towed by Blazer’s auto on Tilton Road in nearby Northfield.

When he was done his shift the State Trooper returned to his bar- racks and filed a report about the towed blue Chevy convertible that no one apparently read, then went on a two day fishing vacation. Blazer, who had towed the car, also went fishing.

The parents of the girls were pretty upset when they didn’t arrive home or call, and they filed missing persons reports with the Ocean City police, then rented a helicopter to follow the route the girls would have taken, looking to see if they had an accident and ran off the road.

By Monday, Memorial Day, the State Trooper returned to work and discovered the girls were missing, and were driving a blue Chevy convertible, a car that he had reported towed, but his report went unread.

Parkway maintenance worker Elwood Faunce found the bodies in a bed a leaves not far into the woods from where the car had been towed. They had been stabbed to death and probably raped.

But the three days that had elapsed since the murders had occurred made for few clues and the trail had gone cold. The boys from the diner were questioned, as were hundreds of others when the State Police set up a trailer at the diner to question transient visitors on the following Memorial Day weekend. and anyone who was around at the time recalls those girls every Memorial Day. at first Barth contacted me about articles I had written as a reporter, saying he was writing a fictionalized novel about the case -The Origins of Infamy. I asked him why he had to write fiction when the true story was more incredible than anything you can imagine. So after Infamy was published Barth undertook the research for this non-fictional account, and it is the most documented and up to date compilation of information on the murders.

While they say time heals all wounds, this one just won’t go away, and won’t, as long as the mystery remains. Some national true crime magazines have featured the story recently, but most of the current spate of publicity stems from the book The Garden State Parkway Murders – a Cold Case Mystery (Wild Blue Press, Col. 2020) by Christian Barth, a Cherry Hill, NJ lawyer who took a serious interest in the case.

If you want all the gory details, they are in Barth’s book, and he gives a good chronological run down on all of the known suspects, but the one that interests most people is notorious mass murderer Ted Bundy, who doesn’t make it into Barth’s book until near the very end.

Bundy was in the vacinity at the time, was aware of the murders, and confessed, sort of, to his prison psychologist, who had to keep quiet about it for professional reasons until after Bundy was dead.

But the NJ State Police, local police and a succession of county prosecutors are reluctant to tie Bundy to the case because it would have been the first time he committed such a crime, and because since they failed to solve it, they could feel responsible for the fifty or so other murders Bundy is suspected of committing afterwards.

In Chapter 17, of The Garden State Parkway Murders, Christian Barth writes:

“(Richard) Larsen, a political reporter who’d firt interviewed Bundy in 1972 while covering Washington State Governor Evans’ re-election campaign, was initially impressed by the young campaigner and envisioned a bright future for him…. Larsen later chronicaled his days covering Bundy’s initial arrest and subsequent travails. His book, The Deliberate Stranger, was made into a three-part NBC miniseries, with actor Mark Harmon playing the role of the deranged killer….. according to Larson’s article,’In 1975…investigators learned that during the spring of 1969, Bundy had been living in the Philadelphia area with an aunt and uncle and attending classes at Temple University.’”

Besides Larsen, Bundy was extensively interviewed by two criminal psychologists, Dr. Dorothy Lewis and Dr. arthur Norman, a Portland, Oregon clinical forensic psychologist, and a member of Bundy’s defense team.'

Bundy told Dr. Lewis that, “In the spring of 1969 I went to Ocean City, New Jersey. and just hanging out at the beach and looking at the young

↘Continued on 90 women, trailing them around. and my plan again was-I had never done anything like this before – it was very confusing, kind of, and fearful, and yet I felt compelled to continue to, sort of, act out this vision….” The vision he explained, “was some other women.”

Bundy: “Okay, so I was just stalking around the downtown area of this small resort community and I saw a young women walking along… ..I didn’t actually kill someone this time, but I really, for the first time, approached the victim, spoke to her, tried to abduct her, and she escaped. But that was frightening in its own way. But that was the first – the kind of step that ou just – that you don’t – that I couldn’t return from…..I know that I, in Ocean City, I realized just how inept I was. and so I didn’t do that again for a long time. It scared me. It really scared me.”

During Bundy’s eighty hours of talking with Dr. Norman, Bundy recalled living in Philadelphia in 1969 he went to New york City to view violent pornography at Times Square. “Talk about being pushed to the edge,” Bundy told Norman. “So after being more or less detached from people for a long period….didn’t have any friends, didn’t go anywhere, just more or less had school and then sort of entertained himself with his pornorgraphic hobby and drove to the shore and watched the beach and just saw young women liked up along the beach.”

“ you know, it’s like an overwhelming kind of vision, eventually found himself tearing around that place for a couple of days. a nd eventually, without really planning anything, he picked up a couple of young girls. and ended up with the first time he had ever done it. So when he left for the coast, it was not just getting away, it was more like an escape.”

Barth says that, “Norman was certain that Bundy was cryptically referencing the parkway murders.” as for remorse, Bundy said, “ yeah, yeah, I had this kind of extraordinary, catastrophic kind of despair. This horror. This fear of getting caught. It’s just an extraordinary trauma, you know. and one that is shocking in many respects. you tend to break all the conventions. and a lot of social taboos. and then there’s the fear of detection and apprehension when you kill someone.”

Barth writes, “Ocean City historian William Kelly also spoke with Dr. Norman in the days following the execution, offering more detail into what Bundy divulged to him in 1986. Norman explained to Kelly that he’d been interviewing Bundy during the time period to compose a psychological portrait to gauge whether he’d be fit to stand trial. The meeting took place over a dozen occasions.”

Norman said, “This has to be put into proper context...I don’t believe he was lying because he never lied to me again. This was a totally different kind of interview, not like one he had ever done before. He was talking about himself in the third person, then in the first person, and he was on a roll, so I just let him talk.”

Norman was unaware of the Parkway murders of Perry and David when he interviewed Bundy.

“I’m convinced he did it,” Norman says of the Parkway murders. “and I believe that it was the first two murders that he got into. He had no reason to lie to me, and if he was lying, he had been saving this information for twenty years just to con somebody. Or is this just an amazing coincidence, that he just happened to be there on Memorial Day before he went back to the West Coast, and two girls disappeared in that area at the time? That is an amazing coincidence then, and I don’t think he had a little book of crimes he knew about that he could use to throw his psychologist off. Everything else he told me has been borne out, so why should he lie just about that? I believe him.”

When then atlantic County Da Jeffrey Blitz talked to Norman, he said that isn’t a confession, just Norman’s psycho analysis of Bundy’s rantings. So he did nothing.

The NJ State Police didn’t send a representative to the Bundy Conference at Quantico, Va., where they reviewed unsolved cases Bundy could have been responsible for. and there’s no record of the official investigators checking Bundy’s fingerprints with fingerprints found on the car, or attempt to match Bundy’s DNa with DNa found at the scene –the murder’s skin scrapings under the girls’ fingernails.

Bundy was on death row in Florida with mass murderer Wayne Gacy, who painted a portrait of Bundy while there, and he too confessed to the Parkway murders. The State Police sent some officers down to question Gacy, but he got a lot of details of the crime wrong, and they dismissed him as a suspect.

While most if not all of the other suspects have been exonerated, Bundy hasn’t been, and he should be looked at more closely by the official investigators to determine if they can take the mystery out of this horror story that resurects itself every Memorial Day holiday weekend, and just won’t go away.

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21. *Smurgesbord, e.g.

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28. Notary Public's mark

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68. Second solfa syllable, pl.