09/03/2026
Did Ted Bundy murder Ann Marie? Rip Ann.
Sixty-five years ago today, 8-year-old Ann Marie Burr disappeared from her family's home in Tacoma, Washington. It was in the early morning hours of August 31, 1961, when Ann woke her parents because her 3-year-old sister, Mary, was crying. Her brother Greg and sister Julie were downstairs, sleeping in a makeshift fort they had built in the basement. It was around 1:30 a.m. when Mrs. Burr came upstairs to settle Mary back down and returned to bed. A few hours later, just after 5 a.m., she woke again and discovered that Ann was missing.
A search of the home turned up nothing, but downstairs there were several things that immediately stood out. The front door was ajar. A living-room window normally left open only a couple of inches was now wide open, and outside, a garden stool had been moved beneath it. Investigators would also find what appeared to be a shoe print and a single red thread caught on a brick below the window.
The search for Ann began immediately. Police, neighbors, soldiers and volunteers combed the surrounding area, while Ann's father and uncle checked construction sites at the nearby University of Puget Sound. At the time, there were deep ditches and excavations around several buildings which were under construction, and Ann's father urged police to search them. When investigators went to check them several days later, the ditches had already been covered with cement and the roads reopened.
Ann remained missing, and more than two decades would pass before another familiar name became attached to her disappearance. Ted Bundy had been 14 years old in 1961 and was living in Tacoma at the time. By the 1980s, Ann's parents were well aware of the speculation surrounding him, and in May 1986, her mother finally wrote to him herself and asked about her daughter. He denied having anything to do with Ann's disappearance and told Beverly Burr that he had been a normal 14-year-old boy at the time.
Later that same year, however, criminologist Ronald Holmes had a very different conversation with him. Holmes, who interviewed Bundy extensively, later said he spoke in the third person about an 8-year-old girl who had disappeared from her Tacoma home and described a location near the University of Puget Sound. Holmes believed he was talking about Ann, although there was never a direct confession.
Decades later, investigators tried another avenue. After obtaining a DNA profile from Bundy, they hoped evidence preserved from Ann's case might finally allow for a comparison. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough usable genetic material to connect him to Ann or rule him out. To this day, the whereabouts of Ann Marie Burr remain unknown.
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