In the spring of 1968, Ted made a friend named Richard, a sometimes thief and drug user. Richard’s life style at the fringe of society fascinated Ted. As age twenty-one, Ted hadn’t been exposed to an outlaw element more sinister than the circle of ski-lift ticket counterfeiters he knew in high school. Stealing, especially shoplifting had come naturally to Ted since the time he was a child. The unsolicited child within him, obsessed with possessing material objects, demanded the expensive, shiny things which the rich owned. Ted felt that theft was an adventure, a game, “a kind of advanced variation on hide-and-seek.”
One night, Ted and Richard sneaked down to a beach near Seattle where landslides had pulled down a cliffside house. They were after anything they could find. Ted later came to describe the experience as “really thrilling.” Ted wasn’t a thief in the ordinary sense, he didn’t take money and he wouldn’t take merchandise for the purpose of selling it. The need was much closer to kleptomania, and it overpowered him. Yet he was never caught for shoplifting, a remarkable fact in light of the number of thefts he made. His first principle was anonymity; he wanted to be presentable but forgettable. After he had put on a good suit and combed his hair, he would down two or three beers. “I’d drink to pump myself up. I felt I wouldn’t have any inhibitions. I didn’t want to be looking over my shoulder and appear nervous. That’s important.”
Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, The Only Living Witness (New York: Linden Press/ Simon & Schuster, 1983),
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