Florida
From Chicago, Bundy traveled by train to Ann Arbor,
Michigan, where he was present in a local tavern on January 2. Five days later, Bundy stole a car and drove
to Atlanta, where he boarded a bus and arrived in Tallahassee, Florida, on the
morning of January 8. He rented a room
under the alias Chris Hagen at the Holiday Inn near the Florida State
University (FSU) campus. Bundy later
said that he initially resolved to find legitimate employment and refrain from
further criminal activity, knowing he could probably remain free and undetected
in Florida indefinitely as along as he did not attract the attention of police,
but his lone job application at a construction site was abandoned when he was
asked to produce identification and instead, reverted to old habits of
shoplifting and stealing credit cards from women’s wallets left in shopping
carts.
In the early hours of January 15, 1978, one week after his
arrival in Tallahassee—Bundy entered FSU’s Chi Omega sorority house through a
rear door with a faulty locking mechanism.
Beginning at around 2:42 a.m., Bundy bludgeoned Margaret Bowman, 21,
with a piece of oak firewood as she slept, then garroted her with a nylon
stocking. Bundy then entered the bedroom
of 20-year-old Lisa Levy and beat her unconscious, strangled her, tore one of
her nipples, bit deeply into her left buttock, and sexually assaulted her with
a hair mist bottle. In an adjoining
bedroom Bundy attacked Kathy Kleiner, breaking her jaw and deeply lacerating her
shoulder; and Karen Chandler, who suffered a concussion, broken jaw, loss of
teeth, and a crushed finger. Chandler
and Kleiner both survived the attack, Kleiner later attributing their survival
to automobile headlights illuminating the interior of their room and
frightening away the attacker (Bundy).
Tallahassee detectives later determined that the four attacks took place
in a total of less than 15 minutes, within earshot of more than 30 witnesses
who heard nothing. After leaving the
sorority house, Bundy broke into a basement apartment eight blocks away and
attacked FSU student Cheryl Thomas, dislocating her shoulder and fracturing her
jaw and skull in five places. She was
left with permanent deafness, and equilibrium damage that put an end to her dance
career. On Thomas’ bed, police found a
semen stain and a pantyhose “mask’ containing two hairs “similar to Bundy’s in
class and characteristic”.
On February 8, Bundy drove 150 miles (240 km) east to
Jacksonville, in a stolen FSU van. In a
parking lot Bundy approached 14-year-old Leslie Parmenter, the daughter of
Jacksonville Police Department’s Chief of Detectives, identifying himself as
“Richard Burton, Fire Department’, but retreated Parmenter’s older brother
arrived and challenged him. Later that
afternoon, Bundy backtracked 60 miles (97 km) westward to Lake City. At Lake City Junior High School the following
morning, 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach was summoned to her homeroom by a
teacher to retrieve a forgotten purse; she never returned to class. Seven weeks later, after an extensive search,
her partially mummified remains were found in a pig farrowing shed near
Suwannee River State Park, 35 miles (56 km) northwest of Lake City.
On February 12, with insufficient cash to pay his overdue
rent and a growing suspicion that police wer closing in on him, Bundy stole a
car and fled Tallahassee, driving westward across the Florida Panhandle. Three days later, around 1:00 a.m., Bundy was
stopped by Pensacola police officer David Lee near the Alabama state line after
a “wants and warrants” check showed his Volkswagen Beetle was stolen. When told he was under arrest, Bundy kicked Lee’s legs out from under him
and took off running. Lee fired a
warning shot followed by a second round, chased and tackled Bundy. The two struggled over Lee’s gun before Lee
finally subdued and arrested Bundy. In
the stolen vehicle were three sets of IDs belonging to female FSU students, 21
stolen credit cards and a stolen television set. Also among the items was a pair of
dark-rimmed non-prescription glasses and a pair of plaid slacks later
identified as the disguise worn by “Richard Burton, Fire Department” in
Jacksonville. As Lee transported Bundy
to jail, unaware that he had just arrested one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted
Fugitives, he heard Bundy say, “I wish you had killed me.”
Florida
Trials/Marriage
Following a change of venue to Miami, Bundy stood trial for
the Chi Omega homicides and assaults in June 1979. The trial was covered by 250 reporters from
five continents and as the first to be televised nationally in the United
States. Despite the presence of five
court-appointed attorneys, Bundy still handled much of his defense. From the beginning,, Bundy “sabotaged the
entire defense effort out of spite, distrust, and grandiose delusion”, Nelson
later wrote. “Ted [was] facing murder
charges, with a possible death sentence, and all that mattered to him
apparently as that he be in charge.”
According to Mike Minerva, a Tallahassee public defender and
member of the defense team, a pre-trial plea bargain was negotiated which
involved Bundy pleading guilty to killing Levy, Bowman, and Leach in exchange
for a frim 75-year sentence.
Prosecutors were amenable to a
deal, by one account, because “prospects of losing at trial were very
good.” Bundy, on the other hand, saw the
plea deal not only as a means of avoiding the death penalty, but also as a
“tactical move”: he could enter his
plea, and wait a few years for evidence to disintegrate or become lost and for
witnesses to die, move on, or retract their testimony. Once the case against Bundy had deteriorated
beyond repair, he could file a post-conviction motion to set aside the plea and
secure an acquittal. At the last minute,
though, Bundy refused the deal, making Bundy realize “he was going to have to
stand up in front of the whole world and say he was guilty”, Minerva said. “He just couldn’t do it.”
At trial, crucial testimony came from Chi Omega sorority
members Connie Hastings, who placed Bundy in the vicinity of the Chi Omega
House that evening, and Nita Neary, who saw him leaving the sorority house
clutching the oak murder weapon.
Incriminating physical evidence included impressions of the bite wounds
Bundy had inflicted on Lisa Levy’s left buttock, which forensic odonatologists
Richard Souviron and Lowell Levine matched to castings of Bundy’s teeth. The jury deliberated for less than seven
hours before convicting Bundy on July 24, 1979, of the Bowman and Levy murders,
three counts of attempted first degree murder (for the assaults on Kleiner,
Chandler and Thomas) and two counts of burglary. Trial judge Edward Cowart imposed death
sentences for the murder convictions.
Six months later, a second trial took place in Orlando, for
the abduction and murder of Kimberly Leach.
Bundy was found guilty once again, after less than eight hours’
deliberation, due principally to the testimony of an eyewitness who saw him
leading Leach from the schoolyard to his stolen van. Important material evidence included clothing
fibers with an unusual manufacturing error, found in the van and on Leach’s
body, which matched fibers from the jacket Bundy was wearing when he was
arrested.
During the penalty phase of the trial, Bundy took advantage
of an obscure Florida law providing that a marriage declaration in court, in
the presence of a judge, constituted a legal marriage. As he was questioning former Washington State
DES coworker Carole Ann Boone—who had moved to Florida to be near Bundy, had
testified on his behalf during both trials, and was again testifying on his
behalf as a character witness—he asked her to marry him. She accepted, and Bundy declared to the court
that they were legally married.
On February 10, 1980, Bundy was sentenced for a third time
to death by electrocution. As the
sentenced was announced, Bundy reportedly stood and shouted, “Tell the jury
they were wrong!” This third death
sentence would be the one ultimately carried out nearly nine years later.
In October 1981, Boone gave birth to a daughter and named
Bundy as the father. While conjugal
visits were not allowed at Raiford Prison, inmates were known to pool their
money in order to bribe guards to allow them intimate time alone with their
female visitors.
Death Row and
Confessions
Shortly after the conclusion of the Leach trial and the
beginning of the long appeals process that followed, Bundy initiated a series
of interviews with Michaud and Aynesworth.
Speaking mostly in third person to avoid “the stigma of confession”,
Bundy began for the first time divulging details of his crimes and thought
processes.
Bundy recounted his career as a thief, confirming Kloepfer’s
long-time suspicions that he shoplifted virtually everything of substance he
owned. “The big payoff for me,” Bundy
said, “was actually possessing whatever it was I had stolen. I really enjoyed having something … that I
had wanted and gone out and taken.”
Possession proved to be an important motive for rape and murder as
well. Sexual assault, Bundy said,
fulfilled his need to “totally possess” his victims. At first, he killed his victims “as a matter
of expediency … to eliminate the possibility of [being] caught”; but later,
murder became part of the “adventure” … “The ultimate possession was, in fact,
the taking of the life”, Bundy said.
“And then … the physical possession of the remains.”
Bundy confided in Special Agent William Hagmaier of the FBI
Behavioral Analysis Unit. Hagmaier was
struck by the “deep, almost mystical satisfaction” that Bundy took in
murder. “He said that after a while,
murder is not just a crime of lust or violence”, Hagmaier related. “It becomes possession. They are part of you … [the victim] becomes
part of you, and you [two] are forever one … and the grounds where you kill them
or leave them become sacred to you, and you will always be drawn back to them.” Bundy told Hagmaier that he considered
himself to be an “amateur”, an “impulsive” killer in his early years, before
moving into what he termed his “prime” or “predator” phase at about the time of
Lynda Healy’s murder in 1974. This
implied that he began killing well before 1974-although he never explicitly
admitted to having done so.
In July 1984, Raiford guards found two hacksaw blades that
Bundy had hidden in his cell. A steel
bar in one of the cell’s windows had been sawed completely through at the top
and bottom and glued back into place with a homemade soap-based adhesive. Several months later, guards found an
unauthorized mirror hidden in the cell, and Bundy was again moved to a
different cell.
Sometime during this period, Bundy was attacked by a group
of his fellow death row inmates. Though
he denied having been assaulted, a number of inmates confessed to the crime,
characterized by one source as a “gang rape”.
Shortly thereafter, he was charged with disciplinary infraction for
unauthorized correspondence with another high-profile criminal, John Hinckley,
Jr. in October 1984, Bundy contacted
Robert Keppel and offered to share his self-proclaimed expertise in serial
killer psychology in the ongoing hunt in Washington for Gary Ridgeway who would
later be called the Green River Killer.
Keppel and Green River Task Force detective Dave Reichert interviewed
Bundy, but Ridgway remained at large for a further 17 years. Keppel published a detailed documentation of
the Green River interviews, and later collaborated with Michaud on another
examination of the interview material.
Bundy coined the nickname “The Riverman” for Gary Ridgway, later used in
the title of Keppel’s book, The Riverman:
Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer.
In early 1986, an execution date (March 4) was set on the
Chi Omega convictions; the Supreme Court issued a brief stay, but the execution
was quickly rescheduled. In April,
shortly after the new date (July ) was announced, Bundy finally confessed to
Hagmaier and Nelson what they believed was the full range of his depredations,
including details of what he did to some of his victims after their
deaths. Bundy told them that he
revisited Taylor Mountains, Issaquah, and other secondary crime scenes, often
several times, to lie with his victims and perform sexual acts with their
decomposing bodies until putrefaction forced him to stop. in some cases, he drove for several hours
each way and remained the entire night.
In Utah, Bundy admitted to applying makeup to Melissa Smith’s lifeless
face, and repeatedly washing Laura Aime’s hair.
“if you’ve got time,” he told Hagmaier, “they can be anything you want
them to be.” Bundy decapitated around 12
of his victims with a hacksaw, and kept at least one group of severed heads—probably
the four later found on Taylor Mountain (Rancourt, Parks, Ball, and Healy)—in
his apartment for a period of time before disposing of them.
Less than 15 hours before the scheduled July 2 execution,
the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals stayed it indefinitely and remanded the
Chi Omega case for review on multiple
technicalities—including Bundy’s mental competency to stand trial, and an
erroneous instruction by the trial judge during the penalty phase requiring the
jury to break a 6-6 tie between life imprisonment and the death penalty—which,
ultimately, were never resolved. A new
date (November 18, 1986) was then set to carry out the Leach sentence; the
Eleventh Circuit Court issued a stay on November 17,. In mid-1988, the Eleventh Circuit ruled against
Bundy, and in December the Supreme Court denied a motion to review the
ruling. Within hours of that final
denial a firm execution date of January 24, 1989, was announced. Bundy’s journey through the appeals courts
had been unusually rapid for a capital murder case: “Contrary to popular belief, the courts moved
Bundy as fast as they could … Even the prosecutors acknowledged that Bundy’s
lawyers never employed delaying tactics.
Though people everywhere seethed at the apparent delay in executing the
archdemon, Ted Bundy was actually on the fast track.
With all appeal avenues exhausted and no further motivation
to deny his crimes, Bundy agreed to speak frankly with investigators. He confessed to Keppel that he had committed
all eight of the Washingion and Oregon homicides for which he was the prime
suspect. Bundy described three
additional previously unknown victims in Washington and two in Oregon whom he
declined to identify (if indeed he ever knew their identities). Bundy said he left a fifth corpse—Donna
Manson’s—on Taylor Mountain, but incinerated her head in Kloepfer’s
fireplace. (“Of all the things I did to
[Kloepfer],” Bundy told Keppel, “this is probably the one she is least likely
to forgive me for. Poor Liz.”)
Bundy described in graphic detail his abduction of Georgann
Hawkins from the brightly lit UW alley; how he had lured her to his car before
rendering her unconscious with a crowbar he had earlier placed beside the
vehicle before handcuffing her and driving her to Issaquah, where he had strangled
her, before spending the entire night with her body, and later revisited her
corpse on three different occasions.
Bundy also admitted , for the first time, that he returned to the UW
alley the morning after Hawkins’ abduction and murder. there, in the very midst of a major crime
scene investigation, he located and gathered Hawkins’ earrings and one of her
shoes, where he had left them in the adjoining parking lot, and departed,
unobserved. “It was a feat so brazen,”
wrote Keppel, “that if astonishes police even today.’
“Bundy described the Issaquah crime scene [where the bones
of Ott, Naslund, and Hawkins were found], and it was almost like he was just
there,” Keppel said. “Like he was seeing
everything. He was infatuated with the
idea because he spent so much time there.
He is just totally consumed with murder all the time.” Nelson’s impressions were similar: “It was the absolute misogyny of his crimes
that stunned me,” Nelson wrote, “his manifest rage against women. He had no compassion at all … he was totally
engrossed in the details. His murders
were his life’s accomplishments.”
Bundy confessed to detectives from Idaho, Utah, and Colorado
that he had committed numerous additional homicides, including several that
were unknown to the police. He explained
that when he was in Utah he could bring his victims back to his apartment,
“where he could reenact scenarios depicted on the covers of detective
magazines.” A new ulterior strategy
quickly became apparent: he withheld
many details, hoping to parlay the incomplete information into yet another stay
of execution. ‘There are other buried
remains in Colorado”, Bundy admitted, but refused to elaborate. The new strategy—immediately dubbed “Ted’s
bones-for-time-scheme”—served only to deepen the resolve of authorities to see
Bundy executed on schedule, and yielded little new detailed information. In cases where Bundy did give details,
nothing was found. Colorado detective
Matt Lindvall interpreted this a
conflict between his desire to postpone his execution by divulging
information and his need to remain in “total possession—the only person who
knew his victims’ true resting places.”
When it became apparent that no further stays would be
forthcoming from the courts, Bundy supporters began lobbying for the only
remaining option, executive clemency. Diana Wiener, a young Florida attorney
and Bundy’s last purported love interest, asked the families of several
Colorado and Utah victims to petition Florida Governor Bob Martinez for a
postponement to give Bundy time to reveal more information. All refused as the victims’ families
believing that the victims were dead and that Ted had killed them”, wrote
Nelson. “They didn’t need his
confession.” Martinez made it clear that
he would not agree to further delays in any case. “We are not going to have the system
manipulated”, he told reporters. “For
Bundy to negotiate for his life over the bodies of victims is despicable.”
Boone was a supporter of Bundy’s innocence through much of
his trials and felt “deeply betrayed” by his admission that he was guilty. She moved back to Washington with her
daughter and refused to accept his phone call on the morning of his
execution. “She was hurt by his
relationship with Diana (Weiner]”, Nelson wrote, “and devastated by his sudden
wholesale confessions in his last days.”
Hagmaier was present during Bundy’s final interviews with
investigators. On the eve of Bundy’s
executions, he talked of suicide, stating, “he did not want to give the state
the satisfaction of watching him die”, Hagmaier said.
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