Thursday, August 1, 2019

Life and Crimes of Ted Bundy (Part III)


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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