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“Dave, you’re prosecuting the wrong guy,” said the dark-haired young woman television reporter. “Ted Bundy can’t be guilty of anything.”
Barbara Grossman was grinning as she said it, kidding Dave Yocom. She stirred her vodka tonic and watched for a reaction from the prosecutor across the table.
“What makes you think we’ve got the wrong guy?” asked Yocom.
“Ted’s just too cute,” she explained. “A sharp, good-looking law student. Hell, Ted doesn’t have to go around kidnapping girls. He can have all he wants. The first time I ever saw him I said to myself, ‘Wow, all he’d have to do is ask me to go with him and I’d go.’”
“Yeah, Barb.” Yocom forced a chuckle through his sigh. “Stick around for the trial. Maybe we can change your mind.” Around them, in D. B. Cooper’s, a small, private basement club, the tables and bar stools were already filled with the early-evening crowd of media people, lawyers, and others from the nearby courthouse. Despite the Mormons’ influence, Salt Lake City had a few watering holes—licensed private clubs—and D. B. Cooper’s was one favorite in 1976.
Nearly everyone in the place recognized Yocom, assistant Salt Lake County attorney, a longtime newsmaker. A gregarious, well-liked man, Yocom was known as an effective prosecutor, who prepared his cases well, was assigned the big ones, and usually won. And he was usually good for a quip and a quote afterward. Yet Yocom sensed that, in the crowd around him, and in the city, there were doubts and misgivings about the Bundy prosecution. Barbara Grossman, in a light-hearted kidding way, had made a point. Many people, even Yocom’s close associates in the legal fraternity, wondered if the police and prosecution hadn’t reached too far to charge Ted Bundy. The charge of attempted murder had been dismissed during pretrial proceedings. Now it was down to a charge of aggravated kidnapping.
Covering the case for KUTV, Grossman had met and interviewed Bundy occasionally during his court appearances. She had found Ted to be consistently cheerful, charming, photogenic, and newsworthy—good footage. Most reporters, viewers, and newspaper readers had difficulty reconciling the appearance of that attractive, articulate young man with the allegations against him. Yocom knew this. It would be a key prosecution problem in the courtroom—the defendant didn’t look like a criminal.
“Barb,” said Yocom leaning forward, taking a sip of his drink “I’ve got an offer for you.”
“What?” asked the young woman.
“If we convict Theodore, I’ll see if I can get him released to your custody for a while.”
“It’s a deal,’’ she replied, laughing.
* * *
It had been nearly five months since that day when Carol DaRonch had chosen Ted from among the six other men in the police lineup and written his number, 7, on a slip of paper. Even though Ted had had his long hair cut short, hours before the lineup, and altered the part in his hair, she had identified him as the man who kidnapped her from the Fashion Mall November 8, 1974. Besides Carol, two other young women, watching the police lineup that morning had identified Bundy. They recognized him as the strange man who had been seen later that same night, nearly 30 miles to the north, at Viewmont High School where Debbie Kent had disappeared. There would be no prosecution in that case. Debbie had not been found. For a while, Yocom had toyed with the notion of trying to shore up the kidnapping case against Bundy by attempting to introduce some of the circumstances—the handcuff key and the eyewitnesses’ identification—from the Debbie Kent disappearance. However, the prosecutor dropped the idea. It would have seemed an act of desperation, and those circumstances had little chance of being admitted into the DaRonch case, anyway.
The prosecution lacked hard physical evidence which could directly connect Bundy to Carol’s kidnapping. While Carol had been walked toward the Volkswagen the night of the crime, her abductor had handled the doorknob of the laundromat across the street from the shopping mall. But the Murray City police had been unable to lift a fingerprint from the knob. No latents, either, could be found on the handcuffs left dangling from Carol’s wrist. The handcuff key found at Viewmont High School next morning, after Debbie Kent’s disappearance—was useless as evidence. No microscopic proof could be found to show that key had ever been used in those handcuffs. In fact, that common key could fit any number of inexpensive cuffs.
Yocom was going to trial without a fingerprint or “smoking gun” or otherwise piece of conclusive evidence. There were photographs of Ted’s Volkswagen, taken before he cleaned it up, replaced the seat cushions, and sold it—photos taken in August by Jerry Thompson. Those photos, which showed some exterior rust spots and a tear along the top of the rear seat, matched Carol’s memory of her kidnapper’s VW. Carol had remembered the man’s patent-leather shoes. Thompson had seen some patent-leather shoes in Bundy’s closet during that August 21 search of Bundy’s apartment, but a subsequent search of his new apartment yielded no such shoes. Flecks of blood found on the white trim of Carol’s coat were Type O. Bundy had Type O blood. So did tens of thousands of other young men in the State of Utah.
Circumstance.
Yocom’s best element in the case—and the most uncertain—was Carol.
The shy, passive teenager, the prosecutor knew, could not be counted on as an unshakable witness.
O’Connell was derisive of the police investigative steps which led to the girl’s identification of Ted. Her initial photo identifications had been uncertain, and then, he noted “She was so psyched before the lineup that it was a contest to see if she could pick the guy whose picture she’d picked out and which the police patted her on the head for picking out.”
O’Connell employed a last-minute, pretrial stratagem which came as a surprise both to Yocom and, especially to Judge Stewart Hanson, Jr. Ted, O’Connell advised them, was waiving his right to trial by jury.
Judge Hanson, a capable, sincere jurist, winced at the thought. He had been handed the unenviable task of sitting as both judge and jury in a trial which had raised passions all the way from Salt Lake City to Seattle. In the weeks following Ted’s arrest, the court had been flooded with letters about Ted Bundy. One friend of Ted’s had expressed outrage over the “apparently reckless excesses of the law enforcement system ... and the tragedy of a young man whose life and career may now be ruined.” In Salt Lake City, the missionaries of the Mormon Church stood loyally with Ted. One of them said, in a gentle voice of hope and confidence, “We just know that the trial will clear away these awful doubts which have surrounded Ted.”
There were hate-Bundy letters, too. A woman in Seattle, upset by Ted’s release on bail, had written the Salt Lake County court to ask, “Why is it that our courts allow a murderer like Theodore Bundy to run around free on the streets?” During a December trip home to Seattle, Bundy had triggered a flurry of consternation when he showed up at the University of Washington law library to check out some Utah statute books.
A panicked library employee who recognized him had telephoned police to ask, “Did you know that Ted Bundy is running around loose out here at the library? Ted Bundy, that murderer!”
During the Seattle visit, Ted had met John Henry Browne, a public-defender lawyer who would eventually become a regular, trusted adviser—Ted’s “Seattle counsel.” They discussed the surveillance of Ted by Seattle police and had a few laughs over it. As he had in Utah, Ted played games with the investigators who were shadowing him around Seattle. At one point, Ted had walked up to a police stakeout car, leaned in to greet the detectives, and suggested, “Would you like to give me a ride downtown? It’d be a good way of keeping an eye on me, having me right there in the car.”
When Captain Mackie learned that Browne was advising Bundy, the chief of Seattle’s Ted Squad telephoned the Seattle lawyer. Mackie wanted Bundy to take a lie-detector test. And he asked Browne what information Bundy had shared with him during their conversations.
“Well, Captain,” Browne replied, “you know that anything Ted and I talk about is a privileged attorney-client communication. I can’t tell you what we’ve talked about. And you know that!”
“These crimes are too enormous,” Mackie sputtered in response. “Your attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply in a situation like this.”
After a surprised moment of silence, Browne laughed.
The police, he concluded, had reached a point of desperation when it came to Ted.
* * *
On the morning of February 23, 1976, in a hushed, expectant courtroom of Salt Lake City’s Metropolitan Hall of Justice, the trial of Utah v. Theodore Robert Bundy began.
At the defense table, Bundy, looking dapper and serenely confident, listened with his lawyers as Dave Yocom delivered an opening statement, reciting how the state would show he was the man who led Carol DaRonch away from the shopping mall, then tried to kidnap her in his Volkswagen. “The state, at the conclusion of this case,” said Yocom, “will request this court, in its powers as both judge and jury, to find this defendant guilty as charged of aggravated kidnapping.”
From the defense table, Ted’s eyes skipped briefly around the crowded courtroom, pausing here and there to recognize familiar faces of friends—some former neighbors from the district locally known as “The Avenues,” some young people from the Utah law college. Ted’s eye quickly passed over two faces which directed long, cold stares toward him. Belva Kent, Debbie’s mother, couldn’t resist coming into the Salt Lake City courtroom to study the man who was the prime suspect in the apparent abduction of her daughter nearly fifteen months earlier. Louis Smith, police chief of Midvale, Melissa Smith’s father, had been drawn to the courtroom too, with feelings of pain and anger about the unsolved murder of his daughter. There was extra security for Bundy during his trial. Obligingly, Louie Smith permitted the guards to search him, to assure them he carried no weapons.
O’Connell’s opening statement for the defense was a concentrated attack on Carol’s identification.
“At the outset,” O’Connell told the court, “I think this trial is going to be somewhat anticlimactic to all the hoopla. I think it’s kind of like a Whoosits comedy a few years ago—an awful lot of excitement, but when it comes down to it, there’s not much here. An awful lot of smoke, but not much fire.
“In viewing the evidence, I would ask the court to pay particular attention to the personality type person that Carol DaRonch is. I believe you can do this from observing her testifying, her action on the night of November eighth and then her various statements. And I think it will become apparent that this is a rather immature young lady.
“I believe she appears to have lived a rather sheltered life, is relatively unsophisticated. I think it’s also apparent that she’s relatively unobservant. I think it will become apparent that she has a malleable memory. I think it is apparent that she’s submissive to authority. She’s the kind of person that really does not look at somebody, particularly somebody who is an authority figure, somebody who is somewhat overwhelming her, that she spends a lot of her time looking down. And that is why the only thing she really remembers about the individual, at least on November eighth, were his shoes and pants.
“She thought initially the man had a mustache. A couple days later she decided he didn’t have a mustache. Then later she decided that he did.
“There was a great deal of police activity immediately following this incident. As Mr. Yocom said, the young lady was shown thousands of photographs. We believe that the viewing of these photographs, picking out of the look-alikes, affected the original image that she had of the individual.”
O’Connell referred to Carol’s first tentative identification of a photograph of Ted Bundy shortly after Ted’s initial arrest. After she had examined a new series of photographs, which included one of Bundy, “she made the statement, ‘He’s not in there.’ And Officer Thompson said, ‘Well, what about that photograph?’ He was referring to one she casually had withheld and cradled in her hand at that moment. ‘Why did you take that out?’ And she said, ‘Well I don’t know. I suppose it looks more like him than other photographs I have seen.’”
From that moment onward, O’Connell told the judge, the police worked with Carol DaRonch, almost subliminally suggesting that Ted Bundy was the man.
By the time Carol, on October 2, 1975, sat down in the police lineup room, O’Connell went on, “she’s seen the man’s picture, she’s associated in her own mind the pictures and the automobile, she knows the officers know that this is really a hot suspect and so she ... of course has no difficulty in picking out the individual.”
“This is solely an eyewitness case,” declared O’Connell. The eyewitness was fallible, he suggested, and thus so was the state’s case.
The state opened with routine testimony and introduction of evidence—the handcuffs and the flecks of blood, taken from Carol’s coat, by the Murray police officer who first interviewed her that night. It was Type O blood, but not a sufficient sample to produce more precise blood classification.
Mary Walsh testified how, that night, she and her husband had encountered the terrified girl as she fled from her kidnapper. “Terrible,” said Mrs. Walsh. “She was absolutely ... well, I have never seen a human being that frightened in my life.” Yocom wanted Mrs. Walsh’s words to register on the courtroom and the judge. That intense fear supported the state’s contention it was an aggravated kidnapping, as opposed to the lesser offense of simple kidnapping.
Yocom called Carol to testify. When the slender, dark-haired young woman walked into the courtroom, passing the prosecution and defense tables, the attentive spectators and reporters—and Judge Hanson—noticed that her eyes were cast downward. Solicitously, Yocom had her describe the series of events that night in the mall—the approach of the “police officer,” their walk to her car, then later to his Volkswagen on the darkened street, and a few moments later his attack.
Carol testified about the photographs she’d looked at and the other steps which led to her identification of the man who kidnapped her.
Yocom asked his climactic question: “Is that man present in the court today, Carol?”
“Yes,” she replied, her voice nearly a whisper.
“Where is he seated?”
Slowly, almost reluctantly, Carol for the first time turned her eyes to the defense table. Without real eye contact with the defendant, she nodded toward Bundy. “Right there.”
At the defense table, Bundy, his eyebrows raised, stared at Carol—an unblinking, unemotional gaze.
It was obvious that Carol, weary, nervous, apprehensive, was on the brink of tears when the prosecution’s questioning ended. As the cross-examination began, so did her tears. O’Connell asked Carol if she had cried when she had given testimony behind closed doors during preliminary hearings.
“No,” she replied, her soft voice quavering.
“Is it the crowd here that is making you nervous?”
“Yes.”
O’Connell questioned her at length about the steps through which police had taken her in identifying Bundy’s Volkswagen as the car of her abductor—even though, at the time she saw it, the ripped back seat had been repaired and the exterior of the car had been altered.
O’Connell asked how Carol had identified the Volkswagen after it had been so changed in appearance. “It looked completely different,” said Bundy’s lawyer, “but you identified it anyway, isn’t that true?”
Carol nodded. O’Connell brought out that when she had gone to see the Volkswagen with Detective Thompson, she assumed it was the same vehicle she had seen earlier in the photograph, at the time when its rear seat was ripped and its rust spots and other blemishes were conspicuous. Quietly, Carol conceded she understood from conversations with police that it “was supposed to be the car in the picture.”
O’Connell paused. There was quiet. He was satisfied. He had shown how totally trusting Carol had been of police officers.
In his redirect examination, Yocom sought to prop her up, to emphasize Carol’s certainty when she had selected Ted Bundy in the police lineup that October.
“When you saw him in the lineup, could you tell?”
“Yes,” Carol replied levelly.
“Seeing Mr. Bundy at that lineup when he first walked into the lineup room, what did you associate that with, Carol?”
“When he first walked in was the way he walked on that night.”
“What night?”
“November eighth.”
“Did you know immediately?”
“Yes.”
“And you are positive today?”
“Yes.”
Yocom hoped he had persuaded the court that, as uncertain as Carol might appear in many elements of her testimony, she was positive about that moment when she sat in the darkened audience and Ted Bundy walked on stage, along with the other men.
* * *
Bundy’s defense was allowed to offer the testimony of an expert on the human memory—Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a University of Washington psychologist.
She gave technical testimony about experiments dealing with the fallibility of the human memory. Various conditions alter and impair the reliability of a person’s memory, she testified especially the span of time between the original incident and the subsequent attempt to identify the person involved. Accuracy of recall, too, is lessened, according to the degree of stress which was imposed on the eyewitness.
The implication was clear: Carol DaRonch had been under extreme stress that night. And nearly a whole year had elapsed from the kidnapping until the police lineup.
Judge Hanson posed a question about a changing situation in which there were both—a nonstress circumstance, which later became stressful. “Let’s assume, then, that you have a time continuum as represented by a straight line. At one point in time there is no stress whatsoever. As that continuum line proceeds, the stress begins to build. ... The victim begins to suspect that the victim might be a victim. And then at a point further down in the continuum line, the victim becomes assured of the fact that there is a real problem.
“Now, at all times on that line of continuum ... the victim is able to observe the perpetrator of the offense.
“How would stress, in your judgment, affect eyewitness identification under those circumstances? ... Would the victim be more likely to be able to identify the perpetrator under those circumstances than in a situation where there was a sudden violent event, like a breaking-in through a door or a window?”
“Well, although that particular experiment hasn’t been done,” Dr. Loftus said, “my guess is that the sudden event would produce a less accurate identification, because the whole experience would be while the victim was in an extreme state of stress.”
It passed as an almost academic exchange between the judge and the witness. Yet Judge Hanson had logged a conclusion in his mind. The violent situation in which Carol DaRonch found herself in the Volkswagen, struggling for her life, may have impaired her memory during those moments. But there had been that earlier period, walking with her abductor during unthreatening minutes, when her memory might not have been impaired.
* * *
Through all the months since his arrest, Ted Bundy had been publicly silent about the accusations around him and about the charges. Understandably there was anticipation among the reporters and spectators when, on Thursday, February 26, the defendant at last was called to the witness stand to testify.
As Bundy stood, taking the oath, with a faint smile of self-assurance, Yocom, pen and legal pad in hand, studied him. He had a feeling that, if he could put the right kind of pressure on Bundy, the young man’s composure could be shaken.
O’Connell asked Ted where he was on the evening of November 8, 1974, at the time when Carol DaRonch was being kidnapped. “I’m not going to fool anybody,” Bundy said with a grin. “It’s hard to think back ten months, twelve months ... sixteen months now.”
He did remember, he said, that his Volkswagen had been acting up about that time. So he believed that he had gone to a movie and later to a favorite hangout, The Pub, had had a beer and then gone home. “The only time I can fix definitely in that that evening is I know I must have been home by eleven-fifty that night, because I made a phone call to a girlfriend of mine in Seattle. And I told her at that time that I’d been to a movie.”
Listening, Yocom tightened in a reflex of anger. He knew that the detectives, checking Bundy’s telephone records, had determined that each night a girl disappeared in Utah, Bundy had telephoned Cas in Seattle. It seemed to police to be almost ritualistic. Bundy’s telephone call at 11:50 P.M. that night, November 8, had been used in the search for Debbie Kent’s body. If Debbie vanished from Viewmont High School just after ten o’clock, and if Bundy were at his apartment in Salt Lake City, about thirty minutes away, at 11:50, placing a telephone call, police speculated that the high-school girl should be found somewhere within forty-five minutes’ drive from the place she disappeared at Bountiful.
“Did you go to the Fashion Mall on November eighth, 1974?” O’Connell asked.
“No, I did not,” Bundy replied.
“Did you have any contact with Carol DaRonch that day?”
“No, I did not.”
O’Connell’s questioning elicited from his client an explanation of the items, especially the handcuffs, which had been found in his car when the state-patrol sergeant had arrested him the previous August.
“In the early part of 1975, in the course of doing work for my landlord,” Bundy testified, “I took things to the Salt Lake City dump. And I found them [the handcuffs] in a box of odds and ends there.”
Initially, he carried the handcuffs away from the dump in his old pickup truck, the one he’d bought in Seattle for his move to Salt Lake City. Later, Bundy said, he tossed the cuffs into his VW. He said he’d never had a key for them.
There was one conspicuous lie which lurked in the record of Ted’s statements—that explanation he gave to Sergeant Hayward the night he was arrested in the suburb of Granger. He had said he had driven, lost, into the neighborhood after seeing The Towering Inferno at a drive-in movie. O’Connell began a line of questioning by which Bundy could explain that away.
Earlier that night, Bundy testified, he had worked at his job as a University of Utah building watchman until eleven o’clock. Then, he said, he went home, bathed, and decided to go for a nighttime drive. “I just decided to, as is my habit on occasion, to drive until I felt tired enough to come home and go to bed.”
There was an expression of mild chagrin on his face, as he admitted he had smoked one marijuana joint early in the evening. Then, while he was parked on that quiet residential street, in the darkness of early morning, he said he lighted up another. Then came the state trooper’s car. And the pursuit began.
With a sheepish grin and gestures of embarrassment, Bundy described it: “All of a sudden I became frightened, paranoid. I can’t describe to you the feeling. But I knew that what I was doing was definitely illegal. That is, smoking dope. And, also, you know—I have always been paranoid about doing it because I was a law student. I mean, quite panicky ... I just wanted to make sure I got rid of this stuff as quick as I could and air out the car, just in case it was the police.”
It was an understandable reason for lying when he told Sergeant Hayward he had lost his way into that nice quiet Mormon neighborhood after being at a drive-in movie. He was avoiding detection as a pot smoker.
O’Connell tied it all up: “Why did you tell them that you had gone to a movie rather than just driving around?”
“At the time it seemed like a plausible explanation.”
“When did you get around to telling me what really happened, Ted?” It was a gently understanding question from his defense lawyer.
“Well, a couple of weeks ago. The whole thing seemed so absurd to me. I don’t want to be argumentative, John. But its relationship to this particular case, to me, was not such that I felt that it was something I had to get into.”
When he at last began cross-examination, Yocom had an unexpected defense position to challenge. The All-American, young defendant smoked a little pot and had—perhaps understandably—invoked a fib as a cover when he had been nearly caught.
Yocom began his questioning with some long-planned questions about Bundy’s whereabouts on the date Carol was kidnapped. Bundy had testified his car had not been running well on November 8. Yocom produced gas slips, signed by the defendant, which indicated he had purchased a total of twenty-three gallons of gas in a four-day period during late October.
“In fact you were running the wheels off it, weren’t you?”
“I can’t recall.”
Yocom asked how many miles of travel Bundy had put on his VW during those four days. “Can you tell me just generally, in your head, how many miles you traveled on twenty-three gallons of gas?”
“Well, no.”
O’Connell objected. “This is a math test?” he asked. The objection was overruled. There was silence.
Yocom: “Have you computed that yet?”
Bundy: “Oh, I’m not really thinking about it, Dave. I thought you made your own conclusion. I’m not here to do mathematical problems.”
Bundy’s eyes smiled with self-satisfaction.
Yocom fumed privately for an instant. He resented Bundy calling him Dave from the witness stand.
When the court went into its midday recess, with Bundy still on the stand, Yocom retreated to his desk at the county attorney’s office, tossing his briefcase onto his desktop in anger. Damn it, he thought, I haven’t cracked him. I haven’t even dented him. Yocom reflected on Bundy’s testimony to that point. It had been controlled, a detailed alibi for everything. Yocom had the feeling that, whatever he asked Bundy, the response was a carefully rehearsed speech.
When he resumed questioning that afternoon, Yocom had vowed to rattle Bundy out of this well-orchestrated performance. The prosecutor asked Bundy to go over details of his early-morning arrest by Sergeant Hayward, beginning with the smoking of that marijuana cigarette when the state-patrol car approached. “So you lit up and started driving,” said Yocom. “And that is when you saw Officer Hayward’s car. Is that correct?”
“That was when I first saw a car which later turned out to be Officer Hayward’s car.”
“How fast were you going?
“I couldn’t tell you. Fast enough to try to air out my car.”
“When did you roll down the windows?”
“When I determined that someone was following me. Which was after ... I made the second left-hand turn.”
“So you were in a residential area, making numerous turns, saw a car two hundred yards behind you, then rolled down both windows.”
“I believe I rolled down the driver’s side window. I may have slipped open the window on the other side. I couldn’t reach over too well.”
“And at the time you were going at a high rate of speed?”
Bundy acknowledged he was speeding.
Gradually, his composure had begun to disintegrate. Bundy seemed unsure of himself, unsettled by Yocom’s rapid-fire questions.
Yocom pressed for explanations—detail after detail—about how Bundy was getting rid of his marijuana evidence as he fled the pursuing officer.
“When you threw out the Baggie of marijuana and, I take it, the cigarette you’re smoking, I assume you also threw out the cigarette papers.”
“I got rid of the paraphernalia—quote—so to speak.”
“Driving the car, rolling down the windows, and making turns at high rates of speed—you were able to do all of this?”
“Well, yes, I was. Like I say—”
“Where did you keep your Baggie?”
“I was rather panicked at the time trying to find it. It was in the glove compartment. Then at some point in time it may have fallen on the floor. I was hunting around for it while I was traveling out of the area.”
“So you were driving a car at high rates of speed, making turns, trying to find your Baggie of marijuana, cigarette papers, all at the same time rolling down the windows?”
“Well, it really is not as impossible as it sounds. It can be done rather easily, I would imagine.”
Yocom had elicited an implausible picture of Bundy, speeding from his pursuer while performing acrobatic feats within his car. Sergeant Hayward had testified that, when he arrested Bundy, there was no aroma of marijuana in the car.
Yocom sought to take care of another loose end—the mustache question. Carol had vacillated, but she believed the kidnapper had a mustache. The prosecutor asked Bundy if it were true that, while he was involved in Governor Dan Evans’ 1972 campaign in Washington State, he had worn a false mustache in his spying on the other candidate.
“I wasn’t spying on anyone,” Ted replied, almost angrily. “I never wore a fake mustache during that period.” He acknowledged that, years earlier, while he was visiting Philadelphia, he did own a fake mustache and had worn it. But, he said, it seemed absurd, so he got rid of it.
Yocom had to deal with one other loose end of circumstance in the state’s case—the patent-leather shoes Carol had noticed. The defense had provided testimony to the court from acquaintances of Bundy that he had never been seen wearing patent-leather shoes. Yocom called to the stand Charles Shearer, a young man who had resided for several months with his wife, in apartment 4, at the house on The Avenues where Bundy lived.
“Now, Mr. Shearer,” asked Yocom, “did you have occasion ... to observe Mr. Bundy in a ... dressed-up manner?”
“Yes.” Shearer explained he often saw Bundy dressed up in a suit or sport coat on Sundays.
“Did you have an occasion to observe the type of shoes that he was wearing?”
“Yes.”
“Would you describe that for the court?”
“Black patent leather. Shiny black.”
“Is there any particular reason why you would notice that, Mr. Shearer?”
“I don’t like the shoes,” replied the young man.
“What?” Yocom grinned inwardly.
Shearer replied emphatically. He hated patent leathers, so he really remembered Bundy’s.
* * *
For his closing argument in the case, Yocom had decided to group together all the elements of circumstance in a charted graph of mathematical probability. “Assume, as a base, we are dealing with the population of all males in Salt Lake County between the ages of twenty-five and thirty,” said the prosecutor—the age of the man whom Carol DaRonch had identified. “Consider those twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old males who have Type O blood—about thirty-five percent of that population.”
Systematically, he narrowed the population of possible suspects—males, twenty-five to thirty ... who have Type O blood ... who have dark hair ... who are about six feet tall ... who drive Volkswagens ... who drive older Volkswagens ... who drive older Volkswagens with a rip in the back seat ... Volkswagens with chips and rust spots on the right front fender and body, as Carol described. ... Males twenty-five to thirty who possess all those characteristics, who drive such a Volkswagen, who also carry a crowbar in the VW ... who also carry handcuffs in their car.
Yocom continued to suggest that the mathematical probability of Carol’s kidnapper being someone other than Ted Bundy was virtually zero.
At the defense table, Bundy glared at the prosecutor. Along with some other observers in the courtroom, Judge Hanson had noticed during the week that the defendant’s physical appearance seemed almost to change with his mood. Bundy’s skin, the blueness of his eyes, seemed somehow to pale at that moment of upset. His hair, at other times almost sandy in color, appeared darker as he leaned into an angry, animated conversation with his lawyer.
During his closing statement for the defense, O’Connell brushed aside the prosecutor’s pseudo-mathematics of probability. Yocom’s last-minute use of that graph had bothered the defense. Now, said the attorney, the consideration before the court had to be the presumption of innocence of Ted Bundy—a promising law student, a young man trying to get ahead in the world,” who had become the victim of zealous police suspicion and rampant publicity. The prosecution, suggested O’Connell, had parlayed all that into a portrayal of Ted as “a monster.” And the suggestible kidnap victim, while well-intentioned, had become the central actress in a tragic drama of misidentification of an innocent man.
* * *
The closing statements ended on Friday, February 27. When Judge Hanson summoned the principals back to the courtroom the following Monday afternoon, there was already a sense of what was to come. The judge had asked for extra security and so a special guard of deputy sheriffs had been posted around the courtroom.
There was tomblike silence as the judge pronounced the verdict. “I find the defendant, Theodore Robert Bundy, guilty of aggravated kidnapping, a first-degree felony.”
Ted’s face was impassive. From behind him came the sound of Louise Bundy’s gasp. Her tears began. Johnnie Bundy reached to comfort her. So, too, did Cas Richter, who had come, with troubled emotions, to be there.
John O’Connell swallowed hard.
The weight of the decision and the deliberations which had gone into it showed on the weary face of Judge Hanson as he looked down at Bundy. It had been a difficult role for him, sighed the judge. “I cannot say that there weren’t any doubts,” he confessed. But, he added, there were no reasonable doubts based on the evidence.
Ted Bundy stood as a convicted felon, a stoic look masking his inner anger. “I wonder,” he asked flatly, “if I could have a couple of minutes with my parents?”
The judge agreed to that. There would be an extensive presentence examination prior to any decision on probation or prison sentence, he indicated.
In the explosion of activity, reporters swarmed after O’Connell for comment.
“The turning point was when you people started bringing in other cases,” O’Connell told the newspeople. There would be an appeal, there was a presentence investigation pending, so O’Connell was saying nothing further. Privately, though, he was furious. If the defendant’s name had been different—something other than “Ted,” the highly publicized Ted Bundy—he fervently believed, the verdict would have been innocent.
“Dave,” shouted a reporter at Yocom, who was leaving the building through a lower-level corridor, “when did you know you had a conviction?”
Yocom muttered he’d make no comment. Afterward, though, Yocom confessed the answer in a quiet aside to Paul Van Dam, the county attorney walking beside him. “I didn’t know I had a conviction,” Yocom grinned, “until I heard the word ‘guilty’ from the judge.”