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Dr. A. L. Carlisle, the slender, bespectacled blond psychologist at the Utah State Penitentiary, slid into a chair across the table from Ted Bundy, with a friendly greeting: “Hi, Ted. How are you today?”
“Just fine, Al,” Bundy replied levelly. Wearing prison denims, Ted leaned back in his chair watching as the scholarly Carlisle opened his notepad, glanced through some earlier notes, and prepared for another session of questions and answers about Ted’s feelings and attitudes.
“Ted,” Carlisle began, “I’d like to talk with you some more today about some of your general feelings. And, particularly, I want to go back over some of your early years, the childhood years.”
Bundy’s expression hardened into a mask of guardedness. “I thought we’d just about covered all that,” he said. The cramped interview room, a converted prison cell, felt confining. Ted, who liked Carlisle personally, girded for another session of questioning, more moves in an ongoing verbal-intellectual-psychological chess match. Ted, the psychology graduate, was cooperative even though he grumbled about the subjective nature of the testing, the hours of questioning to which he was being subjected during the court-ordered evaluation.
“The fact is that I am innocent of that kidnapping charge,” he had said over and over to his interviewers. Yet, in his view, the psychiatrists and psychologists were determined to produce an analysis of him that would explain, rationalize, his commission of a crime which Ted steadfastly contended he didn’t commit.
“Ted,” asked Carlisle, “what do you think about life after death?”
“Well, death ...” Ted paused. “It’s inevitable for each of us. I haven’t had much experience with it.” Ted smiled faintly at the thought. “I don’t fear death, I don’t fear anyone or anything!” A surge of strength powered into his voice at that thought. He paused, then continued:
“But life after death? No, I don’t believe in it. If there’s life after death, we will live it and have a good one.” Bundy paused again. And he went on, “If not, you will have fulfilled your purpose here. If there’s life after death, okay. If not, okay.”
Once again, as he had before, Carlisle, a devout, orthodox Mormon, contemplated the commitment which Ted, during his baptism, had made to the beliefs of the Latter-Day Saints Church, and how, since his baptism, Ted had continued his smoking, drinking, and other activities with obvious disregard for LDS doctrine.
During the days immediately following Ted’s conviction, Donald Hull, a presentence investigator for the Utah Probation and Parole Board, had interviewed Ted about his childhood and adult years. Hull had also contacted police and many of Ted’s acquaintances. It was an examination process which customarily was thorough enough to guide a judge in considering the alternatives of probation or sentence, and length of sentence, for most convicted defendants. But, in the case of Ted Bundy, Hull’s eventual report had been uncertain, indistinct in its conclusions. Judge Hanson wasn’t satisfied.
Thus, when the judge had convened court March 22, 1976, for the scheduled sentencing, he had already decided he wanted a more thorough psychological evaluation.
There continued to be public reverberations over the judge’s guilty verdict. “Frankly, I have never seen a conviction in a serious case on less evidence,” O’Connell had said. O’Connell had many believers in his contention that all the pretrial publicity about Ted and murders had made its impact. “A lot of people didn’t think Ted acted right during the trial,” O’Connell told one reporter. “But how are you supposed to act when eight million people think you’re a monster?”
So, when Ted, O’Connell, the other lawyers, and a few spectators gathered in the courtroom that day of scheduled sentencing, Judge Hanson, with obvious soul-searching, spoke of the process he had gone through in reaching his verdict three weeks earlier:
“If the Court had had anything to say in the matter ... I would not have wanted the burden that was placed upon me with regard to Theodore Robert Bundy’s guilt or innocence. Nevertheless, that was my job. ... I suppose you are entitled to know part of what agony I shared with everyone involved on that long weekend. ...
“I was concerned that trials of a spectacular significant nature ... may tend to place an undue burden upon the Court ... to reach a result that the public wanted, as opposed to a true and just result based solely upon the evidence. And after I was confronted with those temptations of human intellect, and after being satisfied in my own mind ... that I had purged myself of any consideration whatsoever relating to other events, other things hanging in the wind ... I proceeded to examine the evidence.
“By my nature and disposition, as counsel may be aware, it would have been an easier thing for me to find no guilt in this matter than the determination that I made, which was the harder of the two ... I think Mr. Bundy and his very able counsel are entitled to know this. ...”
Judge Hanson’s eyes studied the upturned faces at the defense table and the prosecution table—Bundy, O’Connell, Yocom. There was an unmentioned personal coincidence of which the judge and attorneys were all aware. Hanson, O’Connell, and Yocom had all been classmates together during their law-school years at the University of Utah. Hanson resumed:
“To say that there are no doubts of any kind somewhat begs the question. ... There are always lurking doubts, about, not the defendant, but the ability of the trior of fact to purge himself of all of those things about which he ought to be purged. While I have lurking doubts about my own abilities, I have no reasonable doubts based upon the evidence.”
The judge turned to the question of sentencing, saying, “I am not satisfied that I have sufficient information to make the determination which it is now my duty to make. Accordingly ... I am going to order that the defendant be committed to the custody of the Division of Corrections for a period not to exceed ninety days for a diagnostic evaluation.”
* * *
Thus, in late March, Bundy had been transferred from the county jail to the state penitentiary south of Salt Lake City. Classified as a “high visibility” resident, he was assigned a cell in the medium-security block during this three-month diagnostic evaluation. Ted immediately began writing letters of protest, noting that other “diagnostics” were in minimum security.
Dr. Van Austin, the prison psychiatrist, and psychologists Dr. Al Carlisle and Dr. Robert Howell began an extended examination. After the skull X-rays, electroencephalograms, the computerized thermographic brain scan, and other examinations, they concluded there was no brain damage, no other discernible physiological problems. Then Ted underwent a battery of psychological tests, a process during which his mood seemed to swing from highs to lows. At one moment he was cheerful and cooperative. The next, he seemed absorbed in anger and depression. His IQ score: 122, superior intelligence, though not genius.
To supplement his interviews with Ted, Carlisle continued to conduct telephone interviews with police in Salt Lake City and Seattle, with men and women who had known Bundy. Once again, as during the police backgrounding, there emerged a mixed portrait of the man. From many people who had known him came glowing reports of Ted’s stability, his social skills and sensitivity. “I don’t think I’ve known anyone who seemed to have a higher respect for women and their role in our society,” said one woman acquaintance.
From others came contradictory impressions that Ted appeared be “a loner,” a person reluctant to open himself to any deep, personal relationships. “I think Ted was always on guard against anyone getting close to him,” said a young Salt Lake City woman who had known him intimately, had even had sexual intercourse with him. After their lovemaking, she recalled, “Ted was very quiet, aloof—very distant. He told me afterward he just didn’t want to be touched.”
A young woman who had dated Ted in Seattle remembered her puzzlement. They knew each other well, yet Ted always refused to go to her home to meet her parents. “It was funny,” she said. “Ted was always so self-confident, so sure of himself, but I got the feeling that he felt terribly inferior at times.”
Bundy’s interviewers discerned a pattern which pointed toward some void, some hostility within the young man, something perhaps rooted in his early years, perhaps in his family relationships.
Another woman Ted had known in Washington remembered the day she accompanied him when he drove on an errand to the Bundy family home at Tacoma, a midday visit when he knew his mother and the others would be away from the house. “I didn’t know anything about Ted’s family,” she recalled, “and while we were driving there, he told me about everyone. Ted said his father was dead and that his mother was an older woman, in her sixties.”
When they arrived at the Bundy home, Ted pointed out some family photographs hanging on the wall. “He pointed out the photo of his mother, his older sister, his younger sister and brother.” Much later, the woman went on, “I saw a photograph of Ted’s mother, and I figured out that the photo Ted had said was his ‘mother’ was actually his grandmother. His ‘father’ was his grandfather, his ‘older sister’ was really his mother. I could never figure that out.”
The professionals examining Ted felt convinced that the fact of his illegitimate birth was a troubling psychological dynamic within the man, even though, when asked about it, Ted’s standard comment was, “I can’t understand why everyone wants to make such a big deal out of that. I don’t consider it to be important.”
Through his earliest years, Ted had been told that his real father was dead. He thought he had been around thirteen years old when he discovered a birth certificate which listed his father as “unknown.” “I think I’d had a sixth sense about it,” Ted reflected. “It really wasn’t that important.” When he discovered that birth certificate, Ted explained, “I didn’t feel nauseous or tearful. It just confirmed my inner knowledge. An experience of being bitten by a dog when I was four years old was more clear than finding the birth certificate.”
Thoughtfully considering Ted’s answers, Carlisle wondered if the words used by Ted in his disclaimer of concern—nauseous ... tearful ... having been bitten by a dog—might have been a more accurate representation of the actual feelings he had.
No, Ted insisted, he harbored no feelings of anger toward his mother. His praise for his mother sounded mechanical: “She had sacrificed a great deal to have and raise an illegitimate child.” His mother was, Ted recalled coolly, a person who “paid all the bills” and who never used force or anger. “She never yelled at me.” Otherwise, he had little to say about her.
Ted acknowledged an initial dislike for Johnnie Bundy, the man who married Ted’s mother and who fathered the other children in the family, Ted’s half-brothers and half-sisters. Again, Ted’s description of Johnnie came in words carefully chosen, mechanical, devoid of affection: “He was always busy digging in the garden, rebuilding things. He couldn’t sit down.” Briefly, during his toddler years, Ted developed memories of his grandfather, the man who came closest to providing a father figure. Ted described him as an “intelligent man, interested in science and technology.”
Cas Richter, Ted’s onetime fiancée, had gone through another abrupt change in her feelings about Ted. Following his conviction, she had developed a new feeling of hostility toward the police and prosecutors. Conspicuously remorseful about her role in what had happened, she sought to explain away all the suspicions she had once voiced about Ted. “I certainly don’t want anyone to think that I truly believe Ted had anything to do with the murders of those girls or that kidnapping,” she had said plaintively during one telephone interview.
When Ted talked about Cas, he reflected about their times together, the comfort of her home, the fragrance of cooking in her kitchen, their conversations. She seemed almost to have taken on a motherly role in their relationship. At times, his tears welled as Ted talked about Cas, as he shared the poetry he had written for her. And there was his memory of the time when she had had too much to drink and, Ted later discovered, had a sexual experience with another man. “My world was so destroyed,” Ted said tearfully. “That was the last straw. But we got back together and we cried together. ... That was the only time she was unfaithful.”
At every opportunity, Ted forcefully turned his interviews to a diatribe about his conviction. He criticized the evidence, the police techniques, and Carol DaRonch’s eyewitness testimony. “Yes I had some handcuffs in my car,” Ted snapped. “But I felt they could be useful if I had to apprehend someone. I had a job as a night watchman at the university. And, in Seattle once, I had chased and caught a purse snatcher. I thought at that time it would have been useful to have handcuffs to restrain that suspect.”
* * *
In late May, Ted wrote to me:
The diagnostic evaluation will be sixty days old tomorrow. The bulk of the time has been spent sitting in a cell, but the staff here has conducted tests and examinations on me that are, by far, more thorough than any one else has been subjected to.
Frustrated, confused and perplexed, the psychologists and psychiatrists have found my responses normal. Of course we all have our idiosyncrasies. (So who is truly normal?) Phrased another way, there is nothing in the results to substantiate the judge’s verdict or to answer the unanswerable question: “Why?”
They repeatedly characterize my case to me as “very interesting,” “very complex” and “extremely difficult.” This case becomes curiouser and curiouser. The obvious conclusion of my innocence is strenuously avoided.
Carlisle and the other examiners would not disagree that it was, as Ted said, “extremely difficult” to enter the tightly locked doors Carlisle sensed were within the man. Again and again he pondered words Ted had used to describe events and his responses. During that period when his once-exclusive relationship with his mother had been changed abruptly by her marriage to Johnnie Bundy: “Life was not sweet, but not a nightmare.” And Ted’s recollections of “the buzzing, baffling world of kindergarten.” And his adjustment: “I didn’t feel like an outcast.
“I had lots of friends,” Ted said of his early high-school years. But then, too, he spoke of becoming “less dependent on my friends and more of an individualist.” During his crucial formative years, when the young teenager usually seeks new social experiences, Ted fell into a very private, introverted pastime. For hours, he listened to the radio, finding pleasure, he explained, in memorizing voices he heard. “Social relationships were not that important. ... I just felt secure with the academic life.”
There could have been an implication, too, in Ted’s aborted interest in entering a fraternity during his first weeks at the University of Washington. He appeared to betray a feeling of inferiority, of some hostility when he explained how he turned away from the whirl of fraternity-sorority life: “I wasn’t interested in the social politicking, the emphasis on clothes and parties. It was shallow and superficial.” Whether by choice or otherwise, Ted was on the outside, looking in, at the rather exclusive social world, the laughing, beautiful people who resided in “Greek Row” at the edge of the campus.
During his questioning of Ted about his relationships with women, Dr. Carlisle’s attention focused on Diane, the strikingly beautiful, tall brunette with whom Ted became infatuated during his first years at the University of Washington. In an interview at her California home, Diane had confided that, at the end of 1973, she had the distinct impression that Ted and she were engaged; that Ted’s intention was marriage. But then, she said, he subsequently refused to write or telephone her. When asked about that, Ted coolly explained, “I just wanted to prove to myself that I could have married her.”
Dr. Carlisle reflected much later that Ted might have been fearful of entering into a deep relationship with a woman of such extraordinary poise and confidence. Perhaps haunted by insecurities and self-doubts, he turned away, into his loneliness ... perhaps with bitterness.
(More than a year later, in a personal letter, Ted engaged in some free-wheeling memories of Diane, perhaps betraying his feeling of inferiorities. “All right, so she had a Mustang. ... And so what if she may have been the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, or have seen since: tall, dark haired, smooth, and oh, so sophisticated. She moved like something out of Vogue and anything she wore looked like a million dollars. I, on the other hand, possessed the innocence of a missionary, the worldliness of a farm boy. ... She and I had about as much in common as Sears and Roebuck has with Saks.”)
* * *
After twenty hours of interviews, spanning a six-week period, Dr. Carlisle wrote his own preliminary evaluation of the intriguing young man.
Mr. Bundy sees himself as a fairly open person. This contrasted with the strong defensiveness shown throughout all the interviews. He also viewed himself as a person who experiences almost no anxiety, yet he showed definite indications of anxiety at times during the interviews. In general, the scores of the objective tests portray the picture of a person who is happy, confident and very well adjusted. These results contrasted with the results found in the projective tests and in the interview. Even the turmoil he is experiencing because of his present situation did not show up on the objective tests. An intelligent person can answer the questions to place himself in a favorable light, which would help explain the conflicting results. ...
Mr. Bundy is an intelligent person with a good verbal ability. He can present himself well and makes a good initial impression on most persons. Thus he tends to win friends easily. ...
Mr. Bundy is a “private” person who does not allow himself to become known very intimately by others. When one tries to understand him he becomes evasive. Outwardly he appears confident and reveals himself as a secure person. Underneath this veneer are fairly strong feelings of insecurity. He has a strong need for structure and control, such as in interpersonal relationships and in control of his own emotions. ... He becomes somewhat threatened by people unless he feels he can structure the outcome of the relationship ...
With a smile, Carlisle recalled how, during his questioning of his subject, Ted had skillfully managed to attain the role of the superior. Once the psychologist had jotted an analytical marginal note to himself: “He’s controlling me!”
The constant theme running throughout the testing was a view of women being more competent than men. There were also indications of a fairly strong dependency on women, and yet he also has a strong need to be independent. I feel this creates a fairly strong conflict in that he would like a close relationship with females but is fearful of being hurt by them. There were indications of general anger and, more particularly, well masked anger toward women. ...
He has difficulty handling stress and has a strong tendency to run from his problems. That his defenses break down under stress is shown by his general instability, both in the past and with his inability in adjusting during his first quarter at the University of Utah. His use of marijuana and the fact that he was a heavy drinker at one time are also indicators of difficulty with handling stress. These correlate with the evidence of anxiety, loneliness, and depression found in the testing.
Passive-aggressive features were also evident. I felt there was a good deal of hostility directed toward me and other personnel even though he would carefully point out that it was not aimed directly at us personally.
The above personality profile is consistent with the possibility of violence and is consistent with the nature of the crime for which he is convicted. A prediction cannot be made as to whether or not Mr. Bundy will show violence in the future as the best predictor is past behavior, and he disclaims any violent acts in the past. ... However, I feel Mr. Bundy has not allowed me to get to know him and I believe there are many significant things about him that remain hidden. ...
On June 7, 1976, Dr. Austin, the prison psychiatrist, submitted the final diagnostic report to Judge Hanson. “I do not feel that Mr. Bundy is psychotic,” Austin wrote—i.e., he is not a victim of a severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia. “In fact he has a good touch with reality, knows the difference between right and wrong, has no hallucinations or delusions,” Austin explained.
Perhaps, the psychiatrist suggested, Ted would be included in the loose diagnostic category known as personality disorders.
He does have some features of the antisocial personality such as lack of guilt feelings, callousness and a very pronounced tendency to compartmentalize and rationalize his behavior. ... At times he has lived a lonely, somewhat withdrawn, seclusive existence which is consistent with, but not diagnostic of, a schizoid personality. ...
His denial of memory for the crime is not consistent with amnesia due to a hysterical reaction, alcohol or drug intoxication, or temporal lobe epilepsy. This amnesia seems too circumscriptive and convenient to be real. ...
In conclusion, I feel that Mr. Bundy is either a man who has no problems or is smart enough and clever enough to appear close to the edge of “normal.”
It is my feeling that there is much more to his personality structure than either the psychologist or I have been able to determine. However, as long as he compartmentalizes, rationalizes and debates every facet of his life, I do not feel that I adequately know him. And, until I do, I cannot predict his future behavior.
For weeks, apprehensive of the course of the evaluation by the doctors, irritated by what he considered to be the repetitive, vague, subjective nature of the examination, Ted had written letters of complaint to Judge Hanson. At last Ted had filed his own legal motion—a bold show-cause action to require prison officials to explain why they should not be held in contempt of court for failure to perform an appropriate evaluation. In his letters to the judge, Ted had also argued it would be inappropriate to sentence him to prison. Given his clean record, Ted contended, he and society would be best served by a decision for probation.
* * *
On June 30, the day of sentencing, Bundy, wearing plaid shirt and jeans, stood before Judge Hanson for more than an hour, arguing, gesturing, sobbing at times, disputing the conclusions of the doctors in their evaluation. His eyes sometimes brimming with tears, he disputed, point by point, the conclusions which had been reached by Austin and Carlisle.
“Dr. Austin’s a very experienced man, practiced years at the state hospital at the prison,” said Ted in a quavering voice. “But the conclusion he states—‘I feel that Mr. Bundy is either a man who has no problems or is smart enough and clever enough to appear close to the edge of normal’ ...”
Bundy swallowed heavily. He exhaled a sigh and continued, “That’s a helluva choice. Your Honor, I think it revealed the basic lack of security, maybe even the pressure that is on these men—that a man with a great deal of experience, an education, is going to make a preposterous, but perhaps honest, statement like that. ...”
Judge Hanson watched compassionately as Ted, his hands trembling, his heavy breathing pulsing with sobs, turned to other pages of the diagnostic report.
Ted bit his lip. “Summarizing my bad points ... I was ‘defensive, a private person, insecure.’ ... I was ‘dependent on women.’ Good grief! I don’t know that there’s a man in the courtroom who isn’t. And if he isn’t, maybe there’s something wrong with him. Our mother is a woman. ...”
He attacked Carlisle’s conclusion that the “personality profile [developed during the examination] is consistent with the nature of the crime for which he was convicted.” “There are probably tens of thousands of people in the city walking around, especially on the university campus here, more or less like me. ... Those characteristics are not predicted by anyone necessarily, because many people have them and are never violent. And there are many people who are violent who never have those characteristics.”
As they watched and listened, the doctors earnestly felt they had done a professional, unbiased evaluation of Ted and had managed some significant and accurate glimpses of the real “inner Ted.”
A silent fact worked against Ted and his impassioned arguments that day.
During the days following his conviction, another FBI laboratory report had been belatedly provided to Jerry Thompson and the other investigators of the Carol DaRonch kidnapping. A hair found in Ted’s Volkswagen, detectives learned, was a highly likely match for the hair of Carol DaRonch. As he watched Bundy in the courtroom, tearfully pleading against imprisonment, Yocom felt more comfortable than ever. He had convicted Ted Bundy without a crucial piece of evidence.
“As I said,” Ted went on, red-eyed, his voice still trembling. “This ...” He held up the several pages of the psychological evaluation. “... was written to conform to the verdict.”
At last Judge Hanson indicated he was ready to impose sentence, and he allowed Ted a further chance to address the court.
Defeat and anger showed in Ted’s body as he addressed the certainty that he would be sentenced to prison. “Imprisonment,” he pleaded, “is neither a rational nor a humane alternative. To commit me to prison ... I can assure you this ... Some day, who knows when? Five, ten, or more years in the future? When the time comes for my release ...”
He was sobbing. So was his mother, who sat among other spectators straining to hear his mumbled words.
“When the time comes for my release, I suggest you ask yourself, What’s been accomplished? Was the sacrifice of my life worth it all? An eye for an eye, measure for measure, is child’s play in comparison to what you are about to do today.
“Yes,” he continued, turning moistened eyes toward Austin and Carlisle, “I will be a candidate for treatment. Not for anything I have done. But for what the system has done to me.”
Then it was time. Ted stood listening as Judge Hanson sentenced him to be confined to the penitentiary for a term of from one to fifteen years.
Ted’s face bore a look of frozen hostility as the guards led him out of the courtroom toward a room where he would be dressed again in prison clothes for his trip back to prison and a medium-security cell.