Chapter Fourteen: Point of the Mountain

Compared with other prisons, the Utah State Penitentiary was regarded as a rather easy, decent joint—a place which had its assaults, rapes, and an occasional inmate murder, but a place which also had the reputation of being well run and secure, relatively free of the overcrowding at other institutions.

Locally, it was known as Point of the Mountain, a name derived from its location, south of Salt Lake City, where the freeway to Provo curls around the toe of some foothills jutting westward from the Wasatch Front. The complex of neatly clustered buildings, ringed by double steel-mesh fences, topped with barbed wire and razor steel, was surrounded by valley farmlands. In early July 1976, Ted Bundy was checked into his medium-security cell there to start serving his time.

Although he was apprehensive about his personal safety, Ted made a deliberate effort to befriend other inmates and, because he had enough familiarity with the law and the skills to write motions, he was accepted as a potentially helpful “jailhouse lawyer.” Prison officials and guards assessed him as a respectful, pleasant, cooperative prisoner. Ted settled into a daily routine of morning calisthenics, letter writing, and work, assisting John O’Connell and Bruce Lubeck on the appeal of his kidnapping conviction. Ted routinely accepted his excommunication from the Mormon Church. “I know there was no alternative for them,” he reflected. After all, despite the fact he was appealing, he stood convicted by law of a felony. Even so, Ted told Mormon friends, he would continue to attend Mormon church services at the prison.

There were no new developments in Colorado, so far as Ted knew—nothing since Mike Fisher and Bill Baldridge had interviewed him in early March about the Caryn Campbell murder. “Colorado is a dead issue, no matter what the hopes of the interested parties might be,” Ted wrote to me. But despite that kind of public-relations utterance, Ted was concerned about what might be happening in the Campbell murder case. It dangled in his mind as a persistent threat. Ted’s guards began to notice that, when he moved through the prison, or while he was at his assigned job in the prison print shop, Bundy’s eyes were constantly moving, absorbing the sights around him, memorizing the places, the routine. “He’s one to keep our eye on,” concluded one of his guards.

Bundy made it a point to gain the acquaintance of Willis Maguire, a lean, dour-eyed prisoner in his mid-forties, a long-termer who had a reputation as an escape artist. In a whispered conversation one day, Bundy proposed a plan to the veteran con. Working, in the print shop, said Bundy, it would be possible for him to manufacture phony identification—driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, other papers—which could be used to assume new identities. That would be his contribution. Maguire’s contribution would be the escape plan itself.

“That’s stupid,” growled Maguire. “Just goddamn stupid. You start messing around printing stuff like that inside here, and it’ll get you into deep shit. ID is nothin’. Who needs it? You can always pick up all the ID you need on the street, once you get out.”

Ted tried again. But the older con responded by giving Bundy a lecture: “If you had any goddamn smarts at all, you’d settle down in here and stay clean.” At the Utah pen, doing one to fifteen, as Bundy was, parole could come early. “In a couple years you’re gonna walk. Why risk it?”

Ted mumbled an explanation—about “a problem I got in Colorado.” Maguire seemed bored.

Other inmates began to notice that Bundy, while seemingly adjusting to the prison routine, at times was short-tempered, restless. “You can hear him pacing in his cell at night,” muttered a man in a neighboring cell. “Back and forth. Back and forth. He’s tight.” A prison staff member reported a feeling of uneasiness about Bundy: “I’ve seen a lot of guys in here, but—it’s funny—Bundy’s the only one I’ve ever picked up a sense of real fear from. You can tell he’s got a helluva lot of anger inside him.” The Utah Appellate Court had rejected Bundy’s appeal of the kidnapping conviction, so the next step would be an appeal to the Utah State Supreme Court. That meant months of waiting in confinement.

Among others, the supervisor of the print shop noticed the increasing nervousness, the furtiveness in Bundy’s behavior. One day, by prearrangement, Bundy was abruptly summoned from the print shop, where he was working, to a guard station. His supervisor, watching from a distance, saw him slip something into a garbage can before he left. It was discovered to be a facsimile of a phony Social Security card, almost ready for printing.

When guards shook down Bundy’s cell, they also found roadmaps, airline schedules, and a false driver’s license. For possession of such escape-plan contraband, now considered a “high escape risk” prisoner, Bundy was dispatched into an isolation cell—the Hole—for two weeks. When he came out, he was assigned to the maximum-security block home of the “heavies”—the prison’s most dangerous inmates and the men under sentence of death.

At Aspen, investigator Mike Fisher, still working on the Caryn Campbell murder case, received a cryptic note in the mail from a prisoner at the Utah state prison. Fisher had never heard of the man who wrote, but he was fascinated by the message: “I might have some information for you about a murder case there in Colorado involving Theodore Bundy. If you’re interested, contact me—Willis Maguire.”

“I’m damned interested,” Fisher breathed. He went to Ashley Anderson, a youthful assistant district attorney who had been assigned the Campbell case. Anderson agreed that they needed to talk with Maguire. After their flight to Salt Lake City, Fisher and Anderson discussed the Maguire note with Jerry Thompson, Dave Yocom, and others who had been involved in Bundy’s Utah conviction. “What do you know about this guy Maguire?” asked Fisher.

“He’s a tough old con,” replied Thompson. “From what I can find out from the guys down at the prison, he’s not your usual snitch. If he’s got something to say, it might be worth listening to.”

“Yeah,” said Fisher. “But we’ve also got to find out what Maguire wants in return.”

The Salt Lake County attorney’s office, Warden Sam Smith, and the others at the Utah prison offered total assistance to Fisher and Anderson. Whatever Maguire wanted as his end of the deal would be delivered, if at all possible, by the State of Utah. Smith arranged for the Colorado men to see Maguire in an absolutely secret meeting inside the prison.

As they talked, the wily prisoner gradually outlined his side of the deal. Maguire was to be moved to a prison in South Dakota where, he said, he could be closer to some members of his family. Looking into the cold eyes of Maguire, Fisher guessed the man’s real motive was to get into a prison where he’d have an easier chance of escape.

“Now, Willis, why don’t you tell us about Bundy,” said Fisher. “What’s he told you?”

Maguire repeated the conversation he had with Bundy about Bundy’s plans to print false identification papers for an escape. “And I asked him, why in hell he was so hot to get out of here,” Maguire went on. “And he said, ‘Well, the Colorado cops are gonna be coming in here to get me for that girl I killed over in Colorado.’”

Fisher and Anderson exchanged hopeful glances. It sounded like a breakthrough in the case—a confession, even if it was hearsay, could be admitted in trial. The wiry little investigator pressed Maguire. “You’re not shittin’ us are yah?” Fisher asked.

“Okay,” replied Fisher. “We’re gonna have to find out what we can do with these Utah guys about your deal. And we’ll get back to see you.”

Later, as Anderson and Fisher talked it over, they had an approval from Utah officials of Maguire’s deal. “It’d sure as hell make our case for us,” concluded Fisher. “The hair in his car ... the gas slips ... Mrs. Harter’s eyewitness ... And now this.”

But, noted Anderson, “it’s a death-penalty case.” With the stakes that high, Anderson and Fisher decided Maguire would first have to undergo a polygraph test.

A day later, Fisher and Anderson returned home to Aspen in deep gloom. Maguire’s story hadn’t held up convincingly. What Bundy actually told him, they concluded, probably was “The cops in Colorado are gonna be comin’ here after me. They say I killed a girl in Colorado.” There was still probable cause to bring a charge of murder against Bundy in the killing of Caryn Campbell. But the state would have to go with what it had.

On October 22, 1976, Fisher, carrying a warrant charging Bundy with Caryn Campbell’s murder, was once again heading toward the Utah prison at Point of the Mountain. He had planned it carefully, hoping to catch Bundy by surprise. Perhaps, thought Fisher, Bundy, caught unawares, might be shaken into some admissions. After that March interview, in the Salt Lake County jail, which had left Bundy upset, perspiring, and rattled, Fisher had developed a theory: “Theodore’s always got to be in control of every situation. But if you can catch him when he’s rattled, when his defenses are down, when he’s not ready for you, when he doesn’t have that control, you might shake something out of him.” And, Fisher had learned, Bundy’s emotional condition had sagged to a deep low in “the max” at Point of the Mountain.

But it was Fisher who was in for the surprise that day. There had been an advance leak of his plan to serve the murder warrant. A television reporter in Salt Lake City had telephoned Bruce Lubeck to ask, “Is it true that someone from Colorado is on his way to Point of the Mountain to serve a murder warrant on Ted Bundy?” Bundy’s defense lawyer had driven immediately to see his client at the prison.

When Fisher arrived in the steel-wrapped visiting room in the “max” area at Point of the Mountain, Ted greeted him with a smile. “Hi Mike,” said Ted. “What can we do for you?” Sitting beside Bundy was his lawyer. Fisher’s hope for the element of surprise was gone.

“I’ve got a warrant here for you, Ted,” Fisher said quietly, “from the State of Colorado. It’s a charge of murder.”

Bundy’s initial reaction to the Colorado charge was to fight extradition. Meanwhile, as he waited there in maximum security at Point of the Mountain, there was a lively, growing media interest in a man in another cell. The hoopla was over Gary Gilmore, a 35-year-old tough who had served 18 of his years in prisons and jails. He had committed a couple of pointless murders while committing robberies at Provo that July and had been convicted in October and sentenced to death by Utah’s firing squad. Gilmore requested a quick execution.

One day when Lubeck sat talking with Bundy in the visitor’s room at “max,” their eyes turned to another inmate and his visitor: Gilmore, looking casually tough and disheveled, straight, dark hair flopped onto his forehead, was having a conversation with his pale, brunette girlfriend, Nicole Barrett.

Ted Bundy had always been a fervent opponent of the death penalty and now, watching the condemned Gilmore, he was as close as he had ever been to the reality of the planned execution of a human. It made Ted queasy.

“Y’know,” he said to Lubeck as they gazed at Gilmore, “if someone doesn’t do something pretty soon, they’re going to kill that guy.”

Yes, agreed Lubeck with a sigh; and America would resume its old business of executing people.

Gilmore achieved what he’d asked for. Shortly before sunrise on January 17, 1977, they took Gilmore to an old, unused cannery building on the prison grounds, shackled and strapped him loosely into a chair, placed a black hood over his head and pinned a black target with a white circle to his T-shirt. Firing squad marksmen hit the target, killing him with a fusillade of four slugs through the heart.

For weeks Ted had been wrestling with his Colorado dilemma, especially that state’s move to extradite him. Because he was without funds, he had been assigned the services of a Colorado public defender lawyer, Chuck Leidner of Aspen. Leidner, a competent defense lawyer, had scoffed at Colorado’s murder case against Ted: “I can’t imagine a prosecutor in his right mind bringing a case as thin as this.” But Bundy was wary. He was unimpressed by Leidner. And he worried that the wave of publicity about him, which had washed over Utah, had extended to, and prejudiced, Aspen and other places in Colorado.

“Of course,” he reflected, “if I fight extradition, I come off in the news media like someone who’s afraid of going to trial. And everyone reaches the conclusion, ‘See, he must be guilty!’” On the other hand, Bundy told friends, he could encounter in Colorado, as he maintained had happened in Utah, an atmosphere of prejudice which could result in a conviction, regardless of the vacuum of evidence in the state’s case. With help from O’Connell and Lubeck, he had initially filed motions resisting extradition. But it was inevitable.

When he appeared in court on January 28, 1977, his ankles and wrists manacled, Bundy waived extradition. It was over in moments. Ted winked and smiled as he left the courtroom, and Lubeck handed out to reporters a carefully structured, confidence-filled statement which Ted had written the night before:

I would not waive my right to a hearing and voluntarily request removal to Colorado unless I was certain that I will be acquitted of the charges there.

I have postponed going to Colorado these two months for a number of reasons. First, I wanted to determine what remote connection, if any, there could have been between myself and the tragic death in Colorado. As I suspected, the accusations ... have proven to be grossly exaggerated, in some instances purely fictitious and totally without merit.

Second, I needed time to check into ... the legality of the extradition.

He vowed to appeal the kidnapping conviction in Utah which, he said, is “the major, if not the sole justification for the charge against me in Colorado.”

A “new” woman had begun to occupy Ted’s thoughts during the final months of 1976. Tall, auburn-haired Carole Boone, a woman in her late twenties, one of Ted’s co-workers at the Washington State Department of Emergency Services during the summer of 1974, had been one of the persons who had lavished such high praise on Ted after his initial arrest. She had been married and living in Europe through his trial period but, when she took up residence in Seattle again, newly divorced, she began corresponding with Ted.

“Mostly they were just letters to make him laugh, to keep his spirits up,” she explained. Like Ted, she had a wry sense of humor (her letters were sometimes addressed to “Dear Bunny” or “Dear Bun-Bun”). Carole and some other Washington State friends had visited Ted in Salt Lake City, during the spring of ’75, when Carole and Ted had gone horseback riding and laughed together—only weeks before Ted’s arrest and the beginning of his troubles. Like others among Ted’s circle of friends Carole was convinced of his innocence, and she was derisive of “the fl0ck of gobbling turkeys”—the investigators, the prosecutors, the media people—who, she believed, were responsible for Ted’s plight.

Throughout his Utah confinement, Ted had kept busy with his reading (The Gulag Archipelago, nonfiction dealing with political subjects) and his writing, which sometimes turned to poetry. In one of his poems “Nights and Days,” he wrote of the boredom of watching daytime television, especially the game shows, with their slick hosts, prizes, and giggling, raucous participants and audiences. One passage in particular would intrigue detectives who suspected Ted in the disappearances and brutal murders of all those girls. It referred to the “perverse pleasure” derived from watching such shows and the tendency of “some neat suburban daisy/To scream and go crazy.”

At four o’clock on the morning of January 29, 1977, a Colorado sheriff’s car passed through the gates of Point of the Mountain in a freezing fog and turned southward toward Provo, beginning the trip to Aspen. Bundy, the prisoner, handcuffed and his ankles chained, sat in the back seat with Fisher. Pitkin County Deputy Rick Kralicek was driving and, beside him, Undersheriff Ben Meyers kept an eye turned toward Bundy.

It was a secret operation. There continued to be deep concern about Bundy’s security. Not only was he an escape risk, he was also a potential assassination target. Fisher knew a number of anger-filled fathers or relatives of murdered and missing girls—or some crackpot—might take pleasure in shooting the man. In the predawn darkness, the car turned eastward where the highway began rising into the mountains toward the Colorado border.

Windblown snow swept the lonely gray-brown plains, with their scrubby sage and dwarfed trees, and the distant flat-topped buttes. Fisher watched as Bundy stared at the passing landscape. “Country look familiar, Ted?” asked the mustached, long-haired investigator. It was, Fisher knew, the same highway Bundy had taken on his trips into Colorado two years earlier, the route along which he had left a trail of credit-card purchases—at Grand Junction, Glenwood Springs, and other places in Colorado.

Slowly, the three police officers in the car became uncomfortably aware that another sedan, following at some distance, was rapidly gaining on them. Kralicek accelerated the police car to eighty-five. Then to ninety. The following car continued to gain.

Meyers lifted the microphone of the police radio to send a message ahead to the Colorado Highway Patrol, to alert troopers of their home state that they were approaching the border. Meyers explained theirs was a Pitkin County vehicle with a high-security prisoner. “And we have an unidentified vehicle coming up on us from behind at a high rate of speed,” Meyers added.

The speedometer hit a hundred miles an hour. “Chrissake,” muttered Kralicek. “That bastard’s still comin’ at us like there’s no tomorrow. He must be doing a hundred-ten or more.”

Bundy had become aware of potential danger. Gradually, Fisher noticed, the prisoner lowered his upper body below the window level and began to slide onto the floor of the car.

The pursuing car passed them on a long, straight stretch of highway dropping down from the plateau toward the town of Grand Junction. Watching the other driver pass, Meyers sighed and grinned. “Hell, he’s just a racer. Poor bastard. He’s headin’ into some kind of trouble.” Ahead the alerted Colorado Highway Patrol troopers waited to make the arrest.

In the back seat, Fisher glanced down at Bundy, who now lay in a hunched position on his knees on the floor of the car. With his wrists cuffed together, he seemed to be in a position of prayer. Theodore, thought Fisher, you really ARE afraid of dying, aren’t you?