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Only a handful of reporters were waiting when Ted, in handcuffs and leg irons, was brought into the old brick Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen for his “advisory hearing” on the afternoon of January 31. His on-again, off-again beard was off again. He looked serenely confident and greeted me in the corridor with a quip: “I see I’ve brought you over to beautiful Aspen.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Watch out for the crazy women over here,” Ted laughed.
Chuck Leidner, Bundy’s public defender, a man whose relaxed expression was distinctly Aspen casual, arose to fire some aggressive defense motions. He asked Judge George C. Lohr for a court order to permit Ted to make his court appearances without handcuffs or ankle restraints and that he be permitted to wear street clothes, rather than jail garb in court. Leidner further asked for a court ban on all photos of his client, in handcuffs, en route to the courtroom. Such photos carry an aura of guilt, Leidner argued.
Lohr, well known as a judge of careful sensitivity to defendant rights, agreed Ted could wear street clothes and be free of restraints when he appeared in the courtroom—despite a plea from the sheriff that Bundy had shown thoughts of escape at the Utah penitentiary. The judge took under advisement the motion to ban photography and a broader defense motion to close all pretrial hearings completely.
Ted eased into the daily routine of the ancient jail in the courthouse basement. Pitkin County deputy sheriffs discovered that their intriguing new prisoner was pleasant, talkative, witty. At Aspen, the jail had an open-cell-door policy. So Ted had a chance to mingle with and talk with the other prisoners, most of them youthful short termers, doing time for drunken driving, thefts, other minor offenses. Ted’s only complaint was about the food. “Aspen has some of the finest gourmet restaurants in America,” he mused, “so why is it our meals are so bad in here?”
Leidner, however, found Bundy to be a difficult, demanding client, who insisted that his lawyer spend hours with him in interminable conferences about his case. “It’s a murder charge,” conceded Leidner, “but one of the weakest I’ve ever seen. Hell, the state’s got no case at all.” Privately Leidner grumbled that “Bundy just wants a babysitter. I’ve got other cases to take care of. I can’t give him all my time.”
Bundy anxiously fretted that “discovery documents”—the details of investigations which had been carried out by police in the Caryn Campbell case and other murders—were coming into the possession of Leidner. Ted wanted those reports in his personal control.
Thus Bundy made a quiet resolve to undertake his own defense, pro se. In a penciled letter, on yellow legal stationary, he outlined that proposal to the judge, saying that course of action, handling his case, “is intelligently charted in my own best interests. ...” Leidner’s reaction to the idea was a miffed shrug of the shoulders. Judge Lohr persuaded Bundy to wait until after the important pretrial show-cause hearings, scheduled for early April, before deciding to undertake the case, serving as his own counsel.
* * *
Frank G. E. Tucker, the district attorney, had conceded he didn’t have the courtroom skills or time to handle the Bundy murder trial. So he had succeeded in getting two prosecutors assigned to the trial from Colorado Springs—Bob Russel, the D.A. there, and the quietly effective Milton K. Blakey, Russel’s assistant. Blakey had already taken on most of the case preparation and had spent hours with Mike Fisher, the Aspen D.A.’s office investigator, familiarizing himself with the evidence.
Critical pretrial hearings began in early April. Under subpoena, Mrs. Harter, the state’s key witness, had flown into Aspen from her California home April 3, and that evening, at Aspen’s Holiday Inn, she met and chatted briefly during the dinner hour with Fisher, Blakey, and Russel. “I get a feeling something’s wrong,” Fisher reflected afterward. When she had picked out Bundy’s photograph from those Fisher had shown her in January 1976, Mrs. Harter had been an enthusiastic, positive witness. “Now she seems kind of detached and withdrawn,” Fisher told the prosecutors.
Early next morning, before the beginning of the hearing, Russel drove Mrs. Harter the few miles from Aspen to the Wildwood Inn where, together, they walked the route she had walked that night—from her room, past the elevator, down the stairs to the drugstore below. She pointed out to the prosecutor the place near the elevator where she had seen “the strange man.” Russel concluded she would be a good witness.
Perhaps unwittingly, however, she was about to drop a bombshell on the prosecution when pretrial hearings began. As she took the witness stand the morning of April 4, Mrs. Harter appeared nervous and faltering, even under the gentle questioning of Blakey. She recalled her movements at the ski lodge that evening of January 12, 1975, and remembered that, while she was returning to her room she saw two men near the elevator. She described the younger man, but added that, in the darkness, she hadn’t seen him too well. One man was quite close to the elevator and the other was several feet away, she said—near a low wood-lath structure which surrounded a refrigeration compressor.
Suddenly Blakey had an uneasy feeling. He was now dealing with a witness who remembered having seen two men.
Gingerly, the prosecutor proceeded with the questioning. “Do you see anyone in the courtroom that looks like either of these men?”
“Could I have one of them stand up?” asked Mrs. Harter.
“Certainly.”
“The man in the first row,” she replied. “Stand up.”
Blakey’s heart sank. The woman’s eyes had swept past the defense table where Bundy sat and had focused on the front row of spectators. Mrs. Harter had pointed to a man sitting there.
“Referring to the man in the blue pants, in the blue jacket?” asked Blakey in an almost forlorn tone.
“Uh-huh,” said the woman. “In the blue jacket.”
Blakey stared at the man in the blue jacket standing, a sheepish look on his face. It was Ben Meyers, the undersheriff. He was a middle-aged man, huskily built, with sandy brown hair, brown eyes, and a straight nose. Some of his facial characteristics were similar to Bundy’s. But he was a heftier man with a distinctly fuller, rounded face.
“Does he look like either of the men?” asked Blakey.
“Similar.”
“To the one ... ?”
“To the one by the elevator.”
“The one that was close to you?”
“Right.”
At the defense table, Bundy’s eyes filled with mirth as he tossed his head back, suppressing a laugh. The few reporters in the room furiously scribbled notes. They had a startling story. The state’s chief eyewitness had identified the “mystery man” in the Caryn Campbell murder case—the Pitkin County undersheriff!
It was a crazy moment of confusion and consternation for the prosecution. Blakey did the only reasonable thing. He ended the questioning. It remained possible that some man she’d seen near the elevator resembled Ben Meyers. Perhaps she would remember Bundy as the “strange” man, further away, near the refrigeration unit. But ... Blakey risked no more questions.
A quiet “goddamn”—almost in unison—rose in the throats of Fisher and Russel at the prosecution table. They studied Mrs. Harter as she left the witness stand and nervously sought the courtroom exit. She had been so positive in her photo identification, Fisher remembered. “Somethin’s happened to her. But I don’t know what the hell it was,” the investigator growled.
Later, a disconsolate Blakey vetoed a suggestion that someone talk to Mrs. Harter to determine what had gone wrong. “No, let’s leave her alone,” ruled Blakey. Perhaps by the time of trial, Blakey hoped, she could be rehabilitated as a witness.
But, for the prosecution, there had been severe damage: eyewitness fails to identify bundy, said one of the many headlines.
Through the rest of the pretrial hearings, the prosecution produced testimony steadying the elements of its shaky case. Robert Neill, the FBI hair-comparison specialist, testified about the morphological characteristics of human hair and the range of characteristics of Caryn Campbell’s hair which were “microscopically indistinguishable” from the hair found in Bundy’s Volkswagen.
Neill pointedly conceded that a hair comparison is not like a fingerprint. It is not a precise method of identification. He recited, too, the comparisons of hairs taken from the VW with the hair specimens of Carol DaRonch, the Utah kidnap victim, and the murdered Utah girl, Melissa Smith.
“Mr. Neill,” asked Russel, “in your fourteen to fifteen years of experience, have you ever had the experience before, whereby, in relation to three alleged victims, you would be able to make such a match to one source?”
Neill: “In my experience, I can’t recall a situation in which hairs from three alleged victims were microscopically identified from one common source, such as the interior of an automobile.”
Fisher’s testimony established Bundy’s gas purchases near the Wildwood Inn about the time of Caryn’s disappearance. There, too, was testimony about the Wildwood Inn notation discovered in the ski brochure found at Bundy’s Salt Lake City apartment.
At the end, Judge Lohr ruled there was, at least, legal probable cause. Ted Bundy would stand trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell.
* * *
Even with Mrs. Harter’s testimony under a dark cloud and the state’s case weakened, Ted was unhappy. It upset him when he was transferred from the easy jail at Aspen to the more secure Garfield County jail, forty miles down the Roaring Fork River Valley at Glenwood Springs. Only a few weeks earlier, the Colorado health department had ruled the aged Pitkin County jail was not suited for holding prisoners on long-term basis.
He forced the issue of serving as his own counsel. Judge Lohr was clearly reluctant, issuing the standard reminder that, “a man who serves as his own attorney has a fool for a client.” Yet the judge permitted Bundy to go ahead, to take command of his own case, as a pro se defendant. Simultaneously, Lohr ordered that Leidner and James Dumas, a Denver public defender who wished to be involved, serve as Ted Bundy’s “advisory counsel.”
Ted was exhilarated. He would be in control of his own murder case, defending himself against the massed efforts of police and prosecutors. He took control with gusto.
In his jail cell at Glenwood Springs, Bundy began penciling a flurry of motions to the court—motions requesting access to a telephone, mornings and afternoons, six days a week ... that he be allowed to receive telephone calls, any time, seven days a week ... a telephone in his cell ... access to a law library for a three-hour period, twice a week ... services of a secretary in the public defender’s office ... a court-appointed investigator to check the investigations of police and develop new defense evidence ... permission to keep law books and case files in his cell ... and to have his own forensic hair specialist, to challenge the FBI hair analysis.
Ted also began a series of vigorous actions to improve his jail conditions, his diet, the illumination of his cell. He asked Judge Lohr to order a better jail diet, plus vitamin supplements. With a deficiency of Vitamin A in his diet, “my eyes become sore and my vision blurred,” he complained.
“What justification is there for being treated like a dangerous animal, with a big sign over my door saying, Caution?” he asked the judge. “I am guilty of nothing in the State of Colorado. The total environment is cruel and unusual. ... The weight loss threatens my health. My treatment contradicts the notion that I am proven innocent until proven guilty. ...”
And he demanded periods of outdoor exercise, a monthly haircut, and dental care.
Solicitously, cautiously, Judge Lohr examined each of Bundy’s seemingly endless series of demands and requests and granted most of them. Soon Ted had a county-issued credit card with which he could make long-distance calls in his defense preparation. He had use of a telephone in jail and in the law library in the nearby Garfield County Courthouse, where he spent several hours each week.
* * *
Cheerfully, Bundy agreed to an interview with Barbara Grossman, of Salt Lake City’s KUTV, who had traveled with her cameraman to Glenwood Springs to visit him at the jail.
Barbara and Ted, who liked each other, laughingly reminisced about the Utah happenings. With the lights and camera trained on him inside the jail, Ted discussed with Barbara his decision to direct his own legal defense. “By putting myself in the positon of being my own counsel,” he said with determination, “I’m using positive psychology. I’m going to do it!” His speech was accelerated, his voice strengthened. “I’m going to do it because I’m right, because the person I’m representing is innocent. ... I wanted to get involved because I’m such a part of the defense. After all, I’m going to bear the consequences. Why not bear the responsibility of seeking my own acquittal and sustaining my own innocence?
“More than ever,” he said, staring hard at Barbara and the camera, “I’m convinced of my innocence.”
Several days later, in the KUTV studios in Salt Lake City, Barbara and I together viewed the tapes of her jail interview with Ted. She explained it would be used as a segment of a series KUTV was producing, which also would include interviews of some of the families of the Utah crime victims—especially the families of Melissa Smith and Debbie Kent.
“Sometimes,” Barbara confided, “I come away from an interview with Ted thinking I’ve got great stuff. But then the more you listen to what he says, the more you wonder what he’s saying.”
We reran the tapes, watching, listening more carefully. Ted said he was even more than ever convinced of his innocence. “What the hell does that mean?” I wondered: Does it mean that at some time he was less than convinced of his innocence?
And his line, “The person I’m representing is innocent.”
“That,” I said, “is quintessential Ted—the lawyer discussing his client.”
Near the end of May, I had a chance to interview Ted inside the Glenwood Springs jail. I found him rather edgy and hostile. Ted told me he had been displeased with the way the KUTV interview had turned out. “The problem was what they’re doing with that interview,” Ted complained. “Barbara Grossman was running it with a whole series of interviews and stories on the missing girls. And I mean ... who do they have sitting there, saying he doesn’t beat his wife? Me!
“Here is my interview, saying ‘I’m innocent.’ And then, ‘All right, here we are with all these missing girls, folks.’” Ted’s voice quickened and he gestured as though he were a circus ringmaster. “‘And here we are, folks, with all the teary-eyed parents! And here are the solemn faced detectives.’
“And Ted Bundy’s the one who’s put in a position of denying it. Again and again and again. And that doesn’t do me any good.” Ted’s jaw tightened. His eyes showed anger.
I turned the conversation toward his handling his own case. ‘‘How is it going, doing the thing you’ve always wanted to do, practicing law in a courtroom in a major trial?”
“It’s not exactly a Walter Mitty trip,” Ted said, his mood mellowing, “but it may border on that at times. I enjoy doing it. I’m doing a serious job of it.” Ted was brimming with a sense of combat. In Blakey and Russel, he noted, the “State of Colorado brought in two of its top prosecutors. And I’m really holding my own against them.”
He predicted he was going to beat that kidnap conviction in Salt Lake City. “I’m not guilty of crimes—the crimes in Utah or Colorado. ... Or in Washington. I don’t care what state you’re talking about.”
“What about Washington, now, Ted?” I asked. “Let’s talk about Washington for a minute. What about those cases up there?”
He avoided my eyes as he prepared his answer.
Ted had learned, through discovery proceedings in Colorado, that there was a cold trail in the murders of the young women in Washington. He knew only a couple of eyewitnesses at Lake Sammamish State Park had identified him as the man in the park that day in July 1974—the man with his arm in a sling and the Volkswagen. He knew the other witnesses had not IDed him.
“I’m not accused of anything in Washington,” Ted said confidently. “I’ve got the problem here. They’ve got a special problem up there. And I wish them all well in their investigation.
“I can’t say that I will ever understand what’s happening up there. That’s what you have police for. I’m just a citizen looking at a situation you have in Washington as far as I’m concerned.”
Ted ended that phase of the discussion. He would have nothing to say about the Washington murders.
He returned to the KUTV interview. “While I thought I was playing to a Utah market, I was obviously spread all over hell,” Ted complained. “And they played it up here in Colorado in the Denver Post. ... So it spreads. And I have to deny it over and over. And how am I supposed to act? Confident? Angry? How?
“People can draw their own conclusions, I suppose, from anything I say. Whether I say I’m innocent or whether I say I’m happy or whether I say I’m mad or sad. And they are going to say ‘Aha! Well, I knew it!’ ... You know people say ‘Well, he’s obviously a sociopath or something. ...’”
Our interview was being conducted through some bars in a holding cell—really a sectioned part of the corridor at the Garfield County jail. Ted said he was thirsty. I bought him a Dr. Pepper from a vending machine, and we ended our chat with some casual talk about politics.
Later I thought about Ted’s conspicuous use of the term “sociopath”—a psychological label I had heard him use more than once. And at times, I wondered if Ted, the psychology graduate, might have focused on that condition, in some form of self-diagnosis.
Among the multiple characteristics of the sociopath, a person who fits into a broad category of persons with antisocial behavior traits, is that he often shows emotional immaturity and an ability to rationalize behaviors, which frequently run counter to accepted rules of society. The sociopath, too, often displays a persistent propensity to get into trouble, without thought of resulting adversity or punishment, consistently rationalizing his behavior as reasonable and rational.
While Ted was at the University of Washington, earning his degree in psychology, one of the available textbooks, Modern Psychopathology, by Theodore Millon of the University of Illinois, offered an extensive discussion[1] of the various forms of sociopathic behavior:
Despite their disrespect for the rights of others, many sociopaths present a social mask, not only of civility but of sincerity and maturity. Untroubled by feelings of guilt and a sense of loyalty, they often develop a pathological talent for lying. Unconstrained by matters of honesty and truth, they learn with great facility to weave an impressive picture of their superior competencies and reliability. Many are disarmingly ingratiating and charming in their initial social encounters, becoming skillful swindlers and imposters. Their cleverness and alertness to the weaknesses of others may enable them to play their games of deception for long periods. ... Before long their true insincerity and unreliability may be revealed by their failure to keep “working at” their deceptions or as a consequence of their need to let others know how cleverly deceptive they have been. ...
Many sociopaths evidence a low tolerance for frustration, seem to act impetuously and cannot delay, let alone forgo, prospects for immediate pleasure. ... Quite characteristic is a proneness to taking chances and seeking thrills, acting as if they were immune from danger. Others jump from one exciting and momentarily gratifying escapade to another, with little or no care for potentially detrimental consequences. ...
* * *
What no one else knew—just Ted—was that he was getting ready, within the next few days, to make a newsworthy, exciting, momentarily gratifying jump.