| |
In the Ted Bundy murder case there had been so many defense motions, so many preliminary hearings in the courtroom at Aspen, that the one Tuesday morning, June 6, 1977, attracted little notice.
When the sheriff’s car carrying the prisoner arrived from Glenwood Springs and parked behind the old courthouse, Bundy stepped into the sunlight, handcuffed, with Deputy Sheriff Rick Kralicek at his shoulder. A waiting Aspen photographer clicked a shot of them entering the courthouse. Bundy curled a faint, preoccupied smile toward the camera.
Although it was a warm day, Bundy wore a bulky knit, tie-around cardigan over a tan turtleneck. He had shaved his beard again.
There was a drowsy atmosphere in the upstairs courtroom during the morning proceedings. Judge Lohr listened carefully while James Dumas, the dark-haired public defender, delivered a well-used defense argument against Colorado’s death-penalty statute. Time and again, in courtrooms all around Colorado, defense lawyers had been offering the same legal reasoning in capital-crimes cases. Colorado’s death penalty law, Dumas told the judge, was too inflexible, in that it denied judges and juries the freedom to consider a wide range of mitigating circumstances which might have been present during the commission of a capital crime.
Already that argument was before the Colorado State Supreme Court, awaiting a decision.
While his lawyer was speaking, Bundy’s glance flicked around the courtroom. From his seat at the defense table, he glanced to his right, beyond the place where the court clerk sat taking her notes, to the large window and the view of the barren base of nearby Smuggler Mountain. During recesses, Bundy often stood there at that window, gazing down onto mostly vacant stretches of brushy, rocky land behind the courthouse. In fact, he had stood beside that window so often, looking out, one of the young women in the nearby clerk’s office sometimes had the nervous feeling he was thinking of jumping.
Dumas’ legal argument continued. Bundy’s eyes turned to his left, examining the few rows of spectator benches, mostly empty, and, beyond, the little law library. The stacks of olive-colored lawbooks there partially obscured the view of the old cathedral windows at the front of the courthouse. Through one of those open windows, Bundy could hear the sound of a passing car on Aspen’s main street. It was a languid morning.
At last Dumas was ending his argument against the death penalty. Bundy watched for any expression from Judge Lohr’s impassive face as Dumas concluded, “And so we move that the death penalty be removed as a consideration in this case.”
Glancing at the clock, the prim judge announced the court would take its midmorning recess. Judge Lohr rose, left the bench, and passed through a side door into the clerk’s office toward his chambers. With an empty, clattering sound, the few others left the courtroom and moved into the corridor.
Bundy was the last to leave. He yawned as he passed through the doors, turned into the clerk’s office, and approached the service counter.
“What can we do for you?” asked Shirley Dills, the clerk.
“Hi,” Bundy replied. “Has the judge filed that written order yet? The one I asked about the other day?” It was a reference to one of several motions he had filed to improve his jail conditions.
“No, not yet,” replied the clerk. “I’ll check on it.”
Bundy turned from the counter, walked into the corridor outside the courtroom, then circled back to the clerk’s counter.
“That order?” he mumbled. “Has the judge signed that order yet?”
Dills shook her head. Perplexed that Bundy had returned to ask the same question, she wondered if he might be ill.
Alone, Bundy reentered the courtroom. As he passed through the door, he noticed his guard was still standing in the hallway, holding a half-smoked cigarette.
The courtroom was empty. Bundy walked a few steps, turned left into the aisle, past five rows of spectator benches, and pushed open the wooden gate which led to the law library. He moved quickly along the rows of bookcases and stepped into the circle of morning sunshine at the big window which was partially open.
There was no hesitation. He’d recall later, “If it had been six stories, I still would have jumped.” Bundy raised the window further, and, noticing there was almost no activity in the street below, he jumped, feet first.
How are skydivers supposed to land? His thought scarcely was formed when—thump!—he hit the lawn. One ankle turned, and he fell. But he wasn’t hurt. He rose, shed the bulky cardigan, dropped his file of papers, and ran.
Ted’s only fear was that he might be shot by a guard. But he sensed the odds were against that happening. Most of Sheriff Dick Kienast’s deputies, he knew, weren’t the kind of old-line cops who shot first and asked questions later. No, he thought, they don’t shoot you in Aspen.
He dashed behind the business building next to the courthouse, then trotted down an alleyway. Within moments he was at the edge of town, beside a river flowing under a bridge. No one saw him as he ducked and scrambled into a brushy place beneath the bridge.
In the basement of the courthouse, the deputy at the front desk did a slow double-take when she heard the question. The young man who had just walked into the sheriff’s office asked, “Hey, is it kind of unusual for someone to be jumping out of the courthouse window?”
“Oh, Gawd,” exclaimed the deputy after a moment. “Bundy! Where’s Bundy?”
Deputies scrambled from the basement, up the stairs toward the courtroom, shouting, “Where’s Bundy?” Kralicek burst into the clerk’s office, asking excitedly, “Is Bundy in here?”
“No,” said the clerk. Standing nearby, Judge Lohr stared in disbelief. “He’s gone,” exclaimed the deputy as he ran from the office.
Dills would recall later the chaos of that morning. One wave of deputies running up the stairs, to collide with another wave of deputies heading downstairs from the courtroom.
“Christalmighty, Bundy’s gone!” shouted a voice from the second floor. The shout echoed throughout the courthouse.
Within minutes a posse, bristling with shotguns and old military carbines, was beginning to form behind the courthouse. Dills looked down on it all from her clerk’s office and muttered to a fellow worker, “The Keystone Kops ride again.”
Nearby, Dumas, contemplating the noisy hubbub, reflected on the argument he had just delivered in court, pleading to have the death penalty stricken from the Bundy case.
“Never,” sighed Dumas to Chuck Leidner, the other defense adviser, “have I ever had a client show so little faith in my argument.”
From the highway bridge, Bundy had walked quickly along the south edge of Aspen, directly toward Aspen Mountain, which rose steeply behind the town. No one recognized him. The alarm had not yet spread. When he had left the jail at Glenwood Springs early that morning, guards hadn’t sensed Bundy was wearing an underlayer of clothing—jeans under his tan cords, two turtlenecks under the striped, shawl-collared cardigan. When he discarded the outer layers, the description police would remember from his courtroom appearance wouldn’t be valid.
From the sheriff’s office, the crackling police radio was spreading the alarm. Deputies from nearby counties were being summoned to Aspen, and roadblocks were being set up along the highway leading out of Aspen toward Glenwood Springs. Police were alerted at various places along Interstate 70.
A team of tracking dogs led the searchers from the courthouse to the Neal Street bridge, into the brush below it, to the edge of Roaring Creek. But there the dogs yelped and circled 1n frustration.
Bundy was gone.
* * *
The political furor was instantaneous. District Attorney Frank Tucker howled in anger at Sheriff Kienast and his men. “I told that sheriff over and over again, we had to have Bundy watched every single minute,” Tucker told reporters. “We kept tellin’ him ‘Bundy’s an escape risk!’”
Meanwhile, the sheriff’s officers were quietly blaming the judge for the escape. The sheriff and prosecutor, they noted, had argued in vain to have Bundy kept in leg chains, at least during all his courtroom appearances, but Judge Lohr had considered that would be an inappropriate courtroom restraint to be placed on a defendant who was presumed to be innocent.
Possemen in high-country rigs and on horseback started up the mountain roads around Aspen that afternoon and a helicopter began searching the ridges. Meanwhile, Kienast and some of his men studied the wall map in the sheriff’s office, debating where to concentrate the effort. To the south and east, up to the 9,000 and 10,000 foot flanks of Smuggler Mountain? That would have been a likely direction from the place beneath the bridge where the dogs had lost the scent. Or to the south and west—Aspen Mountain, and beyond, toward the rugged peaks at the beginning of the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness area? Or eastward, beyond miles of awesome Rocky Mountain peaks, ranging toward the Continental Divide? Did Bundy have help? A rendezvous with someone in a car?
Night fell. Police cars prowled the streets of Aspen. Heeding radio appeals, most residents locked their doors.
By the second day of the search, Aspen’s offbeat sense of humor came to life. One local T-shirt shop was rapidly silkscreening a new item. Your choice, in a variety of colors: A smiling portrait of Bundy and the dark-humor message: “Ted Bundy Is a One-Night Stand.”
At the bar of the Jerome Hotel, one drinker began a fund-raising effort to install a bronze plaque on the courthouse lawn where Bundy had landed after his jump from the window. The memorial to police bungling, he suggested, should be inscribed “Ted Bundy Leapt Here.”
One Aspen bar quickly advertised its new “Ted Bundy Special”—a shot of tequila, rum, a dash of cascara, and two Mexican jumping beans.
In Aspen Bundy had become a folk hero.
One of the police roadblocks, between Aspen and Glenwood Springs, netted an unexpected catch on the second day. When deputies stopped a dark blue sedan, they smelled a familiar, heavy, sour-sweet aroma. They opened the trunk to discover two bales of marijuana. Another bale was in the rear seat. The burly black man who was driving the car and his well-dressed white companion were arrested for possession. The two men had been making a routine drug run from Las Vegas to Michigan when, after spending the night at Aspen, they encountered the unexpected roadblock.
Later, while he was being booked into jail, Jerris Williams, the black, asked one officer, “Hey, what’s the name of this cat you had that roadblock set up for?”
The officer looked at Williams—a well-muscled, 6 foot 4, 280-pounder. “We’re looking for a guy named Theodore Bundy,” replied the cop. “Why do you need to know?”
“Just do me a favor,” growled Williams. “Whenever you pick up this Theodore Bundy, I want you to put him in my cell with me for a while, okay?”
Mixed with Aspen’s grins and derisions at the Pitkin County sheriff’s officers, there was fear and anguish over the escape.
In Salt Lake City police quickly set up protection around the homes of Carol DaRonch, the key witness, and Stewart Hanson, the judge in Bundy’s kidnapping conviction.
At American Fork, Utah, where they had just moved into an old farmhouse, Jim and Shirleen Aime, parents of the murdered Laura Aime, seethed at the news of the escape. “Those goddamn stupid cops,” snapped the father. “How could they let a thing like that happen? If I could afford it, I’d take off work and go down there and hunt for him myself.” Jim bought his wife a revolver and instructed her to stay home and not let any of their other three daughters out of her sight.
In Seattle, Eleanore Rose, the anguished mother of the murdered Denise Naslund, telephoned Aspen repeatedly for news of the escape and search.
Earlier in the year she had written a letter of desperation to Bundy at the Glenwood Springs jail:
Theodore Bundy: I ask myself, “What were Denise’s last thoughts? How long did she suffer? How frightened was she? How? Why?”
If you know anything—ANYTHING at all—please let me know. ... I am so sick at heart and so unhappy. Everywhere I look I see her face. I visualize her walking in the door, sitting here and talking to me—putting her makeup on and combing her hair. ... Please if you can give me a lead or know anything about anybody, write and let me know.
Her letter had gone unanswered. In terror, Eleanore now locked herself in her small house, alone, fearful of everything around her.
* * *
By Sunday, the fifth day following the escape, the search had yielded one trace of Bundy. Searchers discovered that a cabin eighteen miles from Aspen, on Aspen Mountain, had been burglarized. “Bundy had to break a window to get in there,” said Mike Fisher, the D.A.’s investigator. “We got some really good [finger]prints out of the place.”
Fisher and I sat drinking together in the hot Sunday afternoon sunshine outside the trailer house where Fisher lived at Basalt, a few miles downstream from Aspen along the Roaring Fork River. Wearing a T-shirt and faded denim shorts, Fisher sat with his right leg, the knee heavily wrapped, propped on a camp stool. “Helluva time for this to happen,” growled Fisher, pointing to the knee. He had undergone surgery for an old cartilage injury the day of the escape. The knee was painfully swollen.
“I just can’t believe those goddamn guards lettin’ him get away,” Fisher sputtered. “I kept tellin’ ’em, ‘He’s gonna go. He’s gonna go.’ For weeks we were getting reports from the other prisoners in the jail. Bundy was making them all just nervous as hell. Hour after hour, they could hear him in his cell, jumping. He’d climb to the top bunk and jump to the floor. And do it over again, getting his legs in shape for that jump.”
“Mike, where do you think he’s gone?” I asked.
Fisher took a long swallow from a can of Budweiser and shrugged as he scanned the surrounding mountains. “Hell, he could be anyplace. But I got a hunch he didn’t get far.
“I don’t think Theodore is very good in the mountains,” the diminutive detective added.
Theodore—when Fisher spoke the name, there was contemptuous anger in his voice and a flash in his mournful, pale-blue eyes. Probably no one in law enforcement had studied Bundy so intensively, for such a long time, as had Fisher. He had spent months assembling and storing all the collected wisdom available on Bundy.
A few years earlier, Fisher had decided to leave, as he put it, “the plastic rat race” of Southern California, where he had been making a prosperous living in sporting-goods merchandizing. Then, through police friends, he became interested in law enforcement. He took a lower paying job as a deputy sheriff in Aspen, a place where he would be surrounded by free, open country—the Rockies—with abundant fishing and hunting. Fisher was that unusual sportsman who, when he hunted deer or other mountain game, preferred to use bow and arrow. Sometimes, though, he would confess, Fisher’s prey became of secondary importance as he trekked through the Colorado wilderness, especially during the richly-colored Rocky Mountain autumn. “Sometimes y’know, the greatest thing in the world,” he would say, “is to get under a stand of those beautiful Quakers [his nickname for the quaking aspen] and just lie there on the ground and look up through those bright yellow leaves shimmerin’ against the sun. What a light show. And maybe take a nap.”
Because of his feisty, intelligent persistence and his quick understanding of law, Fisher had been chosen to become the D.A.’s investigator in 1974.
Caryn Campbell had been murdered at Aspen in January 1975, and for a year and a half, Fisher had become a determined stalker working nonstop in a deeply personal hunt for her killer.
Each of us finished a beer. I rose and pulled two more cold ones out of Fisher’s nearby ice chest.
“I only hope we get Theodore back without another girl getting killed,” sighed Fisher. He was staring into the distance, toward a sunlit ridge, its pink-rock face dotted with mountain cedar.
I un-zip-topped a Bud and handed it to him. “Mike,” I asked, “do you think Ted’s good for all those cases up in Washington and Utah? I’ve always had my doubts.”
“Yeah, most of them,” he replied. “Not the California cases, though ... I don’t think. But all the others are just too damned similar.” He took another swallow of beer. Then, with a long, rattling snort, he cleared his sinuses. “Ted the Troller,” he murmured.
“Mike,” I continued, “what do you think really happened to those victims? What would have been the MO?”
“Well, first there’s the approach. Making the contact with the victim and then, once the girl had somehow been lured into the car or beside the car, I think she was hit pretty quick. We will probably never really know whether or not they were always out of earshot of a witness because, if there was a witness, we’ve never been able to find one.
“There’s just a total lack of other signs of struggle on the body,” he added. “No traces you might expect to find, for example, under the fingernails, if a girl had been able to put up a fight. So I think immobilizing the victim was accomplished first. Similar to DaRonch. Like, ‘Here comes the crowbar! Bang!’”
“Do you think the victim is killed with that first blow?”
“I don’t think that initial blow could have been all that controlled. You couldn’t predict that the first blow would kill each victim or only render her unconscious or partially conscious. The lack of clothing also goes against you in trying to figure out what happened. If you never find the clothing, you never know how much violence there was, because you don’t know if the clothing was unbuttoned, or cut off, or torn off or ... Christ, maybe it was eaten.”
“Any theory on the clothing? What was done with it?”
“Those garbage bags ... that damned garbage bag in his Volkswagen up in Utah. You put clothes in a black plastic garbage bag, tie a knot in the top, and toss it in a dumpster. And then Adios! We never found one single scrap of those girls’ clothes.”
“Would it be possible, inside a little Volkswagen, to swing a crowbar with enough of a swipe to really knock out the girl?”
“Oh, yeah. I think once she was in that passenger’s seat, if that was the MO at that particular time, it was just down with the hand to pick up the crowbar and then across. And bang! Ten, fifteen inches of metal is a lot of force. Left-handed, or with the right hand. It had to be very quick and it had to be very natural. With the right hand, sort of a backhand wrist snap. WHAP! That first shot had to be enough to bend them over so they could be handled after that.
“Some of the victims could have been killed with the first blow or the second blow. But where, in the sequence of things, the other blows came, I don’t know. We have, in just about every case, up to as many as four blows. But they’re just about all from about the same quarter. Now I would think that if a guy was going to start hitting with the crowbar during sexual intercourse, or while he’s doing whatever he’s doing with them, when he’s all excited, I think we’d have a great deal more massive violence on all the victims.”
“What about the strangulation? Where would that occur? At what phase?”
“I think the strangulation came along with the sexual attack part of it. Particularly where there was anal intercourse. Usually you find a pattern of experimenting in the sexual part of it. Always experimenting, which is why you have a difference from case to case. That’s part of the profile of the antisocial personality. Experimentation. Anal intercourse could have been part of that and we know that, up in Seattle, he was playing with that. And bondage. And I think the strangulation was part of the sexual experimentation. See, strangulation causes contraction of the sphincter.”
Fisher groaned in pain and shifted his swollen knee.
And he reflected on the hours he had spent with the prosecutor, Milt Blakey, examining all the autopsy photos of the Utah and Colorado victims whose bodies had been found. “I’m not expert on all this, of course,” Fisher said, “but it sure does appear that the strangulation was coming from the rear. In other words, the ligature was being bound and was being tightened from the rear.”
“Do you think that the victim was killed inside the car,” I asked, ‘‘and then moved into the trunk for transportation to the dump site?”
“Could be. Or the victim could have been bopped on the outside of the car. Let’s say her suspicion grew as they approached the car. And maybe a thump and a bump on the outside of the car put her down. Then put her in a big garbage bag and put her under the hood to move her somewhere.”
“That would be a helluva lot of dead weight to lift. It’d take a lot of strength.”
“Well, in a situation like that, that kind of a personality, all hyped up, all fired up with the excitement of the killing, the beating, has got a lot of adrenaline pumping. You can lift enormous weight. You know this from the preliminary hearing—that in Caryn’s case, we found one hair under the floor mat inside the car. And another hair is found in the trunk. That could lead you to two theories. Was she in both places? Or was she just in the front and then her clothes placed in the trunk—in the bag? Where the hair fell off.”
“So you come up with the initial knockout, then hauling the victim, either inside the car or in the trunk, to some other place, where you have strangulation, with the intercourse or whatever else there was. Then,” I asked, “they’re dead when they’re dropped?”
“No, I don’t think he ever checks them out for any vitals. That’s an interesting little ploy he uses. He always leaves them near a road. Right off the road. You know how he rationalizes everything. He can say, ‘Now, if she had just gotten up, somebody would have seen her.’ Or, ‘Somebody was bound to find her. Therefore, it’s not my fault.’”
“What the hell is that all about?”
“Well, it goes back to what the doctor up in the Utah pen said. Often a guy will be using that rationalization—that if the victim could have gotten up, or if someone had just come by, she might still be alive today. I can say, ‘I’m not the full fault of all this.’”
I thought about that for a while. “So what does that do? Make it possible to say, ‘I’m innocent of murder?’”
Noisily Fisher cleared his sinuses again. “Yes. He’s got everything pretty well rationalized.”
I was intrigued by Fisher’s analysis of his prey—Ted, my friend. Fisher understood that Ted and I were longtime acquaintances. I asked if Fisher thought he could ever get Bundy to talk—to confess or to make any incriminating concessions at all.
“I doubt it,” replied Fisher, “unless you catch Theodore when he’s really down. When he’s all in pieces, ragged as hell. Now that could happen. If, y’know, he gets caught here—without being shot—and he’s all exhausted. He’ll be really, really down. Maybe then.”
Fisher confided that he had gotten a promise from Sheriff Kienast. “If Theodore’s caught, then the first thing that happens is I’m gonna hit him with questions. Not about his goddamn escape, because that’s what he’ll be expecting. We’re just going to talk about Caryn Campbell’s murder.
‘‘I think he’s still up those goddamn mountains somewhere,” Fisher continued, shifting his knee again. “And he can’t handle those mountains. They’re just awesome if you’re not familiar with them. When we get him, he’s going to be pitiful. He’s gonna be way down. And we’ll just talk about that murder.”
* * *
During the five days since his jump, Ted had never really gotten much beyond Aspen Mountain. After he circled the edge of the town, he reached the woods at the foot of the mountain and made a lung-tearing run to the top—past the 8,200 foot level, then above 9,000 feet, then higher.
He had no real plan. In his pocket he carried a sparsely detailed map of the Aspen area mountains and some vitamins he had saved from his extra jail ration as prescribed by court order.
When Ted reached the top of the mountain that first day, exhausted, he became confused about the best route to take from there. Had he turned toward his left and followed along the crest of some forbidding ridges, he would eventually have crossed into the Gunnison country—or eastward, the Continental Divide.
Instead, he turned in the opposite direction and began moving in befuddled circles. That night a cold rain and snow pelted the mountain, and Ted, wet and shivering, returned to a vacant cabin he had noticed earlier in the day. After long thought about the dangers, he broke into the cabin. Inside he looked for food, but found only some brown sugar. He slept for a while. Through part of the following day, he lay in the cabin, listening to the sounds of the searching aircraft overhead.
Carrying a .22 rifle he had taken from the cabin, Ted tried to find an escape route, but in whatever direction he tried, he encountered awesome, sheer, frightening rock mountain faces, which seemed to stretch for miles.
Always Ted would retreat, tired and confused, limping on blistered feet, toward the cabin. His hands had become bloodied as a result of falls on the sharp, merciless rocks. As each long night and terrifying day passed, Ted felt smaller, weaker.
By Saturday he discovered traces the searchers had been at the cabin. Ted shivered in the nearby woods that night. On Sunday morning, the helicopter hovered to a landing on an open ridge near the cabin to discharge a searcher and a dog. From his wooded cover 200 feet away, Ted watched, his heart pounding. But the dog didn’t pick up his scent.
That night, exhausted, limping, befuddled by the high altitude, Ted made his way back down the mountain into the Castle Creek drainage, even though he knew the route led back into Aspen. He tossed the .22 away. Carrying a rifle, he might be shot.
In the middle of the night, just outside town, Ted crossed the Glenwood Springs highway and slipped into a darkened Aspen residential area. In front of one house, he found an unlocked Cadillac with the key in the ignition switch.
Well, he thought wearily, let’s just give it a go.
He was recaptured shortly after two o’clock that morning. Deputy Sheriffs Maureen Higgins and Gene Flatt, driving in their patrol car, noticed the oncoming headlights of the car on Highway 82, entering Aspen from the west. The car weaved slowly toward the right shoulder of the road. “Probably a drunk,” said Flatt, turning the police spotlight on the light-colored Cadillac. The driver appeared to slump down in his seat and turned his head away from the light.
When the car was stopped, Flatt at first didn’t recognize the driver. He wore a plaid shirt, an old yellow fishing hat, and some wire frame glasses he had found in the car. And he’d applied a Band-Aid over his nose.
Bundy—emaciated, exhausted, confused—was ordered out of the car and told to spreadeagle on the roadway while Higgins radioed for other officers. Minutes later one of the deputies, shining a flashlight in his face, grinned, “Hi, Ted, welcome back.”
* * *
Two hours later a crowd of deputies and news reporters clustered around the counter at the sheriff’s office. In a back room Bundy was being interrogated about his escape by Sheriff Kienast and Deputy Don Davis. Leaning against a nearby wall, propped on his crutches, Fisher was alone in anger.
The look on his face told it all. The sheriff had reneged on the promise. Fisher wasn’t getting first crack at questioning Bundy—about murders. The sheriff was draining all the details from Bundy about his escape. That was the sheriff’s political priority at the moment.
In the interview room, the sheriff’s people provided Bundy with coffee and food and some medication for his scraped, blistered feet. Smiling, talking, Ted gathered his composure, and he told his attentive questioners, over and over again, the details of his jump from the courthouse and his race up Aspen Mountain. “I just ran right straight up that mountain without stopping,” he laughed with pride.
“And when I came back down off that mountain, I knew I was going to get caught,” he said. “But I was just ... I dunno ... I just didn’t care. It was a funny thing. My body was strong, but my mind was weak.” He chuckled—weakly—at the thought.
The sheriff’s office cranked out news releases for the waiting reporters, detailing the recapture. Two hours elapsed before Fisher was given his chance to talk to Bundy, who now was fully composed and in command.
When the investigator entered the interrogation room, Bundy noticed he was on crutches. “Gee, Mike,” he said solicitously, “I hope I wasn’t the cause of that.”
“No,” growled Fisher. “Ted, I want to talk with you about the Caryn Campbell murder.”
Bundy smiled. His eyes were confident. Fisher knew that the fleeting moment when Bundy might be caught with his defenses down had passed.
* * *
Next day, exhausted, gaunt, and disheveled, resembling an animal which had been run to ground, Ted was taken—shackled and barefoot—into court again. He faced a mass of new charges—escape, auto theft, burglary. Judge Lohr’s mood had changed. Sternly he warned Bundy, “It’s possible that consecutive sentences could be proposed.” And that, Lohr warned ominously, could add up to 90 years. Hollow-eyed, Ted had no reply.
Later, in the basement cell of the courthouse, Ted had a visit with John Henry Browne, the Seattle lawyer, a tall man with long hair and electric dark eyes. Browne, a trusted counselor, had been one of the first people Ted telephoned after his recapture. Sensing there were now storms of crisis around his friend, Browne had flown immediately to Aspen.
“Ted,” said Browne, “I think you’d better give up this idea of a pro se defense.” Now, confronted by the new charges, there would be no way Bundy could handle it all, Browne told him.
The exhausted Bundy, slumped on a jail cot in jail coveralls, his bare feet bandaged and bleeding, listened as Browne emphasized that a murder conviction could mean the death penalty.
Browne produced a pamphlet he had recently obtained—a booklet issued by the Team Defense Project, Inc., legal organization in Atlanta. Headed by Attorney Millard Farmer, it was, Browne explained, a group which was fighting the death penalty in all states. “You might want to get in touch with Farmer. He could be a lot of help to you in your case here,” Browne suggested. Ted accepted the pamphlet.
“What’s going on with executions now?” Ted asked. “Where are most people likely to be executed now?”
“I suppose it might be Georgia,” replied Browne. “No,” he corrected himself. “It’d probably be Florida now.”
“Florida?” repeated Bundy.
Browne explained there had been a U.S. Supreme Court ruling which had clearly upheld the constitutionality of Florida’s death-penalty statute.
“Florida’s probably where they’ll start executing now,” said Browne.
“Florida,” murmured Bundy, “Florida. Hmmh.”