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Around the edge of the Florida State University campus at Tallahassee, the fraternity and sorority houses, the student residence halls, the drab old houses along oak-lined streets, were quiet, mostly asleep that cold, black early morning, January 15, 1978.
It was an unusually chilly winter in north central Florida.
Across the street from the campus, a coed and her date returning from a party at one of the frat houses, passed under a street lamp, then turned in at Chi Omega sorority house.
It was late, almost three in the morning.
At the side door, Nita Neary dialed the combination of the security lock, said good night to Steve, her boyfriend, then tiptoed inside. Some of her sorority sisters, she noticed, had left the lights on in the recreation room and the living room. As she began flipping off the switches, Nita heard a loud thump! Perhaps, she thought, Steve had fallen on the steps outside. She peered through a window, but saw nothing. Steve was gone.
Then, from the upstairs hallway, she heard the sound of hurried footsteps.
When Nita approached the foyer, she saw the man. For only a moment. He was moving from the foot of the stairs toward the front door. His body was slightly hunched forward as he reached for the front door knob. In that instant, Nita saw he wore a dark knit cap, pulled down, and a dark jacket. In his hand, he carried a log, or a club, with bark on it. Then he was gone. Nita was startled.
The upstairs area, where all the girls slept in their rooms, was off limits to males. Perhaps, Nita thought, one of the girls had sneaked a man into her room. But the man Nita had seen had somehow frightened her. He seemed older.
She ran upstairs to rouse Nancy Dowdy. “Nancy,” she told her drowsy, red-haired roommate, “I just saw a guy go down the stairs and leave the house. Who’d have a guy up here? It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
Together, they went to waken Jackie McGill, the Chi O president. The three of them—Nancy and Jackie in nighties and robes—stood in the brown-carpeted hallway, as Nita described what she’d seen. “I just saw his profile. He was reaching for the door. ...”
Nita’s sentence was cut short. One of the nearby doors opened. A girl staggered out into the hallway, her upper body bent forward, her hands clutching her head. “It’s Karen,” exclaimed Nancy. “She must be sick.”
Karen Chandler turned, wobbling, falling toward the hallway wall. Nancy ran to her. “Oh my God ... Blood! She’s bleeding!” Blood was soaking Karen’s hair.
Nita and Jackie tried to steady her, help her. In the next instant Nancy discovered Karen’s roommate. Kathy Kleiner sat in her bed, groaning. Blood poured from her nose and smashed lips.
“God! Someone call the police. We need medics!” Nancy shouted.
Within minutes—at 3:23 a.m.—Tallahassee police officer Oscar Brannon and two Florida State University campus officers arrived on the run at the front door of the Chi O house, “Upstairs!” shouted a girl in the entryway. “They’re upstairs.” The FSU men raced up the stairs.
Brannon stopped at the front door. “Can anyone give me a description of the guy?”
“I can,” Nita said. Hurriedly she gave the description of the man she’d seen at the front door. White, male, maybe 5 feet 8. Slender ... large nose. Waist-length dark coat. Dark knit cap down over the ears ... light pants ... “He was carrying a club or something in one hand. It was rough, like it had bark on it. He had some cloth or something wrapped around the handle.”
Quickly the information was translated into a police-radio BOLO: “Be on the lookout for ...”
At the top of the stairs, Officer Ray Crew bent over Kathy Kleiner. Blood was pouring from her mouth and head. “Broken jaw,” he concluded. A sorority sister held a plastic pail under the girl’s mouth to catch the streaming blood.
Medics, other police, began swarming through the front door and racing up the stairs. “Take care of her,” Crew shouted at a medic. He pointed to Karen Chandler, who lay on the floor, her head bleeding.
Crew, a mustached young officer, began checking other rooms. Jesus, he thought, what’s going on here? He reached for the knob to open another room along the hallway. “That’s Lisa’s room,” the house mother told him. “Lisa Levy.”
Crew opened the door. In the semidarkness, he saw the girl’s form on the bed. She lay on her right side, face down. A sheet was pulled to the top of her head.
“Lisa, wake up,” said Crew softly. She didn’t respond. Then, with the lights on, Crew saw all the blood. “Get an EMT,” he told the house mother. (It was police parlance for the Emergency Medical Technicians.)
Crew touched the girl’s wrist to seek a pulse. There was none. He began to lift and roll Lisa toward her back. He saw her eyes glazing. Her lips were purpling. Gently, Crew lowered the girl’s left shoulder onto the bed again.
When the medics arrived, they lowered her to the floor, to begin frantic resuscitation efforts. Lisa’s nightie had been unbuttoned. Her buttocks were bloodied.
Weeping sounds—and wailing—filled the hallway. Girls were spilling out of other rooms, converging in the hall. “Where’s Margaret?” one of them shouted. “I haven’t seen Margaret!”
Henry Newkirk, a tall slender Tallahassee city officer, pushed open the door to Margaret Bowman’s room. He flipped on the light. Entering, he quickly closed the door behind him so no one else could see the bloody mess. The bedspread had been pulled up over her, but Newkirk could see the gaping hole in her skull. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” he muttered. A nylon was wrapped so tightly around her throat, it looked like she had been decapitated. The wall was spattered with blood.
Outdoors, arriving at the entryway, George Brand, a tall, husky Leon County sheriff’s sergeant, shouted, “What’ve we got?” “A goddamn mess,” a deputy replied.
One ambulance, then another, screamed away from the Chi O house, carrying victims toward Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. Karen, partially conscious, was the first to be taken. Then Lisa. In the ambulance, medics worked over her furiously, trying to get her breathing again.
Brand hopped into his car to follow the ambulances. He radioed a request for every available sheriff’s officer—off-duty people, everyone—to turn out.
Hurrying up the stairs of the sorority house, Howard Winkler, veteran crime-scene specialist for the Tallahassee Police Department, shuddered. The stairs, the hallways were filled with weeping girls. Some had blood-covered hands. They’d tried to help the victims. With so many people, so many fingerprints, and multiple crime scenes, Winkler knew it would be an evidence-gathering nightmare.
In Margaret Bowman’s room, Winkler photographed the dead girl. Her head was down. Her right arm was at her side. The other hand, palm upward, rested on her back.
“Girls! Everyone! Out of the hallway. Downstairs, please,” pleaded one of the officers in the corridor.
The chaos worsened. More police cars howled to a stop outside. Three law-enforcement agencies were on the scene—the sheriff’s officers, city police, and campus police. “What a mess. Who’s supposed to be in charge?” grumbled a detective on the stairway.
Youthful-looking, black-haired Leon County Sheriff Ken Katsaris had always stubbornly insisted on his legal prerogative as the highest-ranking law-enforcement officer anywhere in his county. A former teacher of police science, Katsaris was clever at politics and publicity, but he had no working police experience to help him cope with the crime-scene confusion, the madness, now surrounding him and his top aide Captain Jack Poitinger. City Detective Don Patchen and some of the others on the scene concluded at once that no one had taken charge.
“We oughta just get everyone out of here and seal this whole place off,” snapped one of the detectives upstairs. “We need Bill Gunter.” Gunter, a skilled crime-scene specialist, was a cool, methodical evidence gatherer. But that weekend Gunter was visiting his family in southern Alabama, two hours away. Katsaris failed to call in Gunter.
“Goddammit, any evidence we might have is gonna be ruined in this confusion,” Patchen grumbled. Patchen tried to restore sanity. He ordered fellow officers to guard the front door, so no more curiosity seekers could enter the place. But the sheriff’s people countermanded Patchen’s order.
Meanwhile, at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, Dr. Mark Goldberg was fighting, but losing, a battle to save the life of Lisa Levy. She had arrived in the ambulance with no vital signs. No blood pressure. No pulse. No respiration. Goldberg tried chest massage. And drugs to stimulate heart activity.
“Large amount of swelling under both jaws, extending down to her neck,” he’d report later. “A laceration over her right nipple ... some bleeding in her eardrum ... severe head injury ... Also some evidence of some rectal bleeding.”
Lisa was dead.
* * *
It was as though a tornado of violence had touched down at the Chi Omega House. Then the tornado touched down again, an hour and a half later, six blocks away.
In a small, dilapidated frame duplex on Dunwoody Street, Nancy Young was fast asleep. But her roommate, Debbie Cicarelli, dozing on a mattress on the floor, was roused by a sharp, staccato sound, as though someone was pounding on the floor with a hammer.
Bang ... bang ... bang. It went on, Debbie thought, for ten seconds. Maybe more. She sat up, her ears straining to hear.
Through the wall, from the other unit, Debbie could hear the girl’s voice, whimpering, moaning. Something’s wrong with Cheryl, Debbie thought. Cheryl Thomas, a friend, a pretty, graceful FSU dance major from Richmond, lived alone in the adjoining apartment.
Debbie roused her sleeping roommate. “Nancy! Something’s wrong over at Cheryl’s.” Together, they listened to the whimpering sounds. Debbie reached for the telephone.
After she dialed Cheryl’s number, they could hear the telephone ring beyond the thin wall. There was an eruption of sounds. A bump. The thumping of running feet. A crashing sound in Cheryl’s kitchen, as though the table were banged into the cabinets. Sounds of someone running.
After five rings of Cheryl’s telephone, Debbie hung up. She dialed police. Instantly, the duplex at 431 Dunwoody Street and its neighborhood was swarming with police, dispatched from the nearby Chi Omega House.
Tallahassee City Patrolman Wilton Dozier raced in the darkness toward the duplex with Officer Mitch Miller. “The guy might still be around,” yelled one of the other officers who were arriving, carrying shotguns.
Inside, Dozier and Gerald Payne found Cheryl semiconscious, lying on the bloodied bedsheet. An ambulance was on its way. “Are you okay?” Dozier asked the girl. Cheryl tried to mumble something through the blood, the groans. “She’s still alive,” Dozier exclaimed.
Most of the bedclothes had been pulled from her bed. Atop the wadded blanket and sheet on the floor, Dozier noticed pantyhose. Nearby was a long piece of wood, a two-by-three.
Soon paramedic Gary Mathews was bending over Cheryl. He’d just made one ambulance run to the hospital with the badly injured Kathy Kleiner. Now he was examining the newest victim. “Possible neck injury ... Maybe a fracture,” he murmured. The pretty, brown-haired girl had suffered crushing blows to the head. Already there was severe swelling of her face and neck. Cheryl’s eyes stared blankly at the ceiling. Matthews and the others lifted her gently onto a special stretcher bed, to guard against any further damage to her spinal column. She was a talented dancer.
Then they rushed her to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.
Upstairs in the Chi O house, Winkler was dusting for fingerprints on the door of Lisa Levy’s room. Nearby, Carroll Hurdle, his partner, was dusting the door of Margaret Bowman’s room. The crime-scene men were doing their best. “God, I wish someone had taken some control over this,” said Winkler. He could only imagine all the crime-scene contamination that had been permitted to happen. “But who am I to tell the sheriff what to do?”
Then came another sheriff’s order. Winkler was to abandon his work at the sorority house and head to the morgue. “Dammit,” Winkler told two nearby officers, “let’s at least seal these rooms up.” As ordered, he left for the morgue.
* * *
Dr. Donald Woods was completing the autopsy on Lisa Levy’s body, which lay on a slotted metal examining table. Body traces were taken. Hair specimens. Fingernail scrapings. Winkler photographed her upper body. One nipple had been nearly bitten away.
When she was turned over, face downward, they saw the streaks of blood which had streamed from the vaginal and anal areas, covering the buttocks. When that was swabbed away, Woods and the others noticed, on the left buttock, the marks of human teeth.
“Chrissake,” breathed one of the officers in the room. “The son of a bitch bit her.” Winkler winced. The attacker would have left saliva residue with that bite. But the swabbing of the blood had swept away any saliva trace. Lost evidence.
The medical examiner’s camera was malfunctioning. So, while the sheriff and others watched, Winkler focused his Pentax .35 millimeter camera on the bite marks.
Steve Bodiford, a sheriff’s detective, interrupted. “Think we should have some kind of scale there, like a ruler?” he asked. Winkler concurred. He waited, camera in hand, while Bodiford went to a desk drawer and found a yellow plastic ruler. That was laid beside the bite mark. Winkler snapped the strobe-lit photo.
He thus recorded, in one photo, the circle of bruises, beneath the skin, which had been left by the killer’s teeth.
Bodiford’s thought—putting the ruler there—would eventually prove to be crucial.
Dr. Woods excised a section of skin and tissue, containing the actual bite mark, for possible evidence. It was placed in a saline solution. Days later it would be learned that the solution had ruined it for evidence.
Winkler was horrified when he learned that Sheriff Katsaris, perhaps in his overexcitement, had prematurely ordered Margaret Bowman’s body to be taken from the sorority house to the morgue.
(If attendants handling the body had worn gloves, if it had been processed properly, there could have been found on the body a fingerprint of the killer. That wasn’t done. The crime scene was being bungled. “I should have hollered, ‘Whoa!’” mourned Winkler afterward. But Katsaris and his man Poitinger were running the show.)
Chunks of bark were found in the beds and in the hair of the victims. The attacker apparently had entered the Chi Omega house through the side door, with the combination lock. Often that door failed to latch securely. He’d gone from room to room, attacking the girls with an oak club—perhaps taken from a stack of firewood outside the sorority house. On the carpet, inside that door, was a trail of oak-bark particles.
For hours, police searched the streets, sidewalks, yards, and garbage cans around the Chi Omega house, seeking the murder weapon. Hundreds of limbs and chunks lay beneath the old oak trees of the neighborhood. None was found with blood on it.
At midmorning, police began forming a joint task force to investigate the killings and attacks.
In the foyer of the sorority house, one after another, the Chi O’s were being fingerprinted and interviewed. Nita Neary stood, advising an artist who sat sketching, re-creating the profile of the man she’d seen at the door.
* * *
It was instant national news. The “Chi Omega murders,” at a quiet, sedate college campus, near the Florida state capitol. Two girls were dead: Margaret Bowman, a slim, twenty-one-year-old beauty with long dark hair, an art history major; and Lisa Levy, twenty, an effervescent, cheerful blonde, a fashion-merchandising major. Coincidentally, both were from St. Petersburg.
Each had died of violent strangulation. Margaret’s skull had been damaged by savage blows. Lisa’s body had bite marks—on the buttock and one nipple.
Karen Chandler, twenty-one, of Tallahassee and Kathy Kleiner of Fort Lauderdale had been brutally beaten. They were undergoing extensive surgery. Each would live. Cheryl Thomas, horribly beaten an hour and a half after the Chi Omega attacks, would barely survive.
When the wire-service report reached the newsroom of the The Seattle Times, it caught the eye of Paul Henderson. He handed a copy to me with an attached memo: “Sounds like ‘Ted.’ A campus. He loves a campus. Girls the right age. And the guy’s ballsy enough to go into a sorority house, filled with girls, like he’d go into a state park with 40,000 people to take two girls.”
“Nah, Paul,” I replied. “I just don’t see it. Even if you give all those others to Ted, this one sounds too sloppy. There’s gotta be evidence and fingerprints all over the place down there. He’s too careful for that.”
In downtown Seattle Bob Keppel, veteran of the King County police’s old Ted Squad, was on the telephone to Florida. “You might want to look for a guy named Ted Bundy,” Keppel told Captain Steve Hooker of the FSU police. “He’s a multiple-murder suspect from up here who goes for young women.”
Hooker replied, “We’re getting thousands of calls like this.” But Hooker also asked Keppel if he could provide original sets of Bundy’s fingerprints. “You probably could get ’em from Mike Fisher in Colorado,” Keppel replied.
Already, Fisher was on the telephone to Tallahassee, telling Patchen, the Tallahassee detective, and D. Phillips, of the sheriff’s office, “Look for a guy named Ted Bundy.”
At Fort Lauderdale, police officer Bob Campbell read the news of the Tallahassee murders, then folded the paper and had a private thought: Strange as hell, but I got a hunch Bundy’s in Florida. One week earlier, Bundy would have been going to trial in Colorado for the murder of Bob Campbell’s sister.
In Tallahassee, late that Sunday, Virginia Ellis, state capitol bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times, had a telephone conversation with her mother, Virginia Riley, who lived at the far corner of the continent—on Whidbey Island, in Washington State.
Mrs. Ellis explained to her mother that, instead of covering government and politics that day, she had been out gathering facts at the scene of a horrible murder. “It was gruesome, horrible,” she told her mother. Two pretty girls had been molested and murdered as they slept in the sorority house.
“Do they have a suspect?” asked Mrs. Riley.
“No,” replied the Florida newswoman. “And they don’t think they’ll ever find him. They have so few clues.”
“I’ll bet I know who should be their suspect.”
“Sure you do,” said Mrs. Ellis, chiding her mother.
“Ted Bundy,” said the Washington State woman.
“Who?”
“Ted Bundy.”
“Who’s Ted Bundy?”
* * *
Ted Bundy was living in a new place—in a cramped, bleak apartment in Tallahassee, Florida, on West College Avenue, about a block and a half from the FSU campus. He had assumed a new name, “Chris Hagen.”
Inwardly, Ted occasionally glowed with the memory of that wild, exciting adventure which had taken him cross-country, from a jail cell in Colorado that cold, snowy night, to his new anonymity in the far corner of America, in Florida.
That evening of December 30, 1977, he had lain in the attic of the Garfield County jail, above the jailers’ apartment, listening until the jailer and his wife left to go to a movie. Deliberately, as quietly as he could, he had broken through the plasterboard and shelving, lowered his body down into the closet, then slipped through the outer door of the unoccupied apartment.
Beautiful ... beautiful ... beautiful. That’s how it felt, he rejoiced. Freedom. Walking into a lovely snowy night in the Rockies. Giant snowflakes were drifting down in the blackness as he walked to a neighborhood of Glenwood Springs where, other jail inmates had told him, there was a good chance to find a car with a key left in the ignition switch.
Ted found an aged, snow-covered MG Midget. He cramped his body into the small seat, nursed the engine to turn over, then wheeled the small car, its engine coughing and sputtering, across the Colorado River bridge to the freeway and turned toward Denver.
Before he reached Vail, though, the small car was overheating, gasping its last. Ted abandoned it against a snowbank beside the highway in the blizzard. He was offered a ride by a motorist bound for Denver. After the sedan passed Vail, the weather worsened. At a mountain tunnel between Vail and Denver, state troopers were halting traffic and directing motorists back—toward Vail. Ted had a sinking feeling, as his Samaritan drove him back the way they’d come. “I’ll just get out here at Vail,” Ted told the driver. “Thanks for your help.”
Then Ted, still not knowing if his escape had been detected, took a gamble. He went to the Trailways bus depot at Vail. He caught a bus to Denver. Because of the snowfall, other traffic was being turned back, but the bus was permitted to go on—all the way to Denver. At the TWA counter in the Denver airport, he paid cash for a ticket to Chicago. Late Saturday morning, December 31, his flight was landing in Chicago—about the time the panic-stricken jailers at Glenwood Springs were reporting his escape.
He was heading for a campus—the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “I always loved trains. There’s something romantic about trains,” Ted would recall later. “So I thought, Why not?” From Chicago, he traveled by train to Ann Arbor, passing the time in a club car, sipping Scotch, making cheerful conversation with fellow passengers.
At Ann Arbor, with the few hundred dollars he still carried, Ted walked through the snow and numbing cold to find the YMCA, where he took a room for the night. Next day, Monday, January 2, he recalled later, “I sat there in a bar in Ann Arbor, Michigan, watching Washington, my alma mater, beat the pants off Michigan. Great game!”
Washington, a gambling underdog team, won 27–21. “And I was there, getting a little drunk, cheerin’ my head off for Washington. And surrounded by Michigan fans!” He was living dangerously and enjoying it.
Unprepared for the harsh Midwest winter, he decided to seek a warmer climate. At the University of Michigan library, Ted said later, he leafed through college catalogs until his eye fell on Florida State University. At a place called Tallahassee. He didn’t know where that was, but on the map, it appeared to be closer to the ocean—the Gulf—than did the University of Florida at Gainesville.
When he stepped off the bus at Tallahassee a few days later, Ted sucked in a breath of “that soft, sweet, warm southern air.” And he began walking toward the Florida State University campus, looking for a place to live. In his pocket, he had only about $160 left from his original roll of $700 or so. As he walked through neighborhoods around the FSU campus, Ted was disappointed by his new surroundings. There were a few palm trees but little else to suggest the warm, tropical Florida he’d expected. Along the streets were small, unpainted old houses, perched on blocks, their porches sagging.
On West College Avenue an “Apt. for Rent” sign caught his eye, and he turned into a narrow, aging, two-story frame building huddled under a massive old oak tree. The weary-looking apartment house bore a hand-lettered name: “The Oak.” Inside, Larry Winfield, the student manager of the place, asked for advance rent and had him fill out a lease. As he signed it, Ted became “Chris Hagen.”
Chris moved into Room 12, a tiny upstairs room, with a bunk bed, a chest of drawers, an old desk, and a Formica-topped table. With other occupants, he’d have to share the upstairs bathroom. Slowly, he got acquainted with the other tenants—some students, a young working woman, and a rock musician, whose high-decibel rehearsals with his band shook the old building.
To most of the others, Chris seemed friendly enough, although sometimes standoffish. As days passed, he began carting into the apartment a few possessions—a sleeping bag, a bicycle, a small TV, some other items.
“He gave me the impression he was a law student, that he’d gone to Stanford,” said one of the tenants. Now and then there were impromptu, middle-of-the-night gatherings of some of the young people, sitting in the hallway, smoking, drinking, talking. A couple of times, Henry Polumbo, the musician, recalled, Chris seemed to be very drunk.
Tina Hopkins, who lived two doors away from Chris, puzzled over the fact that the quiet, aloof new resident of Room 12 seemed to have a changing physical appearance. She’d remember later, “He always looked different. ... I don’t know, sometimes he just didn’t even look like the same person at all. His face—sometimes it would be real sunken. Sometimes he’d be healthy looking. Sometimes, you know, his hair would be perfectly straight. Sometimes it would be real curly.
“And his face, his whole face, even his eyes, you know ... he would just look real different all the time.” Tina noticed that Chris sometimes wore tortoise-shell glasses; at other times he wore wire-rimmed glasses.
Henry and his pal, Rusty Gage, the sound man in Rusty’s rock band, hadn’t heard about the crimes at the nearby Chi Omega house when they arrived at The Oak shortly before five o’clock that morning. They had been at Rusty’s place listening to records. In the predawn, at The Oak, they encountered Chris, standing alone, staring up the street, toward the fraternity and sorority houses.
“Hi, how’s it going?” asked Henry.
Chris didn’t reply, Henry remembered. “He just was staring off.”
The crimes dominated conversations around The Oak. Henry thought he recalled Chris once saying, “It was a pretty professional job. Whoever did it has done it before.”
Tina had a taunting, offbeat sense of humor. Once, when she encountered the solemn-faced Chris on the stairway, Tina grabbed his arm, stared at him menacingly and whispered, “I’m the murderer, and I’m going to kill you!”
Chris’ response was a mirthless stare.
In early February, Chris was late with a promised rent payment, and he was out of money.
On the morning of February 11, the Tallahassee Democrat, still heavily playing news of the Chi Omega crimes, printed a “psychological profile” of the Chi Omega killer. Prepared by an FBI psychologist, it portrayed the attacker as “a loner,” living in the Tallahassee area, “but [who] is not a student.
“He has had an emotional problem ever since his childhood,” it went on, “which was deeply influenced by a dominant mother ... who probably lives by himself and who definitely does not live with a woman.”
Earlier that week, Chris had been away from the apartment, on a trip somewhere for a couple of days. That Saturday, February 11, one of his neighbors remembered that Chris borrowed a copy of the Democrat and read it. Soon after that, around February 12, a little over a month after he’d moved in, Chris slipped out of The Oak.
That night, in a nearby neighborhood, a young man named Rick Garzaniti discovered that his car had been stolen from its parking place on East Georgia Street. It was an orange Volkswagen.