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A salty, chilling, Gulf Coast breeze added to the rawness of the cold February which gripped Florida’s Panhandle. It was well past midnight, so the streets of Pensacola were quiet, almost deserted. Patrolman David Lee, an unsmiling young cop with stern dark eyes and eyebrows and a brooding black mustache, turned his patrol car onto Cervantes Street, in a slow cruise.
It was about one thirty in the morning, February 15, 1978. The headlights of Lee’s police car briefly reflected off a bright orange Volkswagen, which was moving slowly along an alleyway behind Oscar Warner’s restaurant. Lee knew the place had long since closed for the night, and he didn’t recognize the VW as one of the restaurant employees’ cars. No reason for that car to be prowling there so slowly, Lee thought. He kept driving, past the restaurant—a police deception—keeping his eye on the rear-view mirror, watching the VW.
When the little orange car turned west, in the opposite direction, Lee made a U-turn and began to follow. The VW picked up speed, made a left turn, then another turn. Following, Lee switched on his patrol car’s blue pursuit light and radioed for an “NCIC”—a “stolen” check on the license of the car ahead.
Gradually, the tempo of the chase accelerated. Lee noticed his speedometer had reached 55, as they traveled north beyond the Pensacola city limits. “Subject vehicle,” said the voice on his police radio, “reported stolen by Tallahassee P.D.”
Finally the Volkswagen slowed and came to a stop at the roadside in a darkened area. Gun drawn, Lee emerged from his police car and approached the driver’s window of the car ahead.
“What’s wrong, officer?” asked the voice of the driver in the Volkswagen.
“Get your hands up where I can see ’em,” Lee ordered. Lee thought he saw a form, perhaps another person, in the passenger seat.
“What’s the problem?” the driver asked.
“I want your hands up.” Lee opened the Volkswagen door and ordered the driver to get out and walk forward, into the lights of the car. “Now, down on the ground, spreadeagle,” he ordered.
With a wary glance back toward the VW, where he still thought there might be someone else, Lee knelt to snap on the handcuffs—first, on the driver’s left wrist.
It happened with cat quickness—the swing of the man’s legs, then his lashing body movement. As though hit by a football block, Lee was knocked from his feet, and the sinewy man was scrambling up, running. Lee’s gun discharged. Cursing, the policeman leaped to his feet and started pursuit, firing a warning shot in the air. Ahead, the man ducked into Scott Street, looking back over his shoulder. From a quarter of a block away, Lee saw a glint of metal—the dangling handcuff—and, thinking it was a gun, he fired directly at the man. He missed. But the man dropped, as though hit. Lee ran and pounced on the man’s body.
There was a kicking, gouging, wrestling battle on the ground until Lee, after rapping the man’s head with the butt of his revolver, had his captive, hands cuffed behind him.
“Let’s go, goddammit,” ordered the cop. Lee marched the young man back to their cars. In the beam of his flashlight, Lee could see that the Volkswagen interior was piled with possessions—the “passenger” he’d thought he’d seen.
Ted Bundy felt empty, numb, too tired to even protest, as Lee put him roughly into the patrol car. Ted’s head hurt. Blood was seeping through the messed hair at the back of his head and dribbling down his neck.
Driving toward the police station, Lee studied his morose prisoner. He had a scruffy mustache and mussed curly hair. “I wish you’d killed me,” said the prisoner in a voice muffled by fatigue.
“What’d you say?”
“I wish you’d killed me back there,” Bundy repeated.
I did my damndest, Lee thought. Lee had been shooting to hit this guy, whoever he was, but he’d missed. Goddamn gun doesn’t shoot straight.
For Bundy a forty-six day blur of freedom had come to an end in an unfamiliar Florida town near the Alabama border. At the desk of the Pensacola city jail, he was booked as “Kenneth Misner”—the name on the driver’s license he carried. It was a name he had fully researched to use as his new identification. While his fingerprints were being rolled, Ted wondered how long it would take for these small-town police to discover the prize they had caught that night.
As exhausted as he was, he couldn’t resist tweaking their interest. He asked Lee what police rank he held. Lee replied he was a patrolman. “You’ll make sergeant for this,” the prisoner murmured, cocking one eyebrow.
Pensacola Detective Norman Chapman had been summoned to the police station in the predawn to question the man Lee had captured. Already the police had compiled an inventory of suspicions about him, Within the Volkswagen was stuffed a bicycle frame, a portable television, some stereo equipment, clothing, a sleeping bag, a brown leather notebook filled with the identification of Kenneth Raymond Misner of Tallahassee. In his possession and strewn inside the car were more than twenty credit cards bearing a wide variety of names, plus several photographs of girls and young women.
Chapman, a plump man with a soothing Southern accent, opened the questioning:
“Would you state your full name, please?”
“Kenneth Raymond Misner.”
“Where do you live, Mr. Misner?”
“Presently I live in Tallahassee. Nine-eighty-two West Brevard.”
“Okay. How old are you, Mr. Misner?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“How much education do you have?”
“I have a bachelor-of-science degree in education.”
(Bundy had initially stolen a student identification card belonging to Misner, a onetime member of the Florida State University track team. Systematically he had begun developing other documents of identification with the eventual plan of becoming Kenneth Raymond Misner. He had applied for and received duplicate copies of Misner’s university diploma and Misner’s birth certificate from North Carolina.)
Chapman asked about the Volkswagen and the credit cards with all the different names. The answers came freely. He’d stolen them in Tallahassee. Where in Tallahassee?
“Well, let’s see. Ah ... Can’t tell you the street. Ah ... Oh boy ... Okay. About two or three miles from campus I guess.”
The word “campus” registered. Everyone in Florida, probably, knew of the murders just one month earlier near the FSU campus.
Chapman was simultaneously suspicious and intrigued by the man he was questioning. An intelligent, respectful, almost friendly manner came through the man’s obvious fatigue. Chapman was beginning also to learn that he’d try never to lie to his questioner.
“Okay. You also had in your possession—uh—some identification cards and a number of credit cards. Uh—would you tell us where you received this identification?”
Those things, said “Misner,” had been stolen from purses. “Took the small stuff ... uh—from ... uh. They were in taverns. Well, the purses were in taverns, you know—in the Tallahassee area—I’d just take the pocketbooks out.”
“Was there any specific tavern that you took them from?” asked Chapman. (Police of North Florida and elsewhere knew that, before the murders, some of the Chi Omega girls had been at the disco taverns Sherrods and Big Daddy’s.)
“No. No specific tavern.”
The interview was being tape-recorded. Chapman asked, “Has this statement been made voluntarily and of your own free will so that the truth may be known?”
“Yes,” replied the obliging “Misner.”
“Would you like to make any corrections, or add to, or take away from, this statement at this time?”
“Well, let me see ... uh—I just want to make it clear. You know ... I guess technically, under the law, it’s assaulting a police officer ... But I’d just like it to be known that I ... the intent was not to hurt the police officer. All I did was run away.” Chapman nodded acknowledgement.
The suspect also conceded the TV in the Volkswagen had been stolen at Tallahassee.
The interview ended at 4:33 that morning and later, back in his cell, exhausted and tense, Bundy noticed he was being watched by a special guard outside the steel door. Ted contemplated how he’d handle the eventual revelation of his identity. He wanted control over that. And he wondered how long it would be until they’d be questioning him directly about those Chi Omega murders over in Tallahassee. He knew he’d be a suspect.
Chapman quickly telephoned the Tallahassee Police Department, where he reached Don Patchen, one of the officers of the Chi Omega murders Task Force. Pensacola’s strange new prisoner sounded highly interesting, Patchen agreed. By late morning Patchen had been in touch with Steven Bodiford, a Leon County detective, and by midday they were driving toward Pensacola.
Later that day, Thursday, February 16, Bundy was being questioned by the officers from Tallahassee. This time he dropped the “Kenneth Misner” identification.
“You wish to remain anonymous, as far as a name goes at this time, is that correct?” asked Patchen.
“Yes, sir.” During this interview Ted would be John Doe.
Patchen, a pleasant, blondish officer, had “John Doe” go over the thefts of the credit cards. Patchen read names and numbers of the cards—the Sun Oil, Mastercharge, Gulf, Bankamericard, Shell charge plates.
“Do you recall where you took these from?”
“I really can’t tell you.”
“Did you steal these cards?”
“Yes, I did,” he replied with a sigh.
“Where?”
He couldn’t remember. There were times when, at a shopping mall or a supermarket, he said, he’d pick up a wallet from an unwatched purse in a shopper’s cart. His collection of stolen documents included numerous student ID cards from men and women FSU students; plus other papers from man wallets. There were indications that “John Doe” had been very, very busy around Tallahassee in January and early February.
Patchen and Bodiford had been deeply involved in the Chi Omega murders. Both had worked in that bloody crime scene that night. Bodiford had been the detective who thought to place the ruler on Lisa Levy’s body for that autopsy photo. But the two men were approaching this suspect—their hottest suspect thus far—carefully.
Listening to Patchen’s questioning, Bodiford reflected on some peculiar, seemingly unrelated happenings a few days earlier. He had received a report from a Jacksonville police officer about a strange man who was driving a stolen white van with the license 13-D-11300. The man had tried to pick up the officer’s fourteen-year-old daughter. That had been in Jacksonville February 8. On February 12, in Tallahassee, Leon County Deputy Sheriff Keith Daws had been questioning a young man about a license plate found lying in a car the man was entering—plate number 13-D-11300. Suddenly, the man had run away from the deputy, leaving the plate behind. That incident had happened very near the Dunwoody duplex where Cheryl Thomas had been attacked.
Patchen asked “John Doe” if he remembered—“somewhere around the twelfth”—being stopped by a deputy sheriff and being asked about a license plate.
“No. Nothing ... L’ ... Let’s not talk about it ... I ... [sniff].”
“You’re not denying it, is that right?”
“I don’t want to discuss it.”
Bodiford asked, “What about a white van?”
The prisoner seemed to recoil at the question. He said he knew nothing about it.
Later, though, he freely talked about stealing the Panasonic TV out of a car, even stealing cards from, among other places, Sherrods, the disco next door to the Chi O house: “Uh—well, they’d be in ... like purses would be under a desk ... a ... a table or bench or something. And there’d be a large crowd of people, and I’d just take the pocketbook out of the purse.”
* * *
Weary, with a dry, lonely ache in his belly, Ted groped disconsolately toward the inevitable. “I would,” he told the detectives, “like to call ... uh ... an attorney friend of mine in Atlanta to ... to d-d-determine just how and when I should reveal my identity ...” Patchen and Bodiford nodded their agreement.
Bundy had decided he’d first talk with Millard Farmer, the lawyer in Atlanta with whom he had developed a long-distance telephone relationship during his jail months in Colorado. Farmer was chief of the Team Defense Project office at Atlanta, a fighter against the death penalty.
That was Thursday morning. It would be a day of flurrying activity. During their telephone conversation, Farmer asked Ted about his arrest, the interrogation and the crimes Ted had admitted—the thefts of cars and credit cards. Farmer advised him not to say anything more to police until one of Farmer’s associates, Alan Holbrook, could reach Pensacola to talk with him later that day.
When Ted was taken, heavily guarded, to the Escambia County Courthouse, for a first appearance before Judge Jack Greenhut, he remained a mute “John Doe,” being charged with possession of stolen property, auto theft, and assaulting an officer. But already the Florida detectives had learned, through his telephoning, that the man’s name was Theodore Bundy—a name which, for the moment, meant nothing to them.
Bodiford telephoned Tallahassee, to report to Leon County Sergeant George Brand. “This guy they’ve got over here at Pensacola,” said Bodiford. “We found out his real name is Theodore Robert Bundy.”
“Damn, that’s familiar,” replied Brand. “I think we’ve got that name in our files.” Four weeks of frantic investigation by the Chi Omega Task Force at Tallahassee had produced a mass of reports on suspects. Within the files were reports about Bundy from investigators in Seattle, Salt Lake City, Aspen, and other places. Mike Fisher had provided a complete packet of information about Bundy.
Meanwhile, Patchen was shipping to Tallahassee from Pensacola, by air, a polaroid photograph of Bundy, a set of fingerprints, and a list of all the stolen credit cards. Those items would trigger some nonstop work among the Chi Omega investigators and other lawmen across North Florida.
In a meeting at the Pensacola jail late Thursday, an agreement was worked out among Holbrook, Farmer’s representative, Pensacola public-defender lawyers, Bundy, and the police: the public announcement of his identity could be made at a news conference the following morning. Meanwhile, Ted was permitted to make a series of telephone calls.
His first thought was of Cas Richter in Seattle. In his telephone call to her, Ted’s words came in rambling sentences, punctuated by frequent breakdowns, weeping. Initially Cas had difficulty understanding where he was, what he was saying, what had happened. Peculiarly, Ted apologized for his behavior that Sunday—that one memorable day, July 14, 1974, that hot summer day in Seattle. “I really was awfully sick that day,” he told her in plaintive, mumbled words, barely above a whisper. He reflected his mood had been foul; he had spoiled their dinner together that evening, but Cas was remembering particularly that that was the day those two girls vanished at Lake Sammamish State Park. And (police determined later) Ted murmured tearfully to Cas, “I want to make it right with all the people I’ve hurt.” She was tenderly, sympathetically encouraging.
Ted made his other telephone calls—to John Henry Browne in Seattle, to his mother, to others. Ted was allowed a visit by a Catholic priest because the regular Pensacola jail chaplain, a Protestant, was ill that day. Police wondered if Bundy, a non-Catholic, was making confession.
From the Far West, news-media people, responding to “leaks” that Ted Bundy had been recaptured, were beginning their rush toward Pensacola. From Aspen, Mike Fisher placed an excited call to Tallahassee, where he reached investigator William Dewitt (nicknamed D.) Phillips, one of the detectives working nonstop on the Chi O murders. “What the hell’s going on?” asked Fisher.
“I don’t have all the details,” said Phillips. He explained the man had been captured at Pensacola, about 200 miles west of Tallahassee. Phillips explained that Bundy seemed anxious to talk to the detectives there, “but no one here knows anything about Bundy.”
“Well,” said Fisher, “if you’re gonna get anything out of that guy, you’re gonna have to get it now—when he’s flat on his ass. ... When he’s down.”
Phillips puzzled over that. Down? Fisher explained his theory. “Right now Theodore’s probably down, right at the bottom. ... He’s emotionally at an all-time low. If you ever let him come out of that, if you ever let him up, you’re not gonna get it out of him.”
“Just a minute, Mike, I’ve got Steve Bodiford on another line.” Phillips put Fisher’s call on “hold” and relayed the information to Bodiford at Pensacola. “Mike Fisher’s on the other line, from Colorado,” Phillips told Bodiford. “And he says that if you’re gonna get anything from this guy, you’ve got to do it now.”
“I think it’s going to work out,” replied Bodiford. “He told us he wants to talk to us tonight, and he told us to bring plenty of tapes.”
Phillips repeated that to Fisher. “Well, if that guy ever starts telling all, they’ll be listening for a long, long time,” said the Colorado investigator. “I’ll help any way I can,” said Fisher. He and Milt Blakey were preparing to leave immediately for Pensacola.
* * *
A compelling urge, a lonely need churned within Ted that midnight when he sent word he wanted to talk with the detectives. Chapman, Bodiford, and Patchen wearily—but hopefully—sat down again with Bundy in one of the offices at the jail.
Setting the tape recorder in operation, Chapman established that Ted had earlier talked with Holbrook, the lawyer, and also the local public-defender attorneys, Isaac Koran and Terry Terrell, and “you desired to talk with us ... without these individuals present. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Ted agreed. “I approached you.”
It was one thirty in the morning. The interview began. Although Ted appeared ragged, unkempt, and his face was marked by a raw cheek abrasion suffered in the scuffle with Lee, his bright blue eyes appeared alert—more alert than the drowsy eyes of the detectives. As had happened after his recapture at Aspen and as at other times, Bundy’s energy level seemed to be rising in the middle of the night.
Chapman, a gentle, hefty man, assured Bundy, “Any time you get tired of seeing our wornout faces, tell us so. And we’ll take you back to the cell.”
“I feel like I’m in charge of the entertainment tonight,” Ted responded with a grin.
“Whatever you want to talk about,” Chapman assured him, leaning back in his chair.
The detectives wondered about his escape in Colorado. Bundy obliged, enthusiastically describing in elaborate detail how he worked his way out of that cell in Glenwood Springs.
“I can’t reveal too much [of what] was involved there, but it simply involved cutting a plate out of the ceiling of my cell. And I knew the jail layout. I knew the place inside and out. I knew the place better than the people that worked there.”
For more than an hour, Bundy, sometimes laughingly, regaled his interrogators with anecdotes and details of his cross-country flight after the escape.
Bodiford asked the question which would long puzzle Mike Fisher and other of Bundy’s Colorado pursuers: “Where’d you get that money from?”
“Well, man,” said Bundy, his eyes fixed on the ceiling of the room, “there’s other people. Other people are in it. It was not ... uh ... let me put it this way, it was not given to me for the purpose of escaping.”
(Months earlier, while he was in jail in Colorado, Bundy had proposed to Seattle friends that they raise a $700 or $800 fund for him, which would be used to finance a public-opinion survey of the Aspen area. The survey was to have been used in his argument for a change of venue. I pledged fifty dollars, which was never collected. Seattleites who were principal fund raisers had refused to say how much money was provided to Ted—or how, or if, it was delivered.)
As the interview went further into the early morning hours, Bundy’s rambling turned to the joys of his brief freedom: “Walkin’ without chains ... playing racketball.” Sometimes the memories came with tears, in a trembling voice. “There are certain places and certain things, Ted, when you start thinking about, that you start crying,” Bodiford noted quizzically.
Bundy: “I think it was part of ... I think ... I don’t know. Hold the phone. Well, it may be tearful. Not sobbing or crying ... Anyway ... No, it was just so good to be around people. And just so good to be a part of people. Not to be looked at differently. And ... it was just college students. People are great anyway, but college students are beautiful people. Good looking people. Healthy people. Exciting people. Right? ... Uh—and it was good to be back amongst them.”
Patchen noticed he was shaking, his head down. “You still feeling all right, Ted?”
Bundy raised his eyes. “Oh, I’m feeling fine.” The officers poured more coffee for him. Bundy went on, reminiscing about his need during freedom, to acquire little things “to make life more comfortable.” He talked freely about the thefts of credit cards and the things he bought with them—clothing, meals, books. The Tallahassee detectives prodded him about the wallets he stole at Sherrod’s, the popular disco, a student hangout right next door to the Chi O house. (Some FSU coeds had reported encountering a “weird looking” man there the night the murders occurred.) Bundy emphatically denied ever being in Sherrod’s during January.
He detailed how he stole two Volkswagens and a Mazda at various times in Tallahassee. Patchen asked about fingerprints. Did Ted wipe away prints in the cars?
Bundy: “Well, I didn’t wipe my prints out. I wore gloves.”
Patchen: “You wore gloves? Every time did you wear gloves?”
Bundy: “When? In the car? Most of the time. Just leather gloves.”
The hours wore on toward dawn. While the officers tired, Bundy seemed eager to talk, even though his words occasionally were broken by sobs, and he appeared overtaken by depression. Steadfastly, he refused to talk directly about the Chi Omega murders. But, at one point, which was unrecorded, the detectives remembered Ted told them, “The evidence is there. Keep digging.” It was no confession, only a tantalizing encouragement to the detectives—just as he once, in Utah, exhorted Jerry Thompson to persist in the search for straws, to make the broom, in the Carol DaRonch investigation.
Watching, listening, Patchen and the others had a distressing thought: Here we are with probably the biggest thing in the nation right now. And we really don’t know what we’re dealing with.
Bundy began talking about the difficulties he’d had during his law-school days. During that period, he said, “My problem arose again.” This “problem,” wondered the detectives—what was this “problem”?
Ted’s eyes moistened. His voice became distant. His words went unrecorded, reconstructed only by the memory of the detectives. “Guys,” he said, “remember this. It’s important.” He began to recall an event from an earlier year, an unspecific happening. He’d seen a girl. She was riding a bicycle. “I saw her and I knew I had to have her. I had to possess her”—those were the words, as recalled later by the detectives. He said he had followed the girl, but nothing had happened. It was then, he indicated, that “the problem” began for him.
(Eventually the detectives reached a common interpretation: Bundy was telling them his “problem” was a need to possess, wholly control, dominate girls or women. They also concluded that Ted long had been, as Chapman put it, “a voyeur,” who furtively watched, savored, coveted unsuspecting young women.)
Hours passed. The detectives’ bodies began to ache. They stood, walked around the room. They drank more coffee. “You guys getting tired?” asked Bundy. “No, we’re fine,” Bodiford replied. “How’re you doin’, Ted?”
Ted, although he looked ragged and was smoking heavily, replied he was fine. He revealed he was most alert during the nighttime. “At times I feel like a vampire,” he mused.
With the constant, unspoken thought of the Chi Omega killings on their minds, Bodiford and Patchen encouraged Ted to recall some of the crimes out West in which he had been a suspect. He defensively recounted that first arrest of his and “the satchel of things” the Utah officers had found.
“Uh—in the satchel there ... was all kinds of stuff ... It was sort of a junk bag I carried around in my car. There was rags, and there was rope in it. ... There was pantyhose in it with the eyes cut out. There was ...”
Bodiford and Patchen suppressed their reaction: Pantyhose. Pantyhose at the throat of Margaret Bowman. Pantyhose at the Dunwoody house. Pantyhose.
“Okay,” said Bodiford a little later, “so then, in Aspen, Colorado, uh ... a woman was kidnapped. Is that right?”
“Again,” replied Bundy, “there’s only speculation as to what happened.” It was the Caryn Campbell murder.
“In what manner was she murdered?” asked Bodiford.
Bundy’s faltering reply: “Well, I—I—I had the misfortune of seeing the autopsy photographs and uh—uh ... a combination of uh—blunt trauma and strangulation.” (To Steve Bodiford, a thoughtful, husky man with dark, curly hair, a thorough, perceptive detective, came vivid memories—his memories of the Tallahassee morgue, at the autopsies of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, both victims of blunt trauma and strangulation.)
Clearing his throat, Patchen asked, “Back in Tallahassee, did you—did you ever go and visit any of the sororities, or been in any of them?”
“No,” said Bundy.
* * *
Next day, the news media were out in force—reporters and cameramen from Seattle, Salt Lake City, elsewhere—when Bundy, handcuffed, heavily guarded, returned to Judge Jack Greenhut’s courtroom. Public Defender Isaac Koran was visibly upset as he protested the prolonged police questioning of the defendant. “Just what is my access to Mister Bundy?” he asked. Koran complained he and other defenders had problems getting into the jail to see the man. And, he said, referring to Bundy, “He’s tired. He’s worn out.”
Bundy was obviously uninterested in the public defender’s words. The silver-haired judge ruled the defenders could have access to Bundy from early morning until 10 p.m. daily. Then Bundy, a strange, aloof look in his eyes, was taken away past the photographers to reenter a police car and return to jail. He didn’t recognize me. His face wore a dour, goddammit look of boredom.
He wanted to talk with the detectives again that night. There were heavy thoughts on his mind. Again together with Chapman, Bodiford, and Patchen, he told them he was tired of the public attorneys’ meddling. Lying in bed in his cell earlier that evening, he said, he had some of his own thoughts:
“I—I thought I came up with something I thought was very comfortable. Uh—which as I lay there in bed ... It is, I said to myself ... going to be easier than the dickens. And it would all come out. I mean not—and again I know what you want—but I’m interested in the whole thing. I’m interested in everything. Okay? And it’s the whole ... it’s the whole ball of wax. And it’s—it’s got to be dealt with.”
Chapman: “In other words, you’re interested in clearing up everything?”
“From Seattle all the way down to Florida and ...” Bundy said.
There were gentle, delicate offers, urgings, from the three interrogators, who now sensed a final breaking through. “Uh—just exactly, you know, do you want to handle it?” asked Patchen.
“Now ...” Bundy began. There was another pause. “If I had my choice ... I can’t force anything. But if I were to sit back and think about how I would like the thing to resolve itself—everybody being satisfied to the degree they would be satisfied [in] getting all the answers they want to all the questions they want to ask ... Then, after that was all over, I would like to be back in Washington State. ...’’
Bundy’s voice choked. He cleared his throat. “Because that’s where my mother is, that’s where my family is. And that’s where I’m from.
“Now, I—I—I—I imagine that is a lot involved there, to say the least.” There was a long silence. “That’s where I started out thinking about ... answering all these questions.”
Chapman interpreted, “In other words, what you’re trying to tell us is you don’t mind answering the questions about anything you’ve done, as long as the end result’s you’re back in Washington State so that you’ll be in an institution close enough to where your mother can visit you?”
Bundy: “That’s what I’m saying.”
Chapman: “Is that your way of asking for some kind of deal?”
Bundy: “Let’s turn off the tape recorder.”
The visible tape recorder was turned off. But a surveillance tape recorder was operating, picking up, with some garbles, the subsequent talk of “deals.”
In vague ways, the men talked about the complexities of jurisdictions, of prosecutors, of political conflicts, of finding a course, as Bundy put it, which would “be very satisfying [to] all parties concerned.”
His words sometimes inaudible, Ted went on, “Okay. Ted Bundy wants something out of this. And maybe that’s not right. And maybe he doesn’t deserve it. ... But still, I mean ... I’ve got to take care of—of ... survival ... Ted Bundy wants to survive, too.”
Chapman noted there could be a problem, dealing with all the police jurisdictions. But he added, “There’s a lot of people who are heartbroken ... because of missing people they don’t know what happened to. And they don’t know where they are ... And if we could, you know—you could ease a lot of people’s minds. They’re going to be heartbroken anyway, but at least their minds would get eased. At least they’ll know. And at least they’ll be able to make, you know, decent burials and so forth. And set things right as best you can.”
Chapman hammered on that theme of conscience. Bundy replied he was seeking “a way that’s satisfactory to me ... I still place a value on myself.”
Patchen: “Let me ask you this, if you can answer, of course. ... How many states we’re going, you know, to be concerned with—so we know how wide a range we are looking at to get things in—uh—perspective.”
Bundy: “Well ... well, I think you’d be talking about—investigations [in] six states.”
“That’s six states?”
Bundy: “I’m not sure about that.”
Patchen: “Uh—it’d be around that number, more or less, huh? Whew! Six,” he sighed.
Bundy: “Some of them don’t even know they’re involved.”