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Possessive of his celebrity criminal, now the highly publicized prime suspect in the Chi Omega murders, Ken Katsaris, the publicity-conscious Leon County sheriff, arranged to have Bundy whisked suddenly out of Pensacola that Saturday night, February 18.
While reporters and cameras waited in a floodlight-illuminated entry of the Pensacola jail, Bundy was removed through a dark side exit and placed in a Leon County sheriff’s car, which sped the 200 miles along Interstate 10 to Tallahassee.
There Katsaris’ office had tipped other reporters, other cameramen, about the impending arrival, so that they could get their photos and footage of the suspect in Katsaris’ home county. “It’s amazing,” Bundy would recall later, “how easy it is to form such an instant dislike for Ken Katsaris.”
The following day, Sunday, Ted’s eye fell on a page 1 article of the Tallahassee Democrat. It was splashed with photographs of Bundy, taken through the years. The article extensively quoted Katsaris’ description of Bundy and the three nights he’d spent, under questioning, at Pensacola. “We’re changing the rules now,” Katsaris was quoted as saying. “We’ve played his game until now. A change in jails might make a difference. We’ll establish when we’ll talk to him and under what conditions.”
Bundy bristled when he saw that. He resolved, in his later words, to get “stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger ... And harder, harder, harder ... guarded.” Whatever rapport had developed during his interviews at Pensacola with Chapman, Bodiford, and Patchen had now been marred. When they read those Katsaris words, the detectives’ hearts fell, too. They sensed that whatever hope they might have had of eliciting confessions from the evasive subject now might be fading.
Square-jawed John Rudd, a man with close-cropped hair and the leathery look of a North Florida outdoorsman, went to see Bundy at the Leon County jail for a preliminary hearing. The tough chief criminal judge of Florida’s Second Judicial Circuit, a man famed for his quick wry humor and stern judicial conduct, was coolly curious about the former law student whose name and face had been page 1 news in recent days. They met at a jailhouse hearing room.
Judge Rudd wasn’t surprised when Bundy told him that, on the initial charges being filed against him—grand theft, auto, and burglaries—he’d like to proceed pro se, acting as his own legal counsel. Rather boastfully, Bundy told the Florida judge that he had been conducting a pro se defense while he was in Colorado, prior to his escape, and that he thought he’d been conducting it well. Frostily, Rudd suggested Bundy might not be as clever an attorney as he thought. Said Rudd slyly, “You’ve just made an admission to committing a felony [escape] and this is a judicial proceeding.” Bundy grinned in chagrin.
* * *
That same Sunday I was driving eastward, toward Tallahassee from Pensacola, when my eye caught a conspicuous sight beside the freeway. Parked on the grass shoulder was a blue sedan which had hitched behind it an orange Volkswagen. A wiry, mustached man in blue denims was frantically waving his arms for me to stop. It was Mike Fisher.
I braked and pulled over to a stop. “That goddamm Theodore,” Fisher shouted, “look at the mess he’s got us in now.” Fisher and Milt Blakey, along with Tallahassee City Detective Don Patchen, had been towing the orange Volkswagen to Tallahassee, where it would be impounded. Suddenly one of the VW tires blew out.
“And here we are stranded out somewhere in the Florida swamps!” snorted Fisher. “Damn Bundy.”
Patchen had sent word to a service station, asking that a Volkswagen tire be delivered to the scene. “But,” said Patchen, “I don’t know how long that’ll take.” They couldn’t enter the VW to use the spare. The vehicle was sealed for evidence.
“You’d think that Bundy’d have sense enough to steal a car with decent tires on it,” growled Fisher. “Nah,” he contradicted himself. “Bundy’s too dumb.”
As we all sat in the sedan, waiting for the spare tire to arrive, Blakey and Fisher, the men who had pursued Bundy so persistently over such great distances for so long, had some laughs now that their prey was in custody. “Y’know,” quipped Fisher, “if Ted had ever learned anything about credit cards ... and if he’d learned to drive better, we’d never have caught him.”
“That’s right,” said Blakey. Bundy, he noted, first got into trouble driving too slowly in Bob Hayward’s neighborhood in Utah. “Then,” added Fisher, “the only reason he got stopped in Aspen, that night after his escape there, was because he was driving that Cadillac so damned slow and wobblin’ all over the place.
“And he gets picked up in Pensacola, ’cause he’s driving dumb again—too slow in a residential area in the middle of the night. If he’d ever learned to drive right ...”
“If I were the judge,” said Blakey ... And he laughed, pretending to be a judge uttering a solemn verdict: “And now, Theodore Bundy, having been found guilty of murder in the first degree, I sentence you to die in the electric chair. But first! I sentence you to spend thirty days in remedial driver’s school!” Rollicking laughter filled the car.
After the tire repair, Patchen, driving the Colorado men’s car, towed the orange Volkswagen into a police impoundment at Tallahassee. Inside were dozens of articles Bundy had crammed into it after he stole that car—shoes, socks, shorts, pants, a small TV, a burgundy shirt and other clothing, a sleeping bag, a bicycle frame, and other items.
Eventually, each item would be scrutinized by lab technicians. Some would yield clues to the yet-undiscovered murder of a twelve-year-old schoolgirl.
* * *
They were peculiar, seemingly unrelated happenings. Yet they all began to fall together that weekend of Saturday–Sunday, February 18–19, 1978.
It was more than a shot in the dark when Steve Bodiford had, during his early questioning of Bundy at Pensacola, asked about a stolen white van. A few days earlier, on February 9, Bodiford had received a phone call at Tallahassee from Les Parmenter, a fellow detective with the Jacksonville Police Department, 165 miles to the east. Parmenter was angry. “Some SOB tried to pick up my daughter yesterday,” said the Jacksonville officer. “Some guy from over your way.”
Parmenter described what happened. A man, driving a white van, had approached fourteen-year-old Leslie Parmenter at a shopping mall near her junior high school. When Leslie’s older brother Danny showed up, the man was frightened away. Danny wrote down the license number of the van: 13-D-11300. It was, said Parmenter, a plate or tag registered to a Tallahassee owner who reported his tag had been stolen in January.
“Ah’ll see what I can find out and get back to you, Les,” Bodiford promised. Bodiford, through a call to Captain Steve Hooker of the Florida State University police, learned that a white van, owned by the FSU media center, had been stolen around February 6, but then had just been found abandoned. It was being impounded. But its license number wasn’t 13-D-11300. That was obviously a stolen tag, used by the person who had stolen the van.
In the meantime, Deputy Sheriff Keith Daws had an encounter with a suspicious man in the early morning of February 11, at a time when Daws was doing surveillance in the vicinity of the Chi Omega sorority. “When I came up to him, the guy was leaning into this car.” When he questioned the man, Daws noticed, lying on the floor inside the green Toyota, a license tag—13-D-11300. Then, while the deputy used his car radio to check the status of the tag, the man bolted away into the darkness.
Bundy’s photograph, flown to Tallahassee from Pensacola, was shown to Daws in a lineup with other photos. He identified Bundy as the man who fled from him, leaving that license tag behind.
On Saturday, Detective D. Phillips drove east to Jacksonville with a photo lineup which included a duplicate photo of Bundy. There he met with the Jacksonville officer, Les Parmenter, and his daughter. The pretty, blonde fourteen-year-old identified Bundy as the strange man who had terrified her that day, February 8—the man driving the white van with license 13-D-11300. “Yeah, this is the one,” said the girl, selecting Bundy’s photo. She recognized him, even though he had been wearing glasses that day he approached her.
Next, in the town of Lake City, a Florida State Highway Patrol trooper, helping other officers trace the purchases on Bundy’s stolen credit cards, parked in front of the Holiday Inn. Inside, interviewing a desk clerk, he discovered one of those cards had been used at that motel the night of February 8. The clerk identified a photograph of Bundy as the man who spent the night there.
Thus, in a flurry of investigation, police reconstructed some movements of Ted Bundy during the earlier part of February. Driving a stolen white van, bearing the stolen plate 13-D-11300, he had apparently traveled across North Florida, from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, then returned, making an overnight stay in Lake City, a small town near the intersection of Interstate Highways 10 and 75.
Lake City.
The trail of investigation led there.
On February 10, the local newspaper, Lake City Reporter, had carried an inconspicuous headline: girl reported missing. “A twelve-year-old Lake City girl was reported missing by her parents Thursday afternoon when she did not return home from school,” the story began.
Ted Bundy’s trail had intersected on February 9 with the disappearance of Kimberly Diane Leach.
* * *
“About all we know right now is that we got a little girl missin’,” said G. Larry Daugherty, investigator for the small Lake City Police Department. I’d driven immediately to Lake City to learn what was happening. “Ah dunno nothin’ about Theodore Bundy,” added Daugherty, “’cept that he’s from out your way, isn’t he—from Washington State?” I confirmed that and said I knew him. “You know him?” asked Daugherty. The square-shouldered young detective seemed interested in that.
He gave me the basic facts about the missing girl. “She’d gone to school, over at Lake City Junior High School, that mornin’ ... February ninth.”
During her first-period class, she had returned to her home room in a separate, satellite building to pick up her blue denim purse, which she’d forgotten there. “She left her home room, and no one saw her after that,” Daugherty told me. “She just vanished.” Probably the girl had taken a short cut to the main school building, an outdoor route across a playfield.
“It wasn’t till the afternoon that they discovered her gone,” Daugherty said. Kimberly’s mother had become frantic. “Kimberly wasn’t the kind to jus’ take off like that,” she had said. H. Morris Williams, the principal, and everyone had searched the school and around the grounds, but found no trace of her. “We checked all the alleys and garages, and the woods, the pine and oaks around the edges of the lakes around here, but we found nothin’,” the detective said.
“And it was in broad daylight, with all kinds of cars comin’ and goin’ around the school. You’d think someone woulda seen somethin’.”
Daugherty showed me a photo of Kimberly. My heart sank. She was beautiful, a pretty, shining, gamin face, radiating the beauty of a young-woman-to-be. She had long, brown hair, parted in the middle. Five feet tall, one hundred pounds. When last seen she was wearing jeans, a blue football jersey, with crimson numerals “83,” and probably, a fur-trimmed tan coat.
“She’d just been voted first runner-up in the school’s Valentine Queen contest,” said Daugherty. I silently wondered who in the world could be prettier.
“C’mon into the chief’s office,” Daugherty told me. “He’d like to talk with you about Mister Bundy.” I followed the investigator into the tiny, wood-paneled office, where I was introduced to the chief, Paul Philpott, Columbia County Sheriff Glenn Bailey, and Dale Parish, Daugherty’s fellow investigator.
The officers stared at me intently. I was unaware of anything other than that Ted Bundy had reportedly been in their town about the time the twelve-year-old girl vanished. Now their task was to find her—or her body—wherever she was. They were obviously worried.
“What do you know about Mister Bundy?” asked the sheriff.
“Well,” I said, “he’s an escapee from Colorado. He was convicted in Utah of kidnapping a girl.”
“And he’s a suspect in a whole bunch of murdered girls out your way, isn’t he?” asked Daugherty. A suspect, yes, I answered—but there was no hard evidence to connect him with the crimes.
They began pumping me with questions about the crimes of which Bundy was suspected—the MO, the approach of the victim, and especially the age of the victim. “The girls in all the cases out West,” I said, “were all in their late teens or twenties.”
They already had sketchy information about Bundy, picked up from lawmen at Tallahassee and from the FBI. Now they had the task of beginning a search—a search which could cover thousands of square miles of swamp and forestland—for a small body. And they had no idea where to start.
“Where were all those bodies left, in the cases out West?” asked Daugherty. The ones I knew about, I said, were usually on high ground. Mostly in mountainous areas. “Of course,” I said, “that won’t help you here. Your country’s perfectly flat.”
“Were any of those victims left in water?” asked the sheriff.
“No, not to my knowledge.” Most of the victims out West had been, as Mike Fisher had noticed, left near a rural side road, not many miles from an interstate highway.
“You guys gotta understand, that I’m just a newspaper man,” I told them. “I really don’t know all that much about these cases. And I’m not sure that Ted Bundy’s guilty or innocent of those crimes out West. And I really doubt it in your case here. A twelve-year-old, that doesn’t fit those others at all.”
“You’re sure he never leaves a victim in water?” The question was repeated by one of the officers. No, I replied. Never water. Always high ground. I added, “The guy you should talk to is Mike Fisher. He’s the investigator in Colorado, and he knows the most about Bundy.”
Later Daugherty led me to a wall map in the police station, a map of Lake City, Columbia County, and its surrounding area—a remote, sparsely populated stretch of North Florida. “Thousands of square miles,” he drawled, “an’ most of it’s pine forest and oak and palmetto and swamps.” His hands swept over the map. “This’s all swamp country. Up no’th hea’s mo’ or less jus’ an extension of the Great Okefenokee Swamp, comin’ down out of Georgia.
“’N’ all around this country, in all these forests, we got them sink holes. Deep, deep black water. Sometime’s the hole’s only a few feet across. And sometimes y’ nevah find bottom, ’n one of them sink holes.”
I could understand why they were wondering if the body of the girl might have been dropped in water. “An’, y’ know,” the intense young investigator continued, “there’s ’gaters all ’round. And snappin’ turtles. They’d take a body fast. An’ just leave bones.”
Within the next few days, fanning outward from Lake City, there began the largest ground search in North Florida history. Hundreds of men, on foot, in pickup trucks, on horseback, began looking for Kimberly. The Florida Highway Patrol dispatched dozens of its cars and scores of troopers. Overhead were search planes. One of them, flying at night, was equipped with a sensor camera which could pick up “hot spots” on the ground, where there might be a decomposing body.
The Florida Department of Criminal Law Enforcement,[2] a highly professional investigative agency, was asked by the sheriff to coordinate the effort. George Robert (Bob) Dekle, Sr., an assistant state attorney at Lake City, was placed in charge and FDCLE investigator J. O. Jackson was assigned to work with Daugherty and the other detectives.
As a volunteer, I spent a few days in the search, traveling the roads of the remote Osceola National Forest, north and east of Lake City, sometimes slogging into the seemingly endless series of swamps. Then, forty miles to the west, I traveled remote roads, through thick pine forests, along the olive-dark Suwanee River. It was, I concluded, such a vast country, so lonely, so forbidding, they’d never find Kimberly.
* * *
On a cold, late February night, Daugherty took me to meet the girl’s parents, Tom and Freda Leach, who’d been in seclusion since their daughter disappeared. At their trailer home at the northeast outskirts of Lake City, they welcomed us solemnly.
“We appreciate everythin’ that’s bein’ done—the search ’n’ all,” said Mrs. Leach. She was a trim, attractive woman, brown-eyed and blonde. She worked as a beautician in Lake City. I had a sense that all her tears had already been shed. She bore only a dry fear and anxiety.
Daugherty and I sat listening in the compact living room of the trailer, as Mrs. Leach recalled the day Kim vanished. “And nobody at the school even noticed she was gone until two-thirty in the afternoon! I jus’ don’t understand.
“She wouldn’t jus’ go off with anyone. Only thing I can think is that someone went up to her and told her that somethin’ had happened to me or her dad. And he’d told her ‘I’m gonna take you to the hospital.’ She might go if she thought he was some kind of authority.”
Tom Leach, a lean man with dark, curly hair, a truck driver, described the fears they’d had—hoping for, dreading, a telephone call with some news. “We see some of the stuff on TV,” he said, nodding toward a television in the corner of the room. “We shore hope that if ...”
Daugherty interrupted with reassurance. “If anythin’ happens,” he promised, “we’ll sure let y’all know first.”
“This Theodore Bundy,” said the father, turning toward me, “I understand you know this man.”
“Yes, sir, I’m acquainted with him.”
The father leaned forward on the chair where he sat, looked directly at me, wringing his hands. He used soft words to phrase the question in his mind: “You know this man ... Ah ... Can you tell ... Uh ... How—how ... These girls ... What does he do to them? How does he kill them?”
I struggled for some reply. How could I answer? I settled for evasion. “Mr. Leach,” I began, “we ... uh, the police ... no one really knows that he had anything to do with this situation here in Lake City. ... with Kimmy’s disappearance.”
The cases the police investigated out West, I explained, were all young women in their late teens and twenties. “Never a very young girl like Kimmy. So ... I don’t think you should ...”
Perhaps the father desperately needed a scrap of reasonable doubt to which he could cling. Tom Leach nodded. “I guess any man has to be considered innocent until he’s proven guilty,” he sighed.
As we departed, Daugherty promised the Leaches again, “We’ll sho’ let you know of anythin’ that comes up.” Tom and Freda Leach nodded.
For a moment Daugherty and I stood outside that mobile home, in the darkness that night. I looked upward at some tall pines, the black sky, and the stars.
“Wee-e-e-ell,” sighed Daugherty, “ah jus’ know we’re gonna find that little girl. It may take a while, Dick. But I promise yah—like I promised the Leaches—we gonna fin’ her if it takes the rest of my life lookin’.”
As we got in his car, the sturdy investigator had one more thought: “Ah’d love just dearly to have ’bout fifteen minutes of conversation in that jail cell with yo’ Mister Bundy. ... Jus’ him and me.”
* * *
For a week, Ted Bundy continued his nighttime interviews in the Leon County jail at Tallahassee with Norm Chapman, Don Patchen, and Steve Bodiford. But the detectives knew that he had been collecting his composure and was yielding less and less information to them. His telephone calls to Seattle, to Cas, seemed to settle him.
Fisher and Blakey waited, in rising fury, as Sheriff Katsaris—through his chief of detectives, Poitinger—refused them permission to talk to Bundy. “All we want to ask him about is the escape,” explained Fisher. “Where he got the hacksaw blades. And where he got the money.”
Poitinger made it clear. Bundy was Sheriff Katsaris’ prisoner. And the sheriff was interested in one thing—solving the Chi Omega murders, not solving anyone else’s cases.
“If ever Theodore were going to crack, that would have been the time,” Blakey, the Colorado prosecutor, would reflect later. “But they just didn’t know how to go about it. They didn’t understand.”
Chapman, Patchen, and Bodiford, all able detectives, agreed—there would have been more success with Ted if just one of them had done the questioning.
“What you really need to have down here is that psychologist from the Utah pen,” Fisher advised. “Doctor Carlisle. And he’s willing to come. If you’d send him a plane ticket.”
In fact, Carlisle had agreed to fly to Tallahassee, either to interview Bundy or to advise his interviewers on the best way to unlock, finally, whatever secrets the man seemed to want to release—if the Leon County sheriff would provide the airplane ticket. “Christ, it’d only be a lousy six-hundred dollar ticket,” Fisher argued.
Katsaris and Poitinger ignored the proposal. Carlisle was never called in.
Again the surveillance tape recorder, operated by Poitinger, had failed during an intriguing question-answer session the detectives had one night with Bundy in the Tallahassee jail.
The detectives asked about the FBI reference to thirty-six unsolved cases of murder.
“We asked him ... if that was an accurate figure, as far as he knew,” Poitinger said later. “And he said the figure ‘probably would be more correct in three digits.’” That would remain, perhaps forever, an enigmatic, disputable version of what really was said and meant. (“Ted was just playing with them,” John Henry Browne, the Seattle lawyer, said later.)
Frustrated and disgusted with Katsaris and Poitinger, Fisher and Blakey flew home to Colorado.
Next it was the turn of the Lake City investigators to be frustrated by Katsaris and Poitinger. Bob Dekle, the Lake City Task Force chief, the Columbia County sheriff, and others involved in the frantic search for the Leach girl asked Katsaris for an opportunity to listen to the tape-recorded interviews which had been conducted with Bundy. “Maybe,” explained Dekle, “we could pick up something out of that. Something,” he said, “to help us in the search for Kimberly.”
The Leon County sheriff reminded the men from Lake City that the interview tapes belonged to him. But Dekle related later, Katsaris offered a deal. Katsaris said the investigators in the Leach case could hear the tapes—if ...
If, when the girl’s body was found, Ken Katsaris would be notified first so that he could announce the discovery to the news media.
It was an infuriating proposition to the men who were working night and day in the search for the Leach girl. But they agreed.