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Theodore Bundy and a man with the almost-funny name of John Spenkelink would never know each other. Yet, as though under the force of some dark star, the life and especially the death of John Spenkelink would touch events in the life of Ted Bundy.
In late January 1973, while bright, youthful Ted Bundy was doing law-enforcement research in Seattle, Spenkelink, a lifelong drifter, a robber, an escapee from a California prison camp, was on the run. He’d teamed up with another fugitive. Together they’d driven—seeking the warm climate of Florida—to Tallahassee.
It was a cruel, rather undistinguished murder, committed in a motel not far from the Florida State University campus. Apparently, their argument was over money. Joseph Szymankiewicz, an Ohio parole violator, was found dead in the motel room. There were two gunshot wounds, one through the head. And his skull had been bashed by a hatchet. His companion was gone.
Bill Gunter of the Leon County sheriff’s department and Howard Winkler of the Tallahassee Police Department—crime-scene specialists who’d be working other cases together in the future—did the evidence gathering. They found an abundance of clues—fingerprints and some backings from Polaroid films. Those film backings yielded photographs—clear pictures of a dark-haired man with tattooed arms. There were clean fingerprints on a Miller malt-liquor can and an Old Mr. Boston mint-gin bottle.
A few weeks later Spenkelink, the dark-haired man of the Polaroid photos, was arrested in California. The murder weapon was in his possession. His fingerprints matched those at the crime scene. Despite Spenkelink’s plea that he’d killed in self-defense, a Tallahassee jury convicted him of first-degree murder on November 28, 1973. The following month, shortly before Christmas, Judge John A. Rudd sentenced him: “It is the judgment of this court and sentence of law that an electric current be caused to be passed through your body until you are dead. ...” Spenkelink was taken to a cell in Death Row at the Florida State Prison at Raiford.
Gary Gilmore, who’d been a fellow inmate with Ted Bundy at the Utah State Penitentiary, drew national attention when he died before a Utah firing squad January 19, 1977. Gilmore had wished to die. In early 1979, John Spenkelink, who didn’t want to die, was gaining national attention as he headed toward his execution in Florida, a state with a constitutionally approved death penalty law.
When Ted was first arrested in Florida, Millard Farmer, his friend and counsel at Atlanta, mourned, “Oh, my Lord—Ted’s down here in the Death Belt of America. And Florida—that’s the buckle of America’s Death Belt.” Ted had tried unsuccessfully to have Farmer serve as his lawyer. Judge Rudd had denied the request, a ruling left standing by the Florida State Supreme Court and later by the federal courts.
In May 1979, Farmer was trying to save Spenkelink from execution. Florida Governor Bob Graham, indicating he was willing to go along with executions, had signed the death warrant. Appeals had failed. Spenkelink was scheduled to die May 25.
Other Death Row inmates later told how they had heard Spenkelink resisting, fighting, screaming in his cell, when the guards had come to shave his head and one leg—places on his body where the electrodes would be placed.
Thirty-two witnesses watched through a window while Spenkelink was trussed into the old oak chair which had been manufactured there at the prison decades earlier. His head was strapped. “Do you have any final statement to make?” asked David Brierton, the prison superintendent.
“I can’t talk,” Spenkelink managed to mutter. “The [chin] strap is too tight.” Brierton assumed that meant Spenkelink had nothing to say.
The witnesses saw Spenkelink’s eyes—“It was just a wide, wide, wide stare,” said one—as the black leather mask dropped over his face. Two black-hooded executioners administered three surges of electricity. The first, 2,500 volts, was administered at 10:12 a.m. Spenkelink’s body jerked in the chair. One hand clenched into a fist. After two succeeding shocks and more convulsions, it was over. Spenkelink was dead.
Farmer, a deeply compassionate man, was sickened. An aggressive, articulate lawyer, with a warm-honey Georgia accent and intense blue eyes set in his bony, Lincolnesque face, Farmer was dedicating his life to the battle against, as he saw it, the inhumanity of the state’s killing of people.
Farmer worried especially about Ted—a young man he knew and enjoyed as a person. Now Ted was scheduled to go on trial within days—on June 9—in the same courtroom where Spenkelink had been sentenced to die. Some of the people who helped send Spenkelink to the chair were involved in the case against Ted.
The state’s evidence against Ted in the Chi Omega and Kimberly Leach murders was not overwhelming. But the trials, one after another, loomed as ominously billowing black clouds which, added to the storms of dark publicity which constantly raged around Ted, made his outlook bleak. Ted’s defense was in disarray. He constantly criticized and debated (often with cause) the public-payroll lawyers who were assisting him—especially Mike Minerva, chief of the Tallahassee public-defender office.
“I think we’ve got to figure out a way of saving Ted’s life,” said Farmer in one of his many long-distance telephone calls to Bundy’s friends and counselors. Negotiations with prosecutors began, discreetly. The proposal: If Ted would plead guilty to the three counts of murder, he would be guaranteed three consecutive twenty-five year sentences. In a word, life.
Ted contemplated the suggestion with sullen reservations. But eventually he conceded that the odds were overwhelmingly against his winning two consecutive acquittals—especially considering the nature of the crimes and the setting, Florida. With Ted leaning toward the agreement, Farmer flew to Washington State to talk it over with Ted’s mother, John Henry Browne, and others. They were supportive. Ted’s life, they all agreed, must be saved.
At Tallahassee, Minerva and the other public-defender lawyers were agreeable to a plea bargain. Eventually the state attorneys involved, despite some qualms, began to agree—State Attorney Harry Morrison at Tallahassee, and his assistants, Larry Simpson and Dan McKeever, the men who’d try the Chi Omega case, and State Attorney Jerry Blair and his assistant, Bob Dekle, in the Kimberly Leach case at Lake City.
There were some political risks. Many citizens wanted the highly publicized Ted Bundy to get the chair for the awful murders they believed he had committed. There could be outrage against a state attorney who settled for less.
But for the prosecutors, there were advantages, too. Two consecutive complex trials could be enormously expensive for taxpayers. There also was a possibility Bundy could be acquitted. “You never know what a jury’s going to do,” said Simpson.
Delicately, the prosecutors in both jurisdictions consulted with families of the victims. For various reasons, sometimes with great agonizing, they agreed.
The lawyers approached and advised the two judges—Judge Edward Cowart, who now presided over the Chi Omega case, and Judge Wallace Jopling, presiding over the Kimberly Leach case. (Judge Cowart, chief of the criminal division of Dade County, Miami, had succeeded Judge Rudd, who had recused himself after a technical claim of prejudice by the defense was sustained by the Florida State Supreme Court.)
The plea bargain was to be consummated without fanfare, in court the morning of May 31, 1979. There would be no advance word to the news media. John Henry Browne, the Seattle lawyer, Ted’s mother, and Ted’s newest, closest confidante, Carole Boone, all flew to Tallahassee beforehand to visit Ted and to be with him when his plea was entered and the sentence imposed.
At the Leon County jail, Ted was allowed “contact visits” with Carole that week—private visits without interfering bars or partitions.
The night before it was to happen, Browne and Farmer visited Bundy at the jail. They came away confident. Ted sounded in favor of the plea bargain. Over dinner that evening, Farmer, usually a non-drinker, had three glasses of rosé in celebration of the saving of Ted’s life.
Even before nine o’clock the next morning, an expectant crowd began to gather in the courtroom. Word had leaked to many law-enforcement men. Sheriff Ken Katsaris’ detectives had been alerted. So, too, had Colonel Eldridge Beach of the Florida Highway Patrol and Ed Blackburn, director of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and some of their people. (I was one of a few newspeople who had been advised to be in court that day.)
Before proceedings began, Browne and Farmer left the courtroom to visit Ted in a nearby holding cell. “Everything okay, Ted?” asked Browne. Bundy replied he felt fine. But he added, “I dunno.” Both lawyers noticed that Ted held a legal pad, on which he had apparently penciled a lengthy statement or motion of some kind.
While the crowd waited in the courtroom, there was another brief preliminary conference of the lawyers and both judges in chambers. Minerva was carrying a copy of the plea bargain. “Did he sign it?” asked Dekle. Minerva nodded.
“I don’t believe it,” replied the Lake City prosecutor. “I gotta see it.”
Minerva opened the folder. The document had Bundy’s signature.
It was Bundy’s confession, devoid of details, that he killed Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, and Kimberly Leach. His reciprocal condition: “... under the terms of this negotiated plea, I will serve seventy-five (75) calendar years in prison before I become eligible for parole.”
When Bundy appeared at the doorway, entering the courtroom under guard, his eyes swept the room. He recognized the faces of law-enforcement men, especially the smug face of Katsaris. As he approached the defense table, Ted glanced at his mother and at Carole, sitting beside her.
There was quiet. Everyone awaited the arrival of the judges. Ted appeared nervous. His left hand rested, palm down, on the plea-bargain agreement which lay before him on the table. With his right hand, he fondled the statement he had written, a statement protesting the quality of his public defender’s work.
As though he were weighing the decision, Ted’s right hand lowered. His left hand rose. Then his left palm moved downward again, onto the plea bargain. He reached to tug at Browne’s jacket. “I’m not going to do it,” Ted whispered.
“Oh, Christ,” grumbled Browne. The Seattle attorney moved quickly to confer with Minerva. Frowning, Minerva nodded toward the doorway. Together with Farmer, they left the courtroom for a conference with Ted. Sensing something was going wrong, the prosecutors, too, departed.
Ted was adamant. He told the disconsolate defense lawyers the deal was off. Later, back in the courtroom, he began distributing copies of his motion for new legal counsel.
“What the hell’s going on?” Dekle asked Blair.
“We’ve been had,” replied the state attorney.
At last the judges, Cowart and Jopling, entered the courtroom, a room now filled with an atmosphere of uncertainty. “Are we ready to proceed, gentlemen?” asked Cowart.
“Yes, sir,” replied Minerva.
“What is your motion, Mr. Minerva?”
That would have been the moment for the expected plea bargain to be presented. Instead, Minerva told the court that “the defendant has a motion.” Judge Cowart scowled.
Ted rose to announce he was moving to seek new counsel. “Recent developments in the case have revealed to me the ineffective state of counsel that I have been receiving in the course of preparing for trial,” he began.
The attorneys, glowering, listened as Ted launched a tirade. Mike Minerva, the day before, Ted contended, “was pessimistic because ... the community feeling is so pervasive and so strong for a belief in guilt in this case that it would be impossible to obtain a fair trial and to find an impartial jury.”
In fact, in his written motion, Bundy was alleging that Minerva, his chief public defender, has “revealed his own belief in my alleged guilt.”
Bundy closed his angry speech, reciting numerous failures by his lawyers. Then he paused and reached for the plea-bargain document lying on the defense table. Prosecutors watched him warily. Dekle leaned toward Minerva to ask, “He’s not going to plead now, is he?”
With a shrug, Minerva indicated it looked that way.
“Tell ’im to sit down,” growled Dekle. “We ain’t takin’ no plea now.”
Every lawyer in the room knew it was over, even if Ted didn’t. He had created a record alleging his counsel was incompetent. So the prosecutors now couldn’t touch a plea bargain which had been agreed to by that same counsel.
Minerva tugged at Bundy’s sleeve and murmured some advice to him as Ted sat at the defense table. There was a lull, then Bundy spoke falteringly, “Your Honor, there is also before the court ...”
“Mister Bundy,” interjected Judge Cowart, “when you address the Court, stand up please. You are acting as a lawyer now.”
Flustered, Bundy stood. He said he was also planning to file a motion to delay the opening of the trial.
“Madam clerk, I want copies of those motions, please,” said Judge Cowart. His voice was terse. All the efforts by everyone, all the negotiations, all the agonizing with the victims’ families, the willingness of the judges to travel to Tallahassee that day to take a plea bargain—all had been in vain. “This court will be in recess,” Cowart concluded.
Farmer and Browne sat stunned. Carole Boone looked at Ted with a round-eyed smile of encouragement. Louise Bundy appeared confused.
It was as though Ted Bundy had been struggling with Ted Bundy. Lawyer Ted probably recognized the legal realities, the probability of conviction, and the wisdom of accepting the bargain. But the impulsive Ted, unwilling to yield control, unwilling to submit to being sentenced (and perhaps miffed at the presence of all the lawmen in the courtroom) had prevailed.
Or was it, as some wondered, a subconscious act of suicide? Having created havoc in his defense team, Ted would go on trial first for the Chi Omega murders.
Before heading home to Seattle in disappointment, Browne had some final counsel for Ted: “It was the most stupid decision of your life. But you made the decision. So the only alternative now is to fight like hell.”