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“So there’ll be just one camera and one cameraman in the courtroom, and we’ll have a rotation schedule on the camera. ABC one day, NBC the next ...”
A crowd of TV reporters, cameramen, and technicians sprawled on chairs and perched on tables, listened to the plan for courtroom coverage. They were gathered in an expanse of empty space, with some rambling divider walls, on the ninth floor of the Dade County Metropolitan Hall of Justice in Miami.
It was Sunday, June 24, 1979. The trial of Theodore Bundy for the Chi Omega murders would start the following day in a courtroom five floors below.
The media army was getting ready for action. Bundy’s trial would be national news. The elements were all there—the savage attacks on the pretty coeds, the debonair, photogenic former law student, the defendant, claiming his innocence. Plus the fact that Florida permitted cameras in the courtroom—one TV camera, one still camera—for graphic coverage.
Cables for audio and video were strung from the courtroom up to the ninth floor where thousands of square feet had been converted into ministudios, crammed with monitors, tape machines, editing consoles, audio mixers, the other gear required for preparation of the daily TV feeds across America.
In early June, Judge Edward Cowart had satisfied himself it would not be possible to empanel an unbiased jury in Tallahassee, where the awful crimes had occurred. When the judge shifted the trial to Miami, Bundy and his public-defender lawyers reacted with grins and sighs of relief.
But now, as the clock ticked toward the beginning of trial, Bundy’s cheerfulness evaporated. “Ted’s really, really upset,” Carole Boone told me as we watched the activity of the TV people setting up on the ninth floor. “The public defenders have been down here in Miami for days now, but Sheriff Ken’s been keeping Ted up in Tallahassee until the last minute.
“And Ted really needs to get together with the defenders. They’re not anywhere near close to being prepared,” Carole added. “Things are really screwed up.”
Carole was a tall, auburn-haired woman, in her early thirties, who wore glasses with oversized round frames, giving her a look of perpetual wonder. Her sense of humor was lively, offbeat, often derisive of police and prosecutors. Fondly, almost protectively, she used her own nicknames for Ted, “Bunny” or “Bun.”
Carole’s relationship with Ted had deepened and intensified, month after month, especially while he was in Colorado. When his Florida trial was about to begin, she had left her job in Washington State to come to Florida, with her fourteen-year-old son, to be near Ted. She was obviously committed to being Ted’s most important, constant source of sympathetic support. (“She’s always keeping me up,” Ted had told me. “She’s a very, very gifted person, and she’s been important to my morale.”).
Shortly before the trial, Carole, who had previously sought anonymity, had decided to “go public.” She began to seek media interviews so that she could dispute the mass-murderer image which the news media, she believed, had so casually bestowed on Ted. “I haven’t seen anything physical or circumstantial that suggests Ted Bundy belongs in jail,” she would say.
At Tallahassee that Sunday, Ted was in an angry mood. When his guards at last came to the Leon County jail, to take him to the airport for the flight to Miami, he was refused the right to carry with him his legal files in the Kimberly Leach murder case, a case which, Ted insisted, required his day-by-day attention, even while the Chi Omega trial would be underway.
One of his guards later recalled that day in the cell. Ted, tossing aside a stack of personal mail, snapped, “And not one letter from my beloved mother.”
The “beloved,” recalled the guard, was uttered with heavy sarcasm.
* * *
With Judge Cowart presiding, the case of Florida v. Theodore Robert Bundy, venue now in the Circuit Court of the Eleventh Judicial District, Dade County, began June 25, 1979.
Seated with Bundy at the defense table were three Tallahassee public defenders—Ed Harvey, Lynn Thompson, and Margaret Good. It was a youthful team. Good was twenty-nine, Thompson and Harvey were in their early thirties. With them was a new face. Robert Haggard, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer in private practice in Miami, had volunteered to help the defense in the trial and his offer had been quickly accepted by the beleaguered defenders.
The prosecution had a capable team of young attorneys: Larry Simpson, calm, reserved, methodical; and Dan McKeever, quick-witted, glib, often smiling. In his own way, each was aggressively effective.
Jury selection, a slow, grueling process, went on for a week. One after another, most prospective jurors said they’d heard about the Chi Omega murders. Many had read or heard something about Ted Bundy.
When one young man was being questioned, he said he couldn’t be sequestered with the jury for several weeks because his girlfriend wouldn’t like it. “Well,” coaxed Judge Cowart, “y’know absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
For all his folksiness, his mirth, Cowart was a strong, certain judge. At fifty-four, he was the presiding judge of the criminal courts of the 11th Circuit, a jurist whose decisions almost always held up on appeal. A hefty man with thick shoulders and prominent jowls, Cowart, in his robes, peering down at the courtroom through black-rimmed glasses, accurately resembled a bigger-than-life captain at the bridge of his ship in stern command.
At week’s end, Friday evening, June 29, a jury was finally seated. Rudolph Treml, a middle-aged, well-educated petroleum engineer, a stolid man, appeared to everyone as the natural, eventual foreman. The twelfth juror to be chosen was James L. Bennett, a truck driver. He told the questioning lawyers he held some reservations about the death penalty, and he had heard of the case. “You’d have to be in Siberia, not to know about it,” he had observed. But the powerfully built black man vowed his consideration of guilt or innocence would be “based on the evidence.” (The defense was pleased with Bennett. Perhaps, as a black man in a Southern state, he could sympathize with the problem of police abuse.)
With the jury chosen, Ted leaned back in his chair, apparently satisfied. He smiled and chatted with his lawyers. Ted’s jury of his peers included seven blacks, five whites. A clothing designer, a teacher, a bookkeeper, a maid, an engineer. Expectedly, in Miami where the population is heavily Latin, one woman juror, Estela Suarez, was Cuban-born.
The twelve jurors and three alternates, chosen later, were taken by bus to the Sonesta Beach Hotel where they were sequestered through the ensuing days while lawyers battled over defense motions to suppress key elements of the state’s case.
* * *
Bundy’s defense sought to suppress three major elements in the prosecution’s case: 1. Nita Neary’s “eyewitness testimony” about the man she’d seen at the Chi Omega house that morning; 2. the pantyhose mask found in his Volkswagen when Bundy was arrested in Utah—and which so resembled the pantyhose found at the Tallahassee crime scenes; and, 3. the potentially explosive tape-recorded interviews Bundy had with the detectives after his recapture at Pensacola.
Simpson and McKeever had concerns about Nita, their twenty-two-year-old star witness. She was nervous and apprehensive about her role in the dramatic legal drama, and the defense was ready to attack her rather tentative identification of Bundy on several fronts. She had selected Bundy in a photo lineup, but when police in October 1978 took her to a Tallahassee courtroom to view Bundy in person, she hadn’t been positive he was the man.
Before Judge Cowart, Simpson, with supportive, friendly questioning, had Nita recall all the events of that early morning of the murders. She repeated the descriptions she gave to police of the man. She described her collaboration with the artist who drew the sketch of the killer’s profile.
Then the prosecutor took her to the final question: The man she had seen in the Chi Omega house that early morning—“is that man in the courtroom today?” “I feel positive ...” she began.
She paused and continued, “I have never seen the exact profile real—in life—through the whole thing. I’ve never gotten ... as good a look as I have gotten this morning. I immediately recognized him to be the man I saw at the door that night.”
Simpson urged her onward. “Would you point him out for the court?”
For an instant Nita seemed reluctant to look directly at the defense table, at Bundy. Then her left arm raised rather mechanically. Her index finger—and eyes—pointed directly at Bundy.
With mixed anger and boredom in his voice and on his face, Ted assisted the court reporter by speaking, for the record, in lawyerlike calm.
“That’s Mister Bundy,” said Ted.
Judge Cowart ruled that Nita Neary’s description of the man she saw leaving the Chi Omega house was “deliberate and careful” and had remained consistent through all her subsequent descriptions.
The prosecution’s star witness would be allowed to testify.
Three Utah officers—Bob Hayward, the state trooper who arrested Bundy in August 1975, and Salt Lake County Detectives Jerry Thompson and Daryl Ondrak—had been flown to Miami for the suppression hearing. The defense sought to block the state from using their testimony about the pantyhose mask found in Ted’s VW—the pantyhose cut to form a mask—as were the pantyhose found at the Chi Omega and Dunwoody crime scenes.
After listening to the testimony and arguments from both sides, Judge Cowart indicated he would reserve, until later, his ruling on whether the Utah pantyhose evidence would be allowed into trial. Eventually the ruling would be a shocker to the prosecution.
With the jury still sequestered, the defense fought to suppress the tape recordings made while Ted was being questioned following his recapture at Pensacola.
Burly, gentle-mannered Pensacola Detective Norman Chapman sat in the witness chair for nearly three hours, while Judge Cowart and spectators and reporters strained to hear the noisy, barely audible tape recordings of the detectives’ questions and Ted’s answers during those first predawn interviews.
The “Pensacola tapes” had more than one legal flaw. The tape recorder had been turned off and on, so that some of the questions and answers went unrecorded. That bothered Judge Cowart—the gaps. But the most serious flaw was pointed out by Terry Terrell, a Pensacola public defender. He testified that, on the early morning of February 17, 1978, while Bundy was in the jail undergoing that questioning, Terrell was denied the opportunity to talk with the prisoner.
There was supporting testimony from other Pensacola public defenders. Assistant State Attorney Ron Johnson, they said, had blocked their access, and thus Bundy was denied his right to counsel.
“I just can’t understand that,” said Judge Cowart. He ruled the tapes out of the trial.
“That really hurt us,” mourned McKeever later, in a corridor conversation with reporters. “It was really a disaster. A disaster with a capital D.”
Now, suddenly, Ted Bundy’s defense had a winnable case.
* * *
When Simpson approached the jury that afternoon to deliver the state’s opening statement, the youthful-looking prosecutor scooted a blackboard into place, as though he were the teacher, preparing to give the class a complicated lecture. “There are seven charges in this case,” he explained to the expectant jurors. “There are two crime scenes.” With a piece of chalk, Simpson began covering the blackboard with diagram jottings—the crime scenes, Chi Omega and Dunwoody, and the crimes, Burglary, burglary, murder, murder, attempted murders.
Larry Simpson had lived that murder case for months, working long hours with police and lab specialists, on the crimes and evidence, learning everything he could about Bundy and his background. “The toughest part of the case,” he once confided privately, “is the complexity of it. How can we present it in a simple way, so that it could be understood, and still cover all the parts of it?”
Simpson described to the jury the apparent chronology of events, beginning with Nita Neary’s arrival at the Chi Omega house that early morning and the discovery of the victims at the Chi Omega house, then an hour and a half later, the discovery of the battered Cheryl Thomas at the Dunwoody place. “She had been beaten severely about the head and was laying in a pool of blood on the bed.
“She had suffered five compound fractures of the skull.” The jurors listened intently. (Eventually, during the trial, Cheryl would appear as a witness, along with the other survivors. Cheryl, a beautiful, regal girl, who aspired to be a dancer, had to undergo extensive rehabilitation. As she walked across the courtroom, she would falter, as though her equilibrium had been impaired by her severe injuries.)
“An important piece of evidence ... was a pantyhose mask,” Simpson told the jury. “Remember I told you that Margaret Bowman was strangled [in the Chi Omega house] with a pair of pantyhose. And now we have a pantyhose mask that has been found at the Dunwoody scene.” Simpson described how a crime analyst, Patricia Lasko, had found two hairs in that pantyhose and would testify “it is highly likely that the hairs found in that pantyhose mask were those of Theodore Bundy.”
Simpson told the jury that bite marks were found on Lisa Levy’s body—and the state would show that “within a reasonable degree of dental certainty, the defendant, in this case, Theodore Robert Bundy, was responsible for leaving these bite marks on the buttocks of Lisa Levy.”
Haggard, a diminutive man with long blond hair, who was quickly assuming command of the defense legal team, delivered the opening statement for the defense. “Certainly there was a crime committed,” he said. “No one disputes that. But there is a true issue in this case—who committed these crimes?”
Haggard continued, “The issue is, did Ted Bundy commit this crime and no other man? Will the state prove that Ted Bundy and no other man committed this crime, beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt?”
“Object!” Simpson rose to argue that Haggard had strayed into the realm of argument. The judge agreed. Haggard plowed onward with an opening statement interrupted by more than twenty objections from Simpson. At the defense table Bundy scowled at this unfamiliar lawyer who was making such a disjointed presentation of his case to jurors. Among spectators, Carole Boone bit her lip nervously. With Haggard, things were opening badly for Ted.
* * *
The parade of state’s witnesses began the following Monday, July 9. Jurors first heard testimony of officers who had arrived at the crime scenes and the recollections of the medics who cared for the injured.
To the astonishment of Simpson and others, Ted Bundy, the defendant, arose to act as counsel, to personally cross-examine Ray Crew, the Florida State University officer who was first on the scene at Chi Omega.
“Christ!” exclaimed one of the TV news people watching a monitor on the ninth floor. “Bundy’s gonna question the witness!” Crowds collected around the TV monitors.
Wearing a sport shirt and tan jacket, Bundy strode to a podium carrying a legal pad in one hand, his other hand casually slanted into his pocket.
In the courtroom, spectators and reporters leaned forward in anticipation and jurors stared, as the defendant softly asked, “Officer, tell me step-by-step what you did when you entered the room.”
Crew described finding the bleeding Kathy Kleiner. “Someone was holding a small plastic pail to catch the blood from her chin, to keep it from running all over the place,” he said.
Lawyerlike, Ted jotted notes and asked for more details. He wanted to know what the room looked like. He asked about the position of the dead girl’s (Margaret Bowman’s) arms and legs.
“How was the lady removed from the bed to the floor?”
“Were there any other pantyhose in the room?”
Jurors gazed in fascination as Ted dispassionately asked his questions of the police officer. The jury didn’t know it at the time, but Bundy, who was acting as a lawyer in the courtroom at that moment, eventually would never take the stand as a witness in his own case.
Dr. Thomas P. Wood, who conducted the autopsies, testified about his findings. When asked about the cause of death of Lisa Levy, Wood replied, “In my opinion the deceased in all likelihood was rendered unconscious at the time by the blows to the head and shoulder. I think that, following this, the bites to the right breast and the left buttock occurred, along with penetration of the vaginal and anal orifices, and then suffocation by strangulation.”
He described the pelvic-area hemorrhaging. Wood theorized that Lisa had been killed first, then the same pantyhose ligature was used to strangle Margaret.
A later witness, Richard L. Stephens, of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, described the pantyhose which the medical examiner had taken from the neck of Bowman. “Hanes Alive, Size D. They are inside out and the right leg is cut off just below the crotch, completely removed. They are split down the sides on each side of the waistband ... There’s a knot tied in the remaining leg, which would be the left leg. A very, very tight knot tied in the left leg, which leaves a loop with the foot sticking out of the other end of the knot.”
Another pantyhose had been discovered belatedly at the Chi O house, several days after the crimes—another crime-scene lapse by police. It had been found, partially covered, on the bed of Bowman’s absent roommate. It had been almost identically altered.
Thus the stage was set for the state to introduce the “Utah pantyhose.” Again, the Utah officers had been flown to Miami and were waiting, prepared to testify about finding such pantyhose in Ted Bundy’s Volkswagen in Utah in August 1975.
Judge Cowart’s ruling on the admissibility flabbergasted the prosecution. “I do not think the possession of it, in Utah two years since, in and of itself, would be, in fact, a crime that’s creditable for introduction in this particular reference,” said the judge. The “Utah pantyhose” evidence was ruled out of the trial.
“I just can’t believe it,” whispered Simpson. McKeever snapped, “People just don’t carry pantyhose masks around with them! With a knot in them!”
Its case weakening, the prosecution pushed ahead with testimony from Patricia Lasko, microanalyst for the FDLE. She told the jury that two hairs found in the pantyhose mask, discovered where Cheryl Thomas had been attacked, came either from Bundy “or someone else whose hair is exactly like his who happened to have been at the Dunwoody apartment.”
She conceded that hair is “not like a fingerprint identification.” It’s not conclusive.
The following morning, July 18, Bundy refused to go to the courtroom. He pulled a sit-down strike in his cell, until Judge Cowart, threatening a contempt citation, ordered his appearance. When the defendant finally appeared, Judge Cowart scolded, “I’m not tolerating any more of this!”
Ted protested his jail conditions and complained his files from Tallahassee still hadn’t been delivered. “The sheriff of Leon County has not complied with this court’s order,” Ted exclaimed angrily, jabbing his finger in a gesture of emphasis toward the judge.
“Don’t shake your finger at me, young man!” snapped the judge. In the ninth-floor media center, newspeople clustered around the TV monitors. “Bundy’s blowin’ up! Bundy’s blowin’!” shouted one of the reporters gleefully. The television crews got dramatic footage of the murder defendant and the judge in a heated confrontation.
* * *
Ted had access to a telephone at the Dade County jail, which he used for nightly conversations with Carole. That night he telephoned me, at my hotel room, to discuss his outburst of the day.
“It’s so darned frustrating, sitting here, watching myself get put away,” Ted said. “This defense team’s all messed up.” Ted was growing upset with the young Miami lawyer and he was critical of his other defenders.
Ted poured out his frustration with the defense team, which, he said, was making decisions without consulting him. “So here I sit. Isolated. I don’t know what to do. Y’know, we can win this case! And they keep me isolated from my own case. And they know my life is on the line.”
I found myself in sympathy with Ted. Even though he had helped create his own problems, here was the most dramatic, most publicized criminal trial in America in 1979, and the defendant appeared to be without a well-coordinated defense.
* * *
The prosecution paraded a series of witnesses before the jury, each adding an element to the pattern of circumstance. Some young women identified Bundy as the man who acted so strangely that night at the disco next door to the Chi Omega house. Henry Polumbo, the young rock musician who lived at The Oak, described seeing Bundy—then known as Chris Hagen—dressed and awake, in front of the apartment at “approximately a quarter to five in the morning.” That was soon after the crimes. David Lee, the Pensacola officer, described his arrest of Bundy, an indication to the jury that Bundy was fleeing, evading police.
Simpson knew there could be a lurking question in the minds of jurors: Why weren’t Bundy’s fingerprints found in the crime scenes?
The youthful prosecutor came up with a last-minute inspiration to answer that wonderment. “Call William Gunter,” Simpson told the bailiff.
Gunter, the Leon County sheriff’s department crime-scene specialist, a fingerprint expert, described going to Bundy’s vacant apartment at The Oak, soon after the arrest at Pensacola, and dusting for fingerprints. Gunter told of his exhaustive search for a print—or prints—on closet doors, shelves, bed posts, even an overhead light bulb.
“There was not an area in there that we did not dust for fingerprints,” Gunter testified. “The room had been wiped clean.”
There was an instant of silence after Gunter’s words. ...
Wiped clean! The jury seemed to absorb the thought that Ted Bundy was fingerprint-conscious.
Simpson and McKeever wound up the state’s case with what they hoped would be their strongest elements, Nita Neary’s eyewitness identification and the bite-marks evidence.
In the presence of the jury, Nita gave her version of the events that early morning, describing the man she’d seen leaving the sorority house. Simpson asked if Neary saw the man in the courtroom. She nodded.
“Would you point him out for us, please?”
She pointed toward the defendant. The man she saw, Neary added, was the man sitting at the defense table “with the dark pinstripe suit, with the red tie.”
“Let the record reflect that she has pointed out the defendant, Theodore Robert Bundy,” noted Simpson.
Haggard’s prolonged cross-examination raised some doubts about the possibility of police prompting, but did not shake her.
With the jury out of the room, Public Defender Ed Harvey challenged the impending testimony of Dr. Richard Souviron, the Coral Gables dentist, a rather handsome, animated man, the state’s enthusiastic key witness on the bite-marks evidence.
Harvey questioned him about the photograph of the bite marks on Miss Levy’s body and the yellow plastic ruler which appeared in the photo. The defender drew out the fact that the original ruler had been lost. But there had been a ruler in the photograph—and Souviron said he could assume it was an accurate ruler. That preserved the scale of the teeth in the photograph and the validity of comparisons.
Judge Cowart ruled that Souviron could testify in the trial.
For the jury, Souviron presented an elaborate illustrated lecture, with a photograph—enlarged more than six times—of the bite mark on Lisa’s skin, and an oversize photograph of Bundy’s teeth, with the lips retracted to show the gums and irregular uppers and lowers. Souviron held an acetate overlay, with the pattern of Bundy’s front teeth, atop the photograph of the bite marks, to demonstrate the alignment.
“I can tell this is a human bite,” Souviron told the jury. Using a pointer on the bite-mark photograph, he went from mark to mark, explaining, “You have some large scrape marks in the upper left hand corner. ... The overall pattern here would be one of crooked teeth.”
The lawyers gathered around Souviron as he stood close to the jury box, explaining, detailing for jurors the points of comparison. “We’ll start with Mr. Bundy’s right side ... the first bicuspid ... tucked down here, but coming to a point ... his right cuspid. ... Next, the lateral incisor ...”
Bundy sat forward, elbows propped on the defense table, watching the juror’s attentive faces. “Two large central incisors,” Souviron went on, ‘‘then the lateral incisor on either side. ... We have two actual bites there. ... [He] bit once and turned sideways and bit a second time. ...” That was fortunate, Souviron told the jurors. It allowed a double check on the accuracy of the comparison.
When the lecture to the jury had ended, Simpson asked, “Doctor, can you tell us, within a reasonable degree of dental certainty, whether or not the teeth represented in that photograph as being those of Theodore Robert Bundy and the teeth represented by the models [of Bundy’s teeth] ... can you tell us within a reasonable degree of certainty if those teeth made the marks on those photographs [of Lisa’s body]?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what is that opinion?”
“They made the marks.”
Dr. Lowell J. Levine of New York University, chief consultant on forensic dentistry to the New York City medical examiner, a dark, bearded, professorial man, delivered his testimony with quiet confidence—without the flair of Souviron, but with obvious effect on the jury. Using an enhanced photograph—given almost three-dimensional quality—of the bite mark on the victim, he compared it with a photo portraying Bundy’s teeth. His conclusions solidly supported Souviron’s testimony.
Mike Minerva, chief of the public-defender office at Tallahassee, made his only appearance in the trial that day, cross-examining Dr. Levine. Minerva reminded Levine that he had, in 1972, written that flesh “is not a very good medium for retaining dental impressions.” “A lot of things have happened in seven years in all the sciences,” Levine replied.
On Thursday, July 19, after testimony from forty-nine witnesses, the state rested its case.
* * *
Ted’s actions—his open-court criticisms of the public defender in Tallahassee—had ruptured the relationship with Minerva. Yet, when Minerva immediately left Miami that day, returning to Tallahassee without saying good-bye, Ted was upset.
That evening, in our telephone conversation, a depressed Ted confided to me, “I just have to pull it together. ... Here we are with a chance to win this case, and there’s no organization, no leadership. We’re always making decisions at the last minute.
“I don’t like the way the jury is looking at me now. I have to establish some sort of rapport with the jurors, some sort of communication.” He confided he was seriously thinking of questioning some of the witnesses for his defense.
Friday night, July 20, Ted had an angry showdown with Haggard in the visiting cell at the Dade County jail. Haggard had aggressively come to dominate the defense strategy. And Ted Bundy was not about to be dominated. Ted announced that Margaret Good—not Haggard—would deliver the important closing statement for the defense. Haggard left in a huff.
Next morning, in the courtroom, Ted announced that decision to the court—that he was taking over direction of the defense, that Margaret would handle “the closing. There’s no question in my mind, Your Honor, that we can obtain an acquittal with a proper closing statement,” he told the judge.
Controlling his fury, Haggard asked permission to quit the case. With a shrug, the judge permitted it. Then a disconsolate Ed Harvey, the “senior” defender in the case, asked to be excused from the case, too. The calm public defender said he and Ted had “irreconcilable differences.” Cowart refused that request. Harvey countered with a suggestion that the court conduct a competency hearing for Bundy. In view of the turmoil which the defendant was causing, Ted might be suffering from “a debilitating ... mental disorder,” resulting in his “inadequate ability to consult with lawyers about the case with a reasonable degree of rational understanding.”
McKeever objected to a competency hearing at that time. “This man is difficult to work with,” said McKeever, with a grin and a good-natured wave toward Ted. “He’s almost cunning in his way of working against his attorneys.”
But, McKeever concluded, Ted was competent to continue through the end of the trial.
Judge Cowart agreed. As difficult as Ted might be for his co-counsel, he was competent to be on trial.
* * *
Sprawled on the bright blue carpet of her room at the Holiday Inn, not far from the jail, Carole Boone, in jeans and T-shirt, was on the telephone with Ted that weekend, discussing his last-minute emergency needs.
“I’m going to call Terry Terrell up in Pensacola,” Carole said. “Maybe he can help us get that negative. We can’t get anywhere with the Tallahassee Democrat. Do you want me to go over and tell the judge that you had straight teeth when you escaped? And that we have photographs to prove that?”
Abruptly in the final hours of the trial, on the eve of closing statements, Carole and Ted were scurrying on a new avenue of defense—Ted’s teeth. Ted said he remembered that, while eating a meal in the Leon County jail in mid-March 1978, a chunk of his tooth—his right central incisor—had fallen out. That was after his arrest at Pensacola and before the impressions were made of his teeth. “If that chip did not occur until March of ’78, one month or two months after the Chi Omega crimes ... then there’s obviously something wrong with the observations made by the state’s odontologist [Souviron],” Ted maintained.
Their last-minute efforts to delay proceedings, to develop some proof about the chipped tooth, ended in limbo. Judge Cowart ordered that closing statements by both sides begin at once.
* * *
There was a stern, almost angry look in the blue eyes of Larry Simpson as he began the state’s closing statement on Tuesday, July 24. Simpson’s argument flowed systematically through a review of Nita Neary’s eyewitness identification and the sketch of the assailant. The prosecutor followed a hunch that jurors, in viewing that sketch, could see a resemblance to Bundy. “That sketch,” said Simpson, “is an identification of Theodore Robert Bundy as the man going through the Chi Omega house on the morning of January 15, 1978.”
Simpson wove together stitches of testimony. There had been Pensacola policeman David Lee’s testimony about capturing Bundy during the early morning of February 15, when Bundy had told him, “I wish you had killed me.” And why did he wish Lee had killed him? “Here is a man that ... has committed some of the most horrible, brutal crimes known to the Tallahassee area. ... He can’t live with himself.” The powerful circumstances, the eyewitness testimony, and the scientific testimony about the teeth marks—any one of those parts of the case would in and of itself be enough to find Ted Bundy guilty, said Simpson. “There is only one conclusion that you can reach,” Simpson told the jurors in a lowered voice. “A verdict of guilty as charged in this case.”
Margaret Good, a young woman with long, blonde hair, was earnest and businesslike in her appearance. Her speciality in the Tallahassee public defender’s office was appellate work. She’d been assigned to the Bundy case at the last moment, just as the trial was being shifted to Miami. But Ted liked her. And he watched her hopefully as she began, for the first time in her life, nervously delivering the closing statement in a major case, a statement she’d labored over far into the night.
“The defense,” Good began, “does not deny there was a great and terrible tragedy that occurred in Tallahassee on January fifteenth. ... But I ask you not to compound that tragedy by convicting the wrong man. The state’s evidence is insufficient to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Bundy, and no one else, is the person who committed those crimes.”
She enumerated all the evidence-collecting failures of police. There were about 260 different fingerprints in the Chi Omega house. But before police finished eliminating all those by comparisons, Ted Bundy showed up as the police’s prime suspect. “And they stopped looking.”
At length, Good portrayed the police work as a systematic process of induction, shaping, molding, fitting the circumstance to the suspect. Good attacked the state’s inference about the lack of Bundy fingerprints at either crime scene. “They want to imply that somehow the assailant was wearing gloves.” Yet, she recalled, Nita Neary had testified the man she saw did not appear to be wearing gloves.
She reviewed testimony of Dr. Richard Stephens, the serologist, who had tested a semen stain found on a bedsheet at the Dunwoody duplex. He had explained some men were “secretors”—i.e., their A-B-O blood type antogens are secreted into their saliva, blood, and other body fluids. About 20 percent of the population, he had said, are “nonsecretors.” Tests on the stain from the Dunwoody bedsheet, he had testified, were inconclusive as to blood type. Those results, said Good, were “consistent with the semen donor being a nonsecretor” ... a positive exclusion of Mister Bundy [who was a secretor].”
Simpson had a last, hard-hitting summation. The killer, he told the jury, was a smart killer, who took pains to cut holes in a pantyhose mask, who avoided leaving fingerprints, who even wiped fingerprints from his apartment. “He’s the kind of man who’s smart enough to stand in this courtroom to cross-examine witnesses in this case. ... He thinks he is smart enough to get away with any crime.”
That Tuesday afternoon, July 24, Judge Cowart read his lengthy instructions to the jury, then told the dozen men and women, “You may now retire to consider your verdict.”
Ted, as he was led out of the courtroom to await the verdict, tossed a smile and a wave toward Carole and, sitting beside her, his mother. Louise Bundy had arrived in Miami only hours earlier to watch the finale of the trial.
* * *
While we waited for the jury that evening, Ted and I were on the telephone again. “I feel good about the jury right now,” he said hopefully. “That’s not to say that we have an acquittal. I think there will be several votes.”
(I didn’t tell him, but the press corps had formed a “pool” on the jury’s verdict. Each of us had tossed a dollar into a box and, with it, our predictions of the length of deliberation and verdict. ... Some local reporters were guessing it would be “guilty” within three to eight hours. A few had predicted acquittal. I had guessed twenty-two hours of deliberation and a hung jury. There was a varied reaction among the media observers to the credibility of some witnesses. Obviously there was “reasonable doubt” in the state’s mostly circumstantial case.)
Ted kidded about the credibility of Nita Neary. “If Nita Neary said she saw your spouse in a motel with someone else, would you get a divorce on that basis?” I laughed. It was a good point. “And,” Ted added, referring to the suave dental expert, so totally self-assured, “if Dr. Souviron said you had cancer, would you want a second opinion?”
Believability of the state’s key witnesses was being decided by the jury.
It was surprisingly quick. About 9:30 that evening the jury filed back into the courtroom, their faces solemn. Sitting at the defense table, wearing a light blue sport coat, matching shirt, and dark blue tie, Ted glanced toward me and flashed a V-for-victory sign with two fingers. It was an unsmiling gesture of irony. It had come so suddenly, I thought it would be an acquittal. But Ted could read it on the jurors’ faces—guilty.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?” asked Cowart.
Some heads of the jurors nodded, as they replied in disunison: “Yes, Your Honor.”
Treml, the foreman, handed seven verdict slips to the bailiff, who relayed them to the judge. There was deathly silence as Cowart studied each, then handed them to the clerk, Shirley Lewis, and ordered her to read them.
Shirley, a middle-aged black woman, began to read aloud, in a voice with an incongruously cheerful Jamaican lilt:
“We the jury in Miami, Dade County, Florida, this twenty-fourth day of July, a.d., 1979, find the defendant, Theodore Robert Bundy, as to count one of the indictment, burglary of a dwelling and committing an assault upon the persons therein, to wit, Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner, guilty as charged. So say we all.”
Leaning back in his chair, a steady hand slightly stroking his chin, Bundy watched and listened, eyebrows raised a little.
The ritualistic reading continued. The words “guilty as charged” recurred. Ted Bundy was guilty on all counts.
Near the rear of the courtroom, the face of Louise Bundy contorted with pain. Then the defendant’s mother cried in a courtroom once again, as she had in Salt Lake City in 1976. Beside her, Carole looked stunned.
Outside, the horde of reporters and cameras awaited the petite, graying mother. Leaving the courtroom she flinched at the sight. Jamey Boone, Carole’s son, a handsome teenager with dark curly hair, put an arm around Louise.
Mrs. Bundy spoke into the lights and microphones: “This is not the final answer. It cannot be. It cannot be. There will be appeal upon appeal.”
She was on the verge of tears, yet she maintained her composure.
Very pale, wearing a sleeveless pink cotton dress, she explained to the media horde, it is “absolutely impossible” to think of her son as the killer and attacker of the young women in Tallahassee ... or anywhere.
* * *
Ted managed one last telephone call to me, about forty-five minutes after the verdict. “Dick,” he told me, “they didn’t take enough time to deliberate.” He was controlled, sounding more puzzled than distressed. “They spent six hours deliberating. Good heavens. To read the instructions would take three hours. ... Well, we don’t know what was going on in that jury room. ... We were bucking a lot of flak and publicity. We don’t know what they knew prior to coming in there. We thought we had a reasonably untainted jury. ... Now there’s a potential that they’re going to get a head of steam and really try to flatten us in the penalty phase.” The prosecution, perhaps the jury, was in a mood for death. Ted sensed it.
* * *
He was right. Eventually James Bennett, the black truck driver, about whom the defense felt so confident, would tell Miami Herald reporters he considered Bundy a beady-eyed killer “incapable of emotion.” Another juror, Alan Smith, would explain he was angered when Bundy, who did not testify, played “lawyer” in the courtroom, questioning a witness. “I was very turned off when he got up. It was a mockery of our system.” Smith believed that questioning could and should have been conducted by one of the defense attorneys.
On Monday, July 30, there was only brief testimony before the jury, which was now considering whether or not to recommend the death penalty. The prosecution was prepared to offer testimony about Bundy’s conviction of kidnapping in Salt Lake City and his escape from Colorado. Jerry Thompson and Mike Fisher had flown into Miami for that. Carol DaRonch, too, had arrived from Utah and was summoned into the courtroom to testify about how Bundy had kidnapped her. Bundy glanced at her without expression.
The jurors studied the pretty, slim young brunette, but they never heard what she had to say. Hurriedly—to prevent her testimony—the defense stipulated that Ted had been convicted of kidnapping Carol DaRonch.
For the defense, pleading for her son’s life, a nervously smiling Louise Bundy testified that, of all her children, Ted had been “my pride and joy.” She recalled his growing-up years, his boy-scout days, his hard work in school. She said she felt Ted could lead a constructive life, perhaps working in the law library of the penitentiary, if only he were allowed to live.
She spoke of capital punishment: “I consider it—the death penalty itself—to be the most primitive, barbaric thing that one human can impose on another. ... My Christian upbringing tells me that to take another person’s life under any circumstance is wrong. I don’t think the State of Florida is above the law of God.”
She left the witness stand, sending a faint, fleeting smile toward her son as she passed the defense table. (“There was so much more I wanted to tell them,” she murmured to me later.)
The jury deliberated one hour, forty minutes. Its advisory recommendation: Ted Bundy should die in the electric chair. At the defense table, Bundy, showing no emotion, jotted something on a legal pad. Judge Cowart announced he would make his imposition of sentence the following day.
On the final day of that steamy hot July in Miami, Ted was allowed his chance to address the court. In the hushed crowded courtroom, he blamed the news media for its flood of prejudicial news about him—the press’s “vilification,” the rush “to make a notorious individual out of me.”
His eyes moistened as Bundy looked up at the judge. “I’m not asking for mercy,” he said, swallowing. “I find it absurd to ask for mercy for something I did not do. ... So I will be tortured for, and suffer for, and receive the pain for the act. But I will not share the burden of the guilt.”
Then, dispassionately, Judge Cowart, reading, citing the aggravated circumstances in the case, imposed the death penalty. Theodore Bundy, he said, would be taken to the Florida State Penitentiary at Raiford, there to be kept until he shall be administered “a current of electricity sufficient to cause your immediate death.”
There were two death sentences—for the killings of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy. There were consecutive sentences of ninety years each for the assaults on the other three victims.
Standing before the judge, Ted’s face was impassive.
Perhaps Ed Cowart, a father and a grandfather, remembered a day, two months earlier, when he had flown to Tallahassee where, he had been told, Ted Bundy would enter a plea bargain and receive a sentence of life. Life—a sentence for which Ted’s mother had pleaded in vain.
But now it was death.
Looking at the handsome Ted Bundy, a surge of words came from the judge: “Take care of yourself, young man.”
There was a startled, bewildered silence in the courtroom.
The judge, who had just sentenced Ted to die, said it again: “Take care of yourself. I say that to you sincerely. It’s a tragedy to this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer. I’d have loved to have you practice in front of me.”
The eyes of Ted Bundy, who’d studied law, whose aspiration was to be an attorney, were turned downward.
“But you went the wrong way, pardnuh,” added Cowart. “Take care of yourself.”
After a moment of frozen silence, there was an explosion of media activity as the newspaper reporters and the radio and television people, in a noisy, shouting, clattering rush, delivered to the nation that strange final moment of the drama.
* * *
In Seattle, where the Miami courtroom action had been daily newsfare, Eleanore Rose wept, saying, “Oh God, I’m so grateful. Maybe now ...” During the trial in Miami, she had observed, in solitude, the fifth anniversary of that date, July 14, 1974, when her daughter, Denise Naslund, was taken from Lake Sammamish State Park and killed. “Now that there’s some resolution of it ... a conviction,” she said, “maybe the police will let me have her remains so I can give Denise a funeral.”
At Fort Lauderdale, police officer Bob Campbell had decided not to go to the nearby Miami courtroom to watch Bundy’s trial. Instead, Campbell followed the proceedings on television. One evening, as we talked over the guilty verdict, Campbell reflected, “It’s very difficult to sit there and look at someone on TV you’ve been looking for all this time—right there in living color—knowing he’s the guy who killed your sister.”
Then, thoughtfully, the handsome thirty-one-year-old policeman confided that he had reasonable doubt about the validity of the bite-mark evidence, and he was skeptical of Nita Neary’s identification. “I don’t know whether to believe her a hundred percent or not. I’m not really sure.” But Caryn Campbell’s brother added, “I think Bundy did kill my sister.”
Ted Bundy was taken quickly from Miami, northward to the state prison at Raiford, a remote institution in the vast, flat pine forests of North Central Florida, not far from the town of Starke, south of Lake City.
It was seven o’clock in the morning when he arrived. A pleasant senior corrections officer, a man with three silver chevrons on his collar, was one of the first to greet him. The sergeant snapped two Polaroid photos of the celebrated new arrival at Death Row.
Ted’s eyes fixed on the silver nameplate on the man’s khaki shirt, the name, “D. J. Dekle.”
“Are you any relation to Bob?” Ted asked.
“Yes, he’s my son,” replied Sergeant Jim Dekle.
Small world, thought Bundy. Here was the father of his prosecutor in the upcoming Kimberly Leach case. “Any message for Bob?” asked the sergeant.
“Well,” Ted grinned, “tell him I’ll see him in court.”
That day, Ted Bundy was placed on Q Wing on Death Row, in a cell once occupied by a prisoner named John Spenkelink.