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Jubilation prevails in Room 214 of the Harley Hotel, about a block from the Orange County Courthouse at Orlando. Chawin’ and grinnin’, a barefooted Bob Dekle, lounging in T-shirt and jeans on one corner of his daveno, presides over it all. Detectives, others who worked on the case—J. O. Jackson, Larry Daugherty, Len Register—drop in for a beer and to exchange good-ol’-boy reminiscences of the investigation and, now, the conviction of Theodore Bundy.
Now that the guilty verdict is in and the only things remaining are the death-penalty arguments, I, a reporter, am allowed to sit in.
“Hey, Larry, how y’doin’?” Dekle unwinds his tall frame from the daveno to greet the newest arrival, Larry Simpson. The businesslike Simpson, the brown-haired, boy-faced prosecutor who’d convicted Bundy of the Chi Omega murders, grins and pumps the hand of the man who’d just heard a jury pronounce Bundy “guilty” in the Kimberly Leach murder.
“Good job,” says Simpson. “Well, we done it,” Dekle exults. “Jerry an’ me. An’ a hunderd others.”
Simpson is delivering photocopies of some court documents Dekle needs for his “penalty phase” arguments to the jury. “Here they are,” says Simpson, “all true and accurate copies. The judgment and sentence, signed in the courtroom there in Miami. With Bundy’s fingerprints ’n’ all. I watched ’em being photocopied at the Leon County clerk’s office.”
We all watch as Simpson leafs through the pages. He pauses at the last sheet and grins. “Hey, you’re not gonna believe this, Bob,” Simpson exclaims. “Look here.”
Dekle peers where Simpson’s index finger points to the death-sentence document. The text is legible, but, in the faint photocopy Bundy’s fingerprints are mere ghostly rings. Vanished.
“Damnation!” Dekle hoots in a burst of laughter. “That boy never leaves fingerprints, does he? Not even when his fingers is inked and rolled right there in the court!”
“Dave Yocom ought to be here,” I tell them. “Then we’d have, all together, the prosecutors who’ve convicted Ted Bundy. And no one had a fingerprint.”
Yocom, in Salt Lake City, had a shy eyewitness, Carol DaRonch, plus circumstance. Larry Simpson, in the Chi Omega case, had an eyewitness of graduating certainty, Nita Neary, some bite marks and circumstance. Jerry Blair and Bob Dekle had an eyewitness, a belated one who was helped by hypnosis, some microscopic wisps of fabric—and circumstance.
Dekle says, though, “Those crimes were jus’ like fingerprints.” He refers to that night when Carol DaRonch escaped her kidnapper in Utah. “And that’s at a shoppin’ center. Then, right away, that Debbie Kent goes missin’ from a school. And we had Leslie Parmenter. He barely misses gettin’ her. At a shoppin’ center. An’ then we have Kimberly go missin’. From a school. Their hair, the way they’re dressed, everythin’ is like a fingerprint.”
In Seattle, detectives ponder some other similarities—the positions of the bodies of the Chi Omega victims on their beds, the nature of the beatings and the fact that the sheets had been drawn up over the heads of the girls. And the investigators recall the sheet which had been pulled up over the head of the girl who was so savagely attacked in her basement apartment in Seattle’s University District in January 1974. And the sheet, meticulously drawn up on the bed where Lynda Ann Healy vanished from her basement apartment.
“How many years of appeals do you suppose Ted’ll have?” I aim the question at Jerry Blair, Dekle’s boss, the restrained, teetotaling Florida state attorney, sitting nearby.
“Spenkelink’s the only precedent we have, o’ course,” replies Blair. “That went five, six years.” But Blair notes the obvious: wily, skillful Ted Bundy, who thrives on challenging the system, will stretch the appeals process. “They’re still typin’ up the transcript from the Chi Omega trial, I hear,” Blair explains. “It’ll be a while before that appeal ever gets started.”
And, Blair has heard, Florida has decided it’ll never release Bundy to Colorado to face the Caryn Campbell murder trial there.
* * *
Later, outdoors, around the hotel’s vacant swimming pool, I’m sitting with Jerry Thompson and Mike Fisher—sharing my six-pack of Budweiser. It’s a sweater-wearing, chilly February afternoon, but there’s a Florida sun as we stretch in deck chairs. From Salt Lake City and Aspen, the two detectives, adding a few more thousand miles of travel and some more hours and days to their years of Ted Bundy, had flown into Orlando to give brief testimony, to tell the Florida jurors about Bundy’s arrests in the West—additional circumstances to prove first-degree murder.
Thompson growls about the “darling little wedding scene” between Ted and Carole in the courtroom on the anniversary of Kimberly Leach’s murder. “Those two deserve each other,” he grumbles. “Makes me so goddamn mad the way that Carole’s goin’ around saying that we framed Ted out there.”
“Yeah,” snorts Fisher. (He held some suspicions about Carole’s early December visits with Ted in Glenwood Springs, not long before the escape from Colorado. Carole had emphatically denied any knowledge or involvement in that. Fisher still doesn’t know how Bundy got all the money or where the hacksaw blade came from.) “If we were gonna frame Theodore, we’d’ve come up with more than a straggle of hair.” Fisher clears his sinuses again—a rattling sound which echoes around the deserted poolside.
“We coulda gone to the victims’ homes—Aime or Kent or Smith—and picked up a piece of their jewelry and put it in that goddamn Volkswagen and then say ‘Oh! What have we here?’”
“Yeah,” agrees Thompson.
In soul searching, Thompson says he even went back to Carol DaRonch, a year afterward, to ask if she’d been in any way influenced by police questioning. “And she says she knew it was him from the first minute. But she was just terrified all along, ’cause of what had happened to her. So if we framed him, what do we get out of it? I’m still just a poor detective. All I ever got out of Theodore Bundy was a pain in the ass.”
“And I’m still an investigator workin’ my brains out,” murmurs Fisher. “Got another Bud?”
I pass him a beer. “Mike,” I ask, “how many murders do you give to Ted?”
“Oh, it’s hard to say. Y’know, the ones where there’s pretty solid circumstances, with the credit cards, where we got him placed, with the right MO and all, it could be, say, twenty-two or so. ... Maybe more. Who knows where he started?”
I reminisce aloud: “After Kimberly Leach, I thought, ‘Oh God! A twelve-year-old. Ted kill a little kid? I don’t believe it! So I went home from Florida and went to Tacoma, to look at a case there. A six-year-old girl, Ann Marie Burr, disappears from her house one night, out of the living room, where she was sleeping. That was years ago—1960. No clue, except a tennis-shoe print outside the window on the porch. She apparently was coaxed or lured out. They had the biggest search in the history of the city, but they never found her.
“Ted’s house wasn’t all that far away from her house. And he’s fourteen at the time. When I asked the old chief of detectives on that case if he’d ever thought a fourteen-year-old boy might have done it, he says, ‘Yeah, funny you should ask. We did look at a fourteen-year-old suspect.’ Only it wasn’t Ted Bundy.
“But it’s a cold case. No way of ever knowing.”
“Well, he’ll give his answers before he fries,” Thompson predicts. “He’s got an ego. There’s no way he’s going to do it, until he’s convinced he’s ready to go.”
“If we get them, any confessions,” Fisher says, “I think we’ll get them without a great deal of specificity.”
“One cop here,” I add, “figures that about the time Ted reaches the chair, he’ll suddenly remember details of one. Just one. And they’ll take him back and listen. Then the next year, when he reaches the chair again, he remembers another one.”
“At that rate,” says Fisher “he’ll be around for years.” The Aspen cop finishes his beer.
Thompson has another thought: “And yet, you know, he might just say, ‘Piss on it.’ And go ahead and die. I dunno. ... Some people truly think that police really framed him in Utah and Colorado and all the way to Florida. So, to them, Ted, he’s the greatest goddamn martyr of all times.”
“Got another Bud?”
His eyes closed in the sun, the mustached, blondish Fisher, begins a soliloquy:
“I would never, for two seconds, bargain for his life, you know. But goddamn, if he were an individual who would come forth with the total truth ... IF he could come with total truth, talk about his problem ... He himself admitted how, when he first escaped in Aspen, that he hadn’t had that urge of his. He analyzed it as having cured himself of this urge. But, of course, he didn’t.
“But maybe somebody can learn something. There are certain things about a personality, maybe in a kid, an indicator, his teachers in school and his mother and dad, if they were trained to recognize any of those traits, you could get a profile. You know, we can get facts about these types, traits. And put ’em in a computer. But then, somebody’s already had to lose his life to gain this information. The sorry part is we can’t answer the question, where does it start?
“Ted’s sane. He’s got total control. He’s not certifiably crazy. He didn’t belong, legally, in an institution. But he doesn’t belong in society.”
“When Ted got away from Glenwood,” I recalled, “one psychiatrist told me, ‘If he kills again, it’ll probably be a furious kind of thing.’ There would be the pent-up urge breaking out, plus his own anger at himself for not being able to control his urge. And it was Chi Omega.”
* * *
Somewhere around the time Ted was thirteen or fourteen, we’ve been told, he learned of his illegitimate birth. Dr. A. L. Carlisle, the staff psychologist at the Utah prison, once mentioned to me his inability to penetrate Ted’s memories about his boyhood years.
So, in one of our recorded conversations while Ted was in his cell in Colorado, I made an effort. “Ted,” I had asked, “sitting in jail now, isolated away from friends and home and everything, do you ever reflect on some of those boyhood years, like boy-scout hikes in the mountains, things like that—say, when you were fourteen or so?”
“My childhood years?” Ted paused for a long time and drew a deep breath. Then, in a very deliberate reply, he reworked my question, carefully compartmentalizing, moving away from a direct answer.
“Well, you’re talking about childhood years as opposed to my mid-twenties, my late twenties? Maybe ...” He paused. “I ... I don’t think a lot about my childhood now. In fact, I think one of the things I do more and more often is that I try to think less about the past because it is disconcerting, under the circumstances, to be confronted by glimpses of—memories of—freedom, as opposed to the reality of the way I live now.”
He described, with rising toughness in his voice, how he had to control himself carefully, adapting to the realities of confinement in steel. “I’ve come across the guys who’ve grown up in prison, or who’ve spent years and years in prison, and one thing you notice about them is they live here and now. They don’t live in the future, and they don’t live in the past. In fact they don’t have a past. ... I haven’t blocked out the past. I wouldn’t trade the person I am, or what I’ve done—or the people I’ve known—for anything.” Ted paused again. The harshness left his voice. He added almost serenely, “So I do think about it. And at times it’s a rather mellow trip to lay back and remember.”
I’d gotten no glimpse of those days when he was fourteen, or earlier. And I wondered about the mellow trip he was remembering.
* * *
A characteristic of the sociopathic personality is the recurring desire to deliver hints of what he has done, to tantalize with suggestions of how very clever he is. Jerry Thompson had experienced it. Ted had told him to keep looking for those straws, to put the broom together. Ted had slyly hinted guilt to me and others. He’d toyed with his Florida interrogators with his line, “The evidence is there. Keep diggin’. You’ll find it.” Then there was that segment of questions and answers, remembered by the detectives, during one of those late-night sessions, when they asked Ted why he liked Volkswagens:
And he said, “Because they get good gas mileage and it’s a common—”
“Well, come on, Ted, what else is there about it?”
He said, “Well, you can take out the front seat.”
“Well, why would you want to take out the front seat?”
There was a suggestion that it would be easy to carry someone in the car that way.
He said, “I don’t like to use that terminology.”
So we fished around for a word that he felt comfortable with.
He said, “Cargo. It’s easy to carry cargo in them.”
“Why is it easy to carry cargo?”
“You can control it better.”
“Is the cargo alive or dead when you put it in the vehicle?”
“I don’t like to use that terminology.”
Well, we fished around for a word and came up with “damaged.” “Is the cargo damaged when it’s in the vehicle?”
And “Yes, sometimes it is damaged and sometimes it’s not damaged.”[4]
* * *
“The pathological need of Mr. Bundy to defy authority, to manipulate his associates and adversaries, supplies him with thrills.” That was one of the observations of Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a Detroit psychiatrist who had interviewed and examined Ted in May 1979 at Tallahassee.
It was just prior to the Chi Omega trial. Mike Minerva, the chief public defender, had secured a court order for an examination of Ted, to determine if he were competent to go to trial. Dr. Tanay recalled their meeting at the cell:
“I believe there were five deputy sheriffs guarding the only exit. Mr. Bundy is a thirty-two-year-old, handsome-looking man, dressed with the casual elegance of a young college professor. ... He was in total command of the situation. The deputy sheriffs appeared more like part of his entourage than policemen guarding a prisoner. ...
“Mr. Bundy commented upon the security precautions, saying they were part of the ‘Bundy mystique,’ which has developed as a result of news media activities. This was presented in the manner of a complaint. It was, however, my impression that Mr. Bundy was taking pride in his celebrity status. ...
“He was asked about his apparent lack of concern, so out of keeping with the charges facing him. He acknowledged that he is facing a possible death sentence [saying], ‘I will cross that bridge when I get to it.’ ...
“The interactions of Mr. Bundy with the police and the whole criminal-justice system have been discussed at length with him and his attorneys. It is my opinion ... that his dealings with the criminal-justice system are dominated by psychopathology.
“Transcripts of the many hours of his conversations with police officers constitute a variety of ‘confessions.’ ... Mr. Bundy confessed the crimes charged against him, while maintaining his innocence. The intellectual denials and emotional admissions are quite apparent from the tapes and transcripts of his conversations with the investigators. ... This behavior was not, in my opinion, the result of rational reflection and decision-making process, but a manifestation of the psychiatric illness from which Mr. Bundy suffers. ...
“If one assumes that his sadistic acts, including homicides attributed to Mr. Bundy in Tallahassee, were carried out by him, then psychiatrically, it would be likely that various other similar acts have been perpetrated by him. It could then be argued that he is effective in concealing his criminal activities.
“Such an argument would be only partially true. It would be more accurate to say that he is of two minds on this issue—he attempts to conceal and reveal his involvement.”
Tanay’s assessment of Bundy was perceptive and, in some ways, prophetic. More than ten days before Ted threw away the plea-bargain offer in the Tallahassee courtroom that day, Dr. Tanay wrote:
“It is my impression that a major factor is his deep-seated need to have a trial, which he views as an opportunity to confront and confound various authority figures ... not only judges and prosecutors, but also his defense attorneys.
“In a certain sense, Mr. Bundy is a producer of a play which attempts to show that various authority figures can be manipulated, set against each other. ... Mr. Bundy does not have the capacity to recognize that the price for this ‘thriller’ might be his own life.”
* * *
“I’d agree with everythin’ Tanay had to say in that report,” says Bob Dekle. “... ’cept the bottom line.”
Tanay’s bottom line was that, while persons with such personality disorders may not be considered insane for purposes of criminal law, “It is my view that sociopaths, if sufficiently severe, do, in fact, suffer from an illness inasmuch as there is an impairment of a variety of psychic features.” That was a recommendation for a plea of insanity—something Ted would never, never consider.
“Regardless of all diagnosis,” Dekle concludes, “I see Theodore Bundy as just one of those guys with nothin’ more than a damn mean streak plumb through ’im.”
Dr. Hervey M. Cleckley, psychiatrist, educator, and author, one of the most respected authorities on the antisocial or sociopathic personality, also disagrees with Dr. Tanay’s conclusion. “Most psychiatrists,” Cleckley indicates, “view the sociopath, the psychopath, the antisocial person not to be technically psychotic.” He alludes to the McNaghten Test, the legal test of whether someone who committed a homicide had the capacity to distinguish between right and wrong. The psychotic personality cannot make that distinction. The sociopath, Cleckley muses, citing an old whimsical definition, “knows the difference but doesn’t give a damn.”
Cleckley testified for the prosecution during that pretrial competency hearing in Tallahassee. He became interested in Ted Bundy.
Now he’s asked if there might have been something in Ted’s early years, something which might have triggered eruptive behavior.
“Well,” says Dr. Cleckley, “you think of how many people have traumatic experiences early in life and yet they seemingly don’t act in that way in adulthood. I think there’s been an overselling of psychiatric explanations. There is the inference that every time somebody commits a crime, it’s because his parents were overprotective or because his parents were oversevere or because it was society’s fault in one way or another.
“I think the pendulum has swung too far that way, with too much interpretation being read into the situation.”
Perhaps now, he speculates, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction toward a frank conclusion—“the conclusion that we don’t know.”
* * *
Dr. Al Carlisle, the Utah State Prison psychologist, remembers that day outside a Salt Lake City courtroom in 1977, when Ted, who’d just been sentenced to prison for kidnapping Carol DaRonch, asked a pointed, disarming question: “Do you think I’m guilty?”
In an almost counseling tone, Carlisle had replied quietly, “I’m not sure. But if you did do it, I am sure that you will do it again.”
“We need to understand more, to learn,” reflects Carlisle now. He is still fascinated by Ted and he continues each day to probe, to seek an answer to the behavior of more and more men arriving in prison, convicted of cruel violence against women.
Carlisle questions one of those men at length about his thoughts—a man who, says Carlisle, is like Ted in many ways: “To him the planning, the stalking of the victim, the carrying out of the attack, the show of power, the ability to outwit and outsmart—all that is very, very exciting. And the beating of the victim is so extremely exhilarating. The guy says, ‘I just can’t put it into words, it’s so invigorating. I just come alive at that time, with the hurting, the beating.’ Afterwards he’s relaxed. But then he’ll feel the need again, as it builds up. It seems almost akin to the usage of drugs.
“Scientifically we need to understand Ted and these others, so we can perhaps begin identifying symptoms ... perhaps catch it early in life.”
* * *
I drive northward from Orlando, leaving Florida, passing Gainesville where Carole Boone settles into her vigil, within driving distance of the prison and weekend visits with Ted.
And I wonder why Ted came to Florida, a place where he knew the death penalty is a way of life now. Its electric chair—“Old Sparky,” they call it—is busy again.
Was it a death wish? An internal subconscious need to self-impose punishment? Or was it Ted’s long-cultivated feeling of omnipotence? To play his thrilling drama on the most ominous of stages?
Ted, driving that orange Volkswagen with all his belongings out of Tallahassee that night in February, was within minutes of the state line. Alabama. Out of Florida. Then further westward, perhaps, to a new place, a new identity. Instead, he turned into Pensacola, the last town in Florida. (“He was trollin’,” theorized Mike Fisher. “Lookin’ for another victim there in Pensacola. Some girl out walking.” Steve Bodiford, Don Patchen, Larry Daugherty, other Florida detectives would agree.) Ted couldn’t leave Florida, Buckle of the Death Belt of America.
In northeast Florida your radio picks up WAPE at Jacksonville, where the eccentric, raspy-voiced disk jockey, “The Greaseman,” leads the public cheers for capital punishment. Greaseman’s morning show once opened with a special message to the inmates on Death Row at the state prison:
“Good mornin’, you maggots. Are you up yet? You’d better enjoy the sunrise. There aren’t many left for you.”
The morning John Spenkelink went to the electric chair, “The Greaseman” turned his microphone to the sound of some bacon in a hot frying pan. As the sizzling sound went over the air, Greaseman cackled, “That’s for you, John.”
“No,” Greaseman tells me, “I haven’t done much with Bundy. Oh, after he was convicted in that trial down in Miami, I think I said, ‘I’d like to have five minutes in a room alone with him with a baseball bat.’”
Around Jacksonville, around Florida, says Greaseman, the “prevailing mood is ‘Let them babies burn.’ God, it’s great! ... It makes me feel proud to be here. And, lookin’ at the opinion polls, it looks like the same feeling is showing up all over the country.”
* * *
My only visit with Ted at the prison was prior to his Orlando trial. He kidded about his “uniform.” Worn over a gray sweatshirt, that bright orange T-shirt was his designation as a Death Row inmate. We were alone together in an eight-foot-square visitors’ room, with two barred windows. “I’m not supposed to do this, but ...’’ With a grin, glancing to see there were no guards watching, Ted took off the orange T-shirt.
I noticed, as he lifted it over his head, his heavy sweatshirt was drenched with perspiration under the arms. Ted seemed nervous.
Our conversation rambled from the legal work he was doing for fellow inmates, to the inadequate recreation facilities and poor law library at the prison, to literature and politics.
And Ted discussed—satirically—mass murder. The governor of Florida, Ted kidded, was proceeding to sign death warrants for the men on Death Row. “I think there’s a hundred and thirty-seven in here now,” he guessed. “Graham would have to be some sort of homicidal maniac to sign all those warrants. Now that would be a mass murderer!”
Ted’s Death Row cell at that time was just three cells removed from the steel door which opens into the corridor leading to the execution room.
I wondered aloud if Ted had anxieties about that waiting door. His answer came with careful deliberateness:
“I don’t think about it. It’s just a door. Another door.
“A locked door.”
When Ted was returned to Death Row after his conviction in Orlando that February, a different reception awaited him. The first time they took him into the institution at Raiford, in late July 1979, it had been early in the morning—a quiet, waking-up time at the pen. This second time, it was midday, so there was bustling activity inside. Scores of prisoners were around the receiving area, sitting on benches, clustered together, talking, when the guards brought Bundy in.
“Haaaaaay, man, there’s Bundy!” one of the cons shouted.
“Yeaah, Bundy,” some others hooted. Ted, his guards said later, appeared startled by the hostility around him.
His guards took him beyond the steel doors, out of the reception area, but the sounds of jeering followed. Ted, convicted of killing a twelve-year-old girl, was now degraded in the harsh, judgmental prison society, to the lowest of the low—the child molesters, the little-kid killers. His only collateral to deal with the threatening atmosphere would be his ability with the law. As the jailhouse lawyer, he could write writs and give advice on appeals.
Walking along the long corridor toward R Wing, Ted, escorted by the guards, passed other cell blocks of the prison’s general population. And the chorus of hoots resumed:
“Hey, man, give us Bundy in here.”
“Bundy, you’ll get yours!”
“Bundy, we’ll get yer ass.”
Theodore Robert Bundy, 069063, beads of sweat on his brow, pressed closer to the protective shoulders of the escorting guards in their brown uniforms. “He was scared to death,” one prison officer recalled—until Ted reached the safety of his solitary cell on Death Row.
[1] From Modern Psychopathology: A Biosocial Approach to Maladaptive Learning and Functioning, by Theodore Millon. Copyright © by W. B. Saunders Company. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
[2] The agency’s name later became the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
[3] Eventually Sheriff Katsaris drew a reprimand from the Tallahassee Bar Association. In a resolution adopted August 7, 1979, that bar association declared that “it condemns the conduct of the Sheriff in reading the indictment of Theodore Bundy on television and further condemns any such conduct in the future, concerning Bundy or any defendant.”
[4] From a deposition of Captain Jack Poitinger, Leon County, Florida, sheriff’s department.