There was much speculation that murder charges might be immediately forthcoming, but Katsaris scotched those rumors by saying, “They will probably be within the next couple of months … or not at all.”
With the months creeping by, and no murder charges, it seemed that the Florida murders might culminate just as the earlier cases in Washington and Utah had. Perhaps there was not enough physical evidence to risk going to trial.
In the meantime, Ted seemingly had once again acclimated to jail. The Leon County Jail is a white brick building four stories high, not new, but not a sweltering rat hole as Southern jails are often characterized in fiction.
He was being kept in isolation in a four-man security cell in the center of the jail on the second floor. He had no contact with the other 250 prisoners, and his only visitors were local public defenders. He seemed to like his jailers, particularly Art Golden, a lumbering, ruggedly good-looking man who was in charge of the jail. But then, Ted had never had much criticism for his jailers. It was the detectives and prosecutors who drew his diatribes.
His cell was clean and air-conditioned, and he was allowed a radio and newspapers. He knew that the Grand Jury seemed to be moving toward his indictment on murder charges.
Mindful of Ted’s previous escapes, his captors were cautious. The light fixture in his cell was far too high for him to reach. The outer door had been beefed up with two extra locks, and only one jailer had a key that would open both. As usual, Ted decried his lack of exercise, the food and the lighting. He could not see the outside world. There were no windows in his cell, even barred ones.
Millard Farmer, still not officially Ted’s attorney, hinted that he would file federal charges because the jail conditions violated Ted’s rights. It was an all-too-familiar chant.
Although I had written to him several times during the spring of 1978, I didn’t hear from Ted again until July. By that time, I had finally broken free of my sweatbox of a cell, the eight-by-ten room where I had been writing a movie script for seven months. That room hadn’t had windows either, and it hadn’t had air-conditioning. Only the worst smog in Los Angeles in twenty years had been able to creep through the cracks in the door, and the temperature in our “writers’ room” had hit 105 degrees.
Ted’s July 6 letter was an example of the sardonic humor he was often capable of, and a far cry from the desperate letter he’d mailed soon after his arrest. It was typed. Along with what the jailers called his “stationery store” of legal supplies, he had been given a typewriter to prepare his defense.
He apologized for failing to answer my last letter sent from California on May 21 and, again, thanked me for the check I’d enclosed. Money was lasting him for quite a while. He had stopped smoking. Ted had been surprised to find that I was still working away on the movie script in Hollywood into the late spring of 1978 and suggested that perhaps I had been naive when I’d signed the contract and that I should ask for additional money for the four extra months I had worked.
At least they could give you “mugger money” so the buggers don’t have to go away empty handed. You said you lived in a “trick pad?” Sorry, I can’t interpret the LA. dialect or whatever, oh there’s the word: colloquialism. Does this mean that magicians hang out there. you know, rabbits out of hats and things. Or do you mean … do you suggest … a … ahmmmm …that persons get to know each other carnally for a negotiated price? If so, and if it pays better than writing—it would almost have to—you might consider getting into administration … You could apply for a small business loan to get started.
As far as his own life was going, Ted wrote that there was nothing happening to him that reincarnation wouldn’t improve on. He didn’t think about it. He viewed his world from the position of a “spectator, a captive audience.”
He was due that afternoon to appear to stand trial for fourteen counts involving the use of credit cards. But, as he’d told me years before, he didn’t sweat the small stuff and he had a “disposition made of duck feathers.” He called the credit cards “damn pesky things,” as well he might.
“Perfect time to use an insanity defense,” he mused. “I saw them used on television, and, honest, I couldn’t help myself.”
Ted was not unaware of what was happening with other famous suspects, and he had followed the Son of Sam case, and concluded that if David Berkowitz could be found sane, it meant that no murder defendant in the country could be found legally insane.
“So I am pursuing a straight not guilty defense, since, for the record and the benefit of the censors reading this letter, I am innocent of those charges as a matter of law and fact. CYA, my Dear.
“Bon chance, bon voyage, bon appetite, catch you later, don’t talk to strangers unless they talk to you first, down some chablis for me, love, and so on … ted.”
It had all become a grimly hopeless joke. I smiled a little at Ted’s jest about his “defense.” He had stolen the television set that he blamed for brainwashing him into stealing credit cards. His life was indeed a vicious circle. And his last admonition to me, “don’t talk to strangers,” was, under the circumstances, dark humor.
I answered in the same vein. “Sure, you can give up smoking … you’re not under pressure the way I am.”
I would write to Ted a few more times, but this was the last letter I ever got from Ted Bundy. There would be phone calls, hour-long collect phone calls, but never again a letter.
The net dropped over Ted with a dull thud on July 27 in what has been termed a “circus,” and a “zoo.” The latest episode in what Ted referred to as the “Ted and Ken Show” occurred on that steamy hot night in Tallahassee.
Sheriff Ken Katsaris had a sealed indictment, and he summoned reporters for a press conference at 9:30 that evening. Ted had been in Pensacola all day for a hearing and he was in that city when the Grand Jury handed down the indictment at 3:00 P.M.
Ted had been back in his cell an hour when he was taken downstairs where Katsaris waited. The sheriff was impeccable in a black suit, white shirt and diagonally striped tie. Ted wore baggy green jail coveralls as he emerged from the elevator under heavy guard. The strobe lights for the cameras blinded him as he walked into the hallway and realized, instantly, what was happening. He quickly retreated into the elevator, mumbling that he would not “be paraded” for Katsaris’s benefit.
Ted’s complexion was the sick white of jail pallor, and his face was drawn, giving him an ascetic appearance. Finally, realizing there was no place for him to hide, he walked out of the elevator almost jauntily.
Katsaris opened the indictment and began to read: “In the name of, and by the authority of the state of Florida—”
Ted plainly hated his guts.
The prisoner approached the captor and asked sarcastically, “What do we have here, Ken? Let’s see. Oh, an indictment! Why don’t you read it to me? You’re running for re-election.”
And then, Ted turned his back on Katsaris, lifted his right arm to lean against the wall, and stared straight ahead, jaw set, head up. He was the persecuted man and he would play it that way. He seemed to rise above the nondescript coveralls and jail slippers. His eyes blazed into the cameras.
The cameras were all on Bundy, but Katsaris went ahead through the indictment, “… the said Theodore Robert Bundy did make an assault upon Karen Chandler and/or Kathy Kleiner …”
Ted spoke to the press. “He said he was going to get me.” And to the sheriff, “O.K. Yon got your indictment. That’s all you’re going to get.”
Katsaris ignored him and continued to drone out the legalese which meant that Ted Bundy was being charged with murder. “… Did then and there unlawfully kill a human being, to wit: Lisa Levy, by strangling and/or beating her until she was dead, and said killing was perpetrated by said Theodore Robert Bundy, and did then and there unlawfully kill a human being, to wit: Margaret Bowman, by strangling and/or beating her until she was dead … and that Theodore Robert Bundy, from or with a premeditated design or intent to effect
the death of said Cheryl Thomas …”
It seemed to take hours, rather than minutes.
Ted made a mockery of it. He raised his hand at one point and said, “I’ll plead not guilty right now.”
Ted was gaining control of himself, grinning widely. He continued to interrupt Katsaris. “Can I speak to the press when you’re done?”
Katsaris read on, many of his words lost behind Ted’s banter.
“We’ve displayed the prisoner now,” Ted said mockingly. “I think it’s my turn. Listen, I’ve been kept in isolation for six months. You’ve been talking for six months. I’m gagged … you’re not gagged.”
When the indictment was finally completed, Ted was taken back to the elevator. He took his copy of the papers and held them up for the cameras and then he methodically tore them in half.
For the first time, Ted Bundy would be on trial for his very life. He would not betray whatever emotions swept through him as he realized that.
Things grew gloomier the next day when Judge Charles McClure refused to allow Millard Farmer to defend Bundy. There had been enough “carnival,” the state said, without allowing a man with Farmer’s alleged reputation for courtroom histrionics into the case. Farmer was not licensed to practice law in Florida, and the state had the power to refuse such privileges.
Farmer argued vehemently that Ted was being deprived of his right to effective legal counsel, but Ted said nothing at all. He refused to answer any of the judge’s remarks addressed to him, and McClure said implacably, “Let the record reflect that the defendant refuses to answer.”
It was clearly a protest demonstration on Ted’s part, a protest over his loss of Farmer. In all likelihood, he had expected the murder indictments. He probably did not expect that he would not have Farmer beside him, and that was a crushing disappointment. Like Buzzy Ware, Millard Farmer was the kind of lawyer Ted himself could respect. It was important to his sense of worth. To be an important defendant, with a famous attorney, could be dealt with. To be stuck with public defenders was more a blow to his ego than a threat to his life.
The net cinched more tightly. On July 31 the sealed indictment that had been handed down in Columbia County (Lake City) lay waiting in Judge Wallace Jopling’s courtroom in Lake City even as Ted pleaded not guilty in Tallahassee. Once again, Judge Rudd rejected Millard Farmer as defense attorney. Ted dismissed his public defenders. As before, he would go it alone.
No sooner were those proceedings ended than Judge Jopling opened the sealed indictment before him. Ted Bundy was now charged with first-degree murder and kidnapping in the Kimberly Leach murder.
The Tallahassee cases were set to go to trial on October 3, 1978, and it was rumored that Ted would probably be facing back-to-back trials. Ted did not retreat. Instead, he attacked.
On August 4, 1978, Millard Farmer submitted a complaint charging the sheriff of Leon County, Ken Katsaris, and eight others (several county commissioners, and Art Golden, and Captain Jack Poitinger) with depriving Ted of his minimal rights as a prisoner. Ted sought $300,000 damages.
Ted was asking that he be allowed a minimum of one hour of daily outdoor exercise—without chains—adequate cell lighting, removal from isolation, and that Katsaris and the other defendants be stopped from “harassing” him. He also asked that he be awarded reasonable attorney fees. It was the audacious Ted Bundy back in action.
The state responded by again blocking Farmer from Ted’s defense. Farmer suggested that Judge Rudd was “in the middle of a lynch mob” and called the state of Florida “the Buckle of the Death Belt” for prisoners. There were, at the time, some seventy to eighty prisoners on Death Row in Florida, convicted of first-degree murder.
In considering a place to run to back in December of 1977, Ted might have done well to weigh other factors beyond the weather.
The headlines continued. Ted told an ABC reporter from Seattle that he had been cleared of suspicion in the 1974 cases in Seattle by an “inquiry judge.” That was not true. Inquiry judges do not make such decisions in Washington State, and he was still regarded as the prime suspect in the eight Northwest cases.
Ted asked that Judge Rudd disqualify himself from the case, after Rudd refused Farmer’s bid to defend him, calling Farmer’s courtroom demeanor “disruptive.” Rudd reacted succinctly to the motion that he step down: “Motion read, considered and denied. File it.”
On August 14 Ted appeared in Judge Jopling’s Lake City courtroom and pleaded not guilty to the charges involving Kimberly Leach. “Because I am innocent.”
Florida justice would not move swiftly. There were just too many murders, too many charges. The Chi Omega trial was put off until November, and there were indications that the Leach trial would also be delayed.
The indications were right. Ted would not go on trial for either the Tallahassee or the Lake City cases until mid 1979. In the meantime, he languished in isolation in the Leon County Jail, still overseen by his archenemy: Sheriff Ken Katsaris.
I received a phone call from Ted on September 26, 197 . CHECK It was a collect call, but I accepted readily. I had heard nothing from him but had been following events in Florida through the media since July. The connection was blurred. I was not sure that we were alone on the line.
He explained that a new order had come down, an order that allowed him to have outdoor exercise. “For the first time in seven months, they took me outside for something other than going back and forth to hearings. Two armed guards with walkie-talkies took me up on the roof and let me walk in circles. Down below, they had three patrol cars and three attack dogs.”
I suggested that even he couldn’t leap four stories.
“Who do they think I am?” He laughed. “The Bionic Man?”
He described his cell. “There’s no natural light. It’s an iron cell in the midst of other walls. There’s one 150-watt recessed bulb in the ceiling with a plastic shield and a metal grating. By the time it filters down to me, there’s hardly any light. It’s l/60th of what it should be for humane purposes. I’ve got a bed, a combination sink-and-toilet, and a portable radio that gets two stations. It felt so good today to be out in the air without shackles, even to listen to the dogs bark— I haven’t heard a dog bark in a long time.”
Ted was adamant that “they” would never break him. “All the psychological evaluations they’ve done here … in the last one, they told the sheriff that, if he read the indictment to me the way he did, that it would break me, and I’d talk. Immediately after they took me back to my cell, two detectives came in and said, ‘Now you see how much we’ve got on you? There’s no place else to go—you might just as well make it easy on yourself and talk.’ But they didn’t break me then.”
For the first time, Ted mentioned Carole Ann Boone to me, saying that he had become “very, very close” to her, and that he was listening to her advice on how to handle matters of interest to him.
He talked of his chagrin at losing Millard Farmer. “The man’s about thirty-seven—looks fifty—and he handles about twenty capital cases a year. He runs himself into the ground. But now I’m prepared to defend myself in both cases.”
He was angry that he was “being paraded” both in Tallahassee and Lake City, where he went three times a week for hearings on the Leach case. And yet, there was an undercurrent of pride that he was in the public eye again, and would be for a long time to come. “The Chi Omega case is very bizarre. I’m not going to go into it—but the combination of Ted Bundy and a case like that! I’ll be in the limelight for a long time. The evidence has all been fabricated. The people here are absolutely determined to get convictions—even if they know they’ll be overturned later. All they care about is shackling me and getting me up in front of a jury. And back-to-back trials to boot.”
He’d said he was talking from the booking room in the jail, but he apparently had made his feelings about Florida lawmen vocal enough already so that he had no qualms about annoying them further.
It was September 26, Te
d’s anniversary with Meg. A year before he’d asked me to send the rose. Now, he said that Meg had finally left him. “I guess she talked to some reporters … I don’t know. I haven’t heard from her in a long time. She told me she just couldn’t take this anymore, that she didn’t want to hear any more about it. How long since you’ve seen her?”
A long time, I told him. It had been more than a year. I’m sure he realized what day it was. Perhaps that was why he had called me, to talk about Meg. He had Carole Ann Boone now, but he hadn’t forgotten Meg.
I asked him what time it was in Florida, and he hesitated. “I don’t know. Time doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
Ted’s voice drifted away, and I thought the line had been broken.
“Ted? Ted …”
He came back on, and he sounded vague, disoriented. He apologized.
“Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, I forget what I’ve said before … I have trouble remembering.”
It was the first time I had ever heard him so unsure, almost slipping away from what was here and now. But then his voice became strong again. He was anxious for trial, anxious to face the challenge.
“Your voice sounds good,” I remarked. “You sound like yourself.”
His answer was a little strange. “I usually am …”
Ted had only one request. He asked me to send him the classified section of the Seattle Sunday Times. He didn’t say why he wanted it. Nostalgia perhaps. Maybe reading the ads in his hometown paper would help to wipe out the sight of the iron walls with no windows.
I sent him the paper. I don’t know if he got it. I wouldn’t talk to him or hear from him again until just before his Miami trial in June 1979.
41
IT IS EXTREMELY DOUBTFUL that Ted Bundy could ever have received an impartial trial in the state of Florida. He was becoming better known than Disney World, the Everglades, and the heretofore all-time media pleaser, Murph the Surf. Paradoxically, Ted both courted and demeaned publicity. His very attitude made him ripe for headlines.