The Stranger Beside Me

  And so, because he needed her so much, he seemed able to obliterate any vestiges of resentment toward her. Because it was essential to have her emotional support, he could forgive her for her weakness. But it was such a flat response, so eerily unhuman for him to be able to simply forget that it was Meg who had caused him to be caught. I am quite convinced that without Meg’s interference the identity of “Ted” would still be a mystery today.

  Ted’s psyche so dominated Meg’s that I am amazed that she was ever able to break free, and I don’t know how free she is, even though she is married to another man.

  Sharon Auer was merely expedient. She was there in Utah when he needed someone to run errands and bring supplies into prison, but he left her behind when he left Point-of-the-Mountain. Carole Ann Boone soon filled the gap. Ted has never been without a woman at his beck and call since his legal troubles began. Carole Boone has endured. She refers to him as “Bunnie,” and plainly adores him. I could not presume to evaluate what his feelings are for her. I talked at length to his other women. Carole Ann said only five words to me. As he told me, “She has thrown in her lot with me,” but it is certainly a blighted romance.

  There is, within all imperfect mechanisms, a tendency to self destruct, as if the machine itself realizes that it is not functioning correctly. When the mechanism is a human being, those destructive forces writhe their way to the surface from time to time. Somewhere, hidden deeply in the recesses of Ted’s brain, there is a synapse of cells that is trying to destroy him.

  Perhaps that first Ted, the small-child-Ted who could have become all that was promised, knows that the Ted who has taken over must be done away with. Or is that too far-fetched? The fact remains that Ted has constantly struck out at the very people who have tried to defend him. Over and over, he has fired his attorneys, sometimes within sight of victory. He chose the most dangerous state in the union to flee to, knowing that the death penalty was a real threat there. Given a chance to plea bargain for his very life, he tore up the motion that would have saved him and virtually dared the state prosecutors to convict him, a challenge they were only too willing to accept. I think he wants to die. I don’t know if he realizes that he does.

  In my opinion, Ted is not a Jekyll-Hyde. I have no doubt at all that he remembers the murders. There may be some overlapping, some blurring, just as a man may not remember distinctly every woman he has ever slept with. How many times has he told me that he is able to put the bad things that have happened to him out of his mind? The memories may lie hidden like festering boils, but he does remember. The memories can no longer be left behind, because he has no place left to run, and they must haunt his cell in Raiford Prison.

  My own memory haunts me. The precognition of the dream—the nightmare—I had in April of 1976 frightens me. Why did I dream that the baby I tried to save bit me? That dream where I saw the bite mark on my hand was two years before the bite mark on one of Ted’s Chi Omega victims became the prime piece of physical evidence in the Miami trial.

  If Ted had only talked to me during our last meeting in Seattle in January of 1976, it might have been different. When he said, “There are things I want to tell you … but I can’t,” was there something I could have said that would have allowed him to talk to me then? Could I have changed any of the events that were to come? Although Ted insists he bears no guilt for any of the killings, I am sure there are many others who, like me, carry feelings of guilt because we should have known more, done more, before it was too late.

  Ted would have lived if he had confessed to me in the state of Washington. We had no death penalty here in 1974. He would have lived in the state of Colorado. The state of Florida will never let him go, not even to stand trial for Caryn Campbell’s murder in Colorado. Colorado let him escape twice, and Florida authorities are scornful of their security. Ted Bundy belongs to Florida.

  Killing Ted will accomplish nothing at all. All it would assure is that he could never kill again. But looking at the broken, confused man in the courtroom, I knew that Ted was insane. I cannot justify executing a man who is insane. Placing him in a mental institution—with the tightest security possible—could perhaps do more toward psychiatric research into the causes and, hopefully, cures for the antisocial personality than the evaluation of any other individual in history. It might save the potential victims of antisocial personalities still being formed. Ted can never go free. He is dangerous and he will always be dangerous, but there are answers to vital questions locked in his mind.

  I don’t want him to die. If the day comes when he is led into the death chamber at Raiford Prison, I will cry. I will cry for that long-lost Ted Bundy who might have been, for the bright, warm young man I thought I knew so many years ago. It is still difficult for me to believe that the facade of kindness and caring I saw was only that, a thin veneer. There could have been—should have been—so much more.

  But if Ted is to die, I think he will muster the strength to do it with style, basking for the last time in the glow of strobe lights and television cameras. If he is relegated to the ranks of prisoners—the General Population—that will be the worst punishment of all. If he is not killed by his fellow prisoners, who have been vocal that “Bundy should fry,” the emptiness inside himself will destroy him.

  When I grieve for Ted, and I do, I grieve for all the others who bear no guilt at all.

  Katherine Merry Devine is dead …

  Brenda Baker is dead …

  Joni Lenz is alive …

  Lynda Ann Healy is dead …

  Donna Manson is gone …

  Susan Rancourt is dead …

  Roberta Kathleen Parks is dead …

  Brenda Ball is dead …

  Georgeann Hawkins is gone …

  Janice Ott is dead …

  Denise Naslund is dead …

  Melissa Smith is dead …

  Laura Aime is dead …

  Carol DaRonch Swenson is alive …

  Debby Kent is gone …

  Caryn Campbell is dead …

  Julie Cunningham is gone …

  Denise Oliverson is gone …

  Shelley Robertson is dead …

  Melanie Cooley is dead …

  Lisa Levy is dead …

  Margaret Bowman is dead …

  Karen Chandler is alive …

  Kathy Kleiner DeShields is alive …

  Cheryl Thomas is alive …

  Kimberly Leach is dead …

  One day, the earth and the rivers may give up more remains, all that is left of the young women whose names are still unknown, the women Ted referred to when he said, “Add one more digit to that and you’ll have it …”

  None of them could fill the hollow soul of Ted Bundy.

  EPILOGUE

  THE TRIALS AND HEARINGS of Ted Bundy had become akin to a Broadway play, its long run ended, replaced by a road company. Only the star remained in the lead role, surrounded by a new cast. And the star was tired. He had lost much of his enthusiasm. Ted’s trial in the Kimberly Leach case puzzled laymen. “How many times can you kill a man?” they asked incredulously. Since Ted Bundy had already been sentenced to death—twice—they could not see the need for yet another trial. The state, of course, was covering its bets. If there should be a reversal on appeal in the Chi Omega killings, they wanted the backup of a third death sentence. Legally, it made sense.

  The Leach trial was postponed again and again, finally settling in Orlando, Florida, on January 7, 1980. Orange County was a grudging host. They didn’t want Ted or the hoopla that seemed to accompany him, but Judge Wallace Jopling, the sixty-two-year-old jurist who would preside at the Leach trial, had determined he could not find an impartial jury in the Lake City area.

  The roster of attorneys had changed. Only Lynn Thompson remained of the original defense team. Thompson was joined by Julius Victor Africano, Jr. The man who might have defended Ted was Milo I. Thomas, public defender for the Third Judicial Circuit—but Thomas excused himself. He was a close fri
end of the Leach family.

  Jerry Blair of the State Attorney’s Office—Jerry Blair who had vowed to himself in June of 1979 that, if Ted wanted a trial, Ted would get a trial—and Bob Dekle, a down-home, good-ole-boy lawyer with a perpetual chaw of tobacco tucked in one cheek, a special prosecutor, would speak for the state.

  There was a pronounced malaise among the reporters who had covered the Miami trial. Nobody really wanted to go through a second trial. Tony Polk of the Rocky Mountain News wasn’t going. A Seattle reporter had to go on assignment, but he dreaded it. A Miami reporter called me and said, “Yeah … I’m going, but not until I have to. I’m just going up for the kill.” And then he gasped and said, “God, that sounds awful, doesn’t it? But it’s the only way to describe it.”

  I didn’t go. I knew what the evidence was, I knew what the witnesses were going to say, and I could not bear to see Ted again in the state he had come to. Instead, I watched the Orlando trial on television and saw a man who might well have been a complete stranger to me.

  Ted was no longer as handsome as he’d been at the Miami trial. His weight hovered near 190 pounds, his jowls bulged, and his eyes were sunken. The lean, cleanly defined good looks were gone, along with his tenuous grasp of reality. He flared with temper easily, and seemed about to blow into fragmented pieces. He took offense when a court stenographer, a woman who smiled naturally, appeared to him to be making light of the proceedings.

  “Would you please take this seriously?” he shouted at her.

  But no one seemed to take it seriously. They had come to see the show. A local disc jockey had set the tone of the trial by opening his morning broadcast with “Watch out, girls! Ted Bundy’s in town.”

  A female impersonator from Pennsylvania made a dramatic entrance, swirling his fake leopard jacket and tossing his platinum wig as he sashayed to a seat. Ted never looked up. A young man removed his jacket to reveal a T-shirt reading: “Send Bundy to Iran.” And, in the front row, were the ever-present Ted groupies, anxious for a smile from the fading star.

  The television camera might as well have focused on the inmates of Bedlam.

  Neither Louise or Johnnie Bundy made the trip back to Florida. There was only Carole Ann Boone, sitting beside the wife of an inmate from Raiford. Carole Ann, still flashing Ted looks of love and encouragement.

  The prospective jurors, available from a seemingly endless pool, appeared willing to say almost anything so that they might be chosen. Judge Jopling had ruled that even those potential jurors who believed Ted guilty might be chosen if they indicated they could put aside their opinions and remain objective. Several of those prospective veniremen made the jury. There was nowhere else in Florida where the trial could go. Prosecutor Blair said a change in venue would be an exercise in futility. “This man is a cause célèbre here and he would be a cause célèbre in Two Egg, Pahokee, or Sopchoppy as well.”

  Twice, Ted stalked out of the courtroom, a demonstration against the jury being seated. “I’m leaving. This is a game and I won’t be a party to it! I’m not staying in this kind of Waterloo, you understand?”

  Returned and calmed down until he had a modicum of control, he blew up again, slamming his hand on Judge Jopling’s desk. “You want a circus?” he cried to Blair. “I’ll make a circus. I’ll rain on your parade, Jack. You’ll see a thunderstorm.”

  Ted headed for the door and a bailiff blocked his way. Ted set down the beer carton, he carried his files in, on a railing and removed his jacket. The television camera caught, for the first time, a Ted Bundy out of control. He was backed to the wall, a snarling fox caught in a circle of hunters. It may have been the face contorted with open-mouthed rage that his victims had seen, and it shocked me. He appeared to be about to come out swinging at the five court officers who surrounded him. He stood panting, trapped. A moment passed … two … Ted and his tormentors were frozen.

  “Sit down, Mr. Bundy!” Jopling ordered.

  “You know how far you can push me!”

  “Sit down, Mr. Bundy!”

  Slowly, he came back to himself, slumped, all the fight gone out of him. He walked back to the defense table and slid into his chair, eyes downcast.

  “It’s no use,” he stage-whispered to Africano. “We’ve lost the jury. There’s no point in playing the game.”

  He may well have been right.

  Day after day, Ted sat in confusion and anger as sixty-five prosecution witnesses took the stand. Africano and Thompson fought it all, digging their heels in for some kind of foothold as they were forced back and back. This time, they would not allow Ted himself to speak, although he was allowed to participate in legal arguments away from the jurors’ ears.

  Three weeks into the trial, in Jopling’s chambers, Ted made a twenty-minute plea for acquittal. His voice quavering, he seemed on the edge of tears as his monologue drifted, a far cry from his ordered, precise arguments in Utah four years earlier. He insisted that there was no evidence that a murder had even been committed.

  The defense presented two witnesses who had allegedly seen Kimberly Leach hitchhiking “near Jimmy’s Buttermilk Chicken place” on the morning she disappeared. But they faltered when asked to identify her picture absolutely as that of the girl they’d seen two years before.

  Even the testimony of Atlanta Medical Examiner Dr. Joseph Burton backfired. He had apparently been retained to bolster the defense claim that Kimberly Leach could have died of other causes, and he clearly could not do that.

  “While my study of findings could not rule out accidental, suicidal, or natural causes, all three were way down on the list.”

  On February 6, the most startling rumors in the courthouse concerned Carole Ann Boone. Ms. Boone had applied for a marriage license! Whether there was any way she could, indeed, marry the man she called Bunnie was questionable. Major Jim Shoulz, county director of Corrections, was adamant that there would be no wedding in his jail. But Judge Jopling authorized a blood test for Ted to fulfill an initial requirement for the license.

  Carole Ann admitted that she fully expected Ted to be convicted, but she was determined to marry him anyway. The odds were not on the chance of acquittal. Spectators were betting on whether Ted and Carole Ann could get married. Ted himself had bet Africano that the jury would find him guilty in three hours. He lost. They took seven and a half hours, a half hour more than the Miami jury had.

  This time there was no weeping mother begging for her perfect son. There was only Carole Ann Boone. It was two years to the day since twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach had vanished: February 9, 1980. Carole Ann took the stand to plead for Ted’s life.

  But first, and seemingly foremost, she had a mission. She wanted to become Mrs. Ted Bundy. She had meticulously researched how one got married in Florida, given the peculiar circumstances. She knew that public declaration, properly phrased, in an open courtroom in the presence of court officers would make the “ceremony” legal. A notary public, holding the marriage license in the names of Carole Ann Boone and Theodore Robert Bundy, sat watching as Ted rose to question his fiancee.

  The bride wore not white, but black—a skirt and sweater over an open-necked blouse. The groom, who had always favored bow ties, wore one with blue polka dots and a blue sports jacket. The jury wore looks of utter bemusement.

  The couple smiled at each other, as if they were the only two people in the courtroom, as he began to question her formally.

  “Where do you reside?”

  “I am a permanent resident of Seattle, Washington.”

  “Could you explain when you met me … how long you have known me, our relationship,” he said, leading her.

  Carole continued to smile happily as she recalled their meeting in Olympia at the Department of Emergency Services office, of the closeness they had achieved as Ted’s legal problems increased. “Several years ago, our relationship evolved into a more serious, romantic sort of thing.”

  “Is it serious?” Ted asked.

  “Serious enough that
I want to marry him,” she said to the jury.

  “Can you tell the jury if you’ve ever observed any violent or destructive tendencies in my character or personality?”

  “I’ve never seen anything in Ted that indicates any destructiveness towards any other people, and I’ve been associated with Ted in virtually every circumstance. He’s been involved with my family. I’ve never seen anything in Ted that indicates any kind of destructiveness … any kind of hostility. He’s a warm, kind, patient man.”

  Over the prosecution’s objections, Carole Ann stated that she felt it was not correct for either an individual or a representative of the state to take the life of another human being.

  She turned toward the jury and spoke with an intensity, “Ted is a large part of my life. He is vital to me.”

  “Do you want to marry me?” Ted asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I do want to marry you,” Ted said, as the state lawyers and Judge Jopling froze with surprise. It took Dekle and Blair a few beats before they were able to rise and object.

  Ted turned to confer with his attorneys. He’d almost blown it. He’d used the wrong terminology. They told him marriage was a contract, not a promise. He would have one more chance on redirect to make his verbal contract.

  State Attorney Blair questioned Carole Ann, suggesting that there might be a less romantic reason than true love behind her desire to marry Ted. He hinted that there might be financial reasons, but Carole remained unmoved. He questioned the timing of the proposal, coming as it did just as the jury was about to deliberate on the death penalty. Carole Ann would not be shaken. As Blair cross-examined her, Ted conferred frantically with his lawyers.

  He rose to question her on redirect. This time he knew what he was supposed to say to be sure the marriage was valid.

  “Will you marry me?” Ted asked Carole Ann.