During the summer of 1982, Carole Ann Boone wore a jacket when she went to the prison to visit her husband, despite the baking heat of northern Florida’s July and August. Tall and large-boned, it was easier for her to hide a growing secret than it would be for a more petite woman.
She was putting on weight. That in itself wasn’t unusual. Women whose men are locked behind bars, who subsist on low incomes, frustration, and meager hope, often eat too much. But Carole Ann’s weight was all around the middle, and to their chagrin, prison authorities saw that her silhouette was unmistakable.
Carole Ann Boone was pregnant, carrying Ted Bundy’s child.
The two of them, together against the world, had managed to marry by subterfuge. Now, they had accomplished the conception of a child the same way.
October 1982 was a landmark month for Ted Bundy. First of all, his new attorney, Robert Augustus Harper, Jr., of Tallahassee, asked the Florida Supreme Court to overturn Ted’s conviction in the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman: Supreme Court Case No. 57,772 (Circuit Court No. 78-670).
Harper cited the controversial bite-mark evidence and deemed the hypnosis of a prosecution witness highly suspect. Further, Ted’s attorney claimed that his client had had inadequate legal help at the time of the Miami trial. (This, when Ted had told me so gleefully just before trial that that was one area in which he would never have an appeal. He had been delighted with his attorneys then.)
“Bite-mark evidence is here to stay… but at the same time, there are certain standards that have to be set out,” Harper argued. “Richard Souviron was out to get famous on this case.”
Harper also attacked Nita Neary’s testimony because it came after hypnosis. “You can see that a creation of memory occurred. That point where her memory has been created by a pseudo-scientific process is improper.”
Assistant Attorney General David Gauldin argued for the state that fairness of the trial was the bottom line. “I think he got a fair trial, and I think the jury was untainted…He hired and fired lawyers at will, all of them publicly provided.”
The six Florida Supreme Court justices did not say when they might make a judgment on whether Ted would get a new trial in the Chi Omega killings.
A new cycle had begun. Ted was attacking again, seeking a new trial and back in the game. Carole Ann, ponderously and proudly pregnant, visited him regularly that October. As the month neared its close, she entered a private birthing center where she bore Ted his first child: a daughter. That was all even the most assiduous reporter found out. No birthweight. Certainly no name. Only “Baby Girl Boone.”
Carole took the infant along when she visited Ted. He was very proud of his progeny. Ted’s genes had prevailed. The baby looked just like him.
On May 11, 1984, James Adams, a black sharecropper’s son, died in the electric chair in Raiford Prison. He was the fourth man to die since John Spenkelink.
A month later, the Florida Supreme Court announced its findings on Ted Bundy’s appeal in a thirty-five-page document.
Ted had lost.
Justices Alderman, Adkins, Overton, McDonald, and Ehrlich had swept away Robert Harper’s arguments. The fact that the public and press had attended pretrial hearings, had not, in their opinion, denied Ted the right to a fair trial.
He had been granted a change of venue from Leon County, and the jury had already been selected and sequestered when the crucial pretrial hearings were held. But then again, Ted had claimed he’d been deprived of a fair trial because he had to ask for a change of venue, (the press’s fault) and lost his right to be tried in the locality where the charged crimes were committed. His two complaints were at counter-purposes. But they were both denied, making it a draw.
On a more salient issue, the court ruled that Nita Neary’s description of the man she’d seen in the Chi Omega house had not materially changed after she was hypnotized. The hypnotist could not have suggested that she describe Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy wasn’t even a suspect when Nita Neary was hypnotized. Nor did the court feel that the newspaper pictures she later saw of Ted Bundy had influenced her. The man she saw opening the front door, with an oak club in one hand, had been in profile. The news photos were all full face.
Ted had also argued, through Harper, that he had been unfairly tried when the Dunwoody Street attack on Cheryl Thomas was joined with the Chi Omega crimes. But the court found the crimes were “connected by proximity in time and location, by their nature, and by the manner in which they were perpetrated.”
Point by point, Ted Bundy lost in this appeal. No, the Grand Jury had not been prejudiced against him when they handed down the original indictment. He had had adequate opportunity to raise his objections in a timely manner. He had always, always had legal counsel. No, he could not have a new trial because he’d been denied Millard Farmer. Nor could he have a new trial because the jury had known that he was an escapee when he arrived in Florida.
The Florida justices disputed Ted’s claim against the Forensic odontologist, Richard Souviron—that Souviron had erred in saying that it had been Ted Bundy’s teeth that left the imprints in Lisa Levy’s buttocks. “… We find that it was proper for the expert to offer his opinion on the issue of a bite-mark match. this was not an improper legal conclusion. All facets of appellant’s argument on the bite-mark evidence are without merit…”
In the sentencing phase, the dry legal terminology cannot hide the horror: “Next Bundy claims that the trial court erred in finding that the capital felonies were especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel. There is no merit to this argument. The victims were murdered while sleeping in their own beds…The trial court also recounted the gruesome manner in which the victims were bludgeoned, sexually battered, and strangled. These circumstances are more than sufficient to uphold the trial court’s finding that the capital felonies were especially heinous, atrocious, and cruel…”
Although it would seem a moot point—now that Ted knew that there would be no new trial in the Chi Omega and Cheryl Thomas cases—he proceeded with his appeal on the Kimberly Leach case: Case No. 59, 128.
But his mind was obviously working on other levels and other possibilities too.
Ted was thin, but he was probably in the best shape he’d been in in years. He did wind sprints, one-hundred-yard dashes, whenever he was allowed out in the exercise yard, or into the long corridors.
And he cultivated his neighbors, tuning in on the grapevine that blooms so lushly with information throughout a cellblock.
Gerald Eugene Stano resided on the cell to one side of Ted. Ottis Elwood Toole was on the other side. Stano, 32, had admitted to killing thirty-nine young women, mostly hitchhikers and prostitutes, between 1969 and 1980. It was rumored that many of his victims wore blue—a color often favored by Stano’s brother, whom he hated. Convicted of ten murders, he had, like Ted, been sentenced to death three times over. Toole, 36, most infamous as Henry Lee Lucas’s sometime lover/sometime murder partner, had admitted to Jacksonville Detective Buddy Terry that it was he who had kidnapped and murdered Adam Walsh.
Adam was six years old when Toole spotted him near a Sears store in Hollywood, Florida. Toole had, for some reason known only to him, decided that he wanted to “adopt” a baby. He had searched all day and found no little babies, so he’d taken Adam. When the little boy resisted, Toole told Terry that he’d killed him and thrown his body into an alligator filled canal. Adam’s father, John Walsh, searched tirelessly for his child, and then relentlessly lobbied before Congress until they passed the Missing Children’s Act.
The movie Adam has been shown many times on television.
Ted’s I.Q. alone nearly equaled Stano’s and Toole’s combined.
In the summer of 1984, following Ted’s heavy losses to the Florida Supreme Court, he came perilously close to repeating his Houdini-like Colorado escapes. Prison officials arrived to do a surprise shakedown of his cell just in time. They found hacksaw blades secreted there. Someone from the outside had to have brought them in
to Ted. That person was never named.
But somehow, someone had gotten the metal blades through all the security checks. The bars in Ted’s cell looked secure, but careful perusal showed that one bar had been completely sawed through at both the top and bottom, and then “glued” back with an adhesive whose main component was soap. Could Ted have ever reached the outside? Even if he’d managed to cut through another bar or two, and wriggled free of his cell, there were so many obstacles. The entire prison is surrounded by two ten-foot-high fences, with electric gates that are never opened at the same time. Rolls of sharp barbed wire bales top the walls and occupy much of the “pen” around the Death Row cellblocks. The guards are in the tower … waiting.
And that is what Ted would have faced after (and if) he managed to get past all the safeguards inside Death Row itself, a building separated from the rest of Raiford Prison.
If he had somehow managed to shed his bright orange T-shirt that marked him a resident of Death Row, and obtained civilian clothing, how would he have passed through the electric gates? When one gate opens, the other has already clanged shut. How would he have gotten the hand-stamp? Every visitor into the dangerous bowels of the Florida State Prison is required to have his hand stamped, like teenagers leaving a dance. The colors change from day to day, without any discernible pattern.
When the visitor leaves, he must hold his hand under a machine that reveals “the color of the day.” Without the stamp—or with the wrong color—the alarm bells sound. …
The hacksaw blades were confiscated, Ted was moved to another cell, and it was “tossed” more frequently than before.
He had been “inside” for more than four years. His child was almost two. There had been no execution date set. He waited, and studied, and played the games that all prisoners play—that Ted Bundy, in particular, played. He’d do anything to put something over on those in authority.
• • •
On May 9, 1985, the Florida Supreme Court ruled once again on Ted’s request for a new trial, this time in the case of Kimberly Leach.
Ted’s points of law were essentially the same that they had been in the Chi Omega case. Only the characters were different. An eyewitness had been hypnotized, prospective jurors had been excluded because they opposed the death penalty. Ted claimed the judge couldn’t have determined if the child’s murder was “heinous and atrocious” because Kimberly’s body had been too decomposed to tell, having lain so long in an abandoned pigsty.
Supreme Court Justice James Alderman wrote the unanimous decision. “After weighing the evidence in this case, we conclude that the sentence of death imposed was justified and appropriate under our law.”
In that May of 1985, I was on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, scarcely a hundred miles away from Raiford, talking, still talking, about Ted Bundy, showing the same one hundred and fifty slides that I have shown so many times. I was speaking to cops at a two day seminar sponsored by the University of Louisville’s School of Justice Administration. The term “serial murder” was relatively new, and seemed to have been coined for Ted Bundy, even though there had been a few dozen more men who had racked up horrific tolls since Ted’s incarceration. Ted Bundy remained the celebrity serial killer.
As I spoke to the three dozen detectives on the South Carolina Island in the Atlantic Ocean, I mused that Ted had truly become a coast-to-coast antihero. Less than a month before, I had given the same presentation, on the Pacific Ocean, to the American College of Forensic Psychiatry.
Hilton Head marked a reunion of sorts. The University of Louisville had gathered many of the players from the long search for Bundy. Jerry Thompson and Dr. Al Carlisle from Utah, Mike Fisher from Colorado, Don Patchen from Tallahassee. Myself. Bob Keppel would have been there too, except that he was weighed down by his duties as advisor to a task force mobilized to find yet another serial killer in Washington State: the Green River Killer.
It was ironic. Keppel had moved on from the King County Police’s Homicide Unit to be the chief criminal investigator for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. He liked his new job. On a long flight to Texas a few years ago—when we were both headed for a VI-CAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) conference— Keppel had confided, “One thing I never want to do again is to work under that boiler-room pressure of a serial killer task force.”
Starting in January of 1984, he had been doing just that, looking for the murderer of not eight but at least forty-eight young women. Tracking Ted Bundy, Keppel had been through the fire, and the knowledge he’d gained made him invaluable to the Green River Task Force. He could not say no—and he hadn’t.
He went back to “the boiler-room.”
Ted Bundy was alive. He was several years older than I was when I first met him, but despite everything that had happened, he looked far younger than his chronological age. If he were free, he could still stroll a college campus and not look out of place. Whatever sins might excoriate his soul, they did not mark his handsome face. Only the gray strands that threaded through his still-thick wavy hair betrayed that he would soon be forty years old.
After seven years with no date set for execution, it seemed that Ted wasn’t going to die. At least not in the electric chair in Raiford Prison. The threat of the chair had been somehow so much more palpable in Judge Cowart’s courtroom in the long summer of 1979.
Ted gave interviews to writers and talked occasionally to judiciously selected criminologists. Led down endless corridors, through myriad electronic devices and doors into a little room with one door and one window looking out toward the guard captain’s office, Ted expounded for hours on his opinions, theories, and feelings. He considers himself an expert on the mind of the serial killer, and offered to share his expertise with detectives in current investigations. If Warden Dugger would allow it, Ted would be happy to appear on videotape for conferences and seminars.
He was considered an escape risk. Always. Within the next year, he had his cell changed once again because he was found with contraband, this time a mirror. Mirrors can be used for all manner of activities in prison.
When I visited him in the Utah State Prison in 1976, he had been neither cuffed nor shackled. In the Florida State Prison, he leaves his cell on Death Row only after his hands have been cuffed behind him, and his ankles shackled. Once he is safely in the tiny room where he is allowed interviews, his hands are cuffed in front of him. He wears jeans, brand-name running shoes, and the ubiquitous orange T-shirt of the death wing.
He seems open and cooperative, but there are things he will not speak of, and he ducks his head and laughs nervously as he demurs, “I can’t talk about that.” He will not talk about Carole Ann. He is most protective of his daughter, who is almost four years old now.
He has “forgiven” me. He describes me to questioners as “a decent-enough person—who was only doing her job.”
• • •
Suddenly, on February 5, 1986, after it seemed that Ted would be caught up in the maze of legal proceedings forever, Florida Governor Bob Graham signed Ted Bundy’s death warrant. The date for his execution was announced: March 4.
One month to live.
The media, who had virtually forgotten Ted Bundy, pursued him as avidly as ever. I had a lecture to give the night the news broke. My topic was, again, Ted Bundy.
But before and after—because they could not talk to Ted and because some comment seemed necessary—I was interviewed by the Seattle affiliates of ABC, NBC, and CBS. What did I think? How did I feel?
I wasn’t sure. I felt shocked mostly. And I felt removed from Ted, almost as if I had never known him—as if he were some invention, some fictional character I had once written about. And I knew, leadenly, that it must be. If Ted was not executed, he would, somehow, find a way to escape.
Ted had fired his last lawyer, Robert Harper, just as he eventually dismissed all the others. He had been representing himself, and he had filed an appeal for new trials with the U.S. Supreme Court, whic
h was to have been heard on March 7, three days after he was now scheduled to die. On February 18 he represented himself again before the Supreme Court by delivering a handwritten appeal for a stay of execution. Justice Lewis R. Powell refused to block the execution, but he gave Ted a second chance. He turned down Ted’s somewhat amateurish request “without prejudice” and instructed him to obtain proper legal counsel “to file an application that complies with the rules of this court.”
No one had ever gone to the Florida electric chair on the first death warrant signed, but that was no guarantee that Ted Bundy would not set a new record.
In Lake City, where Kimberly Leach had been kidnapped, thousands of residents signed a petition supporting Ted’s execution. A nurse whose daughter had attended Lake City Junior High with Kimberly said, “Many of those who signed said they would like to sign twice and would pull the switch if given the chance. …”
Richard Larsen, the Seattle Times reporter (and now associate editor) who wrote one of the 1980 Bundy books, received one of many letters sent to newspapers around America. It appeared to be an official communique from the “Office of the Governor, Florida State Capitol, Tallahassee, Florida, 32304.”
It was two pages long, beginning, “Florida Gov. Bob Graham today signed a cooperative agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority for more electricity to be used in the coming execution of convicted killer Theodore Bundy … The power sales contract with TVA will provide ten additional megawatts of energy to Florida Power & Light in order to ensure Bundy is executed using the maximum voltage and amperage allowed …
“In addition to the temporary contract for electricity, Graham urged Florida residents to reduce their electrical usage for a five-minute period beginning at 6:57 A.M. EST March 4, 1986. Bundy is scheduled to be executed at 7:00 A.M. on that date.
“If citizens of the state can turn off all non-vital air conditioning, televisions, electric dryers and washers during that brief period, we could have as much as five additional megawatts to pump into the chair…