And, in fact, he had been. It was Harris who had shot the cop. In retrospect, there is every reason why the police should have known this. Adams, 28 years old at the time, had never been in any trouble. Harris had been involved in criminal activity all of his life. On the day of the shooting he had stolen a neighbor’s car, taken his father’s pistol (without permission) and gone into Dallas, where he met up with Adams. The pistol was taken in Vidor by Harris, and was in Harris’ possession until recovered by police. The car was also stolen in Vidor by Harris, and was also in Harris’ possession until recovered by police. The description provided by the officer’s partner, though vague, fit Harris better than Adams. She had seen only one man in the car.
Before the murder of the cop was “solved” by the arrest of Randy Adams, Harris had been arrested again, for holding up a convenience store, and was suspected in a string of burglaries and break-ins. He was in custody when first interviewed by the police, and he had told many people that he had committed the crime.
It is anyone’s guess why the police and prosecutors chose to believe the wrong man. Harris was a personable young man, telling a superficially credible story. The system wanted to burn somebody. Adams, an adult, was subject to the death penalty for shooting the policeman, while the teenager would not have been. If the police believed Adams they had nothing, since Adams didn’t know anything about the crime. If they chose to believe Harris, they had the foundation of a case.
Based on the testimony of Harris, the edited testimony of the policeman’s partner, and the last-minute surprise testimony of three passers-by, Randy Adams was convicted of the murder. The passers-by had apparently been induced to testify by a combination of reward money and the dropping of criminal charges against them.
A psychologist nicknamed Dr. Death interviewed Adams for fifteen or twenty minutes, and testified in the penalty phase of Adams’ trial that Adams was a dangerous sociopath who would be a menace to society for the rest of his life. He often made this recommendation; it was his specialty, and much appreciated by the Texas prosecutors. Adams received the death penalty.
By 1980 Adams was within three days of execution, when a stay of execution was ordered. The Supreme Court later ruled, by an 8–1 vote, that jurors were improperly screened in the penalty phase of his trial, and eliminated the death penalty for him. The governor, faced with the options of re-trying Adams or commuting his sentence to life in prison, chose to commute the sentence. Adams still faced life in prison.
In 1985 David Harris murdered a man named Mark Mays during a burglary in Beaumont, Texas. Meanwhile, an independent filmmaker, Errol Morris, set out to do a documentary on Dr. Death, and acquired Adams’ case file as a part of his background research. Reviewing that case (among many others), Morris was astonished to discover that a man was facing life in prison based on such flimsy evidence. Switching horses in mid-stream, he made the documentary about the Adams case, the documentary entitled The Thin Blue Line. His film left little doubt about what had really happened. On December 5, 1986, Harris essentially confessed to the crime in a tape-recorded phone conversation, which became the climax of the movie.
On March 1, 1989, about two years after the film was released, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled unanimously that Adams had been the victim of serious misconduct by the prosecutors, including suppressing evidence and knowingly using perjured testimony. Adams’ conviction was set aside, and he was freed a few weeks later. He had spent thirteen years in prison for a crime that had occurred while he was home in bed.
On June 30, 2004, David Ray Harris was executed for the murder of Mark Mays.
Ted Bundy is one of the pivotal figures in the history of American crime, one of the dividing lines. As I have mentioned numerous times in this narrative—and have probably failed to convince you—police forces until about 1980 all “knew” that stories about strangers who ran around killing people as a kind of mad sport were just that—stories. It happens in fiction; it has happened a few times in real life. But it’s basically just something that only happens on TV and in the movies.
If you don’t accept this I probably can’t convince you, but let me give you a few for-instances all the same.
• When the LaBiancas were murdered in Los Angeles the day after the murders at the Sharon Tate house, the police at first refused to believe that the crimes were committed by the same persons, although the word “Pig” was written in blood on the walls of both houses. A copycat crime, said the police, although how such a copycat would have had knowledge of the first crime scene, at that time, is unclear. It wasn’t until three months later that police finally began to believe what had seemed immediately obvious to the media—that the crimes were linked.
• Between 1974 and 1977 the killer known as BTK (Dennis Rader) murdered seven people in and around Wichita, Kansas. The crimes had several “signature” elements, such as the cutting of phone lines outside the house, and Rader wrote to police and newspapers to claim the crimes—but police officials insisted that the crimes were not linked, pursued separate lines of investigation in every case, and expressly forbade lower-ranking police officers from speculating that the crimes might actually have been committed by the same person.
• Beginning in 1977 someone began strangling prostitutes in Kansas City, leaving their bodies in city parks, shoeless, with paper towels stuffed in their mouths, and with ligature marks on their necks. He eventually killed thirteen women—but for at least the first eight of those, police insisted that the crimes were not linked, and that they had identified good suspects in each case. In 2007 a man named Lorenzo Gilyard was convicted of the murders, based on DNA evidence.
• In 1980, after discovering the bodies of 21 murdered children, the Atlanta police said they were not certain that they had a serial murderer on their hands.
This is a constant theme. If you checked out 50 serial murderer cases before 1980, I would bet that in 45 of them, the police would be quoted in the newspapers insisting that the crimes were not linked, even as the newspapers suggested that they were.
The capacity of mankind to misunderstand the world is without limit. The external world is billions of times more complicated than the human mind. We are desperate to understand the world; we struggle from the moment of birth to understand the world—but it is beyond our capacity. We thus sign on to simplifications of the world that give us the illusion of understanding. Experts are not less inclined to sign on to these simplistic explanations than outsiders; they are more inclined to sign on to them. They have more need of them. Thus, an explanation like “real homicide investigators know that virtually all murders are committed by someone well known to the victim” can gain currency among professionals, and become something that everybody “in the business” knows.
There were a series of events that changed this. The term “serial murderer” is often credited to FBI profiler Robert Ressler, although, according to David Frank Schmid in Natural Born Celebrities (University of Chicago Press, 2005), the term had actually been used sporadically for decades before Ressler went to work with it.
In any case, the gradual acceptance of the term “serial killer” helped enormously in getting police and prosecutors to accept that the phenomenon was real and serious. According to Schmid (p. 69), “once a serial killer became a type of person, a new form of behavior became visible, along with a typical perpetrator of that behavior, in ways that had been previously impossible. Judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and the police could now ‘see’ serial killers in a way they could not have done before because the serial killer was now a recognizable, legible type.”
That’s all true, but there’s another part of it. History was swarming. I don’t know how many serial murderers there were in America between 1960 and 1980, but I would think it had to be at least 100, and that their victims had to total more than a thousand. I have written about a few of these, but I have passed by many more—Edmund Kemper, the 6-foot, 9-inch
, 360-pound genius from California, and the team of Dean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley in Houston, who killed dozens, and Richard Chase, and Gacy, and Randy Kraft, and Randy Greenawalt, and Sharon Kinne, and Jerome Brudos, and Joseph Kallinger, and the Hillside Stranglers, and many, many more. Santa Cruz, California, had three serial murderers active at the same time in the early 1970s; it took police forever to sort out their crimes. The Michigan Murders may be the work not only of John Norman Collins, but of Collins and someone else not connected to him. You can pick almost any major American city in that era, and find two or three serial murderers—often including ones who have never been included in any of the books summarizing lists of serial murderers.
As more and more of these incidents came to light, it became more difficult for the police to dismiss them as aberrations, so uncommon as to be practically insignificant. Ted Bundy was, in a sense, the straw that broke the camel’s back—but there is more to it than that, too.
In the time frame when Robert Ressler and John Douglas and others were attempting to convince the police to flip their thinking about this issue, Ted Bundy was committing a series of very much in-your-face murders. Most serial murderers try to kill people without making waves. They kill people whose disappearance will cause little notice, often prostitutes and drug addicts. Dean Corll and Gacy killed large numbers of teenaged boys, whose disappearance should have set off alarms, but people wrote them off as runaways, and Corll and Gacy both buried their victims, so that bodies were not turning up all around town.
Ted Bundy was killing people whose disappearance could not possibly be written off or marked down. He was grabbing college girls and leaving their bodies where they would be found. It was hard to ignore.
Further, Bundy, when identified, seemed to be such an unlikely murderer. He was nice-looking, clean and articulate. (Like Obama. Sorry, Joe.) He denied having anything to do with the killings. When he broke out of prison in Aspen, Colorado, in 1977, people printed up T-shirts saying “Run, Ted, Run.” It was difficult to get people to understand that, despite his appearance, he was a savage and brutal murderer who had killed dozens of young women, and would kill several more after a subsequent escape.
The narrative of Ted Bundy started as several local stories—a local story in Washington state, and a local story in Utah, and a local story in Colorado, and a local story in Florida. As police—and journalists; perhaps more importantly, journalists—pieced together the full horror of what he had done, Bundy and his crimes became the subject of immense public fascination. Many books were written about him, and additional material about him appeared in literally hundreds of other books. There were made-for-TV movies about him, and—later, once the market was organized—uncounted true-life TV crime shows.
Bundy went on trial in Florida in June, 1979. At that time he and his crimes had received little national publicity. In the five years following that, Bundy became America’s most famous murderer. At the time of their crimes, no one really wrote books about people like Ed Gein and Earle Nelson and Albert Fish and Harvey Glatman and the Lover’s Lane Killer and the New Orleans Axeman. There had been the odd, occasional book about a killer, and there had been many books about Jack the Ripper, but almost all of the books that you see about serial murderers from before 1980 were written after the Ted Bundy phenomenon, after the obsession with Bundy had established that there was great public interest in this material—not just Bundy, but Bundy and Gacy and the Son of Sam, more than anyone else. They were written after John Douglas and Robert Ressler—and Ann Rule—had “sold” this concept, the “serial killer.”
Ann Rule was a friend of Ted Bundy’s, while he was out there killing people, and she was a crime writer. Rule, of course, didn’t know that Bundy was killing people; she knew that somebody in town was killing people, but she didn’t have any idea it was her friend Ted. Crime writing wasn’t a big deal then; there were just a handful of detective magazines, and they’d pay you $150 or $250 or maybe once in a while $1,000 to write up a story about some criminal. Rule, divorced with children, was struggling to keep bread on the table writing for these publications.
After Ted Bundy was identified, Rule wrote a series of books about other serial murderers—The Want-Ad Killer, the Lust Killer, the I-5 Killer. These were virtually the only books of that type in the early 1980s, and they played an enormous role in establishing that there was a public appetite for books of that nature.
Later, after Rule became famous, she stopped writing those kind of books and started writing about a different kind of true-crime case. She started writing about real-life gothic soap operas, dream-come-true husbands who turn out to have a dark past and crap. I don’t have any interest in those crimes or those books, which I think are written for women, and I haven’t been able to read anything she’s written in 25 years, although I keep trying. But her early books—the pulp press quickies about serial killers—those were seminal publications. They were the founding monuments of the serial killer publishing industry.
And then, of course, there was cable television. Cable television, although it had a pre-history, began to gain traction in the late 1970s—about the same time as Bundy was arrested and identified as a monster. I am not saying that Ted Bundy changed the world, but he was a catalyst in the change. Robert Ressler, John Douglas, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Ann Rule, Ted Turner, Bill Kurtis—these people and a few others changed the way that the world of crime was understood by—and sold to—the lay public.
On July 30, 1978, Gary Tison broke out of the Arizona State Prison with the help of his three sons. They took another murderer with them, in case they had any heavy killin’ to do, and headed for a hideout in the small desert town of Hyder, Arizona.
Apart from the name, Hyder was a lousy place to hide. It was little more than a squatter’s camp, where migrant workers slept in the harvest season. It was barely habitable in the desert summer, probably worse than being in prison. Their plan, which perhaps could more accurately be described as a fantasy, was that Tison’s wife would get an airplane, somewhere, and a pilot, somehow, and meet them near Hyder. They would fly to Mexico, fifty miles to the south.
When the plane failed to materialize, they decided to drive in a large circle and drop in on Tison’s brother. The old car they were driving split a tire. One of the sons stood on a desert road, near midnight, a day and a half after the breakout. A motorist stopped to offer help. His name was John Lyons. In his car were his wife, a two-year-old son, and a fifteen-year-old niece. The Tisons surrounded them with drawn weapons, and forced them into the brush.
Tison had been serving life for killing a prison guard during a previous escape. He had also committed at least one murder in prison, a hit for the Arizona mob. Yet he could not have been known, prior to the escape, to be what one might call a mad-dog killer.
With the Tisons was Randy Greenawalt, who is believed to have murdered four truck drivers in cowardly attacks, shooting defenseless men with a high-powered rifle. Greenawalt, however, was not in charge; Tison was giving the orders. Why he decided to kill the Lyons family will remain a mystery, but kill them he did, herding them into the back seat of the disabled vehicle, where Tison and Greenawalt opened fire. Discovering the two-year-old child still moving, Tison leaned in through an open window, and shot him in the head.
Before they blundered into a police roadblock three weeks later, Tison and Greenawalt would kill two more people, for the same ostensible reason: to steal their vehicle. The book about the Tison/Greenawalt crime spree is Last Rampage, by James W. Clarke (Berkley Books, 1990). A cover quote from a reviewer says that we should “Place this fascinating book alongside Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field or Joe McGinniss’s Fatal Vision.”
Last Rampage is a far better book than Fatal Vision. Mr. Clarke is a professor of political science at the University of Arizona. The book is exhaustively researched, without the flaw which so often accompanies exhaustive research: exhausting detail. Clarke’s writing is sound,
careful, and intelligent. The story has a thrilling and dramatic climax. Mr. Clarke is so meticulous about concealing the outcome that in reading the climactic chapter, I genuinely had no idea what was about to happen. This is extremely rare—in fact, I don’t believe I’ve read any other crime book that doesn’t let the alert reader figure out where we’re headed, in broad outlines, by the middle of the book.
Some of the Tisons’ relatives were deeply religious, and Clarke attempts, inexplicably, to make the place of religion in the life of a sociopath into a theme of the book. In all other aspects, Clarke scrupulously avoids speculation. When the subject turns to religion, he loses all discipline. Since none of the principal actors in the book was at all religious, I am at a loss to understand the theory of this. In practice it becomes a series of snide little comments about fundamentalist Christianity:
The members of these tiny, too brightly lit, starkly furnished churches practiced a demanding faith. Notions of right and wrong, heaven and hell, and redemption through unquestioning obedience to God were rigidly cast in the most unyielding scriptural terms. (p. 299)
I would suggest that there is a rule which should apply here, like “there are no funny jokes about AIDS,” or “never pick your nose on a first date.” You don’t denigrate people’s religion for no real reason.
There’s another problem with the book. Clarke says repeatedly that Gary Tison is highly intelligent, and on a certain level it is essential that the reader believe there is something to the man. The problem is, Tison’s crimes—all of his crimes, from his youth through his last rampage—are just incomprehensibly stupid. Tison served as editor of the prison newspaper, but Clarke never quotes anything that he wrote, apart from a few sentences written to flatter the Warden.
I’m not saying that Tison wasn’t an intelligent man; I am saying that Clarke failed to document that he was, to the detriment of his book. If you or I had escaped from prison, it would be obvious to either of us that absolutely the last thing in the world we would want to do is kill somebody. Your number one goal would be for the story of your escape to die down and get out of the newspapers as quickly as possible. If you kill somebody, that’s going to increase ten-fold the intensity of the police manhunt.