Carole saw something else that day, something she didn’t mention to the guards: a hole in the cell’s ceiling. Not long after Carole’s visit, on December 30, Ted Bundy climbed up through the hole and into the crawl space above, and escaped through the warden’s apartment. He had pulled his sheets over a pile of clothes, crumpled papers, and law books, so the guards would think he was still in bed. It was the kind of ruse that should have worked only in a cartoon, but it worked for Ted Bundy. It wasn’t until noon the following day that anyone noticed he was missing. By the time the police alerted the public and set up roadblocks, he was already more than a thousand miles away.
Back in Seattle, Keppel informed Liz of Ted’s escape, and told her to contact him immediately if Ted tried to reach her. “As I lay awake that night, listening to every creak in the house,” Liz wrote, “I admitted to myself that I might be afraid of Ted.”
Liz didn’t hear from Ted in the days following his escape, but some part of her knew how to find him. “One morning in mid-January,” she wrote, “I picked up the newspaper and saw a picture of a frightened woman peering out of a gap in the drawn drapes of her sorority house. The story said an intruder had raped and murdered two young women and beaten two others as they slept in their beds at Florida State University . . . Now I had the ominous feeling that [Ted] was in Tallahassee.”
Liz didn’t have to wait long for her fears to be confirmed. A month later, on February 16, 1978, she got a call from Ted. “It’s OK,” he told her. She could tell that he was crying. “It’s OK,” he said again. “I’m in custody. It’s all over.” Unwilling to ignore her fears any longer, Liz asked him if he was a suspect in the murders she had read about.
“I wish we could sit down alone,” Ted said haltingly, “and talk about things, with nobody listening. About the way I am.”
AFTER HE WAS CAPTURED IN FLORIDA, TED BUNDY changed, in the public eye, from an outlaw to a monster. It was no longer possible to separate the man from his alleged crimes, just as it was no longer possible to tell a story about a girl who simply vanished, then reappeared months later as a skull, a jawbone, a broken tooth, or a strand of hair—a changeling offering mute testimony that something terrible had happened not here in our world but in that strange realm called “thin air.” Now there was no such separation. What had happened at Florida State University had happened in our world. It had happened here.
At the Chi Omega sorority house, a man had stolen upstairs in the earliest hours of January 15, 1978, and gone from bedroom to bedroom, bludgeoning his sleeping victims with an oak log. Twenty-year-old Kathy Kleiner and 22-year-old Karen Chandler survived that night, though they were beaten so severely that drops of their blood were later found on the ceiling. Both Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman were strangled and bludgeoned to death, and Bowman was beaten with such violence that her temple was crushed and fragments of her skull were driven into her brain. Levy was raped vaginally and anally with a bottle of Clairol hair mist, and her autopsy would reveal that she had been sexually assaulted with enough force to damage her internal organs. Her killer had bitten deeply into one of her buttocks and nearly torn her nipple from her breast. Contrary to what Liz read in the newspaper, Levy was the only victim to be sexually assaulted, but the manner in which Bowman, Kleiner, and Chandler were attacked suggested a form of domination akin to rape. Someone had wanted not just to hurt or even kill these women, but to obliterate them.
It had all happened in a matter of minutes. The attacker had moved from room to room, beating each woman in a violent frenzy, then pulling the covers up to her chin and moving on. After he left the sorority house, he went to a duplex eight blocks away and assaulted Cheryl Thomas, a 21-year-old dance student who lived there, in the same way that he had attacked Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler—and then he was gone again. Thomas, Kleiner, and Chandler had no memory of their assaults, let alone of their assailant. The only description the police had came from Nita Neary, a Chi Omega sister who caught a momentary glimpse of the killer as she returned from a date. She described him as a white male in his early 20s, between five eight and five ten, weighing around 150 pounds, with brown hair. In other words, he could have been any one of countless students on FSU’s own campus.
When the Florida Flambeau printed a front-page story on the attack, it had no more information to report, nothing that could make the community feel safer. “So far,” FSU’s student paper told readers, “he has managed to elude a dragnet that has every detective in Leon County working around the clock.” The rest of the issue was shot with ads for self-defense devices (“Every 10 minutes, an American Woman is attacked . . . DON’T THINK IT COULDN’T HAPPEN TO YOU!”). On sorority row, university officials visited each house to warn the girls about the danger that might still lurk on campus. “We’re here because we want to tell you the facts,” they told the sisters at Pi Beta Phi, “and we want to put the fear of the Lord in you.”
Students withdrew from the university. Some never returned. “It was a very dark time,” remembered Ron Eng, the Chi Omega house’s handyman. “I can remember walking across campus a few days [later], trying to make a class or something like that, and no girl would look a man in the eyes.”
Three weeks after the murders at Florida State, 12-year-old Kimberly Leach disappeared from her school in Lake City, a small town east of Tallahassee. She had forgotten her purse after homeroom that morning, and she and her friend Priscilla left their PE class so she could retrieve it. On the way back to the gym, Priscilla was momentarily distracted, and looked up just in time to see Kim walking toward a stranger’s car. Two months later, her friend’s remains were found in an abandoned hog shed.
Six days after Leach disappeared from her junior high school, Ted Bundy was captured in Pensacola. For the second time, he was arrested because he’d gotten lost. At 1:30 in the morning on February 15, 1978, patrolman David Lee noticed an orange Volkswagen Beetle driving down an alley behind a restaurant he knew to be closed. Deeming this behavior suspicious, Officer Lee, like the Salt Lake City Police had before him, acted on a gut instinct and followed the driver. When he radioed the license plate and found that the car was stolen, he gave chase. The driver tried to speed away. Lee followed. Finally, the driver pulled over and cooperated as Lee began cuffing him. Then he escaped Lee’s grasp and tried to run away. Lee fired a warning shot, then fired at the man. He missed, but the man fell to the ground as if he had been injured. After Lee handcuffed him and pushed him into the back of his patrol car, the man remained silent, save for one phrase.
“I wish you’d killed me,” he said.
The Pensacola police initially had no idea who the man was, though by then he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. At first, he refused to give his name. Then he told police he was willing to confess—but he had conditions. If they wanted to know what happened, he said, then “it would all come out. I mean not—and again I know what you want—but I’m interested in the whole thing. I’m interested in everything. OK? . . . And it’s—it’s got to be dealt with.” He was transferred to Tallahassee before the Pensacola police could bring him any closer to a full confession.
As it turned out, they didn’t need one. From this point forward, there would be few surprises: not when Ted Bundy was indicted for murder, not when he insisted on representing himself at trial, not when he decided to accept counsel after all, not when his trial attracted a crush of media attention that put him in living rooms across the country, and least of all when he was sentenced to death not once but three times: first for the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, and then for the murder of Kimberly Leach.
“That he most probably looked normal and walked among us seemed the greatest of horrors,” a Florida State student wrote in the Florida Flambeau. The murders, he wrote, “stripped away a little of the humanity from most of us. Right now, Tallahassee is a town of open wounds. We are like sharks, excited by the smell of our own blood . . . Quite correctly, many have said these murders are one of the strongest
arguments ever for capital punishment.”
TED BUNDY LOOKS AT SHERIFF KEN KATSARIS, WHO stands behind him, reading aloud the list of atrocities for which he will soon stand trial. Bundy’s smile vanishes. For a moment, he seems near tears. Then he looks back at the cameras.
This is the picture you have seen: the man looking out from under a lowered brow, his mouth quirked in a half smile, his eyes deep-set, shadowy, but still focused directly on the camera lens, looking through the flash, through the decades, and into you. This is the Ted Bundy we know today: the man who was pure evil, and proud of his evil, and wanted the world to witness just how evil he was. This is the man who, in the words of one of the countless TV specials dedicated to his life and crimes, “had the capability of being virtually anything he wanted, but . . . instead chose to become a monster obsessed with murder.”
This picture was taken on July 28, 1978, when Bundy was indicted for the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. Katsaris made the unusual decision of inviting the press to watch as he read the indictment to the defendant. Katsaris was dressed for the occasion in a sharp black suit. Bundy wore a jail-issued jumpsuit and sandals.
“What do we have here, Ken?” Bundy asks as he is led out to stand beside Katsaris. “Let’s see. Oh, it’s an indictment! All right. Why don’t you read it to me?”
“Mr. Bundy—” Katsaris says.
“You’re up for election, aren’t you?” he interrupts.
“Mr. Bundy—”
“You finally got it, didn’t you?”
“Mr. Bundy—”
“You told me that—you told them you were going to get me,” he says, gesturing to the reporters and camera crews arrayed before them. Suddenly, he seems a little calmer: he has an audience to play to. “He said he was gonna get me,” Bundy says, and turns back to Katsaris. “OK, you’ve got the indictment. It’s all you’re gonna get. Let’s read it. Let’s go.”
As Katsaris reads the charges, the defendant walks out in front of him, as if to replace the entity described in the indictment with the real Ted Bundy, who could never have done these things. “My chance to talk to the press,” he says, and smiles for the cameras, or tries to. It looks painful to sustain.
“I’ll plead not guilty right now,” he says, and raises his hand, smiling again. The shutters click.
ONE SUMMER, WHILE RESEARCHING A STORY ABOUT Florida, I found myself at the prison where Ted Bundy died. I had already done everything else I could think to do in the state. I had watched trained dolphins perform to “Footloose,” then taken a boat tour of the Everglades and watched wild dolphins perform for no one, and tried not to eavesdrop too much on the other passengers’ conversations. (“It’s like catching snowflakes,” a lawyer from Miami said about his work.) I had lined up with all the other tourists at Key West and taken a picture of the end of America. I had sustained mosquito bites above my hairline and on the soles of my feet. I had gone to the Florida Citrus Center and contemplated alligator claw key rings and back scratchers, alligator tooth necklaces, and dried alligator heads, and I had finally seen the LIVE BABY GATORS promised on all the billboards, where they appeared in cartoon version, wearing diapers and pink bows and looking as rosy-cheeked as reptiles can be imagined. I had done everything on my list, but I still felt that something was missing—and so, instead of going to Disney World, I went to the unremarkable patch of grass that had once been, for a few hundred citizens, the happiest place on earth.
Florida State Prison is often called Starke, taking its name from the closest nearby town, and maybe it was because of this name that I always thought it would look stark in its own way: dry and heat-tortured, glimmering with mirage but incapable of sustaining real life. I didn’t know I was imagining such a place until I saw it contradicted by reality. I had been reading about Ted Bundy since I was a high school student in Oregon, when I became fascinated by the endless true-crime books and TV specials and tabloid spreads about all the terrible things it seemed were always happening to girls not so different from myself. But the more I learned, the more I found myself trying to move beyond dread and into something harder to find in the pages of a paperback: comprehension. Ted Bundy had been a person, too, I realized. I wasn’t so different from the girls he murdered, but I also wasn’t so different from him. We were members of the same species. Was it truly impossible to understand his actions beyond simply attributing them to evil? Was it dangerous even to try? I didn’t understand how it could be, but it seemed to me that most people thought it was. Gaze long enough into the abyss, everyone knows, and the abyss gazes into you—and its gaze is apparently enough to destroy you. I didn’t understand how that worked, but it seemed like everyone around me did.
I had pictured Ted Bundy spending the last years of his life in a place that was the opposite of the Washington forests where he had grown up, but Starke is in central Florida, and, for sheer verdancy, central Florida puts the Pacific Northwest to shame. It is a land that dares things not to grow. Kudzu snakes across power lines and dangles from the trees, kissing the flat surfaces of carefully mown lawns. As you travel north toward the prison, the vines do not just choke the trees but swallow them whole. The 357 prisoners on Florida’s death row as of this writing make it the second most populous in the nation, and in the area surrounding the prison, seemingly every roadside sign advertises gas, boiled peanuts, or God. FROGS ARE COMING, reads one. THERE’S ALWAYS FREE CHEESE IN THE DEVIL’S MOUSETRAP, reads another. WHEN SATAN COMES KNOCKING AT YOUR DOOR, a third sign instructs, SIMPLY SAY, “JESUS, WOULD YOU PLEASE GET THAT FOR ME?” In the end, they all say the same thing: you could be good, if only you wanted to be.
Ted Bundy’s postconviction lawyer Polly Nelson traveled this same highway in April 1986, when she met her client for the first time. She had been practicing law for only a few months, and neither she nor Jim Coleman, Ted Bundy’s principal postconviction lawyer, had any idea who Bundy was when they agreed to take his case. “Which one was he, the guy who killed the nurses in Chicago?” Nelson recalls wondering when a coworker asked if she wanted to help a Florida inmate apply for a stay of execution. After she and Coleman looked over the petition the inmate had prepared, they decided to represent him. Ted Bundy—who had been painted in the press as a legal mastermind even after his spectacular defeat in both of the capital murder trials at which he had served as a member of his own counsel—was representing himself just as ineffectively as he had since his indictment in Tallahassee.
The comparison between Ted Bundy’s legal reputation and his behavior in court paralleled his reputation as a criminal mastermind: both were directly contradicted by his actions. While living in Utah, he had saved receipts for the small quantities of gas he purchased close to the Wildwood Inn in Colorado, where Caryn Campbell disappeared, around the time she disappeared. The receipts were discovered neatly collected in his desk—not far from a ski resort brochure with an “X” beside the Wildwood Inn—after Bundy consented to a search. The police asked him if he had ever been to Colorado. Bundy swore he hadn’t, not long before they found the receipts and brochure.
During the penalty phase of his trial for the murder of Kimberly Leach, Ted had called in Carole Ann Boone as the defense’s sole witness. Acting as his own counsel, Ted questioned her about his good character. Then, while she was still on the stand, he married her. The newlyweds even found a way around the prison’s lack of conjugal visits, and in October of 1981, Carole gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
“The effect of [his daughter] in Ted’s life,” Polly Nelson wrote, “was to give him his first glimmer of heartfelt love. Until then I think he had believed that no such emotion truly existed, that the rest of us had been faking it too. [His daughter’s] unconditional, unguarded, uncomplicated, real love for him touched him very deeply and elicited a strange new feeling that opened his mind to the possibility of the existence of love.” When I spoke to Nelson nearly three decades later, Ted’s transformation in these moments was still fresh in her mind. “He just
lit up,” she said.
Nelson’s descriptions of meeting Ted Bundy for the first time—and of all the hours they spent together as she worked on his appeal—are remarkably different from other writers’ depictions of the same experience. She believed he was guilty just as fervently as she believed in her duty to save him from the death penalty, and the difference between her view of him and the impressions that others described to the public was based not on what Ted Bundy had done, but what he might be. “He fascinated me,” Michaud wrote, “like a viper motionless in a crevice: a black, palpable malignancy . . . Often he made me literally sick to my stomach, and sometimes it was all I could do to get out of the prison and back to the car before I vomited.”
During their first meeting, Nelson wrote, Ted did his best “to impress me, please me, block out for the moment what he knew I knew about him. He wanted me to see him as he liked to think of himself: sophisticated, urbane, polite, respectful.” Yet she always saw him not as the man he wanted her to see him as, but as a person trying to pretend he was someone else. “I always had the impression,” she wrote, “that he was consciously creating himself, his persona. His natural instincts, I think, gave him no clue how a normal person would act.”
By the time Nelson and Jim Coleman took Ted Bundy’s case, their client had become a character in the American imagination—a transformation helped in no small part by a crime desk reporter–turned–thriller author named Thomas Harris. Harris’s time observing Bundy’s trial influenced his creation of Hannibal Lecter, the cold, calculating, erudite villain of the bestselling series that included The Silence of the Lambs. “Nothing happened to me . . .” Lecter explains. “I happened.” Hannibal Lecter, born bad, believes he is superior to the people around him, having transcended their pointless attachments to each other—and, remarkably, Harris’s other characters agree with him. They are frightened, it seems, that if they listen too closely to Hannibal Lecter, they will be swayed by his logic and become evil themselves. As Ted Bundy sat on death row, and as the legend of the genius serial killer grew up around him, the public came to view him with the same fear.
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