Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  Yet when Nelson met Ted Bundy, she felt not terror or revulsion, but pity. In appealing their client’s death sentences, Coleman and Nelson chose to focus on his mental health, and on whether he had been competent not just to act as his own counsel in his Florida trials but even to make the decisions required of a defendant. Bundy’s new lawyers argued that their client’s mental illness had destroyed his right to a fair trial, and that both trials’ prosecutors and judges had been either unable to comprehend his mental illness or unwilling to address the issue.

  Perhaps the most glaring evidence supporting this theory came in the form of a plea deal Bundy rejected before he went to trial for the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. Had he accepted it, he would have pled guilty to both murders and to the murder of Kimberly Leach in exchange for three life sentences. Instead, he decided at the last minute to reject the plea, then complained bitterly about the inadequacy of his counsel. The case went to trial, and Bundy served on his own defense team, alongside a group of lawyers who were forced to work without a coherent defense strategy, since their client—and cocounsel—refused to address any of the evidence against him.

  “When Bundy sabotaged the plea agreement,” Coleman told me, “it was pretty clear at that point that there was something going on that was related to mental illness, and that this was not a rational thing that he had done: trying to fire his lawyers on the grounds that they didn’t believe in his innocence, when he was about to plead guilty.” In the course of rejecting the plea deal so that he could stand trial, Coleman and Nelson argued, Bundy had already proven that he was not competent to do so.

  This logic either makes sense to you or it doesn’t. It makes sense if you are willing to believe that Ted Bundy really was mentally ill, and that his mental illness affected his ability not just to defend himself at trial but to make rational decisions about any aspect of his life. It makes sense if you are willing to consider applying a new diagnosis to Ted Bundy, and moving away from one that has been applied to him to the exclusion of all others: psychopath.

  “Psychopathic killers,” Dr. Robert D. Hare writes in his 1993 bestseller Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us—published two years after the film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs, starring Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, swept the Academy Awards—“are not mad, according to accepted legal and psychiatric standards. Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings.” Psychopaths, according to Hare, are incapable of experiencing even the faintest tremors of love or empathy, and can never be taught to feel any differently. If you encounter a psychopath, Hare says, you can do only one thing: flee. “If we can’t spot them,” he writes, “we are doomed to be their victims.”

  In addition to solidifying the public’s understanding of psychopaths, Hare invented the most widely used tool for diagnosing them: the Psychopathy Checklist, first published in 1980, and known as the PCL-R since its only revision, in 2003. The checklist comprises twenty questions whose answers trained examiners rate on a scale of zero to two, typically after talking with the patient for about two hours. In the context of a prison diagnosis, some scored criteria—like “shallow affect” and “lack of empathy”—may be bolstered by an examiner’s assessment of state-provided information such as a trial transcript or police record, while others—like “juvenile delinquency” and “revocation of conditional release”—are based entirely on a patient’s past interactions with law enforcement. Because of its frequent use in criminal sentencing, the PCL-R necessarily conflates the concepts of “criminal” and “psychopathic”: a PCL-R score of thirty out of forty makes you a psychopath, and at least five of the list’s items can be scored solely on a subject’s history of trouble with the law. Today, since black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans, a black American is also five times likelier to have a ten-point head start on the Psychopathy Checklist.

  Despite this, the PCL-R—which Hare sells on his website for $460, in a bundle that includes an interview guide, a rating booklet, and a set of QuikScore™ forms (with webinar training available for an additional $499)—is regarded by laypeople and legal insiders alike not as a highly subjective questionnaire but as an infallible means of separating good from bad. Today, the diagnosis of “psychopath” is meted out as freely in the courtroom as it is during prime time, and its effect is always the same: instant dehumanization.

  When it comes to assigning blame, no designation could be more comforting. The psychopath is born bad. Nothing can fix him. Society cannot be at fault, and there is no point in wondering whether timely treatment could have averted the inevitable. He does what he wants to do. He knows it is wrong. He can control himself; he simply chooses not to. The idea that the psychopath is somehow more deserving of blame because he was born bad—that his lack of empathy serves as proof of his evil, despite a diagnosis that says he cannot feel it, no matter how he tries—is a paradox few have attempted to address.

  THE EVIDENTIARY HEARINGS CONCERNING THE ISSUE OF Ted Bundy’s mental competence began on October 22, 1987. Jim Coleman started by questioning Mike Minerva, the public defender who had been appointed to represent Ted Bundy after his indictment in Tallahassee, regarding a note he made in the case file soon after he began preparing for the Chi Omega trial. “I believe,” Minerva wrote, “[Bundy] has a basic defect in his reasoning process which prevents him from reviewing the case in a realistic manner.” Throughout both their preparation for the trial and the trial itself, Minerva testified, Ted was “keeping everybody off balance,” and demanded that his entire defense team come to see him for several hours each night, in visits that served no purpose but to keep him from being alone.

  “Did you believe that insanity might be an issue in the case?” Coleman asked.

  “Yes, I did,” Minerva said.

  “Were you able to pursue the insanity defense?”

  “We were not able to pursue it. No, sir.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Mr. Bundy did not want us to do that.”

  Despite his client’s refusal to address the issue, Minerva hired Wayne State University psychiatry professor Dr. Emanuel Tanay to evaluate Ted, and to advise the defense team on whether their client would be capable of accepting the plea deal they were negotiating. After Tanay interviewed Ted, Minerva testified at the evidentiary hearings, he “expressed great reservations [about whether] Mr. Bundy would actually be able to go through with the agreement because of his mental illness.” At the time, Tanay wrote: “I would anticipate that in the unlikely event that the prosecution’s case against [Bundy] would weaken, he would through his behavior bolster the prosecution’s case.”

  Yet for a brief period, Minerva testified, it seemed as if Ted Bundy really would take the plea. “We went through the whole thing with him, and his mother talked to him, and Carole Boone talked to him,” Minerva told me. “They all were trying to convince him that it was OK with them . . . because they were going to still believe that he was innocent, that he was entering a plea so he could stay alive. He agreed to it. And then he comes in the very next morning and takes it all back in open court.”

  I asked Minerva why he thought Bundy had rejected the plea deal.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s over my head. I don’t know.”

  Bundy’s abilities as a lawyer were, Minerva recalled, “scattershot.” Mostly, he said, Ted “knew the performance”: when to stand, which phrases to use. After his trial began, Ted continued to dictate his lawyers’ actions and require their nightly visits, leaving them not just unprepared but increasingly sleep-deprived. He was not only unwilling but also apparently unable to comprehend the evidence against him, and refused to discuss it with his lawyers, instead talking to the press and performing for the media at every opportunity. He also impulsively cross-examined a prosecution witness before his lawyers could stop h
im, leading the witness to describe the horrific aftermath of the Chi Omega murders, including the pains paramedics had taken to ensure that Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler didn’t choke to death on their own blood. To the public—and to the jury—it was hard to imagine that Bundy had a motive for such questioning beyond the desire to revel in his own destructive power. What other rational motive could there be?

  As the trial progressed, Bundy’s attorney Ed Harvey requested another competency hearing, because, he later testified, “it was obvious to me that . . . what he was doing during his trial was hurting himself.” The court denied Harvey’s motion, and Ted Bundy, always the staunchest believer in his own competence, was happy with the ruling. “At that point,” Harvey testified at the evidentiary hearings, “I felt that the relationship between Mr. Bundy and everybody on the staff was such [that] we could not ethically go on and represent him. There was no lawyer-client relationship left. So I made a motion to withdraw as counsel . . . [and] the court appointed him as chief counsel and relegated us to the official position of being just standby counsel.” Once again, Ted Bundy was on his own.

  At Coleman and Nelson’s evidentiary hearings, Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a Yale professor and psychiatrist, testified that she had, after evaluating Ted Bundy, outlined a history of alternating periods of mania and depression dating back to 1967. She diagnosed Ted with bipolar disorder, to which she also attributed his behavior at trial. According to Lewis, the question of whether Bundy was competent to act as his own counsel was not even at issue. “I don’t even think Mr. Bundy was competent to accept or reject a plea,” she said.

  Immediately after the state finished calling its witnesses—concluding with a psychiatrist who stated that Ted’s concern for “his dental care, his body cream, his skin condition . . . shows that Mr. Bundy definitely is not depressed”—Judge G. Kendall Sharp announced that he would not need to listen to any final arguments, and required no time to deliberate. “After hearing all of the testimony,” he said, “the Court now concludes that [Ted Bundy] probably is the most competent serial killer in the country at this time . . . he is a most intelligent, articulate, and complex individual. This Court views him as a diabolical genius.”

  Judge Sharp made no secret of the fact that he had made up his mind in advance. Before the hearings began, Polly Nelson wrote, “a television reporter [asked] if he thought a hearing on Bundy’s competency would be a waste of time.” The judge answered, “Absolutely.”

  ON JANUARY 23, 1989, HOURS BEFORE HIS SCHEDULED execution, Polly Nelson visited Ted along with Dr. Lewis. “Have you felt good at all to have gotten it off your chest?” Dr. Lewis asked Ted, who had already made extensive confessions to the investigators who had flooded the prison over the past several days.

  “It doesn’t feel any better,” Ted told her. “Not yet, ’cause I haven’t really told anybody, I don’t think, the whole story.”

  Now, with Lewis recording the proceedings and Nelson standing by, Ted did his best to tell it. He said “something happened” the summer before he started high school—something that left him feeling “really out of touch with my peers—really out of touch. I mean, my old neighborhood friends went on to groups, and high school, being [part of] a bigger community—and I was sort of just stuck. I spent a lot of time with myself.” Ted would run naked through the forest behind his house and “fantasize about coming up to some girl sunbathing in the woods,” he said, “or something innocuous like that.” As he grew older, his fantasies grew darker. He scoured the library for descriptions of violence, and developed a taste for true detective magazines and their photographs of dead bodies. At 21, after his first girlfriend—a beautiful, wealthy young woman he idolized—ended their relationship, his dependence on pornography and his own fantasy life began to deepen. “It was like I just ran for cover emotionally,” he said. “And, of course, that was the only thing that ever made sense.”

  Ted’s fantasies came to include “some faceless character” assaulting his ex-girlfriend. “I think he raped her,” Ted told Lewis and Nelson. “But he didn’t—he didn’t—I didn’t, I didn’t take it—he didn’t kill her or anything like that.”

  But the line between “he” and “I” had begun to disintegrate. In the first months of 1969, Ted said, he felt “the entity begin to reach the point where it’s necessary to act out. No longer just to read books, or to masturbate, or fantasize, but to actually begin to stalk, to look.” The fantasy, he said, “became more graphic each time it was aroused.” That spring, Ted recounted, “I really, for the first time, approached a victim, spoke to her, tried to abduct her, and she escaped. That was frightening in its own way. But that was the first—the kind of step that you just—that you don’t—that I couldn’t ever return from.”

  “Did you ever think about talking to a psychiatrist or someone about this?” Lewis asked.

  “No,” Ted said. After that first approach he had stopped himself, and believed that he could manage without help. He met Liz that summer. He went back to school. “Things seemed to be good,” he said. “I felt like I had myself back together. I was disturbed about what I was doing in 1969 . . . and, yet, I figured that it was in control, really.

  “It wasn’t,” he said. “I wasn’t.”

  “Did you ever think you were crazy?” Lewis asked later in the conversation.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “There are times I’ve, the rage and the madness was just so strong, I was just so . . . I’d be screeching, screeching, cursing, you know. That’s when I was, deep down inside I was watching this, I said, ‘You’re absolutely mad. This is just madness.’”

  But after each murder, he could still tell himself that it was over. “I convinced myself, OK, this is it, I’ve satisfied myself. No more. I’m OK now. I feel good. I feel like I don’t need that, I know I don’t need that anymore.

  “I can remember that very feeling,” he told them. “It’s very strong in 1974, leaving the state of Washington, going to law school in Utah, feeling all of this is behind me. I got this over now,” Ted said. “This is going to be OK.”

  “IT WAS A PERFECT WINTER DAWN,” MARGARET VANDIVER later wrote. She had provided pro bono paralegal services to Ted Bundy, and after visiting him before his execution, she stood across the road from the prison, walking back and forth between the mass of revelers and the few death penalty protesters who stood apart from the celebration. Believing the prison lights would dim at the moment of the execution, some onlookers began a raucous countdown—“Ten, nine, eight, seven”—as if they were anticipating not a man’s death but a space shuttle launch.

  Earlier, prison officials laid out a breakfast of coffee, grits, ham, bacon, and eggs for the execution’s audience. It was a generous spread: Ted Bundy was allowed to choose two witnesses, the state supplied another ten, and the rest of the chairs were filled with as many spectators as the space could hold. “There wasn’t any room for anybody to move, it was so jam-packed,” said Fred Lawrence, the Methodist minister who prayed with Ted Bundy in his final hours.

  Ted addressed his last words to Lawrence, and to Coleman. “Jim and Fred,” he said, “I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”

  “He seemed disoriented,” Coleman remembered. “He seemed helpless. And he seemed very small.”

  “Is that all there is?” Ray Parrish, a college student from Kimberly Leach’s hometown, asked the reporters outside the prison. “I don’t feel any different,” he said.

  For the six-year-old Cochran twins, Jennifer and May Nicole, whose family had left Orlando at two o’clock in the morning so they could join the festivities, the “field trip” their parents planned had been an educational one. Jennifer told reporters from the Gainesville Sun that “she understood why Ted Bundy was going to die. ‘He killed a lot,’ she said.”

  May Nicole had a harder time focusing on the lesson at hand. “We saw a deer this morning,” she announced.

  The party was over. The crowd dispersed. The TV stations packed up
their equipment. The vendors counted their takes. The sky was the pink of an Easter egg, until the sunrise faded and it was just another day.

  IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BELIEVE IN EVIL WITHOUT BELIEVING in choice. When we talk about the psychopath, we describe a person born without a conscience, yet we often talk about this lack as if it is not a disability but an advantage: proof that someone has evolved beyond the pesky morals that hobble the rest of us and is now free to enjoy a consequence-free life of sex, theft, and violence. Whether psychopaths actually do enjoy this life is, according to Dr. Hare, not a question even worth asking. Therapy—especially “attempts to teach psychopaths how to ‘really feel’ remorse or empathy”—is “doomed to failure,” Hare writes in Without Conscience, primarily because psychopaths don’t want to change. “They see nothing wrong with themselves,” Hare explains, “experience little personal distress, and find their behavior rational, rewarding, and satisfying; they never look back with regret or forward with concern. They perceive themselves as superior beings.” To Hare, and to the psychiatrists and legal professionals who continue his work, a diagnosis of “psychopathy” is wholly separate from mental illness, and cannot serve to mitigate a defendant’s guilt. The only guilt it can mitigate is a jury’s: if it is wrong to kill a human being, it can still be acceptable to recommend the death penalty for someone who is not really human.