by Ann Rule
“That’s fine,” Cowart said. “You can shake it at Mr. Haggard.”
“He probably deserves it better than you do. In the three weeks I’ve been here, I’ve been taken to the law library three times.”
“Yeah, and on at least three occasions you’ve just sat up there and talked to Sergeant Kratz. You never used the library itself.”
“That’s not true. It [the library] is a joke. But it’s a better place to read than the interview room. There is no justification for the treatment I’m receiving. I am given a strip search after I see my attorney and that is unconscionable. Now, this railroad train is running, but if I’m going to get off, I’ll get off if I need to demonstrate to this courtroom that they are influencing me and affecting me.”
Cowart spoke as if to a spoiled child. “This court is going to proceed on schedule without your voluntary interruptions. We’re not going to have it anymore. Now I want you to discuss that with your counsel. I want you to know your rights, but I also want you to know that as forebearing as this court can be, it can also be that strong.”
“I’m willing to accept the consequences of my actions, Your Honor, and anything I do I’m aware of what the court will do.”
“Then we’re together. Bless your heart, and I just hope you stay with us. If you don’t, we’ll miss you.”
Bundy ended it with bitter humor. “And all these people won’t pay their money to come see me.”
Tempers were ragged for much of the day. When microanalyst Patricia Lasko testified that the two hairs found in the pantyhose mask at Dunwoody Street were “from Mr. Bundy or from someone whose hair is exactly like his,” Haggard grilled her unmercifully.
The discussion of hair microanalysis became so esoteric that the jury appeared lost in the scientific terminology. Haggard badgered Ms. Lasko until the judge warned him.
When Haggard asked to examine Ms. Lasko’s notes, she hung on to them stubbornly. Haggard wrenched them away, and Larry Simpson walked over and began a tug-of-war with the defense attorney over the notebook.
Judge Cowart chastised both attorneys and sent the jury out. Then he complimented the usually mild-mannered Simpson. “It’s the first time I’ve seen you get your dander up.”
It was true. There had been little fire in cross-examination from either side.
The state’s case was coming to a close. Nita Neary had again raised her arm, this time in front of a jury, and pointed out Ted Bundy as the man she’d seen leaving the Chi Omega House just after the murders. The biggest gun of all, Dr. Richard Souviron, the dental odontologist, was about to begin.
Souviron, a handsome, dapper man with a flair for the theatrical, seemed to enjoy his time before the jury. He held a pointer and indicated the teeth on the huge color photo of Ted Bundy’s mouth, the photo which had been taken after the search warrant was served in the Leon County Jail more than a year earlier.
The jury seemed fascinated. They had been confused, obviously, by the serology testimony on semen, and by the hair testimony, but they alertly followed the dental testimony.
The tissue from Lisa Levy’s buttock had been destroyed for comparison purposes through improper preservation. Only the bite mark, photographed to scale, was left. Would it be enough?
“These are laterals … bicuspids … incisors …”
Souviron explained that each individual’s teeth had particular characteristics: alignment, irregularities, chips, size, and sharpness—that these characteristics make them one of a kind. Souviron had found Ted’s teeth particularly unique.
Dramatically, he tacked the enlarged picture of Lisa Levy’s buttocks, bearing the purple rows of bite marks, on the display board in front of the jury. And then he placed a clear sheet on top of that, a sheet bearing an enlarged picture of the defendant’s teeth.
“They line up exactly!”
Explaining the “double bite,” Souviron continued: “The individual bit once, then turned sideways and bit a second time. The top teeth stayed in about the same position, but the lower teeth—biting harder—left ‘two rings.’ The second bite made it even easier,” Souviron said, to compare the teeth with the marks because he had twice as much to work with.
“Doctor,” Prosecutor Simpson began. “Based upon your analysis and comparison of this particular bite mark, can you tell us within a reasonable degree of dental certainty whether or not the teeth represented in that photograph as being those of Theodore Robert Bundy and the teeth represented by the models that have been introduced as state’s exhibits number 85, 86, made the bite marks reflected on your exhibit as marked and admitted into evidence?”
“Yes sir.”
“And what is that opinion?”
“They made the marks.”
It was the first time, the very first time in all the years since 1974, that a piece of physical evidence had been linked absolutely between a victim and Ted Bundy … and the courtroom erupted.
The defense, of course, wanted to show that “dental certainty” and forensic odontology is a primitive and not widely accepted science. Ed Harvey rose for the defense on cross-examination.
He began, “Analyzing bite marks is part art and part science, isn’t it?”
“I think that’s a fair statement.”
“And that really depends upon the experience and education of the examiner?”
“Yes.”
“And your conclusions are really a matter of opinion. Is that correct?”
“That is correct.”
“You’ve got a given set of teeth, or models, and a given area of skin, a thigh or a calf. Is there any way to test whether those teeth will make the same marks over and over?”
Souviron smiled. “Yes, because I did an experiment just like that. I took models and I went to the morgue and I pressed the models into the buttocks area on different individuals and photographed them. Yes, they can be standardized, and, yes, they do match.”
Harvey feigned incredulity. “You said cadavers? Is that correct?”
“I couldn’t find any live volunteers.”
Harvey tried to find some areas of inconsistency, but his line of questioning failed.
Souviron explained further, and the jury leaned forward to listen. “If there’s an area of inconsistency—out it goes. If there’s a Vee’d-out central that wouldn’t make this pattern, you’d say, ‘Well, we’ll have to exclude that person even though the arch size is the same, the cuspids are tucked down in behind the laterals and this type of thing. The centrals don’t line up right.’ [But] the odds of finding this would be a needle in a haystack—an identical set like Mr. Bundy’s—with the wear on the centrals and everything, the chipped lateral incisor, everything identical. You’d have to be able to combine that with the three marks on the upper central incisors, and the odds against that are astronomical.”
The state was closing its case with all flags flying. They called Dr. Lowell J. Levine, the chief consultant in forensic dentistry to the New York City Medical Examiner.
Levine testified that he believed Lisa Levy—or the person whose flesh appeared in the photograph he studied— had been “passive” when the bite marks were left on her body. “There is very little evidence of motion or swirling you’d normally get as tissue moves in various directions as the teeth move on the skin. It almost looks more like an animal which has bitten and kinda grabs. These things were left slowly, and the person was not moving. They [sic] were passive when they were left.”
“Can you give us an opinion as to the uniqueness of teeth?”
“Everybody’s teeth are unique to that particular person for a number of reasons. One, the shapes of the teeth are unique, in addition to the juxtaposition or the relationship of each tooth to the other is unique, the twisting or tipping or bending also adds to that uniqueness. Present and missing teeth … and those are basically gross characteristics. We also have other types of individual characteristics which are accidental characteristics, such as breaking.”
Mike Minerva
, left behind in Tallahassee when Ted had grown disenchanted with him, was in the courtroom (apparently forgiven) to cross-examine Dr. Levine.
“When you say ‘reasonable degree of dental certainty,’ you are speaking of some kind of probability. Is that right?”
“A very high degree of probability. Yes sir.”
Minerva was trying to cast suspicion on the “new science,” to make it look simply “probable” and not “absolute,” but Levine would not buckle under.
“… in my mind it becomes a practical impossibility to come up with something with all the identical characteristics.”
“Would you say that it is fair to say that odontology is a relatively new, newly recognized forensic science?”
“No. I do not think that is fair at all. Historically, you have a case of Paul Revere doing identifications. You have testimony admitted to the bar in Massachusetts in the late 1800s on identification, and you can find citations for bite mark cases even in the legal justice system that go back twenty-five years. So what’s new?”
The prosecution rested. Ted Bundy asked that Dr. Souviron be held in contempt of court for speaking out at the Orlando meeting prior to his trial on his case, and Cowart denied his request. In the empty courtroom, Ted studied the dental exhibits of his teeth and the pictures of Lisa Levy’s bite marks.
I have no idea what his thoughts were.
45
THINGS WERE NOT GOOD in the defense camp. Robert Haggard had resigned, hinting that the defendant’s insistence on questioning Ray Crew, the police officer who was in the death rooms on the night of January 14-15, had been a mistake. The public defenders would not allow Ted to cross-examine witnesses anymore.
On the first day of the defense, July 20, Ted rose to address Judge Cowart. He was claiming that his attorneys were inadequate, the same attorneys that he had praised highly to me in his pretrial phone call. He blamed Mike Minerva for dropping out of the case without warning, the man he now said had “the most experienced courtroom presence in this case.” He didn’t mention that he himself had asked Minerva to leave.
“I did not have any choice in the selection of Bob Haggard to represent me here in Miami. In total, I have not been asked at any time my opinion about who should be representing me within the public defender’s office.”
In fact, Ted did not like his whole defense team. “I think it’s also important to note that there are certain problems of communication between myself and my attorneys which have reduced my defense, the defense which is not my defense or sanctioned by me, nor one which I can say I agree with.”
Ted complained that his lawyers ignored his input into the case, would not let him make decisions, and were stubbornly refusing him the right to cross-examine witnesses before the jury.
Cowart was aghast. “I don’t know of any case I’ve seen or experienced where an individual who is indigent has received the quality and quantity of counsel you have. There have been five separate counsel here representing you. It’s unheard of. Who’s minding the store for the public defender I can’t tell you. And what’s happening to all those other indigents they represent I can’t tell you. This court has watched with a great deal of carefulness that, before witnesses are tendered, you are questioned, and this record will show hundreds of ‘just a moment, pleases’ where they [Ted’s attorneys] go by and confer with you. I’ve never seen anything like it in the history of any case I’ve ever tried. Or in twenty-seven years at the bar have I ever seen anything exactly like what has happened in the defense of this case.”
But Ted was adamant. Once again, he wanted to take over his own defense.
Cowart said he would agree, but warned Ted that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.
Ted responded, “I’ve always taken that particular axiom like someone who works on his own car has a fool for a mechanic. It all depends on how much you want to do by yourself.”
It was an old, tired story. Cowart suggested that Ted’s question was one of “submission of counsel.”
“Imposition,” Ted countered.
“No, it’s submission, and this court has addressed that. If they don’t do every little, single, solitary thing that you want ’em to, they’re incompetent. And, bless your heart, if they do … I’m gonna fire ’em.”
It is likely that Ted wanted to be sure the record showed that he had not had his attorney of choice. Millard Farmer’s name wasn’t mentioned, but the implication was clear.
Once again, Ted was at the helm, and his attorneys were only “advisors.” Still, for the moment, Ed Harvey would question the defense witnesses. Harvey said—out of the hearing of the jury, a jury which did not seem to realize that the defense team was in a shambles—that he wanted out too.
The defense tactics were not to present any alibi for Ted Bundy, but to try to negate the state’s evidence. Dr. Duane DeVore, an oral surgery professor from the University of Maryland and an advisor in forensic dentistry to the chief medical examiner of the state of Maryland, testified that bite marks were not unique—though teeth themselves were.
“… The material of skin is flexible, elastic, and, depending upon the bleeding structures underneath and the amount of blood, [a tooth] may not leave a unique mark.”
DeVore produced four models of teeth from Maryland youngsters that he said could have caused the bite marks on the victim, but he admitted to Larry Simpson that Ted Bundy’s teeth also could have made the same marks.
The defense produced a tape taken while Nita Neary was in a hypnotic trance where she said that the houseboy, Ronnie Eng, had resembled the intruder. Eng was brought into the courtroom and stood beside Ted. The jury looked on, and, of course, said nothing.
Serologist Michael J. Grubb, of the Institute of Forensic Sciences in Oakland, testified that the semen left on Cheryl Thomas’s sheet could not have been deposited by Bundy— again in a long, highly technical discourse that seemed to confuse the jury.
Ed Harvey, trying one more time to save his client, asked for another competency hearing. “The man’s life is at stake. He shouldn’t be forced to take the services of public lawyers whom he has no confidence in. His conduct has revealed the debilitating effects of his mental disorder by reflecting a total lack of insight regarding the disorder and its effects on him, by reflecting a wholly inadequate ability to consult with lawyers about the case.”
Danny McKeever opposed the competency motion. “The man is difficult to work with. He’s almost cunning the way he works against his attorneys sometimes … but he’s competent.”
Ted smiled. Anything was better than being considered incompetent.
Cowart felt Ted was competent too, and a compromise was worked out as the trial approached its ending. Harvey would stay, Lynn Thompson would stay, and Peggy Good would make the final arguments. Bundy would comment later, “I feel really, really, good …”
I had not seen Ted alone since I’d reached Miami, although I had left messages at the jail with my phone number. I don’t know if he got them, or, if he had, if he was allowed to call out. Perhaps he no longer had anything he wished to say to me. So I cannot judge whether he was competent or not. It is a moot question whether his deliberate rocking of the defense team’s already shaky platform was a move on his part to gain even more attention or whether it was an indication that he was, truly, no longer rational, a man in the grip of some kind of egomania that obliterated the issue of survival itself. I could only observe him in the courtroom, and he seemed hell-bent for destruction.
Ted continued to denigrate his attorneys, still angry that they would not allow him more control. “I’ve tried to be nice. We’re speaking more to a problem attorneys have in giving up power. Maybe we’re dealing with a problem of professional psychology. Where attorneys are so jealous of the power they exercise in the courtroom they’re afraid to share it with the defendant. They are so insecure in their own skill and experience that they are afraid that anybody else might know as much as they do or can at least
participate in the planning process.”
Cowart commented mildly that Ted’s attorneys had passed their bar exams, had graduated from law school. “I can’t conceive of submitting myself, or I’m sure you wouldn’t submit yourself, to brain surgery by somebody who had only a year and a half of medical school.”
In actuality, of course, Ted’s defense attorneys were not that experienced. Cowart had helped them often in phrasing questions, and much of their cross-examination was tedious, uninspired, and headed nowhere. But then Simpson and McKeever, for the state, did not rival Melvin Belli or F. Lee Bailey.
The Bundy trial had been marked throughout with mediocrity. Only the judge himself was a thoroughbred. If Ted could have worked with his attorneys instead of trying to tear them apart, he might have had an adequate defense. They had succeeded in barring the “fantasy tape,” the Utah pantyhose mask, his former record and his escape. Despite any faltering on their parts, they might well have saved him if he had allowed it.
Moving into final arguments, the press was still wagering even odds on the outcome of the trial.
And yet, there seemed to be something happening, something that couldn’t be stopped. Ted had spoken of “this railroad train running,” and it struck a chord buried deep in the recesses of my memory. The outcome of the trial would not necessarily be the wrong verdict. That verdict was something that none of us had control over any longer. The truth had been lost somewhere among the games, the rituals, the motions, the petty arguments and the rational arguments, the quotes for the press and the notations for the record.
In all human endeavors that deal with what is unthinkable, too terrible to be dealt with squarely, we turn to what is familiar and regimented: funerals, wakes, and even wars. Now, in this trial, we had gone beyond our empathy with the pain of the victims and our niggling realization that the defendant was a fragmented personality. He knew the rules, he even knew a great deal about the law, but he did not seem to be cognizant of what was about to happen to him. He seemed to consider himself irrefragable. And what was about to happen to him was vital for the good of society.