The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  It has taken the jury less than seven hours of deliberation to decide his fate. All those kindly middle-aged women, the devout churchgoers, the people who didn’t read newspapers, this jury handpicked by Ted himself. It appeared that they had been eager to debate the question of his guilt, almost as eager to find that he was, indeed, guilty.

  Ted was lost to me. He had been lost since I looked at the pictures of the dead girls and knew what I knew, knew what I had never wanted to believe. There was no need to remain for the penalty phase.

  Whatever was to come after was already foretold in my mind.

  They are going to kill him … and he knew it all along.

  47

  I FLEW HOME, leaving Miami behind in the grip of a warm, pelting rain. I had to change planes in St. Louis, and there too, that city was crisscrossed with violent thunderstorms. We sat on the ground for two hours, waiting for a break in the storm. At length, we were the last plane allowed off the ground as lightning seemed to split the air only feet from the wing tips. The plane bucked and shook as if the pilot had no control, and we dropped, dropped, and then flew ahead. I was frightened. I had seen how very tenuous life can be.

  When we finally left the storms of the Midwest behind us, I turned to the man beside me, a Boeing engineer, and asked him if he had been afraid.

  “No. I’ve already been there.”

  It was a strange answer. He explained that he had been clinically dead as a youth, crushed beneath a car after he and several friends had hit a utility pole.

  “I watched from somewhere up above and saw the troopers lift the car off someone. Then I saw that it was me lying there. I wasn’t afraid, and I didn’t feel any pain—not until I woke up in the hospital three days later. Since then, I’ve known that the soul doesn’t die, only the body, and I’ve never been afraid.”

  I had seen nothing but death in Miami, heard nothing but death—and death seemed to lie ahead for Ted. Hearing the stranger’s words was somewhat comforting. Ted had written in his last letter, “There’s nothing wrong with my life that reincarnation couldn’t improve upon.”

  It seemed to be his only option left.

  I believed that the verdict had been the right verdict, but I wondered if it had been for the wrong reasons. It had been too swift, too vindictive. Was justice still justice when it manifested itself as it had in the less than six hours of jury deliberation? Was this the delayed justice that should have come before? Perhaps there was no way that it could have been done cleanly, concisely, in a textbook case.

  The people had spoken. And Ted was guilty.

  48

  IN COLORADO, TED BUNDY had been a kind of lovable rogue, with many of the Aspenites delighting in his antics. Judge George Lohr had eliminated consideration of the death penalty in Colorado in Ted’s murder trial there. Had he stayed in his Garfield County jail cell on that day before New Year’s Eve, 1977, Ted might have won freedom (except for his still uncompleted term in Utah) but he certainly would have had his life. By the summer of 1979 he would have been sitting in one western prison or another, but he would not have found himself in the long shadow of the electric chair.

  Florida—the “Buckle of the Death Belt”—was the worst possible state to which he could have run. No one in Florida had taken kindly to Ted Bundy’s mocking superiority or his games. Not the police. Not the judges. And certainly not the public.

  In Florida, “killers” were killed themselves, and with as much dispatch as possible. An Oregon detective, returning from a seminar in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1978, told me that he had talked with some of the Florida lawmen who had dealt with Ted. “They told me they would have killed him,” the detective recalled to me. “They said he would have had an ‘accident’ while he was still in jail, but they didn’t dare because he was too much in the public eye.”

  “Good ole boys” (policemen and laymen alike) didn’t hold with killers of women, with despoilers and rapists. These were the men that Ted had scoffed at in his phone call from the Leon County Jail. These were the people who now would control his every move.

  He had deliberately walked into the very jaws of death. Why? Prosecutors Simpson and McKeever would ask for the death penalty, although, ironically, they stressed that they would not go for “overkill.” There was already enough without inundating the jury with the full background on the man they had convicted.

  In the bifurcated trial, the second phase (the penalty phase) was slated to begin at 10:00 A.M. on Saturday, July 28 despite the defense team’s plea for a week’s delay. The jury was taken back to their luxurious Sonesta Beach hotel to relax for the intervening days.

  Ted had some new motions. Again, he wanted Millard Farmer. Arguing that Farmer had extensive experience with death penalty cases, he asked Judge Cowart if—now that he’d been found guilty—he could have the Atlanta attorney beside him.

  “I’ve already ruled on that,” Cowart said tersely. “I consider the making of the motion a second time an effrontery to the court.”

  Ted wanted to bring a Florida prison inmate in to testify about the woefully inadequate prison law library system in an attempt to point out how much good Ted could do in upgrading the library if he could work there as a law clerk.

  The motion was denied but Cowart commented that Ted might have been a lawyer if he had not taken the path he had.

  Ted’s motion to delay was also unsuccessful.

  “That falls on totally deaf ears.” Cowart would not budge.

  Ted made a motion to plea bargain after the fact, citing that jury trials are unfair because a guilty verdict invariably results in the death penalty.

  It was too late. Ted had been offered a plea bargain back in May and he’d refused it.

  Judge Cowart was annoyed when Peggy Good said that the penalty phase would rob Ted of “due process.” As a Florida judge, he resented that state’s being constantly referred to by defense lawyers in America as “notorious.” (In actuality, many states now have bifurcated trials, including Washington, and there are arguments just as cogent to show that they can tend to save a defendant from the death penalty.)

  When the second phase of the trial began on Saturday morning, the state was remarkedly restrained. Carol DaRonch Swenson, a young matron now, was called to the witness stand. The jurors looked on with interest as the tall woman in white satin slacks and blouse sat silently in the witness chair. She was, quite possibly, the most striking of all the women they had seen in the courtroom during the month long trial, with her great pansy eyes and her mane of long dark hair.

  But Carol DaRonch Swenson never spoke a word. After a quick huddle between the opposing attorneys and a whispered word to the judge, she stepped down. The defense would stipulate to Ted’s conviction in February 1976 for her kidnapping in Utah in November 1974.

  Jerry Thompson, the Salt Lake County detective who had run Ted to earth that first time, took the stand instead of Carol and told of that case, offering a certified copy of Ted’s Utah conviction.

  Michael Fisher, the slender, intense Pitkin County investigator from Aspen, Colorado, who had taken up the chase in his state, was just as succinct, and more inscrutable. He told of taking Ted from Point-of-the-Mountain prison to the Pitkin County Jail. He too read a stipulated statement: “On January 15, 1978, that you [Bundy] were under a sentence of imprisonment by the state of Utah and that you have not been paroled or otherwise released from that sentence.”

  The escape was never mentioned. It was left to the jury to surmise that a man never “paroled or released” from a sentence must have walked away from jail of his own accord.

  There was so much that jury in Miami never heard. They knew nothing about all the dead and missing girls in Washington, nothing about the three dead girls in Utah, nothing about the five dead or missing girls in Colorado and nothing of the Pensacola fantasy tapes. Presumably, they did not know that the man before them was felt by many to be the most prolific mass killer in America.

  The prosecution had,
indeed, avoided any cries of overkill.

  And yet, the specter of the electric chair hovered in that courtroom, as surely as if it had been brought in and placed before the bench. Ted expected it, his attorneys expected it, and the public demanded it.

  Ted had a measure of forgiveness from one of the three women beaten into unconsciousness on the night of January 14-15, 1978. Kathy Kleiner DeShields said, “I feel sorry for him—he needs help—but what he did, there’s no way to compensate for that.”

  Karen Chandler felt differently. “Two people dear to me are dead because of him and I really think he should be too.”

  Tiny Eleanor Louise Cowell Bundy, trembling with anxiety, would take the stand to plead for her son’s life. This was her ideal child. This was the baby she had borne in shame, the little boy she had fought to keep with her, the young man in whom she had taken such overriding pride. He was to have been her vindication for everything. He was to have been perfect.

  She made a pitiable figure on the stand, fighting as all mothers will fight to save their young. Cowart was gentle with her, telling her, “Settle down, Mother. We haven’t lost a mother in a long time, so just don’t be nervous.”

  Louise Bundy told the jury about Ted and the other four children. “We tried to be very conscientious parents, ones who did things with our children, gave them the best we could on a middle-class income. But, mostly we wanted to give them lots of love.”

  Mrs. Bundy detailed Ted’s schooling, his boyhood jobs, his Asian studies, his political activities and his jobs with the Seattle Crime Commission and the Governor Evans campaign. She might have been a proud mother at a church social function, bragging about her boy, instead of sitting in front of a jury begging for his life.

  “I’ve always had a very special relationship with all my children. We tried to keep them all equal, but Ted, being the oldest, you might say was my pride and joy. Our relationship was always very special. We’d talk a lot together, and his brothers and sisters thought of him as just the top person in their lives, as we all do.”

  “Have you considered the possibility that Ted might be executed?” Peggy Good asked quietly.

  “Yes, I’ve considered that possibility. I had to—because of the existence of such in this state. I consider the death penalty itself to be the most primitive, barbaric thing that one human can impose on another. And I’ve always felt that way. It has nothing to do with what’s happened here. My Christian upbringing tells me that to take another’s life under any circumstances is wrong, and I don’t believe the state of Florida is above the laws of God. Ted can be very useful, in many ways—to many people—living. Gone from us would be like taking a part of all of us and throwing it away.”

  “And if Ted were to be confined, to spend the rest of his life in prison?”

  “Oh,” his mother answered. “Of course … yes.”

  For the first time in the long trial, Ted Bundy cried.

  There is little question that the jurors felt for Ted’s mother but they were not to be swayed, however, about their opinion of Ted himself. Larry Simpson voiced the unspoken thoughts in the courtroom as he finished his arguments for the death penalty.

  “The whole four to five weeks that we’ve been here in this courtroom has been for one reason. And that is because Theodore Robert Bundy took it upon himself to act as the judge, jury, and everybody else involved in this case and took the lives of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. That is what this case has been all about. They can stand before you and ask for mercy. How nice it would have been if Lisa Levy’s and Margaret Bowman’s mothers could have been there that morning of January 15, 1978, and asked for mercy for them.”

  Peggy Good argued that to kill Ted would be to admit that he could not be healed, Her argument that it was not a heinous crime was transparently specious. “One of the factors of the definition [of heinous crimes] is whether or not the victim suffered, whether there was torture or unnecessary cruelty to the victims. I believe you recall the testimony of Dr. Wood where he stated explicitly that both of these women were rendered unconscious by a blow to the head. They were sleeping. They felt no pain. They didn’t even know what was happening to them. It was not heinous, atrocious, or cruel because of the fact that they were not aware of impending death, they did not suffer, and there was no element of torture involved whatsoever as to the victims who died.”

  No one, of course, would ever—could ever—know if Lisa or Margaret had suffered or the degree of that suffering.

  The jury debated for one hour and forty minutes, and then returned with the expected verdict: the death penalty. Judge Cowart, who had already sentenced three murderers to the electric chair, could override that decision, should he choose to do so.

  The jury would say later that they had been split at one point with a six-six deadlock, a deadlock that had been broken after ten minutes of “prayer and meditation.”

  It was Ted’s own cold, unemotional demeanor in court that had cost him his life. When he had risen to cross-examine Ray Crew, the police officer, he had turned off many of the jurors. One commented that the decision had seemed “a mockery of our system.”

  On July 31, Ted had his day in court—unrestricted— speaking to Judge Cowart, making, not a plea for his life, but, instead, doing what he had told me he loved to do … “being a lawyer.”

  “I’m not asking for mercy, for I find it somewhat absurd to ask for mercy for something I did not do. In a way, this is my opening statement. What we’ve seen here is just the first round, second round, early round of a long battle, and I haven’t given up by any means. I believe if I’d been able to develop fully the evidence which supports my innocence— which indeed I think created a reasonable doubt—been able to have quality representation, I’m confident that I would have been acquitted, and, in the event I get a new trial, will be acquitted.

  “It wasn’t easy sitting through this trial for a number of reasons. But the main reason it was not easy in the early part of the case was the presentation of the state case on what took place in the Chi Omega House, the blood, the pictures, the bloodstained sheets. And to note the state was trying to find me responsible was not easy. And it was not easy, nor did I ignore the families of these young women. I do not know them. And I do not think it’s hypocritical of me, God knows, to say I sympathize with them, to the best I can. Nothing like this has ever happened to anyone close to me.

  “But I’m telling the court, and I’m telling those people close to the victims in this case: I’m not the one responsible for the acts in the Chi Omega House or Dunwoody Street. And I’ll tell the court I’m really not able to accept the verdict, because, although the verdict found in part that those crimes had been committed, they erred in finding who committed them.

  “And as a consequence I cannot accept the sentence even though one will be imposed and even though I realize the lawful way the court will impose it—because it is not a sentence of me. It is a sentence of someone else who is not standing here today. So I will be tortured for and receive the pain for that act … but I will not share the burden or the guilt.”

  Ted continued with a diatribe against the press: “It is sad but true that the media thrives on sensation and they thrive on evil and they thrive on things taken out of context.”

  And Ted, as always, could see the drama of his legal battles: “And now the burden is on this court. And I don’t envy you. The court is like a hydra right now. It’s been asked to dispense no mercy as the maniac at the Chi Omega House dispensed no mercy. It’s asked to consider this case as a man and a judge. And you’re asked also to render the wisdom of a god. It’s like some incredible Greek tragedy. It must have been written sometime and it must be one of those ancient Greek plays that portrays the three faces of man.”

  And so, at long last, there was no one left but Ted Bundy and Judge Edward Cowart. Antagonists, yes, but the two men had a kind of grudging admiration for one another. In another time and another place, and it might have all been so di
fferent.

  Never before had Cowart had such a literate, educated, wryly humorous defendant come before him. He, too, could see the waste of the roads not taken, and yet he had to do what he had to do. “It is ordered that you be put to death by a current of electricity, that that current be passed through your body until you are dead.”

  At that moment, it was clear that Cowart would have wished that things might have been different. He looked at Ted and said softly, “Take care of yourself, young man.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I say that to you sincerely. Take care of yourself. It’s a tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity that I’ve experienced in this courtroom. You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer, and I’d have loved to have you practice in front of me—but you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don’t have any animosity to you. I want you to know that.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Take care of yourself.”

  “Thank you.”

  I watched that scene, not from my seat in the press section, but in front of my television set at home in Seattle, and I felt the chilling incongruity of it as keenly as if I had been there. Judge Cowart had just sentenced Ted to die in the electric chair. There was no way Ted could “take care of himself.”

  49

  PEGGY GOOD had pleaded in vain for Ted Bundy’s life as the Miami trial neared its close, “The question and the choice is how to punish in this case. It is necessary that you consider the protection of society, but there are less drastic ways to consider the protection of society than taking another life. To recommend death in this case would be to admit failure with a human being. To recommend death is to confess the inability to heal, or to consider that there could be no healing.”

  I have been asked a hundred—a thousand—times what I truly believed about Ted Bundy’s guilt or innocence, and until now I have always demurred. Now, I would like to attempt to express my thoughts on what made Ted run.