by Ann Rule
Perhaps the emotional agony she went through in July 1986, counting down the hours until her husband would die, was too much to go through again. Perhaps the glamour of being the infamous defendant’s special woman faded to ashes as Carole Ann must have realized that Ted was never going to walk free. Possibly life in Gainesville, Florida, with little money, a toddler, and a teenager to support, surrounded by palpable hatred for her husband, was all too gritty and real.
How many people did Ted Bundy write to? I would guess thousands. A hundred or more people wrote or called me for his address. More often they must have simply written to him in care of Raiford Prison.
One very, very important correspondent was a man who was once anathema to Ted Bundy. And yet it was inevitable that they should come together at some point. Bob Keppel had published the definitive book on an area that interested Ted mightily: Serial Murder—Future Implications for Police Investigations. Ted had written to Keppel in 1984 to offer himself as a consultant in the Green River Murder Case. It was so typical of Ted’s manipulation that he said he might offer to help the Task Force when he wrote to me in 1986. He had been in touch with Keppel for two years by then. Later, Bob Keppel told me that he welcomed Ted’s Green River advice. It gave the Washington detective an opening to talk to Ted. If they began talking of Green River, they might also talk about the unsolved cases attributed to Ted Bundy.
Although I suspected that Ted and Bob Keppel were in touch with each other in 1986, I wasn’t sure. These two men had never met during Keppel’s determined investigation into the “Ted” murders. They had met first in November 1984 in Raiford Prison, and they would meet again. Keppel, the intellectual detective, and Bundy, the intellectual serial killer, were engaged in dialogue. Keppel had been deemed worthy, and Ted was giving his theories to him. I had heard rumors, but I never asked Bob Keppel directly. If he was to get a confession—or a series of confessions—out of Ted Bundy, it was going to be a delicate game, and one that Keppel needed time and discretion to carry out.
Bob Keppel and I occasionally had lunch, and infrequently I interviewed him for articles about other cases. There were subtle, tantalizing references to Ted, but I didn’t pursue them because I could sense the inscrutable Keppel would clam up. After two decades as a crime writer, I had long since learned to wait until detectives were ready to talk.
And Keppel was not yet ready.
While Bob Keppel cautiously established some tenuous rapport with Ted Bundy, the legal mechanisms ground on. It could well be that Keppel might finally come to a place where Ted would talk frankly to him about the Northwest murders, and, even more important, the Northwest disappearances—only to run out of time. And yet Keppel knew that Bundy could not be rushed. Anyone who wanted to talk with him must not appear too eager for information. Ted had to call the shots, as galling as that might be for those who waited.
On October 21, 1986, Governor Graham signed Ted’s third death warrant, setting the next execution date for November 18th for the murder of Kimberly Leach. But three federal appellate judges made it clear on October 23 that Ted would get another hearing in federal court on the Chi Omega case. The three-judge panel said that Judge William Zloch had erred in not reviewing the Bundy trial record before making his decision the previous July to deny the petition of Ted’s attorneys. They also told Florida Assistant Attorney General Gregory Costas that he should have asked Zloch to accept the trial record before issuing an opinion.
“I can’t understand your behavior,” chided Judge Robert Vance. “This case is going to be reversed and sent down there because of a stupid error. If you had called it to the attention of the judge at the time, it could have been corrected in four days. It’s wrong. It’s clearly wrong counsel. It’s not arguable by an attorney of integrity.”
That period in July had been wild. Polly Nelson and Jim Coleman had spent consecutive nights without sleep, racing the clock set by Ted’s pending death warrant. Zloch, who was considering his first capital punishment appeal since becoming a federal judge in January, had rejected the six-month stay, and then had also dismissed Ted’s petitions without hearing arguments from attorneys on the issues involved. The trial record remained in the trunk of Greg Costas’s car.
Costas was shaken by the vehemence of his verbal lambasting by the three-judge panel, and later the judges softened a bit. Vance explained he was simply frustrated by the morass of mistakes he’d seen. “Maybe the Court has been a little too harsh on you personally, Counsel.”
It was becoming a merry-go-round. When Ted managed to get stays on the Chi Omega murders, some legal experts said he could not then be executed in the Kimberly Leach murder. Conversely, he would next manage to get a stay on the Leach death warrant, and there was the question of electrocuting him for the sorority murders.
He might be able to continue this legal balancing act until he was an old man.
Ted didn’t die in November 1986 either. Less than seven hours before he was to be executed, the 11th Circuit Court ordered a stay. The Florida attorney general’s office asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule that decision, but all the legal jargon really meant only that there would be another delay of many months. Ted’s attorneys had now filed eighteen different appeals over his two murder convictions in Florida. The appeals were reportedly being paid for by a Washington, D.C., law firm. The State of Florida, however, had to pay to argue against all those appeals and delays, and the tab was running into the millions.
Florida residents were getting restless. Reader boards read, “Fry Ted Bundy,” and “I’ll Buckle Up When Bundy Does.” Disc jockeys played parodies about Ted: “Bye, Bye, Bundy, Bye Byeee!” and “I Left My Life in Raiford Prison.” Carole Ann Boone had left her husband in Raiford Prison. Very quietly, she had left town. She was not there with Ted as he awaited death on November 18. The official reason given to the press was that Carole Ann had left six weeks earlier for Everett, Washington, to visit a sick relative. It would seem that her relative must have been in extremis for Carole Ann to opt for that visit rather than stand by her man as he waited for the third time to die.
Perhaps her reason for leaving Florida was illness in the family. But she never came back.
Initially, the November 18 date didn’t seem as threatening as the July date had been, even though Ted was coming uncomfortably close to his slow walk to the electric chair. The public was simply getting used to Ted Bundy’s execution dates. Maybe Ted was too.
Vernon Bradford, spokesman for Florida’s state corrections department, said that Ted “began the day in a very good mood.” He watched television, and listened to a radio placed at his cell door, the holding cell just thirty paces from the death chamber. “He was confident.”
Ted betrayed no fear at all. Rather, witnesses said, “He was mad, incensed—but he didn’t seem scared. It was as if he was outraged that anyone could do this to the Ted Bundy. …”
Maybe everyone involved, including Ted, knew that it was far from over. He seemed to consider the preparations for executions as a charade, an inconvenience, and a deliberate humiliation.
As the long Tuesday dragged by, Ted’s confidence slipped, and he got angrier and more agitated. But when one of his new wave of friends, John Tanner, a Florida criminal defense attorney and spiritual counselor to Ted, visited him that night, he found Ted calm. “There was a peace about him. …”
Ted knew he wasn’t going to die.
Back in Seattle, I wasn’t as comfortable about Ted’s escape hatch as he apparently was. CBS Morning News called to say they had a limousine waiting to rush me to the Seattle affiliate station, KIRO. They wanted to interview me at 7 A.M. if Ted was executed. At 1 A.M., they called to say the execution was off.
I was vastly relieved. I would not have stopped the execution if I could have. But I was quite willing to have it postponed, accepting only vaguely that, when the time really came (if it ever did), I would have emotions yet unfathomable to deal with.
In November 1986 the pressure was off again.
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The spring of 1987 brought a small rash of articles about Ted. Millard Farmer, of the Atlanta defense team, speaking in Portland, Oregon, at the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, discussed the Bundy case with an Oregonian reporter.
“Either Bundy didn’t commit the crimes or he’s suffering from one of the deepest mental illnesses I’ve ever seen,” Farmer said.
Farmer said it was relatively common for the mentally ill to receive death sentences in the “Old South.” Farmer also blasted the media in the courtroom. “[Television] makes clowns out of the lawyers, jesters out of the judges, and injustice out of the proceedings.”
Farmer said that the judges and witnesses in the Chi Omega trial had preened before going into court and would rush to the pressroom on the ninth floor of the Metro Justice Building in Miami to see how they looked on television.
That wasn’t true. I was there on that ninth floor in the summer of 1979, and Millard Farmer was not there—at least, I never saw him. Nor did I ever see a judge or a lawyer there with us on the press floor looking at television. One time I saw Larry Simpson, for the state, comb his hair before his opening argument. But he wasn’t “preening.”
Ted’s correspondents continued to flood the Raiford Prison mailroom with letters for him. In April 1987, the Associated Press reported that Ted and John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of President Reagan and White House press secretary James Brady, had exchanged a number of letters! Hinckley had written to Ted to “express sorrow” about “the awkward position you must be in.”
The pen pal arrangement was enough to cancel a proposed furlough for Hinckley, who had also written to Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. Fromme had allegedly asked him to write to Charles Manson. Hinckley reportedly declined to write to Manson, but had gone so far as to obtain Manson’s address.
I have always considered that John Hinckley was legally and medically insane. In the years since I wrote the first draft of this book where I stated that I thought Ted Bundy was insane, my subsequent research and enlightenment have convinced me that Ted was never psychotic.
But how Ted would have relished his correspondence with John Hinckley. It would have given him a chance to explore his own studies of the criminal mind, and I am sure he thought his “credentials” as an expert on multiple and serial murder would be greatly enhanced by any inside track to Hinckley.
But there was more. Ted’s research into the reasons behind serial murder was fueled, I think, by his own desperate need to figure out what was wrong with himself. He knew full well he was not insane, but he also sensed there was something deeply aberrant in his actions, although he didn’t know what—or why.
One thing is clear. Ted never wrote to anyone or granted interviews to anyone without having reasons, payoffs, or hidden agendas.
By the summer of 1987 Ted Bundy was no longer front page news in Northwest papers, except during the week preceding each new execution date. The Green River Killer had supplanted Ted.
On July 7, 1987, an old picture of Ted appeared in the “Local/Region” section of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The article suggested that Ted would be around for years, possibly for decades.
“He is really in the infancy of his litigation,” Carolyn Snurkowski, chief of criminal appeals for the Florida attorney general, explained. She estimated that Ted was probably no more than one third of the way along the route to conclusion! If that were to be translated into time in direct proportion, then Ted, who had already survived eight years beyond his first sentences of death, would live sixteen more years, until he was fifty-seven years old.
That formula was probably simplistic. But then …
Governor Bob Graham had been defeated in his bid for re-election, and Ted Bundy’s name—and continuing survival—were subjects raised often in both the gubernatorial and attorney general races in Florida. If Graham couldn’t seem to sign a death warrant that would stick, perhaps his successor, Bob Martinez, could.
Just four of the hundreds of prisoners on Florida’s Death Row had survived three death warrants. Sixteen men had been executed since 1979. There was no other prisoner who evoked rage and frustration in the citizens of Florida the way Bundy did. For many of them, he was no longer a human being. He was a cause.
The first day of August 1987 brought sad news to all of us who covered Ted’s Miami trial. With bleakly ironic timing, Judge Edward Douglas Cowart, 62, suffered a heart attack exactly eight years and one day after he had sentenced Ted Bundy to die for the Chi Omega murders.
On July 31, 1979, Judge Cowart had told Ted to “take care of yourself.”
On Saturday, August 1, 1987, Judge Gerald Wetherington, who succeeded Cowart as chief judge of the 11th Judicial Circuit in 1981, called Cowart to discuss some routine court business, and found him in good health and great spirits.
Ed Cowart then went out to work in his yard. Overheated, he came in for some cold water and suffered chest pains. His family took him to Coral Reef Hospital, more as a precaution than anything. The husky Cowart was first put into intensive care, but was then moved to a private room. It seemed that nothing was seriously wrong. Tests were scheduled for Monday morning.
But Ed Cowart died suddenly Sunday night of a massive heart attack.
His death was a tremendous professional—and personal—loss to the judicial system of southern Florida. Flags flew at half-mast outside the Metro Justice Building on Monday morning as coworkers whispered the sad news that spread like wildfire throughout the building.
Judges cried along with secretaries and bailiffs. Ed Cowart was the kind of a judge who always tempered hard justice with his personal compassion. When he’d had to send a policeman to jail for perjury, bribery, and weapons convictions, he’d granted the rogue cop a two-week delay before starting his sentence because the man had promised his little girl he’d take her to Disneyland.
Cowart’s “May God have mercy on your soul” admonitions to condemned killers always sounded as sincere as a preacher’s sermon on Sunday morning. I can still hear him saying, “Bless your heart,” to Ted and the attorneys from both sides of that trial ten years ago.
He was a good man.
Cowart left his wife of forty-one years, Elizabeth, and two daughters, Susan and Patricia.
Judge Cowart, who had no history of illness, was dead. Ted Bundy, who had had his life threatened for eight years, was alive and well.
And liable to stay that way.
A new legal fight was about to begin. James Coleman and Polly Nelson had hinted for some time that they might attack the verdicts from the angle of Ted’s mental competency. It now looked as if that would be the new thrust in this long process.
It made some kind of sense when they said it out loud. Ted Bundy couldn’t have had fair trials became he wasn’t in his right mind as they were going on.
That was the next campaign to keep Ted from the electric chair. While Polly Nelson and Jim Coleman put forth their theories that Ted had been incompetent during the Kimberly Leach trial, the Florida Attorney General’s Office prepared to argue for the other side. They felt Ted had been sane, competent, and capable throughout all his trials. Indeed, he had served as his own attorney, defending himself in the Miami trial. He had managed to legally marry Carole Ann Boone during the Orlando trial. He had seemed sane.
Early in October 1987, I received a call from the Florida Attorney General’s Office. Assistant Attorney Generals Kurt Barch and Mark Minser asked if I would consent to being an expert witness for the State of Florida in the matter of Ted Bundy’s competency at the time of his trials in 1979 and 1980.
I thought back to the time in 1976 when Ted weighed the possibility of having me testify as a character witness for him. I could not have done that, and luckily, he chose to ask someone else. Now, I was being sought by the other side. Competency is always a dicey judgment call. Even a psychiatrist cannot truly say what was in the mind of a killer at the moment of a crime, or during a trial. It was true that I had been in continual con
tact with Ted from September 1975 through the Miami trial—a vital four-year period. And I had known him for years before that. The last time I had actually talked with him in any depth was, of course, his collect phone call to me in late June/early July of 1979. His mind was clicking along as smoothly as computer software at that point. And, watching him in trial, I had seen a man in exquisite control.
I could testify to my perceptions. That was all.
I had to say yes. If Ted was deemed “retroactively” incompetent, the Kimberly Leach verdict, and possibly the Chi Omega verdicts, would probably be voided, and new trials ordered. There would be a very real threat that Ted Bundy could work his way back through all his legal thickets, back to Colorado where the state had rather “iffy” physical evidence in the Caryn Campbell murder case, and possibly even back to Utah. If his attorneys were skilled enough, and if luck was with Ted, he might find himself at Point-of-the-Mountain again, with only the sentence of the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch to serve out. Incredible as it seemed, Ted’s life and times in the court systems of America had proved to be almost mythic. He was alive still, and that alone suggested he might be eerily indestructible.
I agreed to testify in Florida in Ted’s competency hearing. At that moment, I realized that I would have to be in the same courtroom with Ted as I told a judge that he should not be allowed to avoid penalty for his crimes because I believed him competent. What an unsettling thought that was. Ted would be furious, but then he had been angry at me before. My value to the team was, essentially, that I had known him when. I had no choice.
I received the contract from the Florida Department of Legal Affairs. It asked me to appear on my birthday: October 22, 1987.
WHEREAS
The Department is representing the Department of Corrections (Richard L. Dugger) in the case of Bundy v. Dugger and requires expert services for assessing Theodore Bundy’s competence at the time of his trial and providing expert testimony at trial, and Ms. Ann Rule is willing and able to provide needed testimony in this regard, now therefore the parties agree as follows.…