The Stranger Beside Me

by Ann Rule

  The contract was ten pages long. And moot. I never had to sign it. In the last analysis, they didn’t need me to prove that Ted Bundy was sane and competent.

  The competency hearing proceeded in Orlando during the third week of October before U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp but without any testimony from Ted. Polly Nelson said that his current state of competency would be relevant only if a new trial should be ordered.

  Mike Minerva, one of Bundy’s earlier attorneys, testified that Ted had insisted on directing his own defense. Minerva stayed on to help him, tried to get psychiatric help for his client, and was rebuffed.

  “He said talking to most psychiatrists is no better than talking to truck drivers.”

  “Would you say Mr. Bundy was qualified to represent himself?” Jim Coleman asked.

  “No sir,” Minerva said evenly. “I would say he was not qualified to represent himself… He couldn’t do it. The amount of evidence was staggering. To try to conduct a defense in those two cases simultaneously, given the complexity and details, required a staff of lawyers with full access to investigators and law books. To do both from a jail cell with no investigator and no law books was impossible. No one could have done it.”

  A paradox. Minerva testifying for Bundy, who must have been an ultimately frustrating client. Ted had called Minerva incompetent because he wouldn’t allow Ted to call the shots. Now Minerva was trying to save him. Ted was in the courtroom in Orlando, listening. He wore a blue and white striped sports shirt and white pants. His wavy hair was close-cropped, but the short cut didn’t hide the gray hair that wasn’t there seven years earlier.

  The question of Ted’s competency would drag on for months. Testimony in December was more interesting. Donald R. Kennedy, an investigator for the public defender’s office, and former public defender Michael Coran testified that Ted had been drunk and otherwise compromised at the trial in the murder of Kimberly Leach! Ted had frequently used pills and alcohol during the trial, according to the witnesses. Kennedy said that the alcohol had been discovered in a juice can that had been “doctored up” and provided by Ted’s then fiancée, Carole Ann Boone.

  Coran said the juice cans with flip tops had been in the defense office. Kennedy testified that he had found “one or two pills in a bag of goodies” brought to Ted during trial.

  If Ted chose to cloud his mind with drugs and alcohol while he was on trial for his very life, he showed, at the least, a lack of judgment. One wonders why Carole Ann would help him do that.

  Assistant State Attorney Bob Dekle, who prosecuted Ted in 1980, differed with the defense team’s recall. “If there had been any doubt that Mr. Bundy was incompetent to stand trial, I would have made a motion to that effect.”

  Dekle told Judge Sharp that he had found Ted to be reasoned, articulate, and persuasive in presenting legal arguments and that he had carefully orchestrated defense efforts to sway the Leach jury.

  His wedding to Carole Ann in court wasn’t “crazy” at all. Dekle found it to be a failed attempt to gain sympathy from the jury.

  • • •

  Ted Bundy had the ability to pull new supporters continually to him, like so many rabbits out of a magician’s top hat. Art Norman, the forensic psychiatrist who spent countless hours with Ted in Florida, and who now practices in Oregon, commented to me in January 1989, “I have never encountered an individual who could move from one relationship to the next so easily, being seemingly deeply involved with someone, and then dropping them completely and moving on. “

  Norman hadn’t wanted to talk to Ted in the first place. The first time he met with Ted, the experience was so jolting that he went home and cried. His wife and family didn’t want him to be involved, but he finally agreed to work with Ted.

  Ted would often give Norman details of what were surely his crimes, but he would give no names of victims. Ted would say, “You guess.”

  Norman wouldn’t play the game with this prisoner, who was obsessed with Nazis and torture. “He was devastated for a week after seeing Friday the 13th,” Norman recalled. The slice-and-dice movie stimulated Ted to the point that he was almost out of control.

  Eventually, like all those Ted was close to, Art Norman pulled away.

  And now in December 1987 a new voice was heard from. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, 51, a professor at the New York University Medical Center, educated at Radcliffe and Yale, happened to be studying juveniles on Florida’s Death Row. She was asked by Bundy’s defense team to meet with him and evaluate him.

  Lewis testified that she had spent seven hours talking with Ted, had read “boxes” of legal and medical documents from his past, and had interviewed most of his relatives. She now had a diagnosis.

  Lewis felt that Ted was manic-depressive, subject to drastic mood swings. Another term for this disorder used in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM-III, the “bible” of psychiatrists) is “Bipolar Disorder.” Subjects can be “Bipolar Disorder, Mixed” (with periods of both elation and depression), “Bipolar Disorder, Manic” (with only the highs), or “Bipolar Disorder, Depressed” (with only the lows). Once thought to be a rare disorder, manic-depression is now rather widespread, and occurs with varying degrees of severity. Lithium is the drug of choice to treat manic-depression.

  Ted Bundy, to my knowledge, had never been adjudged manic-depressive before. Was he? I don’t know, but I doubt it.

  Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Charles Mutter disagreed with Dr. Lewis. “His arguments were brilliant. He is brilliant. He has defied and beaten three death warrants. Is that insanity?”

  Whether Dr. Lewis had diagnosed Ted’s mental disorder correctly or not, she did, however, present testimony that I found fascinating. Ted had told me about his grandfather, Sam Cowell of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This was the grandfather who Ted told me he thought was his father for much of the early part of his life. Ted and Louise, of course, lived with the elder Cowells, Sam and Eleanor, for the first four and a half years of his life.

  The grandfather-father Ted described to me at the Crisis Clinic so long ago was a Santa Claus kind of grandfather. Ted clearly adored him, or so he recalled him to me. When Louise brought Ted out to Tacoma in 1951, Ted said he had been torn away from Grandfather Sam, and he missed him terribly. Indeed, Ted also told Dr. Lewis that his grandfather was “wonderful and loving and giving,” and that all his memories were favorable.

  The Grandfather Sam that Dr. Lewis described after interviews with family members (not including Louise Bundy) was a volatile, maniacal man. Sam Cowell, a talented, workaholic landscaper, allegedly terrorized his family with temper tantrums.

  He was the sort of breadwinner whose homecomings sent his family scattering for shelter. He shouted and ranted and raved. His own brothers feared him, and reportedly muttered that somebody should kill him. His sister Virginia thought him “crazy.” Sam Cowell was described as a bigot who made Archie Bunker look liberal. He hated blacks, Italians, Catholics and Jews.

  And Cowell was sadistic with animals. He grabbed any cat that came near him and swung it by the tail. He kicked the family’s dogs until they howled in pain.

  A church deacon, Sam Cowell was said to have kept a large collection of pornography in his greenhouse. Some relatives said that Ted and a cousin sneaked in there to pore over the pulp magazines. Since Ted was only three or four, that may be a creative memory talking. Or it may be true.

  The picture emerging from Lewis’s testimony on Ted’s grandmother, Eleanor, was that of a timid, obedient wife. Sporadically, she was taken to hospitals to undergo shock treatment for depression. In the end, Grandma Eleanor stayed home, consumed with agoraphobia (fear of open places), afraid to leave her own four walls lest some unknown disaster should overtake her.

  There were three daughters born to this ill-matched pair. Louise was the eldest, and then Audrey, and, ten years later, Julia.

  This then had been the household where Ted Bundy spent his first, vital, formative years—the years when a child grows a conscience.
For fourteen years, I have wondered if there was not something more to know about Ted’s childhood, something beyond his illegitimate birth, beyond his mother’s deception (if, indeed, Ted was even telling me the truth about that), something traumatic back in Philadelphia. It finally spilled out in Dr. Lewis’s testimony in Orlando.

  When Louise Bundy discovered she was pregnant, seduced by that shadowy man whose real identity grows more blurred with every year that passes, she must have been terrified. More than most families in 1946, hers would not welcome a bastard grandchild.

  Her church failed her. She was ostracized by her Sunday school group. One can only imagine her father’s reaction. Her mother must have wept and crept still further into herself.

  Louise went off to Burlington, without her family, and gave birth to a husky baby boy.

  And then she went home, leaving Ted behind. Ted waited in the Elizabeth Lund Home for three months while his mother agonized over what she would do. Could she take him home to Philadelphia? Should she put him up for adoption? The nurturing, cuddling and the bonding, so necessary to an infant’s well-being, was put on hold.

  He was only a tiny baby, but I think he knew.

  It was not Louise Cowell Bundy’s fault. I have always maintained that she did the best she could. With the new information coming from Dr. Lewis’s testimony, it is obvious she did the best she could under horrendous circumstances. But she brought little Ted, a sensitive, brilliant little boy, into a household dependent on the whims of a tyrannical patriarch. The fact that Ted Bundy could never remember his grandfather as anything less than a kindly, wonderful man indicates, I think, just how frightened Ted was. He must have repressed all those emotions, virtually wiping out normal responses.

  He survived but I think his conscience died back then, a casualty of Ted’s flight from terror. Part of him closed off before he was five years old.

  Some of the relatives recall that Sam and Eleanor Cowell said they had adopted the baby boy in 1946. Adults in the family didn’t believe such a story. Eleanor was too ill to be cleared as an adoptive parent. They all knew the child was Louise’s, but no one talked of it aloud. That might well substantiate the story that Ted told me. He believed, at least for a time, that Sam and Eleanor were his parents. I know he did. He was so intense and disturbed when he said he never really knew who he was, or whom he belonged to.

  The fact that Ted was damaged early on comes out in a most telling incident that Dr. Lewis related in Ted’s December 1987 competency hearing. It occurred when Ted was three years old. His Aunt Julia, then about fifteen, awakened from a nap to find that her body was surrounded by knives. Someone had placed them around her as she slept. She wasn’t cut, but the glitter of the blades made Julia’s heart convulse.

  Julia recognized that the knives had come from the cutlery drawer in their kitchen, and she looked up to see her three-year-old nephew. The adorable, elfin Ted Bundy stood by her bed, grinning at her.

  Three years old.

  Thirty-eight years later, Ted sat in Judge Sharp’s courtroom and listened with equanimity as Dr. Lewis described his fearsome childhood. He was relaxed, even affable as he chatted with his attorneys. Next, prosecutors played a videotape of the courtroom rhetoric Ted employed in February 1980—after a jury had found him guilty of abducting and murdering twelve-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach. The younger Ted on the flickering screen seemed anything but crazy as he strutted before Judge Wallace Jopling in Orlando.

  “I was not convicted by the jury,” Ted argued. “A publicity-created symbol was convicted. I bear none of the onus. I bear none of the responsibility. I did not kill Kimberly Diane Leach.”

  Ted smiled slightly at his image. Despite how he blamed the media for metamorphosing him into a “symbol,” he’d already proven earlier in this day that he still loved the cameras. As he was led from jail to the security van that would take him to the Orlando courthouse, Ted had spotted the cameras. With a grin, he wheeled and nimbly turned a backward somersault into the waiting van.

  Judge Kendall Sharp, white-haired, jut-jawed, naval reserve, and no nonsense about him, ruled on Ted’s competency on December 17, 1987. Sharp was swift, impatient, and firm. Sharp was convinced that Ted had been “fully competent” during the Leach trial.

  “I consider that Mr. Bundy was one of the most intelligent, articulate, coherent defendants I have ever seen.”

  He added that Bundy was “a very self-assured individual who was well acquainted with legal procedures. … Whenever Bundy presented legal arguments, he did so cogently, logically, and coherently.”

  Sharp said this was never more true than in Ted’s arguments against the imposition of the death penalty on the last day of trial, February 12, 1980.

  • • •

  The tab was getting steeper. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth’s office computed the total bill for the state’s legal battles against Ted Bundy had reached $6 million!

  There was no end in sight. Judge Sharp could see appeals going on and on. “I could be seeing him for the rest of my life—or his.”

  It would be far more economical to keep Ted in prison than for the State of Florida to keep dashing through the mine fields of legal battles. It cost $33.70 a day to keep an inmate behind bars—including meals, laundry, prison maintenance, guard salaries, and other costs. If Ted, 41, should live to be 80, it would cost approximately $492,000 to keep him alive.

  The majority of the people of Florida seemed not to care. They wanted the state to enforce the death penalty, whatever it might cost.

  Thirty days after Judge Sharp’s ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his decision that Ted was competent during the Kimberly Leach trial.

  And then began a strangely quiet year. Legal maneuverings were surely taking place, but not in the headlines. It was easy not to think about Ted Bundy.

  Bob Keppel thought about him. Indeed, Keppel flew to Florida and had a second meeting with Ted in February of 1988. Reporters never picked up on that.

  Their dialogue and correspondence continued.

  One person who thought about Ted continually, obsessively perhaps, was Eleanore Rose, Denise Naslund’s mother. Eleanore could not bury her daughter in the pink casket she had purchased back in 1974. Denise’s remains were still lost.

  She had been allowed to “borrow” Denise’s bones in 1974 to place them in the casket for a religious memorial service. But they had to be returned to the police evidence area, and now they were gone.

  In December 1987 Mrs. Rose and other family members won an unspecified amount in damages in an out-of-court settlement from the county over the loss of Denise’s remains. Shortly after that, officials at Yarrington’s Funeral Home in West Seattle suggested that Eleanore might want to think about burying the casket. They had stored it for thirteen years.

  Rose, 50, looked two decades older. She seemed to survive on the need to avenge Denise’s death. Nothing more.

  On March 30, 1988, Eleanore placed a collection of mementos into the pink coffin: Denise’s favorite floral print dress, a poem, a pink silk rose, photographs of Eleanore and Denise, a rosary, a crucifix and a note,

  Dear Denise,

  God forgive them for what they have done. I love you.

  She didn’t say he. She said they. Eleanore did not explain what she meant to reporters. A short item appeared under “Paid Notices: Funerals” in the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer.

  DENISE MARIE NASLUND

  Final memorial service will be Wednesday, March 30th, 2 P.M., graveside committal at Forest Lawn Cemetery, West Seattle. Denise died July 14, 1974. Her remains were recovered the following September. Rosary and Mass of Christian Burial were celebrated October 10, 1974, at Holy Family Church. She is the daughter of Eleanore and Robert Naslund; sister of Brock Naslund; granddaughter of Olga Hansen, all Seattle. Arrangements, YARRINGTON’S FUNERAL HOME

  I went back to Florida for the first time in many years in July 1988. I was on a promotion tour for my book Small Sacrifi
ces. Eight years had passed since I’d been in Miami and Tampa-St. Petersburg. Although interviewers wanted to talk about Diane Downs, the murderess in Small Sacrifices, they never failed to ask questions about Ted Bundy. Odd, somehow, that his impact had faded in the Northwest while he was a living, breathing reality in Florida.

  In Orlando, the site of the Leach trial in 1980, I appeared in a bizarre early morning show: the “Q-Zoo.” It was a radio station where the show consisted of a disc jockey playing records and greeting guests. It was the definitive “wild and wacky” radio show. Fairly standard, except that the entire program was televised at the same time it was broadcast over radio.

  This was the station that had popularized the sound of frying bacon sizzling, to remind listeners that Bundy should “fry.” An entire cassette caddy was filled with Bundy parodies. While I was the morning guest, the host dedicated songs to Ted. I wondered if he was listening. He might well have been. We were not that far from Raiford Prison.

  Once again, just as he had been in Colorado, Ted Bundy was a macabre kind of folk hero—or antihero. It may have been that his crimes were so heinous that no one could bear to stop and reflect on their reality.

  And so they laughed.

  I could never see anything funny about what Ted had done. The best I’d ever been able to muster was to occasionally see the black irony in his saga. But here in Orlando, on July 19, 1988, the sun already beating hot on the pavement at 8 A.M., the radio blasted out, “Hang down your head, Ted Bundy/Hang down your head and cry/Hang down your head, Ted Bundy/Poor boy, you’re bound to die …”

  Part of me wanted to lean toward the microphone and say, “Ted, this isn’t me playing this song. I just happen to be here to plug my book.”

  I said nothing. Being a Bundy biographer meant having to listen to sick Bundy jokes.

  Throughout the summer and fall of 1988, there were short little columns of information on Ted. Mostly the headlines began, “Bundy Loses an Appeal …”