Old Sparky

by Anthony Galvin

  Yet he stalked and hunted women as a hobby, killing at least thirty and maybe up to a hundred. His smiling face showed that evil can wear a mask of banal ordinariness. As he chillingly said of himself: “I am the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.”

  But monster though he was, he cried like a baby on the eve of his execution and could not face his final meal.

  Theodore Robert Cowell was born on November 24, 1946 to Eleanor Louise Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers at Burlington, Vermont. His father is unknown—but might have been Eleanor’s abusive father. Eleanor’s parents raised Ted as their own son, to avoid the stigma of admitting that their daughter had produced a bastard. It was many years before Ted realized his true parentage.

  Samuel Cowell, whom Ted thought was his father, was a tyrannical bully who injured animals and beat his family members regularly, once throwing one of his daughters down the stairs. He was a racist and bigot, a perfect role model for a future serial killer. From an early age Ted showed signs of abnormality. One family member recalled waking up from a nap to find herself surrounded by knives, while three-year-old Ted smiled down at her.

  When Ted was five, his real mother married Johnny Bundy. But Ted and his adoptive father failed to bond, despite Johnny’s best efforts. Ted was a bit of a loner in high school but did not noticeably stand out. He was caught a few times for burglary and enjoyed peeping into uncurtained bedrooms. He was developing an obsession with dead and mutilated bodies.

  After a year at the University of Puget Sound, Bundy transferred to the University of Washington where he studied Chinese. But he dropped out in 1968. He seemed immature and unambitious, and an early girlfriend dumped him for this reason. In 1969 he began a relationship with divorcée Elizabeth Kloepfer from Utah, who worked as a secretary at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He re-enrolled in college, this time as a psychology major. He even worked on a suicide help hotline. Ann Rule, a writer who knew him at the time, said he was “kind, solicitous, and empathetic.”

  He switched to studying law and seemed to be getting his life on track. Along with his relationship with Ms. Kloepfer, he began to date the woman who had rejected him a few years previously. He juggled the two relationships without either woman realizing she was not the only one in his life. Then he ditched the woman who had ditched him, just to prove to himself that he could do it. In 1974, he began to skip classes. And women began to disappear. Ted Bundy had found his true calling.

  According to his own testimony, Bundy had attempted his first kidnapping in 1969 and his first murder a few years later. But his accounts varied. He told one investigator he killed two women in Atlantic City in 1969, while another investigator was told he waited until 1971 in Seattle. No one knows for sure, and investigators suspect he may have begun killing in his teens. Eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr of Tacoma disappeared when Ted was fourteen and living in that town.

  It is known that he began a kidnapping and killing spree early in 1974. It began when he broke into the basement apartment of eighteen-year-old Karen Sparks and beat her unconscious before raping her. She survived, but with permanent brain damage. From then on, female college students began disappearing at the rate of roughly one a month. The only thing they had in common was that they were young, white, and had their hair parted in the middle.

  As authorities grew increasingly concerned, Bundy began to work at the Washington State Department of Emergency Services in Olympia, the government agency involved in tracing the missing women and tracking him down. He began to date Carole Ann Boone, a twice-divorced mother of two, as fear grew in the local community.

  The Pacific Northwest murders climaxed on Sunday, July 14, when two women were abducted in broad daylight at a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park, twenty miles from Seattle. A good-looking young man in tennis whites, with his arm in a sling, had introduced himself to the women as Ted, and asked for their help to unhitch a boat from his car. He approached many women that day and most refused to go back to his car. But two did. The two women were abducted four hours apart. He kept the first woman alive and forced her to watch as he murdered the second. He then killed the first.

  It had been a risky thing to do, and many witnesses at the beach gave detailed descriptions, both of the man and his Volkswagen car. A number of people came forward to identify the subsequent police mug shot as Ted Bundy, but investigators did not believe the clean-cut and well-adjusted young law student could be their killer, so he was not detained.

  In August 1974 Bundy moved to the University of Utah Law School, relocating to Salt Lake City and leaving his divorced girlfriend in Seattle. He remained in touch but dated many other women as well. The only fly in the ointment was that he was struggling with his course work, finding the intricacies of the law baffling. However, he had his hobbies …

  A string of unexplained murders began in September, with women disappearing every three or four weeks. The murders were never linked to Bundy—until he confessed to them on the eve of his execution.

  However, there were suspicions. Elizabeth Kloepfer, the girlfriend he had left behind in Seattle, phoned police to remind them that she had identified him as a suspect in the earlier Pacific North West murders. This time she was interviewed in detail, as Bundy began to rise in the list of suspects. But there was nothing beyond suspicion to link him to the disappearances and murders.

  In 1975 Bundy began to concentrate on Colorado and women began to disappear in that state. He refined his MO, using crutches and pretending to be injured to present a less threatening face to potential victims.

  Meanwhile cops in Washington had hit a dead end in their investigation of the string of disappearances, which had ended as suddenly as they began. So they tried an innovative new method. They commandeered the King County payroll computer and inputted the many data lists they had compiled—lists of acquaintances of the victims, Volkswagen owners, sex offenders, and so on. Out of the thousands of names, twenty-six showed up on four separate lists. One of the twenty-six was Ted Bundy. Detectives also manually compiled a list of their hundred hot suspects—and Bundy featured there as well.

  But before they could make their move, Bundy was stopped at a routine checkpoint in Utah. The Highway Patrol officer noticed the front seat of Bundy’s Volkswagen was missing, so he searched the car and found handcuffs, ski masks, trash bags, and a full burglary kit. Bundy’s apartment was also tossed, but the investigators overlooked a stash of Polaroids Bundy had taken of his victims. They did not have enough to hold him, but the net was closing. Bundy was placed under twenty-four hour surveillance as Washington cops flew in to interview Kloepfer once more.

  Eventually a forensic examination of Bundy’s car uncovered hairs that matched with some of his victims. There was still too little evidence for a murder charge, but on February 23, 1976, Bundy went on trial for the attempted abduction of Carol DaRonch, a victim who had managed to escape his clutches. He was sentenced to one to fifteen years in Utah State Prison. He immediately began to plan his escape but was transferred to Colorado to face a murder charge before he got his opportunity.

  But on June 7, 1977, his chance came. As he was representing himself on the murder charge, he was not handcuffed in court. During a preliminary hearing at Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, he went to the law library during a recess and jumped through a second-story window. He sprained an ankle but got away. Six days later he was recaptured. But the trial was going his way; he was winning the pretrial motions, and the scant evidence was being thrown out as inadmissible. The prosecutors were getting worried. Bundy stood a good chance of acquittal if he could just remain calm and let the process grind to a conclusion. Instead, he made another break for freedom.

  After months of sawing with a smuggled hacksaw blade, he cut a hole in the roof of his cell and wriggled into the crawlspace in the ceiling. Now he had his escape route. He waited until a few days after Christmas, when most of the staff were on holiday, then disappeared
through the crawlspace. He dropped through the ceiling of the apartment of the chief jailer—who was out with his wife that evening—stole a set of clothes, and walked out the front door. By the time his escape was discovered, he was in Chicago.

  He stole a car and arrived in Tallahassee, Florida, and on January 8, rented a room at a boarding house near Florida State University. It took him only a week to return to his psychopathic ways. He bludgeoned and sexually assaulted four young women in a fifteen-minute orgy of violence that horrified the community. Two survived; two died. And in early February he killed again. A few days after that he fled Tallahassee, but three days later he was stopped in a stolen car. After a brief struggle he was arrested. The arresting officer had no idea he had captured one of the FBI’s Most Wanted.

  The trial was back on, with the two Florida murders substituted for the Colorado indictments. This time Bundy was not going to get off the hook so easily. The eyes of the world were on him now—250 reporters from five continents were in attendance, and it was the first trial to be televised nationally. Once more, Bundy chose to handle his own defense. But he had a strange notion of what a criminal defense involved. He focused on grandiose gestures and bluster, rejecting a more low-key and sensible approach. He was offered a deal: plead guilty to three homicides and get a seventy-five year sentence. The death penalty was off the table. But Bundy couldn’t bring himself to take the deal. It would mean pleading guilty before the whole world. So he fought the charges instead. The prosecution case was weak, but stronger than it had been in Colorado.

  The jury took only seven hours to convict Bundy on two counts of murder, three of attempted murder, and two of burglary. He was sentenced to death on the murder charges. Six months later he was convicted of another murder, picking up a third death sentence.

  In medieval and early modern times the gap between sentence and execution could be as short as a few hours. It still is in China. But in the United States the gap can be several years, as a lengthy appeals process is gone through. Bundy had several years to contemplate what he had done. During this time he began to open up to various interviewers, and a frightening picture emerged. He loved the idea of possession—especially of possessing things he should not have. So he shoplifted compulsively and enjoyed stealing cars. Rape was an act of possession, and he said that he began killing women as a matter of expediency—leave no witnesses. But then he discovered he enjoyed killing women.

  “The ultimate possession was the taking of a life. And then the physical possession of the remains,” he told Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth (Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer). He also revealed that he enjoyed using the decomposing bodies of his victims as sexual toys, often visiting the remote disposal sites days or weeks after the murder. He also hacked off the heads and kept them as souvenirs.

  The execution was set for March 4, 1986, but then put back to July 2. However, fifteen hours before sentence was to be carried out, it was postponed indefinitely as the full case was reassessed. One question that was being considered was whether Bundy had the mental capacity to be tried. Eventually the sentence was put back more than three years, being rescheduled for January 24, 1989. This might seem slow, but in terms of the normal appeals process and the legal minefield surrounding it, it was actually very fast. Facing the end of the road, Bundy began to talk more freely to investigators, admitting to the Pacific North West murders and a number of other ones he had not been connected with. He also confessed to murders in Idaho, Utah, and Colorado. Some of his confessions may have been fabricated to buy more time, but it became obvious that he had killed at least thirty women. The total may well be over a hundred. There was a move to get the families of potential victims to petition for a stay of execution to allow Bundy to reveal more details of his crimes, but the families refused to cooperate. There would be no further stays.

  Bundy thought of one last ploy; suicide would deny prosecutors the satisfaction of seeing him fry. He spoke of it the night before his execution. But death row prisoners are monitored carefully to prevent them taking their own lives. He had no option but to face the chair. He was somber and depressed. Fred Lawrence, a Methodist minister from Gainesville, spent the night with Bundy, and the two men prayed together. Outside the gates of the prison a large crowd had gathered. This is common. Executions are no longer public events, but they generate huge public interest. Normally the crowd holds a candlelit vigil protesting what they see as state-sanctioned murder. Not this time. Five hundred people had gathered to celebrate the death of the man they regarded as a monster.

  On the morning of January 24, 1989, Bundy was woken early and offered a last meal of his choice. But he turned this down. Instead the prison kitchen prepared the traditional fare given to condemned men with no special requests. He was presented with a medium-rare steak, eggs over easy, hash browns, and toast with butter and jelly. This was washed down with milk, coffee, and juice. But Bundy had lost his bravado. He couldn’t face the meal and didn’t eat any of it.

  A little before seven o’clock in the morning, two guards led the ashen-faced prisoner into the death chamber. They strapped his chest and limbs to the shiny wooden chair. Bundy scanned the window to the witness room, looking for familiar faces. There were forty-two people crowded into the room and very few friendly faces. He recognized some of his prosecutors and gave a small nod in their direction. He appeared to be mumbling, and then he bowed his head. His head, shaven for the electrodes, glistened with the gel that had been applied to conduct the current.

  Superintendent Tom Barton bent down and asked Bundy if he had any last words. The killer hesitated for a moment, and when he spoke his voice wavered. Looking at one of his lawyers, Jim Coleman, and at the Methodist minister who had spent the previous night with him, he said, “Jim and Fred, I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”

  The two men nodded. Then the final strap was secured across Bundy’s mouth and chin and the metal skullcap was bolted into place. The black veil fell across the front of Bundy’s face, and Barton signaled that it was time. An unnamed officer pushed the button, and 2,000 volts coursed through Bundy’s body. Through the window, the witnesses saw his body tense and his hands clench on the arms of the chair. A small puff of smoke rose from his right leg, where the second electrode was located.

  After a minute the current was switched off, and Bundy’s body immediately relaxed and went limp. A paramedic walked up and pulled open his shirt, listening for a heartbeat. A second shone a light into his eyes. Both men nodded. The job was done.

  It didn’t take long for word to get out, and at the gates of the prison a cheer welled up, as some in the crowd began to chant: “Burn, burn, burn!” Others sang and hugged and banged on pans and pots.

  “I wish I could have been the one flipping the switch,” said Florida police officer David Hoar. Police chief Jim Sewell was more reflective: “Regardless of what Bundy did, he was still a human being.”

  A number of hours later, a white hearse bearing Bundy’s remains left the prison, and those who were still outside the gates cheered once more. Bundy was cremated in Gainesville, and his remains were scattered at an undisclosed location on the Cascade Mountains of Washington State as he had requested.

  The Boogey Man had been banished.

  ANNA MARIA HAHN THE BLONDE BORGIA

  Often dubbed angels of mercy, there is a breed of serial killer who preys on the elderly and vulnerable, often posing as a friend or caregiver of their victim. Some are motivated by the desire to be at the center of drama or have a God complex, while others are motivated by nothing but greed. They see the elderly as easy sources of income.

  Anna Marie Hahn was the latter. She had a gambling problem and murder gave her the bucks to pay her bills. A German-American, she became notorious as the Blonde Borgia and Arsenic Anna. She showed no mercy for her elderly victims but begged for mercy before the switch was thrown at her execution.

  Anna Filser, the youngest of twelve children, was bor
n in Bavaria in 1906, but the family sent her to America in disgrace when she gave birth to an illegitimate son at the age of twenty-three. Anna stayed with relatives in Cincinnati and quickly married fellow German immigrant Philip Hahn. She found a job at a telephone exchange alongside him but soon grew bored of the hours and quit. The couple opened two delicatessens, but she grew bored of these too. There were three mysterious fires, resulting in three successful insurance claims. Anna was beginning to find ways of making money the easy way.

  She desperately needed more though and hit on the ingenious method of taking out a large insurance policy on her husband. He fought her on this—perhaps remembering the mysterious fires—but was suddenly struck ill and rushed to the hospital. Doctors barely managed to save his life, which denied Anna her payout. It is not known whether the incident aroused the suspicions of Philip Hahn, but when he got out of hospital he also got out of the marriage.

  It was the middle of the Depression, money was tight, and Anna had to support herself and feed her son. She also had a severe gambling problem. In an effort to make more money she began betting on the racetracks, but was not successful. She needed a way of making money and decided that she would take care of elderly men as a paid companion and live-in aide.

  She chose her prey from within the tight German-American community. She began by befriending Ernest Kohler. She became indispensable to the elderly neighbor. Like all those who knew him, she seemed devastated when he died suddenly on May 6, 1933. But her grief was assuaged somewhat when he left her a house in his will. Life was looking up; when you have funds you don’t have a gambling problem, you just have a gambling habit.

  Soon she began to look after another elderly man, seventy-two-year-old Albert Parker. Sadly he too passed away shortly after she began to look after him. He had loaned her $1,000 prior to his death, and she had given him an IOU. But that document mysteriously disappeared and she kept the money. In the summer of 1937, Jacob Wagner, seventy-eight, died and generously left his caring friend $17,000 in his will. She moved on to George Gsellman, who lasted a month and left her $15,000.