Ted had various requests to sort through and there was one he wanted to talk to Nelson about. He had received a letter, supposedly from a doctor, offering to switch brains with him (presumably for research purposes). A more valid request came from Dr. Lewis. She asked Ted if he would agree to leave his brain for research, and had drafted a waiver for him to sign. Ted was interested in the possibility that he might have some brain defect that would explain his crimes. But Weiner was opposed to any part of Ted being denied a final resting place. In the end, he did not sign the waiver to donate his brain, although rumors got around: Bob Keppel heard that someone had kept Ted's brain.
Ted had told Dr. Lewis earlier in the day that while everyone else wanted to know what he did, she was the only one who wanted to know why. He told her how he hadn’t known anything was wrong until he was “...twelve, fourteen, fifteen... ” At one point, he asked her to turn off her tape recorder. She has never shared what their final conversation was, except to say that he discussed “how very, very young” he was when he began thinking about murder; he also wanted to talk about his rage at his mother. His “last thoughts and words were about his deep confusion and anger toward his mother,” Lewis said.
As their time came to an end, Lewis had planned to shake his hand and wish him well. But he suddenly kissed her on the cheek. She instinctively reached up and kissed him back. When she got home that night, she told her husband, also a psychiatrist, that she was “the last woman to kiss Ted Bundy.” That's when her husband added, “And live to tell about it.”
Ted asked Nelson to use his interviews with her and Dr. Lewis “to explain that he was not a monster.” And then he stared into her eyes and asked if she and her co-counsel, Jim Coleman, had “liked” him. “Of course, Ted, of course,” she told him.
Nelson was called out of the room and got word that the Florida Supreme Court had ruled against Ted. When she returned, Ted had written a note. He wasn’t allowed to pass anything to her, so he held it up against the glass. “I hope you liked me. I hope this wasn’t just an unpleasant legal chore for you. I feel close to you now,” it read. It was a touching moment, but Nelson said that even in Ted's last hours she never saw any remorse. “He felt sorry for himself but there was no sense of responsibility,” Nelson said.
The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 against granting Ted a stay of execution. Nelson had left the prison by the time she heard the news, and telephoned Ted to tell him. He was quiet, and they said their goodbyes. Nelson believed both the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court were afraid to risk the “public outrage” that would follow another stay. Nelson called Louise Bundy and Carole Boone to tell them that time and hope were running out. “They were furious with Ted and felt deeply betrayed that he had publicly confessed without telling them first,” Nelson wrote. Ted's last-minute revelations to police were all over the news. Nelson did not want to attend the execution, and asked Jim Coleman to go.
Ironically, Nelson was let go by her law firm three weeks after Ted was executed. Although it had asked her to take the pro bono case, her firm came to believe that she was somehow responsible for the long, “unsavory,” million dollar case. “It ruined the law for me. I never went back to litigation,” she said. She didn’t practice law again for 10 years, and then only because she began to specialize in business law. Nelson never disputed Ted's guilt, but later wrote that, “...in seeing to prevent the killing of a person, I felt I was fulfilling a lawyer's highest calling.”
Ted's only contact visitors that evening—meaning they could sit with him without the glass separation—were John and Marcia Tanner. Nelson saw them entering as she left the prison in tears. “You two will be the last to see Ted,” Nelson said. “No, we won’t. The last will be Our Lord, Jesus Christ,” they told her, their eyes cast “skyward, their faces beaming.”
In the end, Ted had only his “best friends,” as he had described them to FBI agent Bill Hagmaier—the Tanners, Diana Weiner, and Hagmaier. Maybe they took the place of others who had given up on him. So many people in his life were not consoling him, not listening endlessly to him, no longer buying his lies.
Carole Ann Boone, her son, and her daughter with Ted were long gone. They had moved back to the Seattle area in 1986. The original move back was said to be because Carole's mother had been injured in a car accident. An acquaintance of Carole's believed that the notoriety of the case made it impossible for her to stay in Florida, and she was hurt by Ted's relationship with Diana Weiner. According to Ted's sister, his cousin, his attorneys, the police and the journalists who befriended Carole, no one knows where she and her daughter are. Ted's cousin, Edna Cowell Martin, says the family never discusses her. Hugh Aynesworth believed that it was Carole Boone's choice to keep herself and her children away from Ted's family all these years.
Ted's mother and step-father, and his half-siblings, did not go to Florida to say goodbye, something Polly Nelson found sad. In fact, his mother had not seen him for nearly two years before he was executed. Ted's oldest sister, Linda Bussey, is angered when asked why no one went to see Ted. There was “no need” for an in-person goodbye, she said. Bussey dismisses the confessions Ted made the last week of his life, as he confirmed and shared information with various law enforcement agencies. She believed Ted did it because he was “bored.”
Regardless, his family has something sadly in common with the parents, family members, and friends of the girls and women he killed. “Have you had anyone close to you murdered? Have you? It's a horrible thing,” Bussey said over and over, her voice filled with hurt and anger. To his family, Ted was a victim and was murdered, too. She's correct about that; he was murdered. His death certificate from the State of Florida lists “homicide” as the cause of his death.
In a story in the Tacoma News Tribune a few days before the execution, reporter Chuck Doud wrote about Don Burr's reaction to the impending death of Ted Bundy: “We’ve lived all our lives with Ted Bundy,” Don said. “I will personally be relieved that, come Tuesday, this will all be over.” Don had never forgotten the face of the teenager he had seen standing near a ditch at the UPS campus and watching the search for Ann. With time, it had become Ted's face. In a scene that sounds more like something out of the 1950s than 1989, Bev and Don spent the eve of Ted's execution listening to the radio, hoping to hear that he had confessed to more killings, specifically Ann's, prior to his death. He did not.
That evening, January 23, 1989, Doud and photographer Russ Carmack, of the Tacoma News Tribune, waited with Louise and Johnnie Bundy in their home in North Tacoma. A minister was present, but they were the only reporter and photographer. Carole Boone had introduced Doud to the Bundy's a few years before. “I began to know the family then,” Doud recalled. “For some reason, they came to think, ‘When Chuck calls, he’ll at least treat us fairly.’” They may have trusted him because he held different views than most other reporters. Doud was skeptical of some of the evidence against Ted, including the bite marks made on Lisa Levy's buttocks and nipple during the Chi Omega sorority killings (still a controversial subject). “I don’t think any of those cases would stand up today,” Doud says. And Doud was critical of his peers. He was an editor at the paper and supervised other writers. But after Ted Bundy was arrested in Utah, he was concerned that there had been “no fair coverage” of the case. “From the beginning, the press began to make the case against Ted Bundy,” Doud said. He went to Aspen, Colorado to cover Ted's first jail escape; when Ted was captured six days later the press was “jumping for joy, and saying, ‘We finally got him,’” Doud explained.
In fact, Doud played a part in Ted's nearly-successful plea deal. Carole Boone had brought some of Ted's attorneys to Tacoma to meet with his family so they could encourage him to plead guilty to second-degree murder in the two Chi Omega cases and for the murder of Kimberly Leach. If he had, he would have avoided execution. “The plea was worked out in my living room,” Doud recalled. But Ted turned it down. According to Ann Rule, there were r
umors about Ted's “almost” guilty plea, but it was never reported in the press.
Doud still has questions about the extent of Ted's crimes. “Ted Bundy was a thief, a liar, a small-time crook, but did he kill all those people? I have huge doubts,” Doud said. “He was a crook, not a saint. He may have killed someone.”
A few minutes before 11 p.m. on January 23, 1989, the call came that his parents had been waiting for. When the telephone rang, Louise moved into to the dining room and Russ Carmack followed her. He had his Leica with him, an exceptionally quiet camera. He leaned against a wall and listened to her conversation with Ted. “She kept looking down,” Carmack said. He took only a few photos, not wanting to intrude on the scene. He remembers the house was “dark and moody, like the event.” Johnnie, his eyes red, spoke briefly to Ted and paced the floor, calling Ted “son.”
“We just want you to know how much we love you and always will,” his mother told Ted. Doud wrote that Louise's voice “quivered with emotion” as she spoke with him. Prison authorities had allowed 10 minutes for the call. As she listened to Ted, his mother was writing down messages from him for friends and family. At one point, Louise said into the phone, “Chuck Doud is here. Do you want to talk to him?” and she handed the phone to Doud. “[Ted] said, ‘Well, I guess I made a few mistakes,’” Doud remembered. Doud told Ted, “Your mom is a tower of strength.” Then Doud told Ted his prayers were with him, and handed the phone back to Louise.
In the iconic photograph, Louise is holding the telephone in her left hand and in her right hand is a white pencil. “People always thought it was a cigarette, but it wasn’t,” Carmack said. “It was exhausting, my heart was racing. I fired off three frames. She finally said goodbye.” It was Carmack who heard her say her final words to Ted; he shared them with Doud: “You’ll always be my precious son.”
“He sounds wonderful,” Louise said to the others when the call ended. “He sounds very much at peace with himself. He said, ‘I’m sorry I’ve given you all such grief... but a part of me was hidden.’ ”
Then the phone rang again. One of Ted's sisters had refused to take his phone call, so he was permitted to call his mother again. The photo of Louise Bundy in the foreground, alone at her dining room table speaking to her son, was taken during the first call. “She was wiping tears from her eyes. She whispered goodbye,” Carmack remembered.
Carmack had a long career as a photo journalist. The assignment that night was the hardest. The father of four, Carmack said he offered his condolences as he left the house. Carmack's photo was sent around the world by the Associated Press, but first he had to get it back to the News Tribune offices. “They literally stopped the presses to wait for my photo,” he said.
Ted was offered a traditional last meal of steak, eggs, hash browns, orange juice, and coffee after turning down an offer to choose his last meal. His head was shaved. He changed into clean prison-issued shirt and pants.
Theodore Robert Bundy, age 42, was executed by electrocution on January 24, 1989 for the murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach.
Time of death was 7:16 a.m. It took about 60 seconds for him to die. The scene outside the prison was described as a “carnival atmosphere.” Hundreds of people held signs reading “Fry, Bundy, Fry, Thank God It's Fry-Day,” and clapped, cheered, sang, and set off fireworks when prison officials announced his death. Within an hour, the body was transported 23 miles to a funeral home in Gainesville.
At 8:38 a.m., the postmortem began.
12
Bev and Don and Louise and Johnnie
WITHIN DAYS OF HIS DEATH, PHOTOS OF A DEAD TED—authenticated by the medical examiner—were published in the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. “We’ve been selling them like crazy today,” a sales clerk at Dawn's News & Smoke Shop, in Lake Worth, Florida said of the brisk sales.
A director at the Williams-Thomas Funeral Home in Gainesville, where Ted's body had been taken, turned down thousands of dollars in bribes from photographers. Someone took a picture or leaked the coroner's photo. There Ted is, his head shaved, with burn marks on his skull from the electrode that had sent two thousand volts of electricity to his brain. An incision runs around the top of his head, from ear to ear, the cut the medical examiner made during the autopsy.
While people in the east were buying up the published photo, sentiment in the west was running against allowing Ted's ashes to be scattered in the Cascade Mountains. Callers to a Seattle radio show suggested other places the ashes could be disposed of, including a sewer or down a toilet. Authorities said there was no federal or state law preventing the dispersing of a serial killer's ashes anywhere he wanted.
Two weeks after Ted's execution, Louise Bundy gave her most extensive interview ever, to Vanity Fair writer Myra MacPherson. Standing in the dining room where Russ Carmack photographed her saying goodbye to her son, Louise pointed out the 400 condolence cards piled on the dining room table. Some were simply addressed to: Louise Bundy, Ted's Mother, Tacoma, Washington. Vanity Fair photographed Louise embracing Ted's Scout uniform.
Referring to Ted's crimes as “those terrible things,” Louise broke her silence about her parents and talked about the environment Ted spent his first years in, revealing that her father had beaten her mother “once in a while.” She also admitted to ambivalent feelings about keeping Ted and not putting him up for adoption. And then Louise served MacPherson apple pie.
Life was never normal for Bev and Don, or Louise and Johnnie, but it did return to a routine after Ted was executed. Johnnie continued to work as a cook at the military hospital near Tacoma, and Louise spent years working on the University of Puget Sound campus, where she was well-liked and staff and faculty were fiercely protective of her. They had always lived modestly, and it couldn’t have been easy for them to bail Ted out of jail more than once, or to travel and be present when he stood trial.
Don relented and Bev finally got out of the house and had the chance to take writing classes. She worked as a secretary at Bates Technical College and St. Joseph's Hospital, and as a volunteer she taught reading at a local school. Don continued his job at the National Guard base.
Whether planned or coincidental, Bev and Don would often be out of the country in August. They traveled to China, Russia, Iceland, Germany, Canada, Arizona, Cape Cod, the Panama Canal, California, Patagonia, Bermuda, Nova Scotia, and across Asia. They even ran into the Bundy's. Their paths didn’t cross often in Tacoma, but they did on a 20-day bus tour of the Ozarks. “There we were, alphabetically, Bundy, Burr,” Bev remembered. “Twenty days looking at them!” The two couples didn’t speak and seem to have stayed out of each other's photographs.
With the instincts of a journalist, Bev kept a journal of every trip, typing up her notes after she returned home and filling dozens of albums with her observations as well as photographs. If she had a dream about Ann, she recorded it. If she lit a candle for Mary in a church in France, she wrote of it. Both she and Don looked at faces when they traveled, looking for someone who seemed familiar, maybe a little girl grown up. Ann's disappearance was never far from Bev's thoughts. An album of a foreign trip or of a daughter's wedding back home would conclude with newspaper clippings about Ann, updates on Ted in prison, or a yellowing copy of the missing poster. Bev had followed the stories when college-aged girls began disappearing from campuses, and when four-year-old Heidi Peterson disappeared from her front yard in Seattle during the same period.
Bev's closest friends and her relatives said she didn’t talk about Ann. Yvonne Doherty and husband traveled with Bev and Don to Yugoslavia, and on cruises to the Caribbean and South China Sea. They met regularly with other friends for potlucks. “We were very, very good acquaintances for many decades,” Doherty said. “But we didn’t talk a lot about marital problems, men you wished you had married, or even missing children. None of us wanted to push the issue. A lot of our generation don’t talk about these things.”
Don's jealousy of Bev and need for control went with them
, wherever they traveled. If she dared speak to any man, even a tour guide or a baggage handler, he would berate Bev for hours. When they were stranded in Russia, and once when their luggage was lost in Egypt, Don nagged at her for hours after she tried to help. In photographs of trips or holidays at home, there is no affection between them. “I never did see them hold hands,” said Doherty. Raleigh Burr said he “never saw unbridled laughter, joy, mirth” between Bev and his brother.
Bev's mother, Marie, seemed to begrudge Bev's freedom to travel. She would ask her daughter, “What if I die when you’re gone?” Bev would reply, “That would be too bad.”
The Burrs often hosted gatherings but there was a manic quality to Bev's entertaining. Parties and holidays had to be kept light. There were games, songs, more games. At the same time Bev was “putting herself in harm's way,” according to Raleigh Burr. Bev was injured in a series of accidents: she stepped on gardening shears and her shoe filled up with blood; she fell in the yard; she burned her arm. Were they self-inflicted? Dr. Conte said Bev was “acting out.” “She may have felt that she doesn’t deserve to be loved,” Raleigh said. “She was difficult to be around—anxious, constant anxiety, she was protective of Mary,” said her sister-in-law, Bonnie Taschler.
At one point, Bev was hospitalized. Julie visited her, but never knew if her mother had tried to harm herself or had experienced a breakdown. Bev told Julie that she “needed a rest.” And then Bev decided she wanted to become a nun. Bev talked to her parish about the possibility of going into a convent. They discouraged her. “We were teens,” Julie remembered. “It felt very confusing to know our mom wanted to leave us and become a nun. Poor mom.”
In a few years, Laura would witness her mother shoplifting. Bev spent a night in jail. A counselor told Bev she was taking things because something had been taken from her.
It began with the outburst Raleigh Burr remembers. By age 12, Mary was angry, sullen, and remote, and it worsened. At first her parents thought it was just teenage behavior. Mary was sleeping a lot and stopped going to school. The school told Bev that when Mary did attend, she created a “disturbance” in class. Despite the problems in their marriage, Bev and Don were united when it came to helping their daughter. Yet, Don must have second-guessed Bev when Mary was first ill. In a short story for her community college writing class, Bev wrote about a family with a schizophrenic daughter. The husband (named Frank) criticizes his wife (Eva) because he believes the girl isn’t sick; he says she is spoiled. Even Eva's son tells her she is “too nice” to his sister, that she needs to “get tough.” The daughter in the story, named Mary, has stopped eating, going to school, and bathing, and has been cutting herself out of family photos. For a while, Eva is in denial, convinced that Mary only suffers from some kind of nutritional deficiency.
Ted and Ann: The Mystery of A Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy Page 16