The Stranger Beside Me

by Rule, Ann

  Ted himself now became the witness and took the stand. He testified that Hayward’s first words to him were, “Why didn’t you get out of your car and run? I could have taken your head off.”

  He explained that he had been intimidated by the number of officers present and that the search was illegal in his estimation. He opened himself up to cross-examination by Danny McKeever and the admission that he had lied about going to the drive-in before being stopped.

  Ted wanted the Utah arrest suppressed, insisting its evidence was seized through an illegal search. Judge Cowart would suppress it, but not for that reason. He found that arrest too “remote” from this trial.

  “You may step down, Mr. Bundy. But you may not be excused.”

  These transactions would result in a blow against the prosecution. The jury would not be allowed to hear their comparisons of the Utah pantyhose mask with the Dunwoody Street pantyhose mask.

  The score stood one-to-one.

  Judge Cowart would rarely betray his own feelings during the trial, but he slipped a little as he glanced at a composite picture drawn by an artist from Nita Neary’s description, a picture Peggy Good argued was meaningless.

  “I may be blind,” Cowart began, “but, looking at that last picture, I see a striking resemblance to … ah … whoever it was.”

  After hearing the tapes taken in Pensacola, and the testimony offered by Detectives Norm Chapman and Don Patchen of statements alleged to have been made by Ted after the tape recorder was turned off, Judge Cowart made another ruling to suppress, a ruling that caused prosecutors Simpson and McKeever to sag in their chairs. The jury would not be allowed to hear or know of any of it. Nothing of the escape, the credit card thefts or the statements about “vampirism,” “voyeurism” and “fantasies.” Cowart found that too much of the alleged conversations was missing, unrecorded. He would not allow the portions that were on tape. The credit card thefts were not part of the murder charges in Cowart’s judgment.

  The fantasy tape was out too.

  The state was left with Nita Neary’s eyewitness identification and Dr. Richard Souviron. The rest would be principally circumstantial. There were rumbles in the press section that “Bundy may be back in the ballgame.”

  43

  JUDGE COWART WAS READY to begin the actual trial. The defense was not.

  On July 7, Ted and his attorneys argued that they had not had time to prepare the opening arguments. “We need time between your rulings and our opening statement,” Peggy Good argued. “We’re exhausted. We’ve had only five hours’ sleep a night. You’re turning this into a trial by endurance.”

  “You have four lawyers in Miami, one investigator, two law students helping you. As far as the court is concerned, I care about the entire system. I’m very satisfied that there is no reason to delay any further. In this circuit, it’s not unusual to proceed until midnight. We vary the tune, but we’ve got the same fiddler, the same music. Every minute you’ve been here, I’ve been here and I’m fresh as a daisy.”

  Ted tried another tack. “I’m concerned about Your Honor, how you’re going to do this by one o’clock.”

  “You just watch us. I appreciate your concern.”

  And then, Ted was angry. It was Saturday noon, and he wanted to start Monday. Cowart did not.

  “My attorneys are not ready!”

  “We will begin, Mr. Bundy.”

  “Then you’ll start without me, Your Honor!” Ted flared.

  “As you like,” Cowart said imperturbably, while Ted muttered, “I don’t care who he is …”

  But Ted was sitting at the defense table as the jury was brought in for the first time.

  Larry Simpson made the opening statements for the prosecution, only after reporters had sent the youthful state attorney back out to comb his hair and reenter for the benefit of the cameras.

  He did a good job, diagramming the four Chi Omega cases and the Dunwoody Street case on a blackboard, listing the victims’ names, the charges: burglary (of the Chi Omega House). First-degree murder, Lisa Levy. First-degree murder, Margaret Bowman. Attempted first-degree murder, Kathy Kleiner. Attempted first-degree murder, Karen Chandler. Attempted first-degree murder, burglary, Cheryl Thomas. He was workmanlike and showed little emotion, but he was clear and concise.

  Ted had picked Robert Haggard, the thirty-four-year-old Miami attorney who’d been on the case only two weeks, to make the opening statements for the defense. Judge Cowart had urged the defense to wait until their “half” of the trial to make the opening remarks, as was their option, but they forged ahead.

  Haggard spoke for twenty-six minutes, rambling, and the prosecution objected twenty-nine times, an almost unheard-of number. Cowart sustained twenty-three of those objections.

  Finally, Cowart threw up his hands and said to Haggard, “That’s argument. Bless your heart. Come aboard.”

  I felt Ted himself could have done a better job of it.

  Ted did choose to cross-examine Officer Ray Crew about his actions when he had gone to the Chi Omega House on the morning of the murders. I have no idea what was in the minds of the jury as Ted elicited information about the condition of the death rooms and the condition of Lisa Levy’s body, but it seemed to me somewhat grotesque. If this calm, glib, young attorney might have been there to see Lisa’s body himself, might have done that terrible damage to her, he was completely dispassionate as he questioned the officer.

  “Describe the condition of Lisa Levy’s room.”

  “Clothing strewn about, desk, books … some disarray.”

  “Any blood in any area in the room other than what you testified about earlier?”

  “No sir.”

  “Describe the condition of Margaret Bowman’s body.”

  “She was lying face down, mouth and eyes open. Nylon stocking knotted around her neck, head bloated and discolored.”

  Ted had been trying to show that the policeman had left his own prints in the room, that he had not proceeded carefully. Instead he had succeeded only in impressing a horrible picture in the jury’s minds.

  And then the young women—victims and witnesses—were a steady parade through the courtroom doors. Melanie Nelson, Nancy Dowdy, Karen Chandler, Kathy Kleiner, Debbie Ciccarelli, Nancy Young and Cheryl Thomas. Dressed in bright cottons, they all had an innocence about them, a vulnerability.

  There were no outward signs that Karen and Kathy had ever been injured. The pins in their jaws, the concussions and the bruises had long since healed. Only when they told of what had happened to them could one picture the horror.

  They never glanced at Ted Bundy.

  Cheryl Thomas had more difficulty. She limped as she made her way to the witness chair, and she sat with her right ear toward the prosecutor, so that she could hear him. She was still completely deaf in the other.

  She did not testify about the struggle she had had to regain her health, of all the jogging and sit-ups. When she’d first started to walk, she had fallen to one side, but she’d learned to compensate by using her other senses, sight and feeling. She’d learned to develop a sense of balance with her mind. She did not mention how she had fallen again and again when she resumed ballet classes, that she’d had to start over from scratch. She testified very softly, often smiling shyly.

  The defense wisely chose not to question the victims.

  Dr. Thomas Wood testified about the autopsies he had performed, and then, over objections from Peggy Good, produced eleven-by-fourteen-inch color photos of the bodies, pointing out the damage to the jury.

  It is standard for defense attorneys to protest autopsy pictures, declaring them “inflammatory and with no probative value,” and it is standard too that the pictures are admitted.

  I watched the faces of the jury as those terrible pictures were passed silently through their tiers of seats. The female jurors seemed to be managing better than the males, who paled and winced.

  There were several shots of Lisa Levy’s buttocks—with the teeth imprint
s clearly visible. There was one close-up of Margaret Bowman, called the “hole-in-the-head” picture by Judge Cowart, for want of a better term. There was a photograph of Lisa Levy’s right breast, the nipple bitten through.

  I had neither seen nor talked to Ted privately. He did not have the freedom to hold conversations with those in the courtroom that he had expected. At each recess, he was led, manacled, to a small room across the corridor. When court recessed for the day, that day when the postmortem reports and the victims’ pictures had been introduced into evidence, I stood outside in the hallway for a moment. Ted, carrying his usual pile of legal papers in his cuffed hands, emerged and walked within a few feet of me. He turned to me, smiled, shrugged, and disappeared.

  In Florida reporters are allowed to view all the evidence that has been admitted. A group of us waited for Shirley Lewis, the court clerk, to trundle a huge cart full of physical evidence to her office, and there it was spread out on a table. A miasma, real or imagined, seemed to rise from the clutter there, and the laughter and black humor common among the press corps were silenced.

  “Were not laughing now, are we?” Tony Polk of Denver said quietly. We were not.

  All the pantyhose masks were there, including the one Sergeant Bob Hayward had brought from Utah, strikingly similar to one another. The garrotte from Margaret Bowman’s neck, still bearing her dried blood, was there. And all the pictures …

  I had long since managed a degree of detachment when dealing with photographs from homicide cases. They no longer upset me as they once did, although I make it a point not to dwell on them. By the time I stood in Shirley Lewis’s office, I had seen thousands of body pictures.

  I had seen pictures of Kathy Devine and Brenda Baker in Thurston County, but that was months before it was known there was a “Ted.” Of course, there were no bodies to photograph in the other Washington cases, and I had had no access to Colorado or Utah pictures. Now, I was staring down at huge color photographs of the damage done to girls young enough to be my daughters—at pictures of damage alleged to be the handiwork of a man I thought I knew. That man who only minutes before had smiled the same old grin at me, and shrugged as if to say, “I have no part of this.”

  It hit me with a terrible sickening wave. I ran to the ladies’ room and threw up.

  44

  THE CLOYINGLY HOT DAYS in Miami’s July took on a pattern. First, the mass exodus from the Civic Center Holiday Inn by most of the principals—barring the defendant—to the Justice Center three blocks away. Virtually all of the defense team, the prosecution team, the media people from out of town, Carole Ann Boone and her teenage son, the television cameramen and technicians were headquartered at the Holiday Inn, and some of the best quotes reporters elicited came in the evening when the little bar on the first floor was jammed with participants quaffing cold beers and gin and tonics. Here, the demarcation lines were not as pronounced as they were in the courtroom.

  The media scrambled to get to the Justice Center. “Get in there before Watson shuts the door!” The journey was not without its dangers. It was necessary to cross six lanes of rush-hour traffic, balancing on center islands as the commuters of Miami whooshed by, inches away. “Don’t walk under the viaduct—a reporter from Utah got mugged the other evening by some guy on a bicycle with a six-inch blade.”

  But then, the motel itself was not exactly safe. Ruth Walsh, the ABC anchorwoman from Seattle, had lost her money, her jewelry and even her wedding rings to a cat burglar who’d crept into her room from the balcony six floors up as she slept.

  We were a long way from the beaches where the tourists frolicked.

  As I sipped my first cup of coffee of the day on the ninth floor in the communications center, the flurry of activity was underway. Already, the phones were busy, reporters putting the copy men on hold who were waiting for the daily update. Here, the black humor mounted. Two television reporters mimicked a personal interview with Mrs. Bundy, one of them playing the defendant’s mother in a high falsetto:

  “And what was Ted like when he was a child, Mrs. Bundy?”

  “Oh he was a good boy, a good, normal, All-American boy.”

  “What kind of toys did he like, Mrs. Bundy?”

  “The usual things—guns, knives, pantyhose—just like any boy.”

  “And did he have a job?”

  “Oh, no. Teddy always had his credit cards.”

  There were hoots of laughter.

  Waiting for the proceedings to flash onto the closed circuit TV before them, the verse writers scribbled.

  Teddy came to Tallahassee,

  Looking for a pretty lassie,

  Creeping, sneaking through the dark,

  Lurking ’til he found his mark,

  Remember dear, remember well—

  His bite is much worse than his bark.

  For some of the news people, the Bundy trial was only a story, and a great one at that. Others seemed disturbed, too conscious of the waste of lives involved, not only the victims,’ but the defendant’s. We were watching a major tragedy unfold before us, and it meant far more than headlines.

  Down on the fourth floor, the mood of the public was angry and vengeful. As I waited in line to pass through the metal detector, to submit to the search, of my purse and papers, that transpired every time I entered the courtroom, I heard two men talking behind me.

  “That Bundy … he ain’t never gonna get out of Florida alive … he’s gonna get what’s comin’ to him.”

  “They oughta take him out and nail his balls to the wall and leave him there ’til he dies. And that’d be too good for him.”

  I half-turned to look at them. Two nice, grandfatherly looking men. They echoed the feeling of the Florida public.

  As the trial progressed, the crowds grew denser and more hostile. Could the jury feel it? Had they some suppressed anger of their own? You couldn’t tell by looking at them. Their faces, like all jury faces, were bland, listening. One or two of them regularly nodded off to sleep during the long afternoon sessions. Upstairs, in the pressroom, reporters would spot that and yell at the television set, “Wake up! Wake up! Hey Bernest! Wake up! Floy! Wake up!”

  Ted still glanced into the press section to see if I was there, still smiled faintly, but he seemed to be shrinking, his eyes a little more hollow each day, as if something inside him was drying up, leaving only an exhausted shell sitting at the defense table.

  Despite the long procession of young women and the parade of police officers who began to blend into one another somehow, the word was that Bundy might win. There was so much about him that was being held back from the jury.

  Danny McKeever, looking frazzled, gave short press interviews saying that he was worried, something a prosecutor rarely admits. The press began to lay odds that that “son of a bitch may pull it off.”

  We had missed a day in court because Mazie Edge had a virus. We would miss another when Ted himself came down with a high fever and a deep cough. On those days, with nothing else to do, we interviewed each other, and sidebar stories of faint human interest were sent to home papers, stories describing how reporters from other areas felt, in a kind of inbred journalism.

  Ted was back then, looking paler and tired.

  Robert Fulford, manager of The Oak, testified about his first contact with Chris Hagen, of renting a room with a bunk bed, a table, chest of drawers, and a desk to him. “He didn’t have the rent when it come due. He said he could call his mother long-distance in Wisconsin and she’d send it down. I heard him make a call, and it seemed like he was talkin’ to someone, but he never showed up with the rent. When I checked his room a couple of days later, he was gone.”

  The jury knew that Bundy had come to and left Tallahassee, but they would not know whence or why.

  David Lee testified about his arrest of Bundy in Pensacola in the dark dawn of February 15, describing how his prisoner had wanted to die.

  The next day, July 17, Ted did not come to court. At 9 A.M., he was not in hi
s place at the defense table. The gallery muttered, and the press box wondered. Bundy was always in his seat, unmanacled, when court began. Now he was not. Something was wrong.

  The jury was kept sequestered as jailer Marty Kratz appeared. Kratz explained to Judge Cowart that there had been trouble with Ted in the jail.

  At about 1:00 A.M., Ted had thrown an orange between the bars of Cell 406 and succeeded in smashing one of the lights that had been installed outside to give him better illumination in that cell. Jailers had immediately moved him to Cell 405 and searched his first cell. Hidden far back in that cell, they had found shards of broken glass from the splintered light bulb.

  What for? Suicide? Escape?

  “When we went to get him for court this morning,” Kratz continued, “we couldn’t get the key in the lock. He’d jammed some toilet paper in there.”

  Reminded that he was due in court, Bundy had replied, “I’ll be there when I feel like it.”

  Cowart did not take kindly to this information, and sent Ted’s lawyers off to plead with their client to get himself to court in a hurry. He also found Ted in contempt of court for the delaying tactics.

  At 9:30, Ted appeared, a Ted who was angry, arguing that his treatment in Dade County was not satisfactory to him. He again decried the lack of exercise, the withholding of files and the blocking of his access to the law library. His voice broke, on the verge of tears, as he talked to Cowart. “There comes a time when the only thing I can do is passively resist … I have potential … now … now … I’ve only used that part of my potential which is nonviolent. There comes a time when I have to say, ‘Whoa …’”

  “Whoa,” Cowart answered. “If you say ‘Whoa,’ I’m going to have to use spurs.”

  Ted made a tactical error. He began to list the offenses against him, shaking his finger at Judge Cowart as he did so.

  Cowart took umbrage. “Don’t shake your finger at me, young man … don’t shake your finger at me!”

  Bundy tilted his finger slightly toward the defense table.