Dead Men Walking

by Bill Wallace

  On the night of 16 January the courts were still wrestling with the legal problems of his execution. There was a stay of execution and then that was set aside. Eventually the US Supreme Court declared that the execution could go ahead. Gilmore, meanwhile, was partying in prison with his family, drunk on three miniatures of whiskey that his Uncle Vern had managed to smuggle in. At one point country singer Johnny Cash phoned him and sang a song to him.

  At 8 a.m. following morning he was strapped to a chair in a prison building and a paper target was taped over his heart. A black corduroy hood was then slipped over his head.

  His was the first of 1,194 executions that have been carried out in the United States since 1977.

  Ted Bundy

  The problem was, he just looked and sounded nothing like a sex killer. Not only a sex killer; one of the worst the United States had ever known. How could this clean-cut, handsome, well-groomed man who spoke articulately and intelligently possibly be the same man who bludgeoned young women into unconsciousness and strangled them? How could he possibly be the kind of man to rape and even have sex with their corpses long after death? To grotesquely apply make-up to their dead bodies at the places in the mountains where he had dumped them and lie beside them? To decapitate them with a hacksaw? It did not seem possible, but it was. Bundy murdered thirty young women although some say he killed more, possibly as many as one hundred.

  His first murder victim was twenty-one-year-old student Lynda Healy. For some time, he had been looking in windows, watching women undress, graduating to beating them on the head with a piece of wood. In January 1974, he had attacked eighteen-year-old Sharon Clarke at home. He beat her repeatedly with a crowbar until she was unconscious and then thrust a piece of wood inside her vagina, causing dreadful internal injuries. He did not kill her, however. On 1 February, he battered Lynda Healy into unconsciousness before carrying her out to his car. He drove her to Taylor Mountain, about twenty miles to the east of Seattle, where he forced her to take off her pyjamas and raped her. He then beat her to death.

  In the next six months, he killed seven more times. On 12 March, nineteen-year-old Donna Manson was abducted walking to a jazz concert on the Evergreen State College campus, in Olympia, Washington. Her body was never found. On 17 April, eighteen-year-old Susan Elaine Rancourt disappeared as she walked across Ellensburg’s Central Washington State College campus at night. On 6 May, twenty-two-year-old Kathy Parks vanished from Oregon State University in Corvallis while innocently walking to another dorm hall to have coffee with friends. On 1 June, twenty-two-year-old Brenda Carol Ball disappeared from the Flame Tavern in Burien, Washington. On 11 June, eighteen-year-old Georgeann Hawkins disappeared from behind her sorority house at the University of Washington, and on 14 July, twenty-three-year-old Janice Ann Ott and nineteen-year-old Denise Marie Naslund were abducted several hours apart from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah, Washington.

  Three of the girls were taken to Taylor Mountain. The last two were raped at a house near to the park in which they were abducted, the second being raped in full view of the other girl. It was a new thrill for him.

  The method he used to abduct Janice Ott and Denise Naslund was generally the way he always did it. Calling himself by his own Christian name, he approached them with his arm in a sling asking for help to unload his sailing boat from his car. When they arrived at the car park, however, they would discover that there was no boat. Ted told them that they would have to help him get it from his house which was nearby. Many young women he asked that day sensed there was something not quite right and refused to help. The two girls he killed that day seem to have been eager to help the handsome young man. On other occasions, he would seek help in carrying books or a box to his car, but when they arrived there, he would grab a crowbar and smash them on the skull with it before bundling them into the vehicle.

  In 1946, Ted Bundy had been born to an unmarried mother who moved to Seattle to escape the social stigma of having an illegitimate child. There she married a cook who worked in a hospital and from whom the young Theodore Robert took his surname, Bundy. At a relatively early age Bundy began to steal and he was a habitual liar, which may have been a consequence of learning that he was illegitimate. It seems to have had a profound effect on him.

  In his late teens, he fell in love with a fellow student, Stephanie Brooks. The two were engaged and Bundy went to Stanford University to study Chinese, possibly in an effort to impress Stephanie and her wealthy family. It did not work out, however – his grades were poor and he felt lonely and homesick. Not long after his return, Stephanie broke off the engagement, leaving him devastated. He became solitary and moody.

  While working as a busboy in a hotel, he befriended a drug addict and with him drifted into a career of theft, stealing for thrills more than anything else. He meandered through various jobs, at one point working for the Republican Party during an election campaign.

  One night, however, he met a woman named Meg Anders and they became lovers. But at the same time, he was spending a lot of his evenings spying through the windows of women’s college dorms. He was now studying psychology at university and eventually obtained his degree. He moved on to law, but was unable to find a law school that would take him. Around this time, he also rekindled his affair with Stephanie Brooks now living in San Francisco, even though he was still in a relationship with Meg Anders. Stephanie found that he was no longer the gauche, immature young man she had known. There was a new-found air of confidence about Bundy that she found attractive. Manipulative as ever, however, no sooner had he snared her again than he dumped her, dishing out some of the medicine she had given him.

  After the disappearances of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund in July 1974, Investigators at least had a description, the name ‘Ted’ and a make of car, a Volkswagen Beetle. Several people, including Meg Anders, passed his name to police but they were inundated with tip-offs and this clean-cut college student just did not seem the type. They ignored the tips. Meanwhile, bodies were turning up on patches of wasteland and on Taylor Mountain.

  Finally, Bundy found a college that would take him, the University of Utah law school in Salt Lake City. Once established there, he started killing again. On 2 October, Nancy Wilcox disappeared, having last been seen in a Beetle. On 18 October, he murdered seventeen-year-old Melissa Smith, daughter of the Midvale police chief. She was found nine days later, raped, sodomised and strangled. Seventeen-year-old Laura Aime, disappeared after leaving a Halloween party on 31 October. She was found, naked, beaten and strangled a month later in American Fork Canyon in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.

  On 8 November, Carol DaRonch only just escaped from his clutches. He approached her in a mall, told her he was a police officer and told her someone had been trying to break into her car. When he asked her to accompany him to the police station, she got into his car, but when they had driven only a short distance, he pulled over and tried to put a pair of handcuffs on her. As he did so, he pulled out his crowbar but she caught it in mid-air, managed to get the door open and fell out onto the highway. Bundy sped off.

  An hour later, however, seventeen-year-old Debby Kent disappeared from Viewmont High School. A small key was found in the car park which later turned out to be the key to the handcuffs that had been attached to the wrist of Carol DaRonch.

  Bundy started killing in Colorado in 1975. Caryn Campbell disappeared from Wildwood Inn at Snowmass, where she was holidaying with her fiancé and his children. She vanished walking from the elevator to her room, a distance of fifty feet. Vail ski instructor, Julie Cunningham disappeared on 15 March and Denise Oliverson vanished from Grand Junction on 6 April. Using crutches, Bundy asked her to help him carry some ski boots to the Beetle.

  As more women disappeared, Bundy’s name kept appearing on lists of suspects, but it remained to be investigated.

  Suddenly, however, they had him. He was picked up after failing to stop for a police officer and in the car they found the tools of his trade �
� a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs, trash bags and an icepick. Soon, they linked him to the Carol DaRonch incident. While investigations continued into the murders, he was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Bundy sobbed as sentence was pronounced.

  They found strands of hair in his car that matched that of Melissa Smith who he had killed the previous October. He was extradited to Colorado to stand trial for murder. But, sensationally, they let him escape on 7 June when he leapt from the window of the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen. He was on the run for almost a week before being recaptured and would have got away, but for a couple of diligent police deputies.

  Six months later, however, on 30 December, he was out again, having acquired a hacksaw blade and $500 in cash. He escaped through a roof space above his prison cell and stole an MG in town. When its engine gave out in a blizzard in the mountains, he hitch-hiked to Vail and travelled by bus, train and plane to Tallahassee in Florida, renting a room in a boarding house under the name Chris Hagen. In Florida, Bundy established a new identity for himself, even obtaining a false birth certificate and social security card in his new name. Shoplifting and stealing purses and credit cards kept him in funds.

  The boarding house in which he had a room was close to the sorority houses of Florida State University and it was not long before he began to have the old familiar urges.

  On the evening of 15 January 1978, a student spotted a man lurking in front of her sorority house. As she was about to telephone the police, a fellow student, Karen Chandler staggered out of her room with blood pouring from a serious wound, screaming hysterically that she and her roommate, Kathy Kleiner had been attacked by a madman. Karen and Kathy lived, but two other students, twenty-year-old Lisa Levy and twenty-one-year-old Margaret Bowman were not so lucky. Bundy had battered Lisa Levy with a piece of wood and then strangled her. He had bitten her on the buttocks and nipples and had sexually assaulted her with a bottle of hairspray.

  The night was young, however. A few blocks away he broke into a house in which student Cheryl Thomas was sleeping. He beat her savagely, but she survived. At the foot of her bed police found a ski mask. The evidence was there, but forensic science was not as advanced as it is today and Bundy was, of course, completely unknown to the Florida authorities.

  On February 9, he travelled to Lake City in Florida where he abducted, raped and murdered twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. Three days later, he stole another VW Beetle and drove west across the Florida panhandle, and on 15 February he was stopped by a Pensacola police officer who called in a check on Bundy’s registration. When he was informed that the car was stolen, he tried to arrest Bundy. There was a scuffle but Bundy was subdued. As the officer drove him to the police station, the killer moaned, ‘I wish you had killed me.’

  Bundy skillfully conducted his own defence at his trial, charming the jury with his winning personality and using the law to make the case last for as long as possible. It came as little surprise, however, when in February 1980, he was found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

  Awaiting execution, he confessed to many details of murders that had been unknown or unconfirmed. He even offered to help in the search for another serial killer, the so-called Green River Killer, and the investigators in that case did talk to him but he provided no real insights.

  His appeals succeeded in beating death warrants for 4 March, 2 July and 18 November 1986, but when they were finally exhausted, he confessed to the eight murders in Washington State for which he had been the prime suspect. He further confessed to the murders in Idaho, Utah and Colorado. He did not do this out of the goodness of his heart, however. He was hoping he could obtain another stay of execution. He failed.

  He, apparently, contemplated suicide in the days before the execution but decided against it. Therefore, on the morning of 24 January 1989, Ted Bundy was strapped into the electric chair at State Prison at Starke, Florida. Asked if he had any last words, he said, ‘I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends’. The switch was thrown at 7.06 a.m. and the crowds waiting outside the prison that morning cheered as the news spread that Ted Bundy was dead.

  Ruben Montoya Cantu

  Ruben Cantu’s last request for bubblegum was denied, another disappointment for a kid who never had much of a chance in life and who never had any chance when it came to his death. Firstly, he shot a police officer, never a good idea, even though the officer was off-duty and pulled out his weapon first without identifying himself. Secondly, Sam Millsap, the Bexar County District Attorney who presided over his case just happened to be, in his own words, ‘a lifelong supporter of the death penalty.’ The problem was, Ruben Cantu, executed by lethal injection in August 1993, was innocent of the crime for which he died.

  He had been a painfully quiet kid, always eager to please, who sucked his thumb much longer than he should have. But his upbringing might have had something to do with that. His mother had married at the age of thirteen to a man twenty-four years older than her. Ruben was the fourth of the five children that Aurelia and Fidencio ‘Fred’ Cantu brought into the world.

  Fred was a maintenance man at Market Square, a popular tourist attraction and his long hours at work meant that Aurelia brought up her four sons and one daughter pretty much on her own. When Ruben was fourteen, the couple separated, Aurelia moving with the children close to the ranch owned by her parents at the small town of Floresville.

  Ruben, however, chose to stay with his father. They lived in a trailer park on Briggs Street in the downmarket southern outskirts of San Antonio. It was a rough place where drugs were readily available and the nights were frequently punctuated by the sound of gunfire. The southern part of San Antonio was the territory of a gang known as the Grey Eagles, a bunch of tough kids who ruthlessly protected their turf, keeping out rivals and running rackets in the area. Like most other local kids, Ruben became a member, even though he was small for his age, had learning difficulties and was forced to take special classes at school. Before long, he was indulging in the pastimes of the gang members – taking drugs and stealing cars.

  By the time he was fifteen years old, Ruben was working in a car-theft ring, stealing cars to order and sometimes driving them to the Mexican border, absent for days, but returning with as much as $3,000. Not bad money for a fifteen-year-old. In the midst of the horrific poverty with which he was surrounded, Ruben was doing okay, able to buy video games, videos and all the drugs he wanted. Life was good, or at least as good as it could get in southern San Antonio.

  It was a time of corruption and bad practice in the San Antonio police department. Police officers were accused of being involved in drug trafficking and vigilantes even began to supplant the police in certain areas, unable to rely on official solutions to law-breaking. Ruben Cantu was taught by his environment that police officers were not to be trusted and given the way his life turned out it was the correct thinking. It was said in the area in which he lived that he was a master of the art of silence, of never snitching on anyone, no matter what the situation. However, he was never arrested, even though his older brothers were regulars at police headquarters on drug and theft charges. For that reason, police officers disliked him and were desperate to implicate him in something. They would get their wish.

  It was a violent murder on 8 November 1994, Briggs Street where Ruben lived with his mother, that would finally give the authorities their chance to nail the quiet kid who was involved in all kinds of criminal activity. Nineteen-year-old Juan Moreno had recently left a Mexican ranch in Zacatecas to seek his fortune in the United States. He and his friend, twenty-five-year-old Pedro Gomez, a father of three, also from Mexico, were building a house for Moreno’s brother and wife but a water heater had recently been stolen from the unfinished property and Gomez and Moreno had decided to sleep there at night in order to deter thieves. That night, they had eaten dinner and had gone to sleep inside what was a shell of a house. Living conditions for the two men were pretty harsh. Water
was stored in empty beer cans and the only light was from a bare low-wattage bulb that was powered by electricity from a neighbour’s supply. They went to bed that night wearing their clothes, but in their wallets was around $1,000 in cash.

  Suddenly they were both woken by the light being switched on and found themselves confronted by a couple of young Latinos, probably teenagers, the older of whom was wielding a .22 calibre rifle. They wanted money and Gomez quickly handed over his wallet, containing $600. Foolishly, however, as he did that, he turned over his mattress, beneath which lay a concealed .38 calibre revolver. He leapt to his feet, the gun in his hand. The teenager with the rifle opened fire immediately, pumping nine bullets into Gomez who fell to the floor dead. The boy then turned his weapon on Moreno, shooting him at least nine times. The two teenagers fled.

  Juan Moreno had not been killed, however, and somehow made it outside where he called for help. He was discovered at midnight by a police officer in the seat of his pickup close to death, his wallet untouched. He gave investigating officers a description of his assailants, saying he thought they lived nearby, but, in reality, they could have been any young Hispanic male in the area.

  Homicide detective James Herring tried to interview Moreno the day after the murder at Wilford Hall Hospital on the Lackland Air Force Base. Moreno, however, was in a critical condition and on a ventilator. He had received massive facial injuries and eventually would lose a lung, a kidney and part of his stomach as a result of his injuries.

  Six days later, police made another visit to Moreno’s bedside. He was still barely able to talk, but provided more details, describing his attackers as two Latin-American males, one thirteen or fourteen and the other nineteen. He said that he had seen the younger one in the neighbourhood. A teacher at South Antonio High School told a beat officer that there was a rumour going round that Ruben Cantu, a pupil at the school had been involved in the killing. Detective Herring was passed this information and went back to the hospital to show Moreno five photographs of Hispanic men, Ruben Cantu’s amongst them. Moreno failed to identify Cantu.