Devil's Defender

by John Browne

  Now the whirl outside the prison was merely academic. Even that morning’s Tribune story was late to the punch. Gilmore was dead before the newspaper ink had dried.

  At dawn the guards had escorted Gilmore out of his cell and behind the prison. The mercury had dropped to twenty-four degrees. He wore only a sleeveless black T-shirt, white cotton pants, and tennis shoes. They drove him into a warehouse and sat him in what had once been an office chair. Asked if he had any final words, Gilmore, before a small audience, said, “Let’s do it.” A physician threw a black hood over his head. Four gunmen emptied their rifles into his chest, killing him instantly.

  It was an ominous situation to walk into: the death penalty was back, and my client, accused of capital offenses, sat on the other side of the penitentiary walls, just yards away from the inaugural execution of a new era. This weighed heavily on me as I was ushered into the prison—same smell of piss, sweat, and burned coffee as all the others—and down a corridor to the office in which I’d be meeting with Ted Bundy.

  He was serving his one-to-fifteen-year sentence for the aggravated kidnapping of Carol DeRonch and had been charged, in October 1976, with killing Caryn Campbell in Aspen, Colorado. He was fighting extradition to Colorado. No charges had been filed in Washington State.

  A large rectangular table sat in the middle of the room. The surrounding walls were covered with the bathroom-stall-style graffiti of inmates, including that of the now deceased Gary Gilmore. I unpacked my mobile library, some of it regarding allegations against Ted in Colorado but mostly books and treatises on how to fight extradition and avoid the death penalty.

  A guard led my client into the room. Ted looked like a different person nearly every time I’d seen him, and on this occasion he was thin and wiry, with short hair and a clean-shaven face. He came armed with his usual boxes of legal materials, including drafts of motions to suppress evidence and new pleadings that alleged incompetency on the part of his Utah counsel and various errors committed by trial judge Stewart Hanson.

  Two things distinguished this meeting with Ted from those that had come before. For the first time since I’d begun representing him in the winter of 1976, he showed no interest in casual conversation. He didn’t ask about the suit I wore. Didn’t even look at my shoes. He was all business.

  Second, Ted stopped being coy about the charges against him. He informed me that he was involved in the “Ted” murders in Washington State and was responsible for countless other homicides in California, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah. This was no shock, as I had for some time considered him to be exactly who the police thought he was. But to hear the man say it was another thing.

  Without providing details, he began cataloging his kills for me, starting with the murder of a young woman on January 31, 1974, followed by homicides on March 12 and April 17, 1974. (I took these to be Lynda Ann Healy, Donna Manson, and Susan Rancourt, respectively.) Going through his list as if it were a résumé, he informed me the next homicide was in Oregon in May 1974 (which I assumed was that of Roberta Parks).

  Next he listed the June 1, 1974, murder of a woman (Brenda Ball) he met at The Flame Tavern, a bar outside of Seattle frequented by college students but also well known as a place where homosexuals hooked up. This homicide, he said, was followed ten days later, June 11, 1974, by another (Georgeann Hawkins).

  He listed two homicides on July 14, 1974, which would be Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, who went missing from Lake Sammamish State Park. He said he had a memory, but not a clear one, of killing a woman in Vancouver, Washington, a month later. (I didn’t know of that victim.)

  In the middle of this bizarre time line he paused to tell me that, in an effort to meet influential people in Utah, he had joined the Mormon Church in 1975, and then went on to list ten more victims, none by name but all corresponding to the dates of murders for which he was suspected.

  Then out of nowhere, and almost as another aside, Ted told me that he had traveled to California in 1972 or 1973 and killed at least eight individuals during that trip. I knew these California murders, if they existed, were not on the radar of any law enforcement agency investigating him. (It would be years before I would realize just how close to home that revelation was.)

  The confessions that would pour out of Ted over the next two years—again, solely to me, in dank prison rooms—would continue to shock me. But even as he confirmed what I already suspected, a feeling came over me. It clawed its way into my chest, an unholy hybrid: my sense of duty to save a man’s life, fused with my absolute disgust for that man and his actions. I couldn’t tell if I was angry, traumatized, or both.

  I betrayed none of this to Ted. I just listened. He was concerned that Utah authorities would find more bodies and that it would be more likely, and quicker, to achieve the death penalty in Utah—with its new taste for blood—than it would be in Colorado. (Though the latter state was in the process of reinstating capital punishment, it did not at the moment have the legal machinations to put a convicted killer to death.)

  The plan was to stall extradition to Colorado for only a few weeks, long enough to give Ted time to strategize and find a new lawyer in Utah and another in Colorado, and then waive extradition and go to Colorado. I told him I’d help find the right lawyers as well as deliver messages to his family and friends in Seattle.

  He didn’t state it explicitly, but I began to suspect by the meeting’s end that Ted had a secret game plan, one that involved providing me enough information so I could ultimately assist him in returning to Washington and perhaps working out some sort of plea bargain—unlikely—that would allow him to spend the rest of his life in a mental institution there.

  I collected my documents and books and shook his hand. I couldn’t wait to get home. As the Seattle-bound airplane left the tarmac, the Great Salt Lake, black as ever, filled my window once again. Much of what Ted had told me was still on my mind as the g-force of the plane’s rise pulled at my guts. I thought of Gilmore’s execution and what it meant for my serial killer client. What it meant for my future clients—and for the kind of career I was building for myself. The gravity of it all tugged at me until the plane plateaued and the dead sea dissolved behind me.

  11

  ESCAPE

  After meeting with him in Utah I went through a period during which I wanted nothing more to do with Ted Bundy. I waited several months and in the fall finally wrote a letter telling him I would be happy to introduce him to attorneys I knew in Denver and Aspen but was bowing out as his counsel.

  It should have been apparent to him that the things he told me at Point of the Mountain had completely freaked me out, and it amazed me that he would think otherwise. On October 31, nine months after my visit to Utah State Prison, he replied to my letter with the following:

  Dear John:

  Thank you for your letter of October 27. I too, wish the circumstances of our first contact since last February were different. I had intended to write to you on several occasions during the past several months to express my appreciation for the moral and professional support you have given me and my girlfriend and others close to me.

  Recent developments seem to indicate that I will be desperately in need of such support in the near future. I have had a tendency to be overly analytical about the motivations of the Colorado authorities in filing their case at this time. I suppose my real concern should not be “why” they filed but “what,” they filed. Whatever their reasoning, they have taken the plunge and are now committed to follow through. . . . You have no obligation to come to my aid, but I am begging you to do so because my life hangs in the balance. I am asking you to provide whatever services you can offer, because I am immensely impressed by your legal intelligence and more so because I like you and feel comfortable with you. I need your help now more than I have ever needed help before in my life. What more can I say except “please” help me?

  Sincerely,

  Ted

  PS: I will avoid discussing details of the Colorado cas
e in letters. I will only talk about the case directly to my present attorneys. If you should have questions, submit them through my present attorneys, and if you haven’t read Colorado’s affidavit, I will ask my present attorney to send you a copy, should you be in a position to help, that is.

  In this letter I observed a change in Ted’s personality. Always projecting a sense of control, he never begged for anything. It got my attention. I wanted out, but here was someone begging for his life. I sent back a brief reply that I would indeed help him but didn’t think I could afford to without getting paid. I also told him I’d help him find good attorneys in Utah and Colorado. He wrote back right away. That letter read, in part*1:

  I have written my present attorney asking his opinion on several critical matters, including extradition, and requesting a meeting with him before I go to Colorado.

  Of course I would prefer an alliance between my present attorney and you. If I had a choice at this moment between the two of you, I would choose you, but I am not sure I can afford that choice.

  I am in complete agreement concerning guaranteed reimbursement for expenses and lost salary should I ask you to handle my case. Is there any way you could give me some general estimate of what this might amount to . . . ?

  I will be extradited . . . no matter what, but by opposing extradition, are there advantages which outweigh the disadvantages? . . .

  I think it is perfectly suicidal to rush into a strange state and be represented by an unknown attorney who has but a few weeks to prepare against a case, which the prosecution has been plotting for over a year. I believe it is literally suicide. What do you recommend?

  The letter omitted any mention of the lengthy confession he made to me in Utah in anticipation of some sort of psychological defense. He seemed to have slipped back into attempting to defend himself on the facts of the case. As any good attorney knows, fighting extradition is quite hopeless and will just result in negative publicity and a sense that the defendant is trying to use every trick in the book to avoid facing the ultimate trial.

  More interesting are the reasons he thought extradition should be fought: to obtain more time to prepare. Ted totally ignored the solid facts present in the Aspen case. Both eyewitness identification and his credit card activity put him near the scene within hours of Caryn Campbell’s disappearance.

  My next letter from Ted arrived in late November and evidenced his outrage about a story that appeared in the November 24, 1976, issue of the Seattle Times, with the headline FBI LINKS HAIR SAMPLES TO BUNDY. The FBI had released a report that Caryn Campbell’s hair and scalp samples were found on the front floor mat of Ted’s VW. The article also noted that prison authorities had recently transferred Ted to the maximum-security unit “after being found with escape materials, including false identification and information on airline schedules.”

  This is just not something I expected from the Times. What are they doing, warming up the cross for my crucifixion?

  This is one of the most flagrant examples of prosecution by the press that I have seen. The worst thing about this Seattle Times article is that it will be carried by the wire services and broadcast in the Denver and the Aspen area.

  Damn it, John, I can’t get used to this abuse. The impact of the article is deadly, without the knowledge that hair samples are far from being identification. . . .

  Note also how the fallacious escape materials—also how the escape material allegation is injected to magnify the inferences of guilt.

  The intent of the article is purely malicious and prejudicial. I feel powerless as I watch my conviction firsthand by the media.

  Though I paid attention to his story in the media—including his January 1977 extradition to Colorado—I lost contact with Ted after that last letter and was almost able to keep him out of my mind until I woke up on the morning of June 8, 1977, to a headline in the Seattle Times that read, in large print, BUNDY ESCAPES. It was accompanied by a picture of Ted sitting in the jail’s law library, with leg irons on, across from an open window, which was a mere ten feet up from the ground outside.

  Apparently Ted had convinced the jailers he could be trusted, and they removed his leg irons so he could walk more freely through the library. When they weren’t looking he jumped out of the window, sprained his ankle when he landed, and hobbled along the nearby river. He hid out for six days in the mountains surrounding Aspen. He was apprehended coming through town in the middle of the night in a stolen car, which led me to believe he actually wanted to get caught, as he could have driven over another pass and left Aspen for good.

  On June 14, the day after he was caught, I was flown out to Aspen on his parents’ dime. I found Ted asleep in the basement jail cell that once belonged to Doc Holliday (there was a plaque). He was curled up on the floor with a blanket, no mattress.

  The jailers banged their boots on the cell door and said, “Hey, Bundy, you’ve got a visitor.” It took a while for Ted to wake up. When he did he looked up, saw me standing next to two guards, and said, “Hey, John, did you figure out which one of those guys pushed me out the window?”

  The guards did not find this amusing. They said something rude to both of us and locked me in the cell with Ted. He and I then had one of our most fateful conversations. I had the paperwork charging him with the death penalty in Colorado. We went over the materials for a while, and then Ted asked, “John, where would a person actually go in order to obtain the death penalty?” In other words, which states actually carry out the death penalty?

  I responded without hesitation, “Florida and Texas.” Their statutes had recently been upheld as constitutional.

  We then discussed the Colorado death penalty statute, its potential unconstitutionality, and also options he might have by returning to Washington State. He had a list of victims he was willing to admit to killing in Washington and asked whether it would be possible to return to Washington plead guilty to a number of murder charges, and obtain a life sentence, not the death penalty. I said I’d pursue this idea, but only if he seriously contemplated informing Washington State authorities of the specifics of his crimes. He told me he would think about it.

  As usual he was dissatisfied with his assigned public defenders and inquired whether I could find a qualified private attorney in Colorado who would be willing to assist him. I had someone in mind. During the summer between my first and second year of law school, I had worked in Denver with a very gifted attorney named Marshall Quiet.

  Although Marshall was getting on in years, I still felt he was an excellent attorney. I called and asked whether he would be willing to assist Ted. Marshall said his overhead was such that he could not afford to do a pro bono case, or even a case paid at public defender rates. However, he did remind me of a friend of his in Aspen named Stephen “Buzzy” Ware, who he thought might be interested in taking Ted’s case on a pro bono or a reduced-fee basis. I was familiar with Buzzy from my band days in Aspen.

  Buzzy was a fascinating individual who had long, flowing hair and drove Harley-Davidson and Triumph motorcycles way too fast. He agreed to assist Ted and become lead counsel. Unfortunately, within two weeks of this decision, Buzzy was in a motorcycle accident, which killed his beloved wife and completely incapacitated his ability to rationally put thoughts together. I thought I was off the case, but Buzzy’s serious injuries meant I’d be pulled back in.

  During this trip I also had some classic Aspen experiences. The town had become even more radical than when I used to come through with the Crystal Palace Guard. I was walking down the street, and a hippie type walked up to me and asked me if I was that “Ted Bundy lawyer.” I responded in the affirmative, and he said, “Well, hey, man, I hope I get on that jury because, you know, murder is just relative!”

  Ted was transferred to the relatively high-security jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, about a thirty-five-minute drive from Aspen. It was a small facility, only housing twenty or so prisoners, and Ted was watched carefully. All his mail was screened, an
d his phone calls were monitored.

  On July 7, 1977, I received a rather unusual typewritten letter from him. He wrote:

  Dear John:

  Good heavens . . . it has been over three weeks since my early morning call to you upon my return to captivity, and I am just getting around to saying, quote, “thank you,” to you for coming to my aid, coming to Aspen, and just generally making me feel less like a fumbling, stupid idiot I was behaving like.

  Aw, but that adventurous chapter is behind me, or so I would like to think at this moment. The ghosts of my escapade will return [in] the form of five counts and a new information. I will behave like the hardened convict I am and say, quote, “Fuck it. I have got broad shoulders.” That is what a hard con would say, isn’t it?

  Since my return, I have been in procrastination—in a procrastination inspired slump. (“I have got plenty of time; the suppression hearing isn’t for two months.”)

  Instead of working, I have been doing push-ups, pull-ups, jumping rope, and have done my best to emulate Tarzan. I am eating nuts, took vitamins, gagged on nutritional yeast, and in the process have (at least to my own mind) become a superb physical specimen. . . .

  How much is it worth to you to have me tell you that I can’t imagine a finer defense attorney than yourself? It’s true. I consider myself an expert on the good ones and the bad ones.

  Best wishes,

  Ted

  Now, in retrospect, this letter from Ted should have been a clue—the new exercise routine, the diet. Shortly after receiving this letter I visited him at the Glenwood Springs jail and noticed that he had lost at least twenty pounds, perhaps more. He looked completely different.