by John Browne
We then took our case to the state supreme court, which heard it in September 1983. By then we’d refined the strategy: When a man kills another man in a bar fight in self-defense, that defendant’s character isn’t questioned in court. So why was Ivy Kelly’s?
This time the judges agreed, eight to one, reversing Ivy’s murder conviction and prompting a new trial. In its ruling the court explained, “Petitioner was on trial for the murder of her husband. She was not on trial for yelling at her neighbors or for beating on her own door with a shovel.”
This case was even more important than Claudia Thacker’s, as it limited what evidence could be used, in any instance, to refute certain character evidence. State v. Kelly is often cited as the seminal case placing limits on the admission of supposed acts of prior misconduct.
The charges were dropped before Ivy’s second trial was scheduled to begin in 1985, and she went on to live a productive life, active in various women’s advocacy groups. She would often stop by my office when in Seattle and would try to talk me into going with her to Alaska for a plane ride, even though she was too old to maintain her pilot’s license. She passed away a few years ago, well into her nineties.
Claudia, meanwhile, went on to have a rewarding career working for the federal government. I get a Christmas card from her and her kids every year.
And yet these cases confused a lot of people. Here I was, an early advocate for abused women, breaking new judicial ground and bringing attention to a syndrome that was only beginning to be understood, while at the same time famous for defending Ted Bundy, the most notorious killer of women. For me it was easy. The system was taking aim at both, disregarding fairness and the law. Besides, I was done with Ted Bundy.
Too bad he wasn’t done with me.
19
THE EXECUTION OF TED BUNDY
After his trials in 1979 and 1980 I received periodic letters and Christmas cards from Ted and had some personal interaction with his new wife, Carole, as well as their daughter, Rosebud. (Carole, a friend from his days in Seattle, had testified during the Florida trial and was on the witness stand when Ted asked her to marry him. Their daughter’s conception has long been the focus of bizarre speculation; a guard would later claim that Ted had smuggled a semen-filled condom into the death row visitation room and passed it to Carole mouth-to-mouth via a kiss, and that Carole quickly repaired to a fertility clinic to be artificially inseminated with Ted’s sperm.)
It’s chilling to me that no one else seems to have made the connection that Ted had forever tainted his daughter by calling her Rosebud, the name he used as the fictitious police officer in the Carol DaRonch kidnapping and when he called me from jail in Florida.
Although I hadn’t heard much from Ted for a few years, I did get a letter from Carole in January 1980. It was typewritten and apparently designed to keep me in the loop with Ted and solicit my assistance in the Kimberly Leach murder trial and Ted’s appeals.
Happy New Year, tan person [she knew I had returned from Mexico recently].
Que Pasa?
Enough chitchat. Writing you seems novel. Bear with my typing/it is much better than the script. Bunny [Ted] professes ability to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics after these many years of illegible missiles. Our boy isn’t doing real well, but I think it is appropriate, and even beneficial. He came back up after the Miami trial, and shut off. Never any good way to deal with the shit because eventually It Will Out. . . . It will get better again. This has happened before. He will resort to dreams of his personal favorite solution for a while until something happens. Then he will bounce back . . .
Listen, again/there is no intention of you doing it for free. It would be (get it?/would be) helpful if you would put your Parker to paper and roughly estimate expenses, fees, retainers and all that jazz.
I know that it is hard, but give the thing a whirl. Don’t pay any attention to Theo [Ted], about this money stuff. He isn’t in a position to fuss about it at the moment. We have kept him mildly uninformed because of internal problems.
His attorney friend in Seattle, Marlin, didn’t work out (it is a long and boring story) with the money, and Ted has been kept out because he doesn’t have so many friends that he can afford to lose one. Or the illusion of one. . . .
Y’all take care now/I must go pick up Jamie [her son] up [sic] from his martial arts class. Again and again, thank you for your help. I know you were busy, probably not because of your talent, but rather your looks. But busy you are, and there it is.
It is much to your credit that you put up with our hysteria on top of all the legal advice. You are the only attorney that I don’t talk—the only attorney that I don’t talk about behind his back, if that is any repayment.
Cordially,
“Bubbles”
I later declined to help, as the whole Bundy affair began to negatively affect my personal life, and I just wanted nothing more to do with him. I let Carole and Ted know that I was not interested in assisting him legally and was sticking to the position I took, along with Millard Farmer, in the holding cell in Tallahassee, that if Ted wanted to die, I was not going to assist him.
My last contact with Ted of any consequence was in October 1984, in the midst of another rash of serial murders in the Pacific Northwest. The Green River Task Force, which included members of the Ted Task Force, had been formed to find a prolific killer of prostitutes active in the Seattle area in the 1980s and ’90s. He was dubbed the Green River Killer because he had disposed of some of the victims near the Green River, which flows through Seattle’s suburbs.
I received a letter from Ted Bundy from death row in Starke, Florida.
I have a favor to ask of you. Would you mind taking the enclosed letter I have written to someone associated with the Green River Task Force who has some sense and can be trusted to take the right steps to see that the letter both receives proper consideration and remains confidential? . . .
There are a number of reasons why I offer my help to the Task Force at this time. . . . I would like to figure out what makes the Green River guy tick, and I figure I have as good a chance of doing that as anyone on the Task Force. And I also think that the time seems right in some inexplicable sort of way, and I find myself saying, quote, “Why not put some of your knowledge and unique perspective to use. It could be interesting.”
I don’t fancy myself playing detective, but I will bet I can play the man or men they are looking for better than any of them.
Please let me know you received this and what, if anything, happened when you passed it along.
Thank you for your help. Take care of yourself.
Peace.
Ted
P.S. And remember, you can arrange to reach me by phone, if you wish.
Ted’s letter is stunning in his clothed admissions of guilt, which I believe he only felt comfortable making to me because of our interactions in the cell in Miami. In other words, Ted knew I knew he was guilty and the mind-boggling extent of his crimes. Without directly stating that in the letter, it is obvious from his assertion that he wanted to assist the Green River Task Force because of his “unique perspective.” I find his statement about “playing the man or men they are looking for better than any of them” chilling.
Investigators would ultimately identify the Green River Killer as a truck driver named Gary Ridgway, who admitted to killing more than forty women. At the time Ted wrote this letter Ridgway was still at large, and I believed Ted’s motive was simply to find another avenue to prolong his life, as the imposition of electrocution seemed likely within the next few years. Yes, Ted had a death wish years earlier when he turned down the plea bargain, but the reality of his imminent execution seemed to be setting in, and his survival instincts, I believe, had kicked in. If he could convince the task force that he could be of assistance, it might result in sparing his life, at least for a few more years. I do not believe in any way that his motives were altruistic.
Interestingly, one of the task force d
etectives, Robert Keppel—the same detective who tried to get me to provide evidence against Ted back in 1976—later wrote a book about the Green River Killer, which included a lot of information about his investigation of Ted Bundy.
Keep in mind that neither the Ted Task Force nor the Green River Task Force really solved either of those crimes. Keppel’s book was later turned into a movie. And in the book and film he claims that Ted Bundy sent this letter to him directly. He says he found it sitting on his kitchen table after arriving home one evening.
False. I delivered this letter to the task force—see appendix B, page 232—and their initial response was laughter, for understandable reasons. They were not interested in any “assistance” from Ted and made that very clear to me. I later conveyed this to Ted via a telephone call. (As far as I know, they made no contact with Ted as a result of the letter. Their last contact with him was days before his execution, when he was frantically trying to blame pornography and alcohol for his behavior and the authorities thought he might come clean regarding all of his crimes if he spoke with Seattle detectives.)
There are similarities between mass murderers but very few, I believe, between Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgway. Ridgway, also a sociopath, preyed only on prostitutes, and sex was always part of his crimes. As we know, Ted preyed on beautiful, naive, fresh-faced college women who all had a similar appearance. And he was interested more in playing his game of control than in sex. (Ridgway avoided the death penalty by assisting the authorities in solving some open cases. I met with him at his request and told him he had a great team of attorneys, led by the late Tony Savage, and he should keep the team. It was Tony and other gifted attorneys who really did the impossible by saving Ridgway from the death penalty.)
Prior to his execution on January 24, 1989, there was a frenzy of activity surrounding Ted: various police authorities seeking last-minute confessions (and the locations of victims’ bodies) and Ted’s on-camera interview with Evangelical Christian psychologist James Dobson. Ted was desperately trying to postpone his execution by revealing, for the first time, that his motivation and illness were the result of addiction to pornography as a teenager and young adult.
This, from what Ted told me himself, was completely untrue. However, it did result in a lot of attention concerning pornography and Ted’s stated attempt to provide himself as a “study” so society could learn of the evils of pornography. It was simply Ted’s way of postponing his execution, as the evil part of him wanted to continue to live.
I had little contact with Ted after calling him about the Green River Task Force, although I continued to receive birthday and Christmas cards.
He did call me approximately one month prior to the final execution date and asked if I would be a witness to his execution. I declined immediately.
The evening before the execution, I spent an hour on the local CBS affiliate, KIRO Television, in a dialogue with then local anchorperson Aaron Brown, who later became an anchor for CNN. It was, for television, an intimate moment, as I had known Aaron for a long time, and we were discussing the dynamics of Ted’s situation and the frenzy surrounding his execution the next morning in Starke.
Local radio stations in Florida, as was the custom, were playing the sounds of frying bacon, which was to simulate the sound of the electric chair, and joyfully calling for Ted’s execution.
There were hundreds of people at the prison awaiting and cheering for his death, and a few anti–death penalty protesters. The parking lot was full of satellite news vans beaming live coverage.
I left the studio in Seattle at approximately 11:00 PM and went to a friend’s house, a kind and nurturing person, and woke up the next morning to learn that Ted had indeed been executed.
20
PRESUMED GUILTY
In the winter of 1991, two years after the State of Florida executed Ted, I sat in a darkened theater on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The movie was The Silence of the Lambs. Jonathan Demme’s film about the crime-solving serial killer Hannibal Lecter is pretty tame by today’s standards, but it was hard-going for me from the start.
By then I had represented Benjamin Ng and countless other murderers—including, of course, the most notorious serial killer of all time. To see Hollywood turn these men into antiheros—a trend that has continued with shows like Dexter and Hannibal—appalled me.
I never made it to the end of the film. After a few revelations about, say, Lecter dining on some guy’s liver with a side of “fava beans and a nice chianti,” or Buffalo Bill skinning women alive, I was out. I squeezed along the aisle and stepped outside the theater. I felt sick to my stomach—just as I had my last time in Ted Bundy’s cell.
People often ask me, “If you’re so disgusted with these acts of evil, why are you a criminal defense lawyer?”
My answer is that I am in this line of work to do good. I saved Benjamin Ng’s life not because I thought Benjamin Ng was virtuous but because I believe killing is wrong, whether it’s committed by an individual or sponsored by the state.
I’m also all too aware of how fallible our system is, that it can and does charge and convict the wrong people. I’d like to talk about three such defendants: David Kunze, Dr. James Stansfield, and Donna Rodriguez.
David Kunze had been convicted of the 1994 aggravated first-degree murder of his ex-wife’s fiancé, based only on an alleged ear print left at the crime scene. This was the first case in the United States where the state used this sort of forensic science, ear prints, to gain a conviction. The expert the state had used was a high school–educated policeman from the Netherlands who carried a rubber ear around in his pocket. He claimed that “no two ears are alike” and that the smudge left at the murder scene was in fact a print of David’s right ear. I represented David during the appeal process, and, finding the evidence faulty, a three-judge state court of appeals overturned the conviction in 1999. A new trial was set.
For the retrial, in 2001, the state elected to make a jailhouse informant the meat of its case. This informant was a convicted sex offender who was provided favors by the state for testifying that David confessed to him in jail. Unknown to the state, I obtained this informant’s complete prison file, which included details of his proclivities. It seems he liked to have sex with cows. At trial I asked him if it was untrue that he had sex with cows. He became indignant and said, “No, calves!”
The judge had to take a recess to quiet the laughter in the courtroom, including the jury box. Later on in the trial I discovered that the trial attorney for the prosecution had been giving money to this informant and failed to inform me, as required by law. The trial judge dismissed the case for prosecution misconduct, and David was freed. This case illustrates how easy a person’s freedom can be taken away with bogus and purchased evidence. Sadly, it happens every day.
Junk science is a real threat to our liberties. Juries tend to give much weight to testimony clothed in scientific terms, the so-called CSI effect. Another of my cases revolved around the state’s use of an expert to re-create an auto accident using a computer program called PC Crash. I moved to exclude the evidence, calling it a “cartoon,” but the trial judge, a real idiot, was apparently impressed by cartoons and allowed the evidence in the trial. After conviction, the court of appeals held that there was no scientific evidence supporting the validity of the computer program and tossed the homicide conviction out. My client was able to plead guilty to a DUI and avoided a homicide conviction. A sad note was that two other individuals, whose attorneys did not challenge this evidence, were convicted based on similar cartoons. The so-called expert was later sued for his willing participation in this farce.
In 1990 James Stansfield, a retired general practitioner in Quincy, Washington, was accused of killing his wife, Patricia Stansfield, and a neighbor, Frederick Smith. The rumor was that Dr. Stansfield was having an affair with Smith’s wife and wanted his own wife and Fred out of the way.
Patricia died in her sleep, apparently after she stopped breathing
. Fred died in a car crash. The local police suspected that Stansfield had poisoned them both. But the case was a mess from the start. The coroner had dementia. He was prone to non sequitur recitations from Hamlet, and he embalmed one of the bodies before the autopsy. Fred Smith’s body wasn’t buried for ten days, because no one could find his hands. They were eventually found in a cooler in the coroner’s car.
I was able to get the charges dropped after pointing out all the holes in the state’s case, including, most significantly, how badly the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab had handled the toxicology investigation.
The day we won the case we celebrated on Stansfield’s farm. I was taking a shower there before the party when the shower curtain flew open. The doctor stood in front of me, and I tried to cover my wet, naked body. He grumbled “Here!” and handed me a triple bourbon.
In March 1995 I took a phone call from a woman named Jean Wake of Wenatchee, a town in eastern Washington. Jean told me that a woman who worked for her, Donna Rodriguez, had been arrested and charged with multiple counts of child molestation and child rape. It was, according to Jean, connected to what prosecutors were calling “a child sex ring” known as the Circle.
I agreed to represent Donna and, with my talented investigator Chris Beck, began looking into the allegations. I am confident you, the reader, will be shocked and perhaps disbelieving of the facts we uncovered with the help of some other attorneys and the national media, particularly Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal, Tom Grant of the local CBS affiliate in Spokane, and John Larson of NBC’s Dateline.
The facts were that two teen sisters, foster children of Robert and Luci Perez, had made a series of escalating sex abuse allegations involving, in the end, over thirty adults, one being Donna Rodriguez. Most of the events involved members of a small, lower-class church run by an ex-biker, Pastor Robert Roberson, and his wife, Connie.