The Stranger Beside Me (56 page)

Shirley Lewis reads them aloud. Guilty as charged . . .

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guilty

guilty

guilty

guilty as charged . . . guilty . . . guilty . . . guilty . . . guilty ... guilty.

Ted betrays no emotion. Only a slight raising of the eyebrows, his right hand to his chin, rubbing gently. When it is all over, he sighs. Again, it his mother who cries.

It has taken the jury less than seven hours of deliberation to decide his fate. All those kindly middle-aged women, the devout church-goers, the people who didn't read newspapers, this jury hand-picked by Ted himself. It appeared that they had been eager to debate the question of his guilt, almost as eager to find that he was, indeed, guilty. Ted is lost to me. He has been lost since I looked at the pictures of the dead girls and knew what I knew . . . knew what I had never wanted to believe. There is no need to remain for the penalty phase. Whatever is to come after is already foretold in my mind. They are going to kill him . . . they are going to kill him ... and he knew it all along. I

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I flew home, leaving Miami behind in the grip of a warm, pelting rain. I had to change planes in St. Louis, and there too, that city was criss-crossed wtih violent thunder storms. We sat on the ground for one hour, two hours, waiting for a break hi the storm. At length, we were the last plane allowed off the ground as lightning seemed to split the air only feet from the wing-tips. The plane bucked and shook as if the pilot had no control, and we dropped, dropped, and then flew ahead. I was frightened; I had seen how very tenuous life can be. When we finally left the storms of the Midwest behind us, I turned to the man beside me, a Boeing engineer, and asked him if he had been afraid.

"No. I've already been there."

It was a strange answer. He explained that he had been clinically dead as a youth, crushed beneath a car after he and several friends had hit a utility pole.

"I watched from somewhere up above and saw the troopers lift the car off someone. Then I saw that it was me lying there. I wasn't afraid, and I didn't feel any pain-not until I woke up in the hospital three days later. Since then, I've known that the soul doesn't die, only the body, and I've never been afraid."

I had seen nothing but death hi Miami, heard nothing but death-and death seemed to lie ahead for Ted. Hearing the stranger's words was somewhat comforting. Ted had written in his last letter, "There's nothing wrong with my life that reincarnation couldn't improve upon." It seemed to be his only option left.

I believed that the verdict had been the right verdict, but I wondered if it had been for the wrong reasons. It had been too swift, too vindictive. Was justice still justice when it manifested itself as it had in the less than six hours of jury

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deliberation? Was this the delayed justice that should have come before?

Perhaps there was no way that it could have been done cleanly, concisely, in a textbook case. The people had spoken. And Ted was guilty. I

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In Colorado, Ted Bundy had been a kind of lovable rogue, with many of the Aspenites delighting in his antics. Judge George Lohr had eliminated consideration of the death penalty in Colorado in Ted's murder trial there. Had he stayed in his Garfield County jail cell on that day before New Year's Eve, 1977, Ted might have won freedom (except for his still-uncompleted term in Utah) but he certainly would have had his life. By the summer of 1979, he would have been sitting in one western prison or another, but he would not have found himself in the long shadow of the electric chair.

Florida-the "Buckle of the Death Belt"-was the worst possible state to which he could have run. No one in Florida had taken kindly to Ted Bundy's mocking superiority, his games. Not the police. Not the judges. And certainly not the public. In Florida, "killers" were killed themselves, and with as much dispatch as possible. An Oregon detective, returning from a seminar in Louisville, Kentucky in 1978, told me that he had talked with some of the Florida lawmen who had dealt with Ted.

"They told me they would have killed him," the detective recalled to me. "They said he would have had an 'accident,' while he was still in jail-but they didn't dare because he was too much in the public eye."

"Good ole boys"-policemen and laymen alike-didn't hold with women-killers, with despoilers and rapists. These were the men that Ted had scoffed at in his phone call from the Leon County Jail. These were the people who now would control his every move. He had deliberately walked into the very jaws of death. Why?

Prosecutors Simpson and McKeever would ask for the death penalty, although, ironically, they stressed that they would not go for

"overkill;" there was enough already with-388

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out inundating the jury with the full background on the man they had convicted.

In the bifurcated trial, the second phase-the penalty phase-was slated to begin at 10:00 A.M. on Saturday, July

28th, despite the defense team's plea for a week's delay. The jury was taken back to their luxurious Sonesta Beach hotel to relax for the intervening days.

Ted had some new motions. Again, he wanted Millard Farmer. Arguing that Farmer had extensive experience with death penalty cases, he asked Judge Cowart if-now that he'd been found guilty-he could have the Atlanta attorney beside him.

"I've already ruled on that," Cowart said tersely. "I consider the making of the motion a second time an effrontery to the court." Ted wanted to bring a Florida prison inmate in to testify about the woefully inadequate prison law library system in an attempt to point out how much good Ted could do in upgrading the library if he could work there as a law clerk.

Denied. But Cowart commented that Ted might have been a lawyer-if only he had not taken the path he had.

A motion to delay.

"That falls on totally deaf ears."

A motion to plea bargain after fee fact, citing that jury trials are unfair because a guilty verdict invariably results in the death penalty. It was too late; Ted had been offered a plea bargain back in May, and he'd refused it

Judge Cowart was annoyed when Peggy Good said that the penalty phase would rob Ted of "due process." As a Florida judge, he resented that state's being constantly referred to by defense lawyers hi America as

"notorious." (In actuality, many states now have bifurcated trials-including Washington-and there are arguments just as cogent to show that they can tend to save a defendant from the death penalty.) When the second phase of the trial began on Saturday morning, the state was remarkedly restrained. Carol DaRonch Swenson, a youdj^ matron now, was called to the witness stand. The jurors|looked on with interest as the tall woman in white satin slsrcks and blouse sat silently in the witness chair. She was, quite possibly, the most striking of all the women they had seen hi the courtroom during the monthlong trial with her great pansy eyes, her mane of long dark hair. But Carol DaRonch Swenson never spoke a word. A

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quick huddle between the opposing attorneys, a whispered word to the judge, and she stepped down. The defense would stipulate to Ted's conviction in February 1976 for her kidnapping in Utah in November 1974. Jerry Thompson, the Salt Lake County detective who had run Ted to earth that first time, took the stand instead of Carol and told of that case, offered a certified copy of Ted's Utah conviction. Michael Fisher, the slender, intense Pitkin County investigator from Aspen, Colorado, who had taken up the chase in his state, was just as succinct, and more inscrutable. He told of taking Ted from Point-of-the-Mountain prison to the Pitkin County Jail. He too read a stipulated statement: "On January 15, 1978, that you (Bundy) were under a sentence of imprisonment by the state of Utah and that you have not been paroled or otherwise released from that sentence." The escape was never mentioned; it was left to the jury to surmise that a man never "paroled or released" from a sentence must have walked away from jail of his own accord.

There was so much that jury in Miami never heard. They knew nothing about all the dead and missing girls in Washington, nothing about the three dead girls in Utah, nothing about the five dead and missing girls in Colorado, nothing of the Pensacola fantasy tapes; presumably they did not know that the man before them was felt by many to be the most prolific mass killer in America.

The prosecution had, indeed, avoided any cries of overkill. And yet, the specter of the electric chair hovered in that courtroom, as surely as if it had been brought hi and placed before the bench. Ted expected it, his attorneys expected it, and the public demanded it

Ted had a measure of forgiveness from one of the three women beaten into unconsciousness on the night of January

14-15, 1978. Kathy Kleiner DeShields said, "I feel sorry for him-he needs help-but what he did, there's no way to compensate for that." Karen Chandler felt differently. "Two people dear to me are dead because of him and I really think he should be too."

Tiny Eleanor Louise Cowell Bundy, trembling with anxiety, would take the stand to plead for her son's life. This was her ideal child. This was the baby she had borne in shame, the little boy she had fought to keep with her, the young man in whom she had taken such overriding pride. He was to

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have been her vindication for everything; he was to have been perfect. She made a pitiable figure on the stand, fighting as all mothers will fight to save their young. Cowart was gentle with her, telling her,

"Settle down, Mother. We haven't lost a mother in a long time so just don't be nervous."

Louise Bundy told the jury about Ted, the other four children. "We tried to be very conscientious parents, ones who did things with our children, gave them the best we could on a middle class income. But, mostly we wanted to give them lots of love."

Mrs. Bundy detailed Ted's schooling, his boyhood jobs, his Asian studies, his political activities, his jobs with the Seattle Crime Commission and the Governor Evans campaign. She might have been a proud mother at a church social function, bragging about her boy-instead of sitting in front of a jury begging for his life.

'Tve always had a very special relationship with all my children. We tried to keep them all equal, but Ted, being the oldest, you might say was my pride and joy; our relationship was always very special. We'd talk a lot together, and his brothers and sisters thought of him as just the top person in their lives, as we all do."

"Have you considered the possibility that Ted might be executed?" Peggy Good asked quietly.

"Yes, I've considered that possibility. I had to-because of the existence of such in this state. I consider the death penalty itself to be the most primitive, barbaric thing that one human can impose on another. And I've always felt that way. It has nothing to do with what's happened here. My Christian upbringing tells me that to take another's life under any circumstances is wrong, and I don't believe the state of Florida is above the laws of God. Ted can be very useful, in many ways-to many people-living. Gone from us would be like taking a part of all of us and throwing it away."

"And if Ted w|re to be confined, to spend the rest of his life in prison?"

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"Oh," his mothm: answered. "Of course... yes." For the first time in the long trial, Ted Bundy cried. There is little question that the jurors felt for Ted's mother; they were not to be swayed, however, about their opinion of Ted himself. Larry Simpson voiced the unspoken thoughts in

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the courtroom as he finished his arguments for the death penalty.

"The whole four to five weeks that we've been here in this courtroom has been for one reason. And that is because Theodore Robert Bundy took it upon himself to act as the judge, jury, and everybody else involved in this case and took the lives of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. That is what this case has been all about. They can stand before you and ask for mercy. How nice it would have been if Lisa Levy's and Margaret Bowman's mothers could have been there that morning of January 15,1978

and asked for mercy for them."

Peggy Good argued that to kill Ted would be to admit that he could not be healed. Her argument that it was not a heinous crime was transparently specious. "One of the factors of the definition (of heinous crimes) is whether or not the victim suffered, whether there was torture or unnecessary cruelty to the victims. I believe you recall the testimony of Dr. Wood where he stated explicitly that both of these women were rendered unconscious by a blow to the head. They were sleeping; they felt no pain. They didn't even know what was happening to them. It was not heinous, atrocious, or cruel because of the fact that they were not aware of impending death, they did not suffer, and there was no element of torture involved whatsoever as to the victims who died." No one, of course, would ever-could ever-know if Lisa or Margaret had suffered or the degree of that suffering.

The jury debated for one hour and forty minutes, and then returned with the expected verdict: the death penalty. Judge Cowart, who had already sentenced three murderers to the electric chair, could override that decision-should he choose to do so.

The jury would say later that they had been split at one point with a six-six deadlock, a deadlock that had been broken after ten minutes of "prayer and meditation."

It was Ted's own cold, nonemotional demeanor in court that had cost him his life. When he 'had risen to cross-examhie Ray Crew, the police officer, he had turned off many of the jurors. One commented that the decision had seemed "a mockery of our system." On July 31st, Ted had his day in court-unrestrictedspeaking to Judge Cowart, making, not a plea for his life, but, instead, doing what he had told me he loved to do ... "being a lawyer."

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"I'm not asking for mercy. For I find it somewhat absurd to ask for mercy for something I did not do. In a way, this is my opening statement. What we've seen here is just the first round, second round, early round of a long battle, and I haven't given up by any means. I believe if I'd been able to develop fully the evidence which supports my innocencewhich indeed I think created a reasonable doubt-been able to have quality representation, I'm confident that I would have been acquitted, and, in the event I get a new trial, will be acquitted.