Sunday, October 14, 2018

CNN HLN--HOW IT REALLY HAPPENED: TED BUNDY, PARTS 3 & 4

NOTE: After publishing this blog post I went to bed and when I woke up I remembered something that was buried in my memory banks for 40 years and floated to the surface in my sleep.  Below I wrote that Dr. Loren Anderson had nothing to do with finding the body of Kim Leach and that I didn't remember him being involved in the Lake City case at all. I now remember that before I became involved in the investigation, leaves from the back of the van were taken to him for identification. I still don't recall any soil being taken to him and can't imagine why soil would be taken to a botanist. The soil was taken to the FDLE's soil expert, Dale Nute. Otherwise my memory of Dr. Anderson was essentially correct. He gave us his information almost two months before the discovery of Kim's body, and his information played no part in the discovery. I have not changed anything about the original wording of the blog post below. I have interlined comments in [brackets].
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I just finished watching the final two chapters of the "How It Really Happened" documentary on Ted Bundy, and overall I am satisfied with the end product. Part 3 on the trials of Bundy sometimes failed to adequately distinguish whether an event occurred during the Miami trial or the Orlando trial, and occasionally scenes of the Orlando trial were sometimes shown while talking about the Miami trial. This is understandable because to fully cover the two trials would take a two-season miniseries. There was just too much information to squeeze into a one-hour episode.

There are some factual assertions with which I would like to take issue, however. These are minor quibbles with details of the excellent production put together by Producer Alison O'Brien. As the author of several nonfiction books on the subject of capital murder trials, I know how difficult it is to get all your facts 100% accurate. I do not in any way mean the following comments to be taken as disapproval of the documentary--I was very favorably impressed with it.

With that caveat in mind, let me enumerate:


The first is the interview with Dr. Loren Anderson in which he described how his examination of the debris taken from the rear of the FSU Media Center van led to the discovery of the body of Kim Leach. According to Dr. Anderson, he examined the debris, found soil from the Suwannee River flood plane and pig droppings in the debris, and just a few days later the body was found near the Suwannee River in an abandoned hog pen. [The body was not found a few days later, but almost two months later].

I was intimately involved in the search for Kim's body, and the first time that I ever heard of Dr. Anderson being involved in the examination of the debris from the van was tonight, viewing the show. [Wrong. I now remember Dr. Anderson examining the leaves from the van]. As I recall, Dr. Anderson had nothing to do with the finding of Kim's body. He may have spoken to the authorities in Tallahassee and told them about soil and pig droppings, but we in Lake City knew nothing of his findings. [Wrong. We knew that he examined the leaves]. Dale Nute of the FDLE Crime Lab was the soil examiner who gave us information about the type of soil in the van. He told us it came from a river flood plane, and that was all we had to go on. I never heard anything about any pig droppings being found in the soil until tonight, and if they were found in the soil, it had nothing to do with the recovery of Kim's body. The pen her body was found in had been abandoned for years, and if there were any pig droppings in the pen, they were invisible. 

I have worked with Dr. Anderson before on a case involving the cultivation of opium, and I found him to be an excellent botanist and a great expert witness, but his memory is faulty in this instance. I believe that what happened to make him think he was instrumental in the recovery of Kim's body was this: He examined the soil for the Leon County Sheriff's Office and told them his findings. The findings were never relayed to the Task Force investigating Kim's disappearance. [Wrong. They were relayed to the Task Force, but played no part in the recovery of the body].  (It would not have made any difference if they had been, because we had that information from Dale Nute). When Dr. Anderson heard the body had been found in a hog pen, he assumed that his findings were the clue that led the Task Force to the body. They weren't. The clue that was most important for leading us to the body was FDLE Lab Analyst Doug Barrow's examination of the cigarette butts.

Defense Attorney Lynn Thompson said that we made a plea offer to Bundy for a life sentence. We never did any such thing. As I recall, Mike Minerva approached us asking if we would be willing to take such a plea. We discussed the possibility of taking such a plea with the necessary parties (law enforcement and victims' families) and reported back to Mike that we would take a plea. Mike reported our willingness to take the plea to Bundy, and he signed a plea offer. The defense team telling Bundy that we would take a plea if he offered it WAS NOT a plea offer on our part. It was an expression of willingness to take a plea IF HE OFFERED IT. Lynn might refer to that communication as a plea offer by the State, but under the black letter law of contracts, it was an invitation to make an offer made in response to overtures from the defense. [I always have been of the opinion that the prosecutor is in the driver's seat, and if the defendant wants to plead, he should make the offer. Customs change, and while I was a prosecutor the custom of the prosecution making plea offers to the defendant arose. I never liked it and never made plea offers. I did, however, bow to the changing custom and began to tell defense attorneys that if the defendant offered such-and-such a plea, I would accept it].

Another thing that Thompson misremembered was when Bundy tore his name off of the plea offer. The morning of the plea I asked to see the offer with Bundy's signature on it and Mike Minerva showed it to me. Bundy's signature was very much on the document at the beginning of the plea proceeding. After we nixed the plea, I demanded the plea offer back from Mike, and he went and got it. When he brought it back to me, Bundy's signature had been torn off. That suited me just fine, because what I did when I got the plea was to tear it into the smallest possible pieces and deposit it in a garbage can.

The next thing that I take issue with is Defense Attorney Coleman's claim that Bundy did not get a fair trial. The opinion that Bundy got a raw deal is not one that was shared by the Supreme Court of Florida, the Supreme Court of the United States, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States, or the Federal District Court of the Middle District of Florida, all of whom reviewed the case multiple times, and all of whom ruled that Bundy had received a fair trial and could be executed. Mr. Coleman is in a very small minority of people who think Bundy got  a raw deal. He is entitled to his opinion, but not to his facts, and the fact is that multiple courts at multiple levels found the trial to be fair. 

The last thing that I take issue with is a clip from a contemporary news report which said that the Federal Judge (Kendall Sharp) said that Bundy was  "the most competent serial killer [in America]." The reporter then went on to interpret Judge Sharp's comment as meaning that Bundy was a Criminal Mastermind. This quote came about as a result of a serious misinterpretation by the news media of what Judge Sharp said when he declared Bundy a "most competent serial killer." Judge Sharp was holding a hearing on whether Bundy was COMPETENT TO STAND TRIAL in our case, not whether Bundy was a criminal mastermind. Judge Sharp was stating that Bundy was competent to stand trial and therefore he could be executed, he wasn't commenting on Bundy's intellectual capacity.

The idea that Ted Bundy was a "criminal mastermind" is moonshine. In my previous post on Parts 1 & 2, I commented on the stupid way he went about approaching his potential victims at Lake Sammamish. Bundy had above average intelligence, but he had extremely poor judgment which not only led to his capture but also helped to lighten our load in proving him guilty at trial. He was constantly doing things that undermined his lawyers' efforts to defend him because he thought he was the smarted person in the room, and he thereby outsmarted himself on a number of occasions. Far from being a criminal mastermind, Ted Bundy was a narcissistic, self-destructive nincompoop.




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