Being a non-celebrity is perfectly fine with me. I get
uncomfortable when people start paying attention to me. One of my favorite poems
is Emily Dickenson’s “I’m Nobody—Who Are You?” The way I remember the poem is
not quite the way she wrote it, but I like my version better:
I’m nobody, who
are you?
Are you nobody, too?
How dreary to be somebody,
How public, like a
frog,
To croak away the livelong day
To an admiring bog.
Starting about 18
months ago, there was a spate of documentaries on Ted Bundy, and for some reason
many of the documentarians wanted to interview me. I have never turned down an
invitation to talk about one of my cases, so I got a good bit of face time on
some of the documentaries. This stood in stark contrast to the news coverage of
the time and the early documentaries that came out on Bundy in the 1980’s. At
that time the Lake City case was virtually ignored by the media. People would
ask me if I was in any of those documentaries, and I would tell them that if
they paid close attention, they might catch a glimpse of the back of my head in
a courtroom scene or two.
Now, however, things were different. My main agenda
for appearing on these documentaries was to counter the pop culture narrative
that Ted Bundy was the second coming of Professor Moriarty. I tried hard to
spread the news that Ted Bundy was nothing but a garden variety dirtbag who
happened to have a pretty face, the gift of gab, and a slightly above average
IQ.
I failed, but there was an unintended consequence of appearing on these
documentaries--I had become a movie star! Whoopee! I even had a page on the
IMDb! In case you missed the irony, I’m being sarcastic. I mentioned earlier
that I get uncomfortable when too much attention is paid to me. I became very
uncomfortable with one aspect of this newly acquired attention. People started
sending me pictures of Ted Bundy and asking for my autograph on them.
When I got
the first letter, I sat on it for several weeks trying to decide whether to
ignore it. I finally decided that the cover letter seemed sincere, so I signed a
couple of pictures of wanted posters and booking photos. I stopped short at
signing pictures of just Ted Bundy. Answering that letter didn’t open a
floodgate of letters seeking autographs, but I’d estimate that I got about one
letter per month after that. Always there were booking photos and wanted posters, and
always there were photos of just Bundy. I would sign the booking photos and
wanted posters and send them back with a cover letter explaining my refusal to
sign a photo of just Bundy. One of the photos was a picture of him standing in
open court grinning like a mule eating briars. I’d rather have my fingernails
ripped out with rusty pliers than sign something like that!
Feeling guilty for my refusal to sign all the pictures, I began to enclose a 4x6 photo of Bundy taken
at the Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler the day after he got the
death penalty in our case. My father was the Institutional Inspector at RMC back in 1980, and
he got the photo for me. I’d sign that photo and explain its significance and
say I’d enclosed it to make up for not signing all the proffered photos. Here's
the photo:
The "A" at the beginning of his inmate number means this picture was taken on
his second trip through RMC for his second conviction in the state of Florida.
I
occasionally run my name on Google, Bing, and a couple of other search engines
just to see if anyone out there is libeling me, and that’s how I discovered I
was on the IMDb. Over the years I’ve found some incredibly asinine things
written about me, most of them knee slappingly funny. Tonight, however, I saw
something that made me angry.
Somebody had sold one of the wanted posters that I
autographed on ebay for $499.99. There was a promise that the wanted poster
would be accompanied by a certificate of authenticity attesting that I
personally signed the poster in front of a representative of the seller. The representative must
have been hiding behind the curtain in my home office when I signed it. I’m not
sure how he got into the house through the locked door without being detected by
our security system. [I’m being sarcastic again.]
I’m not sure whether I ought
to feel sympathy for the person who paid almost $500 for an autograph that he
could have gotten for the price of sending me a letter containing a postpaid
envelope. I feel like he was hoodwinked worse than I was. But it’s hard to
generate sympathy for anybody who could be dumb enough to pay that much money
for the signature of a non-celebrity like me on the picture of a dirtbag like
Ted Bundy.
As George W. Bush once tried (and failed) to say, “Fool me once,
shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” I am not signing any more wanted
posters or booking photos of Ted Bundy. In the future, anyone sending me photos
of that nature to be signed will have them returned unsigned. Just in case they really want my autograph for themselves rather than to sell on ebay, I will send them an autographed picture of the visual aid we used during final argument.
