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.

CNN TROLLS TRUMP FOR TELLING THE TRUTH

Regular readers of my blog know full well that I am no fan of Donald Trump, but I am even less a fan of distorted news coverage. CNN POLITICS just posted an article titled "Trump: Robert E. Lee Was a Great General." Implication: Trump is a racist bigot because he praised the generalship of a racist bigot. The brief article goes on to poo-poo Trump's statement that Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia about defeating Lee. 

The problem with the tenor of the article--that There is something wrong with Trump because he recognized Lee's talent for generalship and Lincoln's obsession with defeating him--is that there is nothing wrong with speaking the truth. The article has another problem. It takes Trump's statement completely out of context. Trump was making the point that Ulysses S. Grant was an even greater general for having defeated Lee. CNN provided a clip of Trump's speech placing the comment in context, but a large percentage of readers will stop reading at the headline, and an even larger percentage will stop at the brief article. Only a few diligent readers will go on to view the clip. 

The article is a case study in how to mislead by telling the truth. I'm not suggesting that CNN deliberately set out to mislead. I'm suggesting that they should be more careful about how they structure their reporting.

Here's why saying Robert E. Lee was a great general does not make you a racist. Saying Genghis Khan and Tamerlane were great generals (which they were) does not make one a mass-murdering psychopath. And saying Erwin Rommel was a great general (which he was) does not make one a Nazi. 

It takes almost total ignorance of the history of the Civil War to suggest that Lincoln was not fixated on the defeat of Lee. The importance of defeating Lee is amply demonstrated by the fact that all the other significant Confederate armies rapidly surrendered after Lee's defeat. Lincoln knew that defeating Lee's Army of Northern Virginia would lead to the rapid collapse of the Confederacy, and he assigned his best general, U.S. Grant, to the job of defeating Lee.

CNN can and should do better reporting than the fiasco of an article on Trump's remarks praising Ulysses S. Grant.

You can read the full CNN article here:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/10/13/trump-lincoln-lee-grant-great-general-ohio-rally-sot-vpx.cnn

CNN HLN DOCUMENTARY: HOW IT REALLY HAPPENED: TED BUNDY: PARTS 1 & 2

The HLN documentary, "How It Really Happened: Ted Bundy" began airing with Parts 1 and 2 being shown last night, October 7. I settled down to view the show with a great deal of interest. Before watching the Oxygen Channel documentary on Bundy (which impressed me as being quite shallow), I had never watched a video presentation, either documentary or movie, from beginning to end. I'd seen glances of some of the stuff as I walked through rooms where the videos were airing, but whenever I had control of the remote, I switched channels quickly. When I didn't have control of the remote, I left the room.

The Oxygen Channel documentary is a prime example of what I expected of Bundy documentaries and why I had never watched one. I forced myself to watch the Oxygen documentary because I knew the HLN documentary was in the pipeline and I wanted to have a benchmark to compare it with. The HLN documentary was far superior to the Oxygen documentary. 

Hour 1 of the HLN documentary was educational. When I was working the Bundy case I purposely tried to remain as ignorant as possible of Bundy's western crimes because I didn't want my mind crowded with irrelevant facts which might skew my judgment. Because of my relative ignorance of the cases I learned all kinds of details which rekindled my intense dislike for Theodore Robert Bundy. The presentation was, I think, well-done. It handled the grisly details of those cases in as matter-of-fact a manner as was possible, with its focus on the trauma suffered by the victims and their families and not the "awesome marvelousness" of the "criminal mastermind," Ted Bundy.

Yeah, right, Bundy was such an evil genius that he went around introducing himself to potential victims using his real name. That was a brilliant tactic for directing suspicion away from himself. And his two escapes in Colorado were truly the work of a genius. Escape #1: He jumped out of a second story window which had been left open while the people who were supposed to be guarding him were in another room counting their change.  Escape #2: His jail cell had a hole in the ceiling which was big enough for him to crawl through. While he was banging around in the crawlspace in the ceiling, his guards were ignoring alerts from other inmates that Bundy was trying to escape.

The second hour was an account of Bundy's activities in Florida up to and including his arrest in Pensacola, Florida. I can speak to the accuracy of their narrative because they were talking about events which were a large part of my life for a number of years. The only error I found was a rather minor one. They said Bundy's identity remained a mystery until the Pensacola authorities sent his prints to the FBI. The FBI verified his identity through fingerprints, but Bundy had already 'fessed up and told the detectives who he was before the prints were sent off. In that day and age, before automation, it was well-nigh impossible to send off unknown prints to the FBI and have the FBI identify your suspect for you.

All-in-all, I was well-satisfied with the production. I rate it the best true crime documentary on any crime that I have ever seen from beginning to end. I am certainly going to watch the next two hours of the documentary, and I expect it to have the high quality displayed by the first two hours. I may even become a regular viewer of "How It Really Happened."

ENDNOTE: As I watched the program, it occurred to me that if I accomplished nothing else in my career as a prosecutor, I had done much good by helping to rid the world of Ted Bundy.

CNN HEADLINE NEWS DOCUMENTARY--"HOW IT REALLY HAPPENED: TED BUNDY"

Here a while back the Oxygen Channel did a two part documentary on Ted Bundy which basically plowed the same furrows which have been plowed by the various documentaries made about Bundy over the past 30+ years--placing major emphasis on the western cases, doing lots of emoting over how charismatic and charming Bundy was, and almost completely ignoring the crime for which he was executed.

It is not hard to figure out why Bundy's last murder has gone largely overlooked. There is no glitz or glamor, nothing charismatic or charming, about a murdering child molester. Having prosecuted several men who committed crimes fitting the FBI's definition of "serial murder," I was always somewhat disappointed that people could not see how remarkably unremarkable Ted Bundy really was.

I have high hopes that a new CNN documentary might help to demonstrate the ugliness of this twisted mediocrity who succeeded in making himself famous by committing unspeakable crimes. It is the first documentary production which has ever asked my opinion on the subject, and I was not shy about sharing my lack of admiration for Bundy.

“How It Really Happened: Ted Bundy,” a four-part documentary, premieres on CNN Headline News in early October.  Dates and times are below:  

“Part One: The Girls Are Missing” is Sunday, October 7 at 8pm 

“Part Two: Ted Escapes” follows Sunday, October 7 at 9pm 

“Part Three: The Murder Trials” is Sunday, October 14 at 8pm

“Part Four: The Death Row Confessions” follows Sunday, October 14 at 9pm. 

It will also be available on demand on cable systems and on CNNgo (CNN.com/go).

I look forward to watching it, and I hope that it serves to damage Bundy's image as a charismatic super-criminal.

HILLARY'S TRUMP OF GLOOM

I began watching the returns coming in on CNN last night, and it certainly was interesting. The pundits for the most part acted like they were at a wake. CNN held off calling Trump the winner in states where he obviously had won as their vote-count expert examined the states county-by-county desperately looking for some hope that Hillary could pull it out. It went something like this “Well, here in Transylvania, with 97 % of the vote tallied and Trump holding a 100,000 vote lead, Clinton can still pull it out because they haven’t finished counting the votes in Precinct 37 of Philharmonica, a historically Democratic stronghold.” Never mind that there were only 10,000 votes in Precinct 37 of Philharmonica.

I started swapping around between CNN and MSNBC, and the guys at MSNBC seemed to be taking it a little better, but they were still dragging their feet on calling states where Trump seemed to hold a commanding lead. Swapping over to FOX, I saw less gloom and doom, and more willingness to call states for Trump. An online check with a neutral source (the BBC) tended to validate FOX’s courage in going ahead and calling states for Trump.

Then somewhere between 2:00 and 2:30 John Podesta came out and told the somber crowd at the Clinton “victory” party to go home, that Clinton would have a statement the next morning. The next thing that I remember happening is some pundits talking about Clinton challenging the election results, and the illegitimacy of a Trump presidency because Clinton was probably going to win the popular vote. Seems to me like just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump had undermined the very foundation of American Democracy by suggesting that he might challenge the election results. I guess whether democracy is undermined depends completely upon who is challenging the election results.

Before we go any further, let it be known that I did not vote for Trump. I didn’t vote for Clinton either. I voted for the guy who thought Aleppo was a brand of dog food. In doing that, I have found common ground for agreement with Colin Kaepernick, who voted for None of the Above.

I really was upset that Trump got the Republican nomination, because I believed that he was Hillary Clinton’s best shot at getting elected president. I kept saying to myself and anyone else who would listen “If the Republicans had nominated a decent candidate, we’d have a Republican in the White House for the next four years.” I felt that Clinton was so marred by scandal that only someone who was obviously unqualified could lose to her. I was wrong. She was so marred by scandal that even someone who was obviously unqualified could beat her. I wonder how many Democrats this morning are saying “If we had nominated a decent candidate, we’d have a Democrat in the White House for the next four years.”

That’s one of the two things that I haven’t heard the Wednesday morning experts talk about as a factor in her defeat—her trail of scandal from Whitewater through Benghazi to the email fiasco with stop-offs at other scandals too numerous to mention. My fear of a Trump presidency almost persuaded me to vote for her, but her record of scandal was too great and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Another major factor that nobody seems to be talking about is the Second Amendment. I’m not talking about the NRA—I’m talking about the Second Amendment. The media demonizes the NRA as a powerful lobby which whips up public opposition to gun control. The NRA isn’t creating that public sentiment, it’s getting out in front of an already-existing public sentiment. The public knows that Clinton, like many “gun control” advocates, doesn’t want gun control, she wants gun elimination. If she had been elected president and gotten the opportunity to appoint four Supreme Court Justices, that is quite possibly what we would have gotten—gun elimination along the lines of Australia and England. The specter of that possibility almost, but not quite, persuaded me to vote for Trump.

So now, because the Democrats fielded such a flawed nominee, we have the least-qualified President-elect in history. He can, however, become one of the most successful Presidents of the Twenty-First Century if he does two things: (1) He must gather around himself a cadre of the most qualified people he can find to run the various executive offices, and (2) he must get out of their way and let them run the country. It would be nice if Trump assumed as great a role in running the United States government as Queen Elizabeth takes in running the United Kingdom's government. He could show up for ribbon-cuttings and other public ceremonies while people who knew what they were doing actually ran the country.