TED BUNDY AGAIN

There's a new documentary airing this Sunday on the Oxygen Channel about Ted Bundy. Apparently it highlights his relationship with attorney John Henry Browne, who represented Bundy in some of his legal difficulties out west. I just read a Fox News Article article on the documentary which features an interview with Browne about Bundy. I'm not going to talk about Browne's opinions on Bundy's personality. I do, however, want to clear up some inaccuracies in the article. Browne is quoted as saying:

"He [Bundy] also turned down the plea bargain I got for him. Nobody would ever believe you could get a plea bargain for Ted Bundy, but I did with one other lawyer… He turns around and says, ‘I’m not going to do it.’ That’s when we told him we weren’t going to help him anymore."

There are two problems with this statement. As I recall, (1) John Henry Browne didn't get a plea bargain for Bundy, Mike Minerva did; and (2) Bundy didn't refuse to accept the plea agreement; the prosecution vetoed his offer of plea. I was there for the plea fiasco, and my memory of it varies significantly from Browne's.

I think it was John Barth who wrote something to the effect that everyone is a hero in his own biography, meaning that we sometimes remember our roles in an event as being more significant than they really were. Browne's role in the plea agreement was significant for one reason, and it had nothing to do with negotiating the plea bargain. Chi Omega prosecutor Larry Simpson, Second Circuit State Attorney Harry Morrison, my boss Third Circuit State Attorney Jerry Blair, and I were on the other end of the abortive plea bargain, and if I ever spoke to Browne while we were negotiating the plea bargain I don't remember it. As I recall the subject of the plea bargain was first broached to me by Public Defender Mike Minerva as we had lunch during a deposition break in Tallahassee. I took Mike's overture to my boss Jerry Blair and we went with it to Larry Simpson and Harry Morrison. Mike may have also made overtures to them, but if he did I don't remember it. 

After a lengthy process of discussing the matter with family members of the deceased parties, law enforcement officials working the case, and lawyers whose judgement we trusted, we eventually took a deep breath and agreed that 100% certainty of keeping Bundy off the street for the rest of his life was better than going for the death penalty, losing, and turning him loose on society again. Jerry and I agreed that taking the plea might very well end our careers as prosecutors, but that would be a small sacrifice if we could make sure Bundy never killed again.

As we were working out the details of the plea, Mike Minerva told us that in order to sell Bundy on the plea bargain they brought in John Henry Browne to convince him to take the plea. Would we mind Browne being involved in the taking of the plea? We didn't. If it would grease the skids and expedite the plea, we had no objection. We strongly urged Mike to make Bundy understand that we would tolerate no antics at the plea hearing. Bundy would have to behave himself if he wanted the plea. We drafted a written plea offer which Bundy was to sign, and scheduled the hearing. 

It was a fiasco. When we got to court, Bundy immediately took center stage and began berating Mike Minerva and proclaiming his innocence. As his tirade progressed, I spoke with Jerry and Larry about the advisability of going ahead with the plea in light of his antics. We all agreed that we could not under any circumstances take a plea from Bundy in light of his complaints about how Mike Minerva didn't have Bundy's best interests at heart.

I was sitting next to Mike Minerva, who was in turn sitting next to Bundy. Bundy was standing as he ranted about Mike. His tirade seemed to go on forever. Finally, he picked up the plea offer up off the table in front of him, and it looked to me like he was about to announce that in light of the sorry service he was getting from Mike Minerva, he was being forced to plead guilty. I leaned over to Mike and asked "That silly b@st@rd isn't fixing to plead, is he?" Mike said that he thought Bundy was about to plead. I replied "Tell him to sit his @$$ down, we ain't taking no plea." Mike tugged on Bundy's coat sleeve and whispered in his ear. Bundy looked surprised and distressed. Then he sat down. And thus ended the one of the most painful court hearings of my career as a lawyer.

We couldn't take the plea because it would be subject to collateral attack as being involuntary. Apparently Bundy thought we'd be dumb enough to take his "involuntary" plea; he could wait in prison a few years until the case against him had had deteriorated beyond repair; and then he could move to vacate his plea and walk free.

Which is the second misconception fostered by the above Fox news article. Bundy didn't refuse to plead. The prosecution refused to accept his carefully stage-managed "involuntary" plea.

A third inaccuracy in the article has to do with David Lee, the man who arrested Bundy in Pensacola. Of Lee's arrest, Browne is quoted as saying:

"He [Bundy] gets caught by a 300-pound older police officer when Ted was in the best physical shape of his life."

There are very few Southern law enforcement officers who fit the mold of Sheriff Buford T. Justice from "Smokey and the Bandit," and David Lee was not one of them. When Lee arrested Bundy, Lee was young, strong, and in excellent physical shape. Good enough shape to pound the tobacco juice out of Bundy when Bundy violently resisted arrest. Here is a "Reader's Digest" account of the arrest: Lee stopped Bundy and placed him under arrest for loitering and prowling. Bundy broke free and began to run away. Lee fired a shot at Bundy. Bundy fell to the ground. When Lee approached Bundy and began to examine him to determine if he was wounded, Bundy attacked him. Lee beat Bundy into submission. My favorite photo of Bundy is his booking photo from the Escambia County Jail.

THE RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH BEING A PROSECUTOR, PART 2

Back in the mid 1980’s, I got assigned to a case against a drug smuggling ring headquartered in Chicago. The interesting thing about this ring was that approximately half of the members of the ring were either current or former Chicago police officers. The charges included Racketeering, Conspiracy to Murder, Kidnapping, and Murder. Two of the men we indicted were reputed to be organized crime hit men. You can read a more in-depth account of the case in my blog post titled THE WRONG MAN MURDER.

The nice thing about working on the case was that I wasn’t the lead prosecutor. I had been called in to help out on the case when the defense team filed somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 pretrial motions. Although I didn’t like pretrial motion practice, I was pretty good at it, so I got assigned.

After the dust had settled and the smoke had cleared from hearing all the pretrial motions, I stayed on to assist in the trial of the case. This was probably the most complex case I ever tried, which was probably another reason I was kept on after the motion hearings. I was also pretty good at organizing vast quantities of evidence. The office was just entering the computer age, and our system came with a very primitive database program. I used the database program to work out a system for organizing and keeping track of all our witnesses and evidentiary exhibits. It was fun, and I got totally hooked on computerizing trial preparation.

The trial team was a reunion of the Ted Bundy trial team. Len Register was the lead prosecutor, Jerry Blair assumed the role of “player-coach,” and I was the water boy. We tried the case on change of venue to Tallahassee Florida, and I rented a room in a fleabag motel hoping to economize on travel expenses. When we had tried Ted Bundy a few years before, I had run up a whopping credit card bill which took a good long while to pay off, and I wasn’t planning on doing that again.

Jerry and Len seemed awfully nervous about personal safety. They both carried concealed weapons which they had to turn in to courthouse security every morning and retrieve every afternoon. FDLE had formed a witness protection team which acted as bodyguards for our important witnesses, some of whom actually testified while wearing bullet proof vests.  Initially I thought this was a silly display of paranoia, and I took great pleasure in kidding Jerry and Len about their timidity.

Then some relatives of one of the reputed hit men came to town in a black Cadillac and started attending the trial. The Sheriff’s Office tactical unit kept tabs on them while they were in town. They did some strange things, but nothing you could really call criminal. They got blamed for one thing that happened, but there was really no proof they were responsible. Somebody booby trapped the bomb squad which swept our courtroom for explosive devices every morning.  One morning while they were in the courtroom sweeping for bombs, somebody was taking the lugnuts off of two of the tires to their van. After they got through sweeping the courtroom, they went back to the van, got in, and drove off. They hadn’t gone very far before the wheels fell off. I thought it was funny.

I started losing my sense of humor one night about two in the morning when I got a call on my hotel phone. I answered the phone, but my caller did not speak. I said “Hello” several times but got no response. It wasn’t a hang up call, my caller stayed on the line unspeaking. I hung up the phone and went to the manager’s office. The motel was so primitive that there was a little switchboard in the manager’s office. Callers would call the main number and ask for a room, and the manager would connect the caller to the requested room. I wanted to know who the blazes had called, and the night manager ought to know.

He didn’t. Somebody had just called and asked to be put through to my room, and the manager had obliged. I told the manager I needed to change rooms, and I needed to change rooms immediately. He put me up in a room at the other end of the motel from the room I had rented. I slept there that night, and moved my luggage into the room the next day. I continued to park my car in front of my original room.

Then somebody scrawled a death threat on the window of one of the juror’s hotel room. Then one night somebody got to the judge’s car, lifted the hood, and unhooked one pole of the battery. He was seen and fled on foot before he could do anything else. Of course, the theory law enforcement liked was that he was trying to hook a bomb to the judge’s car. The next weekend I drove back to Lake City and retrieved a handgun.

As I said, the Sheriff’s Office tactical unit was keeping track of the black Cadillac as it tooled about town, but sometimes they lost it. One of those nights when they lost the Cadillac I was suffering from insomnia. I decided what I needed was a nice Diet Coke, so I stepped out of my room to walk to the one drink machine in the motel. It was then that I saw a black Cadillac pulling into the motel parking lot. I faded into the shrubbery and watched. The Cadillac turned to drive in the direction of my car, which was still parked in front of my old motel room. When it turned, I could see the license plate—an Illinois tag. The Cadillac slowed down in front of my car, made a U-turn, and drove back out of the parking lot. I got out of the bushes, went to a phone, and called the tactical unit. They posted a highly visible guard on my room for the rest of the night, and I moved out the next morning.

I moved to the motel that was being used by the witness protection team and got the room next door to theirs. It was much more expensive, but I slept much better in my new room. Finally the trial ended, and I can’t say that I was unhappy to be through with it. I believe that two of the defendants were among the most dangerous men I ever prosecuted, and I have prosecuted many dangerous men.