FEEDBACK ON "THE LAST MURDER: THE INVESTIGATION, PROSECUTION, AND EXECUTION OF TED BUNDY"

May 23 was my mumbledy mumbleth birthday, and I got a birthday wish from an unexpected source. Over the past few weeks I have been corresponding with Misha Hajj, a podcast producer who is working on a series of podcasts about Ted Bundy. I helped her obtain a copy of my book on the subject, and she expressed her appreciation with the following letter:

Happy birthday! Thank you so much for all of your hard work during your DECADES as a prosecutor. Thanks to your efforts the world has been saved from the plague of Bundy interviews and books he would have no doubt participated in if still alive. 

Your book, The Last Murder, is hands down my favorite out of the eleven Bundy books I’ve read. Your witty, hilarious and frank account of your role in the Kimberly Leach trial stands no contest to some of the other attempts to cover the case. 

I hope you have an amazing restful day, surrounded by those you love! 

Stay Safe!

Misha Hajj, Host & Executive Producer True Crime Aficionados

AUTOGRAPHS

For most of my life I have puttered along in relative obscurity, unknown outside my hometown and outside my profession. Back between 1978 and 1980 I had Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame as the lead prosecutor in the Lake City murder prosecution of Ted Bundy. Every once in a great while someone would ask me about the case, and I would gladly share my reminiscences. I even wrote a book about the case, hoping that other lawyers who might someday be confronted with such a case could read the book and learn from the mistakes we made during the prosecution. 

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.

TALK AT JACKSONVILLE PUBLIC LIBRARY

I will be giving a re-enactment of the final argument in the Ted Bundy case at the Jacksonville Public Library Main Branch on 303 N. Laura Street at 2:00 p.m. on July 13.

EXTREMELY INACCURATE, SHOCKINGLY DISTORTED, AND WARPED

As a rule, I don’t like movie biopics. They come with the assurance “based on a true story,” and viewers get the impression that the stories they tell actually happened. Sadly, any time I have ever seen a biopic on a person I knew something about, I could see where the movie got important details badly wrong, transforming “based on a true story” into “pure fiction suggested by a true story.” What is even more distressing to me is that usually the important details were gotten badly wrong on purpose. Why? To make the story better. These embellishments often wind up making the story worse.

Thus, in the movie “Hurricane,” Rubin Carter handily defeated Joey Giardello for the middleweight championship but was robbed of the decision by racist judges. I was a fan of Rubin Carter at the time of the fight, and I was sorely disappointed when Joey Giardello beat him with such ease. The same sort of thing goes for the movie “Cinderella Man,” where Max Baer is portrayed as some sort of sadistic bully like Ivan Drago, who loved to send his opponents to the hospital or the morgue. It made for a stirring sort of a confrontation between the underdog James Braddock and the favored Baer, but it slandered the happy-go-lucky Baer, who was as kind a man as ever climbed into the ring.


Which brings me to “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile,” which would better be titled “Extremely Inaccurate, Shockingly Distorted, and Warped.” I get that they wanted to make an interesting story, but this is a situation where the truth is far more interesting that the fictive account the movie rendered up. Of course, the truth is always nuanced in shades of grey, whereas biopics like to portray things in stark black and white.


In rough chronological order, here are a few of the distortions in the movie (I  voice no opinion on the depiction of what happened out West. I wasn’t there and I purposely remained as ignorant of Bundy’s Western “exploits” as possible so that I could concentrate on the case at hand without being distracted by other things):


The Florida police were not portrayed as badly as though they were Keystone Kops, but their portrayal was not an accurate reflection of the highly professional work done to bring Bundy to justice.


When Bundy was arrested in Pensacola, he did not gut punch the officer and knock him breathless to the ground. As the officer was cuffing Bundy, he spun out of the officer’s grasp and ran. When the officer caught him, Bundy resisted violently and the officer used sufficient force to subdue him, producing my favorite booking photo of Bundy.


The depiction of the service of the search warrant for Bundy’s teeth impressions was highly inaccurate. A goon squad did not rush in on Bundy and pin him down while teeth impressions were forcibly made. When the warrant was read to Bundy, he voiced opposition to it, but did not resist in the least.


Most of the courtroom scenes looked like they were written by someone whose only knowledge of court proceedings came from watching “Matlock” reruns.


Almost every lawyer depicted in the movie came across as a nincompoop. The lawyers were not nincompoops. The scene where Bundy jumped up and objected when his lawyer wouldn’t, got his objection sustained, and then his lawyer stormed out of the courtroom never happened. The fall guy who was chosen for the role of nincompoop lawyer in this sequence was “Dan Dowd,” a made-up lawyer who, so far as I know, exists only in the imaginations of the screenwriters. Apparently, they were ashamed to foist this piece of nincompoopery off on an actual lawyer who was engaged in Bundy’s defense.

The tragedy of this flight of fantasy is that anyone with even minimal knowledge of the case will identify “Dan Dowd” with Public Defender Michael Minerva, who rendered distinguished service to the people of the Second Judicial Circuit of Florida for many years, Mike was (and still is) an excellent criminal defense attorney and an honorable man. If I were in trouble with the law, I wouldn’t hesitate to retain him as my counsel.


The only nincompoop in the courtroom was Ted Bundy. He was constantly doing things to hamstring his defense team. Like when he cross-examined one of the first responding officers to the Chi Omega crime scene and had the officer describe, in Technicolor every gory detail of the scene. Or when he fired attorney Robert Haggard in the middle of the Chi Omega trial. Or when he insisted that Margaret Goode, an appellate attorney who had never tried a case to a jury, give the final argument in the Chi Omega case.


I wasn’t there when Mike Minerva talked to Ted Bundy about pleading to escape the death penalty, but I know just as surely as if I were there that it didn’t happen the way the movie portrayed it. “Dan Dowd” came breezing in and discussed the plea in front of a room full of people and tried to strongarm Bundy into taking the plea. That never happened. I’ve presented probably a thousand or more plea offers to clients, and I know as well as if I were there how Minerva presented the offer. Minerva gave the details of the offer to Bundy, discussed the evidence against him, rendered his opinion about the strength of the evidence, and recommended that Bundy take the plea. No strongarm tactics whatsoever were involved. As I used to tell my clients, “It’s no skin off my nose if you reject the plea. You’re the one facing prison, not me. At the end of the trial, I’m going home no matter what happens.”


Bundy did not reject the plea offer; we withdrew it because of his antics in court when he tried to offer the plea. He was trying to set up a post-conviction attack on his plea for ineffective assistance of counsel by berating Michael Minerva. His plan was to give the plea, go to prison for a few years and wait for the cases against him to deteriorate to the point they could never be resurrected, and then withdraw his plea and win an acquittal at trial. What he accomplished was to drive away the most talented lawyer on his defense team. Minerva sent two of his top assistants to Miami to try the case, but he stayed in Tallahassee, and in Miami Bundy boo-hoo’ed in open court about Minerva abandoning him. If I had been Minerva, it would have been all I could do to keep from slugging him.


The marriage ceremony was farcical enough in real life, but the way they portrayed it in the movie was downright stupid. In real life there was a notary public in court who signed the marriage license when Bundy pronounced them man and wife. Gary Oldman’s John Malkovich's “ruling” that all you have to do is stand up in a Florida courtroom and say, “I do,” and you’re married was ludicrous. And the marriage occurred in Orlando during the penalty phase, not in Miami during the guilt phase. [I keep mixing up Oldman and Malkovich for some reason].


The “conjugal visit” in the Orange County Jail never happened. Bundy impregnated his wife with a crude form of artificial insemination in the Death Row visiting park at Florida State Prison. I will spare readers the details of how it was accomplished.



The tragedy of biopics like “Extremely Inaccurate, Shockingly Distorted, and Warped” is that people will watch the movie and think that things actually happened as portrayed in the movie. They didn’t. Something somewhat similar to the events depicted in the movie happened. The actual events were more complex, more nuanced, and cast Bundy in a far less glamorous light.

ZAC EFRON'S PONTIFICATION ON TED BUNDY

Zac Efron has announced that Ted Bundy got away with murder because of "White Privilege." No matter how thinly you slice his words, they are still baloney. White privilege had nothing to do with Bundy's getting away with 27+ murders. I am going to explain how Bundy (and other serial killers) got away with so many murders, and I am going to do it in words of one or two syllables. In order to do this, I'm going to have to use SK to mean "serial killer" because "serial" has three syllables:

Bundy got away with so many murders because he killed strangers. SK's kill people they don't know. When you kill someone you don't know, it's hard for the police to connect you to the murder. When the police got enough to connect Bundy to a murder, they nailed him. Bundy's skin color had nothing to do with him getting away with 27 murders.

I'm going to start using bigger words now: The fact that Bundy was a good looking, articulate white guy may have contributed to his celebrity, but it did not give him any sort of advantage when he became ensnarled in the criminal justice system.

I'm going to stray from the main subject now: The myth of "Bundy the criminal mastermind" is as big a pile of organic fertilizer as "Bundy the benificiary of white privilege." Bundy was a cunning psychopath, but far from a criminal mastermind. At his two trials in Florida his nincompoopery and grandstanding in court served in no small measure to help ease the burden of proof on the prosecution. That's not a criminal mastermind, that's a criminal dumb@$$.

A GOODREADS REVIEW OF “THE LAST MURDER”

QUORA QUESTION: ON A PURELY MORAL BASIS, RATHER THAN A PRACTICAL ONE, TO YOU THINK THERE ARE ANY CRIMES/PEOPLE THAT DESERVE THE DEATH PENALTY?

Yes. Here’s a non-exclusive list of reasons I think the death penalty is morally justified gleaned from some of the First Degree Murder cases I prosecuted.

DERRICK MANNING—Shot and killed two deputy sheriffs who were investigating a sexual battery complaint because he didn’t want his third degree felony probation revoked. RESULT: Death penalty overturned on appeal. Serving life sentences for murder.

THEODORE ROBERT BUNDY—I prosecuted him for the murder of a 12 year old school girl, the crime for which he was eventually executed. Need I say more? RESULT: Electrocuted.

JOHN MERRITT—While burglarizing his girlfriend's home, her father came home unexpectedly, so Merritt tied him up and shot him in the back of the head. He didn’t want anybody to be able to identify him. RESULT: Death Penalty overturned on appeal. Serving life sentence for murder. Had a rap sheet as long as your arm for burglary and crimes of violence.

MARSHALL GORE—A Ted Bundy wannabe who raped a string of victims from Cleveland, Tennessee, to Miami, Florida. His MO was to torture them, bash their heads in, and cut their throats. Miraculously, most of his victims survived, but they were mentally scarred for life. I will never forget the angelic young lady whose wrists and throat he cut. She kept passing out on him while he was torturing her, and he would dutifully wake her up so she could feel the pain he was inflicting. The most disturbing thing he did to her was to screw a corkscrew into her throat. She was so traumatized she flatly refused to come to court and testify against him. RESULT: Executed for a Miami murder before our death penalty could be carried out.

CARLIS LINDSEY—A serial killer who bragged that he “had his own private graveyard down on the muck.” Killed at least four people that we had proof of over a 30 year period of time, his last murders coming when he blew the faces off a young lady and her brother with a shotgun because he was angry that she was moving out of his house. She wanted to move out because of a disagreement over whether she was his girlfriend (she said “No”) or a rent-paying tenant. RESULT: Death penalty overturned. Died in prison.

KENNETH CHAKY—Brained his wife and put her in the trunk of the family car, and then hired a neighbor to “burn my car, but don’t look in the trunk.” When the neighbor opened the trunk, he abandoned the car at a nearby Dempsey Dumpster. A deputy sheriff saw the car, which Chaky had reported stolen, and returned it to Chaky with the body still in the trunk. Chaky then tried to recruit his neighbor to help in gather up a sufficient number of stray dogs to eat his wife’s body. Chaky wanted to be unmarried, but he didn’t want to pay alimony or child support. RESULT: Death penalty reversed on appeal. Now serving life in prison.

RICHARD HAMILTON—Career criminal who escaped prison and kidnapped a young nursing student who had stopped at the supermarket to pick up diapers for her infant child. Raped her multiple times and then killed her to prevent being identified as her rapist/kidnapper. RESULT: Awaiting execution.

ANTHONY WAINWRIGHT—Career criminal accomplice of Richard Hamilton. RESULT: Awaiting execution.

ROGER HARRIS—Another man who had an inconvenient wife. Had the mechanical ability to hand-make a firearm to use as a murder weapon. Lured her into the rear seat of her van on the pretense of having sex and shot her in the back of the head with the gun, which fired a finishing nail punch which was approximately 1/2 inch in diameter. RESULT: Death penalty overturned. Serving a life sentence.

JOHN BLACKWELDER—Serving multiple life sentences for sexual battery on children under twelve. Got angry with his boyfriend and convinced the boyfriend to lie spread-eagle on his bunk and be tied down in four point restraints to make sexual relations more fun. Once he got the victim tied down, he garroted the man. While the trial was pending, he told me he’d like to straighten my tie (I wonder what he meant by that?) and that he would like to sexually molest my children. Shortly after 9/11 I got a letter from him celebrating the deaths of all the victims who were killed on that day. RESULT: Executed by lethal injection.

CHARLES GLOBE—Career criminal serving multiple life sentences for armed robbery who conspired with a fellow prisoner (with whom he was very, very close) to kill a number of prisoners and prison guards. They made a list, decided on one victim, attacked him in his cell, garroted him, had sex on the top bunk while the victim lay dead on the bottom bunk, and then they decorated the cell with the victim’s blood. (A mitigating factor: Globe did talk his accomplice out of cutting the victim’s head off). RESULT: Died on death row while awaiting execution.

ANDY BUSBY—Globe’s accomplice and also a convicted murderer. RESULT: Death penalty reversed, sentenced to life on remand. Now serving life. The remand was after I retired. If I had still been working, I would have pushed for another death penalty.

COMMENT—Probably the two least deserving of death on this list were Chaky and Harris. If I had it to do over again, I would not have sought the death penalty on them, but not because they didn’t deserve it; because I now know how difficult it is to make a death penalty stick on a wife killer. The Chaky and Harris results caused me to forego the death penalty and just get LWOP sentences on a number of other wife killers. (LWOP means life without parole).

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 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.

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.

TED BUNDY: A VISUAL TIMELINE

There's a new ebook out titled Ted Bundy: A Visual Timeline, which should tell you more about the life and crimes of Ted Bundy than you'll ever want to know. The author, Rob Dielenberg, consulted with me concerning the Lake City case, and that portion of the book devoted to Lake City is accurate. If Dielenberg took as much care with the rest of Bundy's career as he did with the portion I know about, and I see no reason why he shouldn't have, then the book will be far more accurate than most of the existing literature on Bundy.

LECTURE ON INVESTIGATING AND PROSECUTING COMPLEX HOMICIDE CASES

Here is the video feed of a lecture I delivered a few weeks ago at the University of West Florida for a college class on serial killers. LECTURE

MORE ON SIMILARITIES BETWEEN TED BUNDY AND BRUNO RICHARD HAUPTMANN

I have previously written about the similarities between our case against Ted Bundy for kidnapping and killing Kim Leach and the case against Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and killing the Lindbergh baby. One striking similarity that I did not discuss was the nature of the proof in each case. In each case the prosecution had three things which must be tied together to make the case. In the Bundy case we had a white van which was used in the kidnapping, and we had to tie both Bundy and Kim to the van. We also had to put Bundy and Kim together. As I analyzed the case, if we could (1) put Bundy in the van and (2) put Kim in the van and (3) put Bundy and Kim together, we could prove he murdered her. This analysis could be diagrammed onto the corners of a triangle. Bundy, Kim, and the van were the points of the triangle, and the evidence tying each of these three together were the legs of the triangle. Eventually, with the help of a graphic artist, we turned this triangle diagram into a visual aid for final argument.

RELATIONSHIP TRIANGLE
FOR BUNDY CASE

 

This visual aid was a key factor in persuading the jury that we had proven our case. When I argued the Bundy case I gave the longest final argument I ever gave in any case before or since. Toward the end of the argument I felt I had started losing the jury. They were becoming restless and inattentive, and I was becoming disheartened. It was about this time, though, that I came to the finale where I would unveil the triangle chart and explain how all the evidence tied together. The jury was mesmerized, not by my oratorical skill, but by the diagram and how it placed everything into perspective.

 

RELATIONSHIP TRIANGLE
IN FINAL ARGUMENT

Although the prosecution team did not seem to notice, the Lindbergh case was amenable to the same sort of triangular analysis. In the Lindbergh case the baby had been stolen from its nursery on the second floor of the Lindbergh home and later a mysterious figure identified as Cemetery John had extorted $50,000 out of Lindbergh on the promise to return the baby. Two years later Hauptmann was arrested in possession of almost $15,000 in Lindbergh ransom money. The prosecution had to tie three figures together to get a conviction. They had to put Hauptmann in the nursery with the baby; they had to put Cemetery John in the nursery with the baby; and they had to prove that Hauptmann was Cemetery John.

In the Bundy case we had a myriad of small circumstances which, taken together, established the three legs of our triangle. In the Lindbergh case they had many small circumstances, but they also had three large circumstances: the homemade ladder which the kidnapper left at the scene; the ransom money; and the ransom notes. In other words they had a LADDER, some LETTERS, and the LOOT to form the three legs of their triangle. The LADDER tied Hauptmann to the scene with proof that he was the one who built it. The LETTERS tied Cemetery John to the scene because they were all written in the same hand and one of them was left in the nursery. The LOOT showed that Hauptmann was Cemetery John because it was given to Cemetery John and later found in Hauptmann’s possession. The LETTERS also tied Hauptmann to Cemetery John because eight handwriting examiners testified that Hauptmann wrote all the ransom letters.

If we take all this and put it on a triangle diagram, we get something that looks like this:

RELATIONSHIP TRIANGLE FOR
HAUPTMANN CASE

If we were going to use this as an actual visual aid in a final argument, we would make it more elaborate and would add in all the circumstantial evidence on each leg of the triangle, not just the three most salient circumstances. As it turned out the prosecution didn’t need such a visual aid to prove their case, but it certainly could not have hurt them had they used something like this.

MEMORIES OF MURDER WEAPONS

I was in the gym this morning trying to reduce my waist size when some of the patrons began to ask me questions about the prosecution of Ted Bundy. This doesn’t happen as much as it did 30 years ago, but it does happen from time to time. One of the men asked me if we had ever found the murder weapon. He reminded me that sometime shortly after Bundy’s conviction I had told him about my belief that we may have found the murder weapon. This immediately conjured up a memory of an event which I had not thought of in many years.

It seems that shortly after Bundy’s conviction, we were informed that a law enforcement officer out in the Panhandle had found Bundy camping and taken a huge knife away from him. The knife was supposedly in some agency’s property room. I asked that it be run down and taken into FDLE custody in case of a reversal and a retrial. I do not recall hearing anything more of the incident and don’t know whether the knife was recovered.

If you have read The Last Murder, you will recall that the Medical Examiner had opined that the cause of death was “homicidal violence to the neck area, type undetermined, accompanied by copious bleeding.” Just the day before the abduction Bundy had bought a huge Buck General hunting knife at a Jacksonville sporting goods store. It doesn’t take a great deal of brainpower to infer that the Buck General was what caused the “homicidal violence to the neck area.” We spent a lot of time, energy, and effort trying to find that knife, but were never able to locate it. Then, after the trial was completely over, like belated manna from heaven, we learned about the officer who had relieved Bundy of a gigantic knife just a day or two before his arrest in Pensacola.

Was it the murder weapon? Was the guy really Bundy? I can’t remember enough detail to say. I learned of the incident in 1980 after Bundy’s conviction. It is now 34 years later. At this distance in time from the incident I can’t really say how much of my vivid memory is real and how much is imagined. Our memory does not work like a DVD. We don’t have a video of every incident in our lives, and we can’t simply rewind the video and replay it to get a 100% accurate account of a long-ago event.

Our brains only record the gist of an event, and when we recall it to memory, it is somewhat like looking at a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. Whenever you look at a partially assembled jigsaw puzzle you can usually infer what the missing portion of the picture looks like. That’s what our mind does when the gist of a memory is recalled. Subconsciously our brains fill in the blank spaces with reasonable inferences of what must have happened. As time passes and more pieces of the puzzle go missing, reasonable inference is less able to reconstruct the incident, and imagination takes over. Psychologists call this process confabulation, which is a fancy word for lying. But it’s not really lying, because the process goes on subconsciously and we think we are remembering actual details.

That’s why we have conflicts in testimony, and that’s why the conflicts tend to become more pronounced as time goes by. Nobody’s lying, their subconscious minds are just filling in different details to the gist of a memory that the witnesses all share. For example, some survivors of the Titanic said the ship broke in two before it went down. Others said it went down intact. This conflict in testimony doesn’t mean that the Titanic completed its voyage by docking in New York. We have pictures of the ship resting on the bottom of the ocean. The two groups of survivors agree as to the gist of the event (the Titanic went down), and that memory is accurate. As the saying goes, however, the Devil is in the details of how it went down.

 

So I have this vivid memory with details that may or may not be true. It was at a campground in a State park. The officer was a wildlife officer. Bundy was found chopping on a stump with the knife. All this may be true or it may be confabulation. What isn’t negotiable about my memory is the fact that an officer took a huge knife away from Bundy shortly before Bundy got arrested in Pensacola. That much is corroborated by my friend remembering that I told him the same facts.  

So the next time two people are telling you about an event and they are in hopeless conflict about the details, don’t assume that either one of them is lying. Just take the details that they both agree on as being the gist of a genuine memory and weigh the conflicting details against each other and against reasonable probabilities to separate the genuine memory from the confabulation. In our Titanic example, I think the witnesses who say the ship broke in two are more likely right. Reason: Photographs of the ship on the bottom of the ocean show it is broken in two.

BTW: Back in 1978, the Buck General hunting knife was configured like a Bowie knife. I don’t know what current models of the knife look like. This makes for an interesting parallel between Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling. Rolling committed his murders with a Ka-Bar fighting/utility knife, which is also configured like a Bowie knife.

 

A HISTORY OF EVIL IN POPULAR CULTURE

I think that I mentioned in one of my first blogs that I had 120,000 words written on The Last Murder with three chapters to go when I learned from my publisher that the word limit on the book was going to be 80,000 words. That caused me to go back with a meat cleaver and cut out what I believed to be a lot of interesting stories AND to collapse the last three chapters into a single chapter. I got the word count down to 90,000 or 100,000 and the publisher was satisfied.

I had some good stories about the post-conviction proceedings which went untold, and I had some words I wanted to say about the phenomenon of celebrity killers. I haven't had the opportunity to tell the story of the post-conviction circus (I probably never will), but I did get an opportunity to say some things about celebrity killers. I was invited to write a chapter for a book of essays entitled A History of Evil in Popular Culture (edited by Dr. Sharon Packer & Jody W. Pennington). They asked me to talk about the near-cult status Bundy gained as a celebrity killer, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity. 

At the time I had no idea how enormous a task the editors had set for themselves. A History of Evil in Popular Culture turned out to be a two volume, 850 page work.  It is set for publication in July of 2014 and is currently available for pre-order. I have no financial interest at all in the book, other than the fact that they're going to give me a free copy. It looks like I'm going to have to clear a good bit of shelf space to accommodate it.

MINNESOTA COUNTY ATTORNEYS ASSOCIATION

Last Friday I spoke to the Minnesota County Attorneys Association. We flew into Minneapolis on Thursday and stayed through Monday. It was 81 degrees F when we left Lake City and -11 when we arrived at the airport in Minneapolis. As a lifelong Floridian who has seen more snow on faulty picture tubes than on the ground, I was not prepared for the drop in temperature. I saw a number of prosecutor friends I hadn't seen since they closed down the NDAA National Advocacy Center back in the early 2000's. The Center, which was subsidized by the Federal Government, served for many years as an elite training school for prosecutors, but it fell victim to budget cuts several years ago. I served as faculty there on several occasions and have nothing but fond memories of the place. I understand that there are plans to open a reincarnation of the Center in Utah, and I wish them the best of luck with the endeavor.

The View from Our Hotel Room

 

I was the last speaker on the MCAA agenda, and I was afraid that I would be speaking to an empty room as everyone checked out of the hotel and headed for home. I was pleasantly surprised to see a full house of approximately 200. I spoke for almost two hours on the investigation and prosecution of Ted Bundy, and the lecture seemed to be well-received. The main topic of the talk was the problems a prosecutor confronts in handling a high-profile serial murder case.

I was pleased to hear several prosecutors praise Cross-Examination Handbook: Persuasion, Strategies, and Techniques, which I co-authored with Ron Clark and William Bailey. The book was a labor of love, and I am gratified that practitioners find it useful for planning and conducting cross-examinations.

Lane (my wife) and I didn't get out much in the sub-zero weather, but we did get an opportunity to visit the Mall of America, a shopping center with an aquarium in the basement, an amusement park on the ground floor, and a multiplex cinema on the fourth floor. It also had a huge Lego store with the biggest Lego model I have ever seen (a gigantic robot). Except for the bitter cold, it was a pleasant trip.