THE SUNSHINE STATE BOOK FESTIVAL (JANUARY 29, 30, 2022)

 I just registered as one of the exhibitors at the Sunshine State Book Festival, which is to be held in the Oaks Mall, Gainesville, on Saturday, January 29, 2022, with lectures the next afternoon at the Matheson History Museum. More information on the festival can be found HERE.

I will be featuring my latest book, The East River Ripper: The Mysterious 1891 Murder of Old Shakespeare, but I will have copies of most of my other books, including The Last Murder: The Investigation, Prosecution, and Execution of Ted Bundy and Six Capsules: The Gilded Age Murder of Helen Potts.

If you are a bibliophile (aka bookworm), you won't want to miss this event.

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.

MY ACCIDENTAL LITERARY CAREER

On the publication of my seventh (or is it my sixth) book, I got to thinking back over my accidental literary career, how it got started, and how it has progressed. I’d always had a hankering to become a published author, but never thought I'd actually do it. Then I retired from the State Attorney’s Office and things began to fall into place. 

[1] Prosecution Principles: A Clinical Handbook, West Group, St. Paul, MN, 2007.

When I started as a legal skills professor at the University of Florida College of Law, I couldn’t find a textbook on how to be a prosecutor, so I decided to write one myself. It wasn’t hard to throw something together because I had taught a lot of continuing legal education courses on a wide variety of subjects and I had written brief monographs for each subject. It was no trick to simply put the monographs together in the order I wanted to cover the subjects in class, and I had a textbook for my first semester. I made a pdf of the book and gave students free copies of the text. I’m almost never satisfied with something I make, and I keep going back and tinkering with it until I get it as near perfect (for me) as I can. Each semester I improved the textbook. One fine day a representative of West Publishing was giving us a refresher course on Westlaw, the computer research software. During a break, I told her about my plight in being unable to find a textbook and my solution. She said that West might be interested in publishing the book if it were aimed at a national audience. I told her I could certainly rewrite the book and make it less Florida-centric. And so, completely by accident, I got my first book published.

[2] The Last Murder: The Investigation, Prosecution, and Execution of Ted Bundy, Praeger, 2011.

Ever since guilty verdict in the Ted Bundy case, people have been asking me “Why don’t you write a book about the case?” I could write several thousand words on why I didn’t immediately try to write something about the case, but I won’t. I’ll just give two reasons: (1) I felt it was not proper to write about the case while it was still in litigation. (2) I needed to put a few decades between me and the crime before I could bring myself to write anything. I purposely set out to write a book that wouldn’t have a lot of commercial appeal. I wasn’t going to write a lurid, sensational penny-dreadful style book like most of the stuff that is written in the “true crime” genre. I wanted to write an antiseptic, professional analysis of the investigation and prosecution. Despite my best efforts to make the book unmarketable it sold fairly well. The style I adopted for The Last Murder would be the style of every subsequent book I’ve written. Academic, scholarly, and difficult to read unless you really want to learn something about the subject.

[3] Cross-Examination Handbook: Persuasion, Strategies, and Techniques, 1^st ed., Wolters-Kluwer, 2011. (co-author). 

I hadn’t been practicing law long before I began to build a reputation as a pretty fair cross-examiner. I was often asked to teach on the subject of cross-examination at continuing legal education courses. (As a matter of fact, I’m going to be lecturing at a CLE on cross-examination in December). I wrote a monograph that I used in connection with my cross-examination lectures, and over the years I tinkered with it. More for my own amusement than with any thought of publication, I wrote a full-length book on the subject. It must have gone through 20-25 revisions. About the time I retired, I was talking to my good friend Ron Clark, Distinguished Practitioner in Residence at Seattle Law School, and he mentioned he was preparing to write a book on cross-examination. I told him I had already written one, and he wanted to read it. I sent it to him, and he invited me to co-author the cross-examination book with him. I said “Why not.” We used some of my work from my unpublished manuscript in Cross-Examination Handbook, but Cross-Examination Handbook is definitely Ron Clark’s book, I'm just a helper.

[4] The Case Against Christ: A Critique of the Prosecution of Jesus, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

When The Last Murder came out someone asked me what I was going to write next. Without thinking I said “I think I’m going to write about the prosecution of Jesus.” I don’t know where that came from. I was surprised when I heard myself say the words, but I got to thinking that would be a very good project. I had been engaged in intense study of the New Testament since college, and I had two three-ring binders full of notes on the Gospels. The Case Against Christ turned out to be the hardest book to write of any of the books I have written. As I understand it, publishers expect fiction writers to provide them with completed manuscripts when they’re pitching a book; non-fiction writers give publishers proposals for unwritten books or books in progress. You send the publisher a description of your project, a sample chapter or two, and an annotated table of contents. If they like the book, they’ll give you a contract and give you direction in how they want you to finish the book. Publishers kept rejecting The Case Against Christ, and some of them were downright nasty about it. I took their critiques and rewrote, and rewrote, and rewrote. I lost track of how many rejections I got, but it was more than two dozen. I kept count of the number of drafts—48.  I finally found a publisher, and they seem to have a much higher opinion of the book’s worth than I do—they’re charging $75 a copy for it. This book turned out to be my biggest disappointment. It’s too dry. Chapters 3-6 should be Appendices A-C. It’s written for too small an audience. It’s formatted like a 19^th Century Bible study book rather than a modern book. I could go on, but I won’t. I got my son John (who is a lawyer) to read the manuscript, and his assessment summed the book up quite well, I think. He said “The five people who read the book will really enjoy it.” One of these days, I’m going to revisit the trial of Jesus and write a more accessible (and affordable) account.

[5] Abraham Lincoln’s Most Famous Case: The Almanac Trial, Praeger, 2014.

The Almanac Trial was far and away the one that I had the most fun writing up to that point in my writing career. By the time I started writing the book, I was beginning to think that I needed write more like the newly emerging genre of “creative nonfiction” than the dry genre of academia. I had a contract to write the book in no time, and I tried hard to be more of a storyteller and less of a dry lecturer. It worked in some places and in other places it didn’t. The critique I got from my daughter Laura was that I spent too much time talking about how I figured out what happened. I felt like I had to do it, though, because some of the things I was saying were so contrary to the conventional wisdom about the Almanac Trial.

  

[6] Cross-Examination Handbook: Persuasion, Strategies, and Techniques, 2^nd ed., Wolters-Kluwer, 2014. (co-author).

You might think I’m cheating by counting a second edition as another book, but we put a lot of work into the rewrite.

[7] The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case: A Critical Analysis of the Trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, 2016. (co-author).

When I was still with the State Attorney’s Office, my good friend Jim Dedman, who was with the National College of District Attorneys, asked me if I would like to write a chapter in a collaborative book he wanted to edit about the Lindbergh Kidnapping Case. I had written chapters for a couple of law books already, and I was game to write another one, so I agreed. Jim was busy and I was busy, and things never quite got off the ground until Jim retired, and the project morphed into just Jim and me writing the book. This book was the second-hardest to write, mainly because I knew absolutely nothing about the Lindbergh case before we began and the volume of material on the case is gigantic. I’m still no expert on the shenanigans that went on outside the courtroom, but I’m pretty well versed in the evidence now.

[8] Prairie Defender: The Murder Trials of Abraham Lincoln, in prepublication with Southern Illinois University Press. Projected publication date: late 2017.

To date, this is my favorite book, and I think it is going to be the most marketable. Of all the books I have written it is the least “academic.” Scholarly books have to go through a peer review process where anonymous experts read the book and critique it. You have to have a thick skin to get through the process. One of the reviewers barbecued me because my language wasn’t scholarly enough—it sounded like I was writing mystery stories rather than an academic text. My response to that was “Good.” He didn’t think I had enough footnotes, either. I added some footnotes, but I didn’t change my language. The book is still written in plain English, not “Academian.” I can hardly wait for the publication date. 

[9] Six Capsules: Poisoned Innocence (tentative title, 70,000 words written so far.

When we were finishing up The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case Jim asked me what I was going to write next, and I told him I didn’t know. Jim said “Why don’t you write about the Carlyle Harris case?” Not many people know anything about Carlyle Harris, but back at the end of the 19^th Century, he was New York City’s answer to Ted Bundy—a handsome, articulate, charismatic medical student charged with the murder of a beautiful young girl. The case made headlines all around the nation, and it made the reputation of Francis L. Wellman, author of The Art of Cross-Examination. I read The Art of Cross-Examination when I was a senior in law school, and I read it about once every three months for the first two years I practiced law. There is a chapter in the book on the Harris case, so I was familiar with the case to that extent, but I wasn’t aware of all the bizarre goings-on surrounding the case. I dug into the facts a little, and I got hooked. I have written the book all the way through to the verdict of guilty and the appellate opinion affirming the conviction, and I’ve got about three more chapters to go. The case really gets bizarre after the Court of Appeals affirms the conviction. I haven’t started shopping the book around to publishers yet—I’m actually thinking about self-publishing this one. I want to publish a book in the price range of $15-$25. Well, we’ll just see what happens. 

[10] Who Knows? 

Where I’m going to go after Six Capsules is anybody’s guess. I do know one thing. As long as I can, I’m going to keep on writing. I’m never going to be on the New York Times bestseller list, but I’m going to do something that I really enjoy and something that I think is really worthwhile.  

WHEN WAS JESUS CRUCIFIED?

 I just finished listening to an excellent series of lectures from the Great Courses on the New Testament. The professor is Bart D. Ehrman, who thinks that the writers of the Gospels (whom we shall call the Evangelists) botched the story of Jesus because they got inaccurate information about what Jesus said and did, and then they changed the details of the flawed information that they got in order to conform the story to their particular theology. He even goes so far as to say that the Evangelists told stories that they knew to be untrue.

Ehrman begins his analysis by positing that none of the Evangelists had any personal knowledge of the details of Jesus’ life. He then says that the stories about Jesus were transmitted orally for some 35-65 years before they were written down by the Evangelists. Anyone who has played the parlor game “gossip” knows what happens to twice and thrice told tales.

He offers as an example Mark’s and John’s conflicting dates of the crucifixion. Mark firmly fixes the crucifixion on Passover. John just as firmly dates it to the Day of Preparation, the day before Passover. Ehrman says that John knew the date was Passover but knowingly changed the date to the day before. Why? Because that’s when the Passover lambs were slaughtered and Jesus is the Lamb of God. So according to Ehrman, John told a lie to convey what he believed to be a spiritual truth. I don’t think so. As I discuss why I don’t think so, I will accept Ehrman’s assertion that none of the Evangelists had personal knowledge of Jesus, but I can’t accept his second assertion that they had only oral sources because one of the Evangelists (Luke) tells us he used multiple written sources. 

Ehrman compares Bible scholarship to police investigation, in that they both involve searching for and evaluating clues. I don’t claim to be a Bible scholar, but I do claim to know something about criminal investigations. Ehrman speaks of three evaluative tools that Bible scholars use when attacking the Gospels. He calls them independent attestation, dissimilarity, and contextual credibility.

(1) Independent attestation—If a story is told by multiple independent sources, it is more likely to be true. E.g. John, Mark, Paul, Tacitus, and Josephus are independent sources. They all say Jesus was crucified. Their agreement makes it probable that Jesus was in fact crucified. The same sort of analysis is true of criminal investigations. The more witnesses we have to an event, the greater the likelihood of the event.

(2) Dissimilarity—If the Gospels say something about Jesus that is dissimilar to what later Christians believe, it is more likely to be true. E.g., in Mark’s story of the Syro-Phoenician Jesus referred to non-Jews as dogs. This doesn’t sound like what later Christians thought about Jesus’s attitude toward non-Jews. Jesus probably referred to non-Jews as dogs. In criminal cases we use a similar criterion: when a party comes forward with evidence that is contrary to the party’s position, it is considered more credible.

(3) Contextual credibility—When various persons in the Gospel stories act as we would expect Second Temple Jews to act, these actions have more credibility. If they act like people from a later stage in Christian history, then that action is suspect. Once again, a similar yardstick is employed in evaluating evidence in a court of law.

Here are some additional yardsticks we use in a court of law which might have some application to the question of Gospel interpretation:

(1) You should never call anyone a liar unless you have an ample evidentiary basis for doing so. Forman v. Wallshein, 671 So.2d 872, 875 (Fla. 3d DCA 1996).

(2) The mere fact that two witnesses disagree does not mean that either of them are lying. Boatwright v. State, 452 So.2d 666 (4th DCA Fla. 1984).

(3) When confronted by conflicts in the testimony of witnesses, you shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that somebody is lying. McLeod v. State, 128 Fla. 35, 174 So. 466 (1937).

The conflict between Mark and John about the date of the Crucifixion is not an ample evidentiary basis for calling either Mark or John a liar.  One of them, of course, has to be wrong, unless different sects of Second Temple Jews celebrated Passover on different days—a resolution of the conflict which has been put forward by some students of the Gospels.

Interestingly, I once had a case in which the credibility of a key witness depended on the date of Easter. He said that his girlfriend couldn’t accompany him on a drug smuggling run because it was over the Easter weekend and she needed to be in church on Easter. Big problem. The weekend of the drug smuggle wasn’t Easter weekend. It looked as though our witness was discredited until further investigation showed that the girlfriend belonged to some minor denomination of the Eastern Orthodox Church which celebrated Easter on a different Sunday than Protestants did. Turned out nobody was lying.

Does this suggest anything about the conflict between John and Mark? Could it be that neither Evangelist was lying but that both were reporting the facts as they sincerely believed them? Maybe Ehrman has it backwards. Maybe John called Jesus the Lamb of God because he sincerely believed Jesus was crucified the day before Passover with the rest of the Passover lambs. Or maybe John only knew that he was crucified around Passover and decided it must have been the day before because Jesus was the Lamb of God. Or maybe he was just mistaken about the date—that doesn’t change the fact that Jesus was crucified.

In my blog on Memories of Murder Weapons I talked about how memory works and how witnesses retell events they’ve seen. I won’t rehash everything I said there, but the bottom line is that we only truly remember the major points of an event and when recalling the event, we “remember” the details by filling in plausible inferences about what happened. For instance, I remember seeing John shoot Mary. When I describe John shooting Mary I say that John pulled the trigger on his firearm. I didn’t see John pull the trigger, but guns won’t fire unless you pull the trigger, therefore I “remember” John pulling the trigger. It’s a subconscious process, and I truly believe that I saw John pull the trigger. Psychologists call this process “confabulation.”

When I wrote The Last Murder, a book about a case I prosecuted, I was remembering events that had happened over three decades in the past. Checking my recollections against newspaper accounts, police reports, and the memories of others involved in the case, I found that I was frequently wrong about the nuances of a transaction but never wrong about the major events of the transaction. When I wrote The Almanac Trial, I wrote it using letters and statements of many of the participants in the trial, but these letters and statements were written three decades or more after the trial. There again, the witnesses were in conflict on the details of the trial, but not the main facts of the trial.

When the Evangelists wrote, they would have had at their disposal both written accounts of the life of Jesus and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. In other words, they’d have been in pretty much the same situation I was in when I wrote The Last Murder and The Almanac Trial. That means that they had accounts which agreed as to the major details but were in conflict as to the minor details. They would therefore have had to make judgments about which minor details were more accurate. E.g. In the story of the healing of the paralytic, his friends tore open the roof of a house that Jesus was in and lowered the paralytic through the hole to get him to Jesus. Mark said they dug a hole in the roof and Luke said they tore up the shingles to the roof. Does it really matter which they did? They made the hole. By the way, Mark was more likely right. First Century Judean houses didn’t have shingled roofs. Be that as it may, I’m not prepared to expel Luke from the New Testament because he was mistaken about the construction of Judean roofs in the time of Jesus.

I’ve worked with the testimony of thousands of witnesses, and I’ve seen all kinds of conflict in testimony. Like Ehrman, I see conflicts in the testimony of the Evangelists. I outlined some of them in The Case against Christ. But in my estimation the conflicts (1) are minor, (2) give no valid reason to doubt the honesty of the Evangelists, and (3) give no valid reason to think that their account of the life of Jesus is untrue.

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.

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, READ THE DIRECTIONS

I blogged a while back that I had sent the final manuscript of my latest book off to the publisher. I thought I had finished and could move on from  Abraham Lincoln's Almanac Trial to my next project--the Lindbergh Kidnapping Case. I was wrong.

When my kids were young, I used to spend Christmas Eve putting their toys together with my hand-dandy tool kit. I took it as a point of honor not to look at the directions unless it was absolutely necessary. With this attitude, I created far more work for myself than necessary. If I had only stopped to read the directions, I would have gotten much more sleep on Christmas Eve. Before GPS, I was the same way about driving directions. I never asked anyone for directions until I was hopelessly lost.

I brought this same attitude to the writing of books. I want to write the book without reading the editorial requirements, and it has caused me countless hours of rewriting. I never seem to learn. When I wrote The Last Murder, I did the first few drafts of the manuscript using the wrong citation form. When my editor pointed that fact out to me, I redid the citations without reading the directions for the citation form they wanted me to use. Then I bought a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), read the directions, and wound up having to completely redo the citations again.

When I wrote the manuscript for Abraham Lincoln's Almanac Trial, I "knew" what the requirements were, so I merely skimmed over the manuscript specifications without studying them in depth. Not a good idea. Two days ago I got an email from my editor saying that had left out some necessary sections and that I needed to get them sent in. Oops. He also asked me to do a bibliography for the book. The last book I did for Praeger, I was told to dispense with a bibliography, but to do full form citations in the endnotes. I had taken it for granted that's what they wanted for the new book, but experience should have taught me not to take things for granted.

No problem, I thought, I can whip out a bibliography in short order. I got the bibliography done quickly, but then I had another problem. I was now 2,700 words over the contractual word limit. I told my editor about the problem and promised would have the manuscript trimmed down to the limit by Friday of next week. Since my wife Lane has been up in Ohio helping our daughter recover from foot surgery, I have had trouble sleeping. So last night, I pulled an all-nighter trimming the manuscript to get it under the word limit.

I decided that the best way to trim words without trimming content would be to use the CMS short citation form in the endnotes. With the short form, you fully cite the book the first time you mention it in the endnotes and give an abbreviated citation afterwards. The abbreviated citation should be full enough to guide the reader unerringly to the full citation contained in the bibliography.

A full citation looks something like this:

Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln: Drawn from Original Sources and Containing Many Speeches, Letters, and Telegrams Hitherto Unpublished and Illustrated with Many Reproductions from Original Paintings, Photographs, Etc., Volume 2 (New York: Lincoln History Society, 1907),  65, http://archive.org/details/cu31924092901077 (accessed December 17, 2012).

The same citation in short form would look something like this:

Tarbell, Life of Lincoln, Volume 2, 65.

When you're dealing with books which have multiple authors and long titles, you can save a lot of printer's ink using the short citation form. I didn't get to bed until well after midnight, but I got it done. I trimmed almost 6,000 words from the manuscript simply by shortening the citations. This afternoon, I got an email from my editor. He said that he had talked our word-count problem over with the higher-ups, and they had okayed the overage--no need to trim anything from the manuscript. I wrote him back and said "Too late. I've already trimmed the manuscript."

If only I had gotten the directions straight at the outset, I could have saved myself a lot of wasted effort. I'll do better on my next book. I'll read the editorial requirements before I write the book. Yeah, right.

THINGS THAT YOU FIND WHEN YOU'RE LOOKING FOR SOMETHING ELSE

This weekend I decided to straighten up the storage area in our detached garage. While digging through some old boxes I found copies of all the press releases I made during the Bundy investigation back in 1978. In The Last Murder I described how I, as press spokesman for the task force, touched off a media feeding frenzy with an ill-worded press release. In the book I said that I followed that misstep up with a press release announcing that there would be no more press releases. This shows how memories can morph over the decades. The final press release makes no mention of the fact that it was the final press release. I made an announcement about no further press releases when the final press release was published. Perhaps sometime in the future I will transcribe the press releases and publish them on this blog. 

I also found a treasure trove of old newspaper clippings about the case which I certainly could have used while I was writing the book. I left out a few of incidents which did not include me as a participant and for which I had no ready reference to cite in a footnote. Looking through the clippings, I found that some of them could have served as authority for the incidents.

Something else I found wouldn’t have helped at all with the writing of the book, but it brought back memories. My father was the institutional inspector at Florida’s Reception and Medical Center when Bundy was sent to prison. When Bundy was booked in after the Orlando death sentence, he made a copy of the booking photo and gave it to me. Praeger obtained another copy of that same photo from a different source and used it on the cover of the book.

Something else I found that would have helped to jog my memory was a collection of cartoons. Ellen Burgess, the deputy clerk who worked the trial, is a cartoonist. She drew a series of cartoons about various incidents that happened during the case, and they were uniformly funny. Some of the cartoons were inside jokes which would have been understandable only to the people involved in the trial, but others would be funny to anyone with a sense of humor. One cartoon that I didn’t have in the collection was a cartoon she did of all the key players in the trial. She passed it around and we all signed it. When Bundy found out about the cartoon, he put in to sign it also. I never got a copy of that particular cartoon, but a few months back, Mrs. Burgess and I got reconnected by email and she emailed me a copy. I think I have the full set of cartoons now.

There were a few other things, like a copy of the Indictment and a copy of the judgment and sentence, but the most interesting find was a copy of Bundy’s written offer to plead guilty in the Lake City case. It is unsigned, as I tore up the signed copy immediately after the plea fell through. I thought that all copies of the abortive plea offer had been destroyed, but obviously I was wrong.

CAMERAS IN THE COURTROOM

This Monday I heard from Vic Africano's son, Chris. He had just read The Last Murder and wanted to share his thoughts on the book with me. Vic, who passed away several years ago, was Ted Bundy's defense attorney in the prosecution of the Lake City case. When I wrote about our battle with Vic over seating arrangements for the trial, I said that he wanted to be facing the TV cameras because he was something of a publicity hound. Chris enlightened me as to Vic's real reason for wanting to face the cameras. I'll let him explain it in his own words:

Just wanted to let you know I read your book on the Bundy case, and found it to be well written and factual. It brought back many childhood memories as I grew up during that time and this case affected my childhood in many ways. My one disagreement is that you stated my father was a media hound. He actually disagreed with cameras in the courtroom, as he thought they were a distraction. The reason he kept trying to move is so the camera would quit showing his bald spot in the back. I remember at dinner several times he would complain about it, stating "every time I see myself on TV, the camera is zoomed in on my bald spot". We used to laugh and tease him about this. He was trying to keep the cameras in front of him to hide his bald spot. I guess me and my family were the only ones he mentioned this to.

It turns out Vic wasn't concerned about the cameras getting his face, he just didn't want them to get his bald spot. It's just as well that Vic didn't share this reason with us. I would have teased him unmercifully.

INSIDE THE MIND OF TED BUNDY

A few months ago, I gave a radio interview on my book, "The Last Murder." Somebody put it on Youtube in four parts, and it garnered a number of comments on the quality of the book, its price, and my lack of prowess as a public speaker. You can look the clips up under the search term "inside the mind of ted bundy", or you can just go to http://northfloridanow.com/ted-bundy-conviction-relived-in-new-book-p4006-92.htm.

ON HITTING THE MARK

I believe I have previously mentioned that I sometimes present guest speakers in my law school classes with a copy of one of my books. Bernie Mortenson, a retired FDLE agent, spoke to my class a few weeks ago on a subject at which he is an expert--complex criminal investigations. I gave him a copy of The Last Murder and got the following email back from him:

Just finished your book last night...............................great writing!! It was even better for me since I knew almost all of the folks involved.

You did a fine job putting all that together.............................that in itself must have been a monster job.

I really enjoyed the group of students last week................they were certainly more engaged than the 1st class (at least I felt that way). Hope I covered all you  wanted me too.

I'm going to get in touch with some of the folks in the book and recommend they get it and read it........................no charge:)

talk to you later

PS: I noticed while reading the book I covered some of the procedures you used in putting the case together.........................glad I made the talk before reading it!!

My response: 

Thanks for the kind comments. I'm not sure what you meant about being glad you made the talk before reading the book. I think what you said dovetailed nicely with what I wrote in the book.

Would you mind if I posted your remarks about the book on my blog?

To which he replied:

would be happy to have them posted.......................the ref to speaking to the class before reading the book, was that if I had read the book first, it would seem as tho I was simply parroting what you had written. It was most pleasing to see that "great minds do run together"!

Thanks again for the book and the opportunity to pass on a few thoughts to future prosecutors.

I take this exchange as further confirmation that I hit the mark with the audience I primarily intended to reach--lawyers and law enforcement officers in the criminal justice system. I had intended the book to also speak to a larger audience of non-professionals who might be interested in criminal investigations and criminal procedure, Florida history, and historical trials, and I have received some positive feedback from that sort of reader. There are other audiences which might be interested in the subject matter of the book but disappointed with its presentation. Hopefully those belonging to such audiences will be mollified by the knowledge that the work was intended more as a textbook than a tell-all.

THE AUDIENCE FOR "THE LAST MURDER"

Howard Blue, whom I met on an internet forum dedicated to the Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, has recently posted a review of "The Last Murder" on a true crime internet forum. I think the remarks he made tend to validate my belief that "The Last Murder" speaks to the audience I primarily targeted (criminal trial lawyers and law enforcement officers). In his review, which he graciously gave me permission to repost, he said:

"I'm just about to finish reading another book that will interest many (but not all) subscribers to this forum. Robert Dekle, Sr. is the author of The Last Murder: The Investigation, Prosecution and Execution of Ted Bundy (Praeger 2011).

"In the interest of full disclosure, he has been answering some of my questions about the legal aspects of a 1956 kidnapping that I've been writing a book about. I got my copy of The Last Murder after Dekle and I exchanged books (his for my book, WORDS AT WAR, about American radio during World War II).

"The Last Murder could be a classic on the trials and tribulations of dealing with a serial killer who decides to be his own lawyer (for at least a part of the time). The book provides interesting insight into Bundy's psyche and behavior during the trial. It also gives a great deal of information about the legal and other nuances of a prosecutor's dealing with competing jurisdictions while involved in both the investigation and the prosecution of a capital crime. For some, the legal technicalities may be too much. However, I've been fascinated with the author's explanation of how the law deals with such a crime.

"The Last Murder is a page turner, but not in the sense that one might experience with a more sensationalized book. In high school I ran the mile, but occasionally I fooled around running hurdles. I would liken the experience of prosecuting Ted Bundy to running hurdles. No sooner did the prosecution dispense of a bunch of motions that the defense threw their way, then a bunch of new ones came on their radar."

RENEWING OLD ACQUAINTANCES

This past Tuesday evening as I was leaving my prosecution clinic class at UF, I ran into an old friend whom I hadn't seen in a while. The Hon. William R. Slaughter, Jr., who recently retired as County Court Judge in Suwannee County, was at UF acting as a volunteer judge for Appellate Advocacy oral arguments.

I have tried many cases before Judge Slaughter and I have also tried many cases against him when he was in private practice, and I have always had the highest regard for his skill, integrity, and collegiality. It was always a pleasure to try a case against him, even when he was beating my head in.

Judge Slaughter expressed interest in purchasing my book, "The Last Murder," and by the strangest coincidence I happened to have several copies in the back seat of my vehicle. I autographed a copy for him and we parted ways.

Today I received an email from Judge Slaughter, and he has given me permission to reproduce it on my blog. Judge Slaughter wrote:

"Just a short note to tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed The Last Murder.  It was well-written, easy to read, and laced with you trademark humor.  I never read a book in one sitting….until now.  About 5 hours straight.  It was that interesting."

When I wrote the book, I tried very hard to make it accessible to anyone who might be interested in the prosecution of Bundy, but my target audience was criminal trial lawyers and law enforcement officers. Judge Slaughter's comments, coupled with feedback from other lawyers and officers, indicates to me that the book reaches its target. 

THE LAST MURDER

I try to have as many guest speakers in my prosecution clinic class as possible. They give the class something that was almost entirely lacking when I was in law school--insight into the real world practice of law. I choose speakers carefully, only asking those whom I believe to be top notch in their profession. Last night I was visited by Heather Jones, the misdemeanor division chief in the Gainesville State Attorney's Office, and she spoke on the topic of prosecuting domestic violence cases. I try to show my appreciation to my speakers in a number of different ways. One way is to present them with a copy of one of my books. I gave Ms. Jones a copy of "The Last Murder," and this morning I received the following email from her:

"Well, before you can appreciate the magnitude of what I am about to say, you need to know a few things about me that I suspect you don’t already know.

"First, I don’t read for pleasure.  Law School and the practice of law beat out of me every impulse to read.  At most, I will flip through fashion magazines.  If those magazines have an article more than a page or two in length, I generally just read the first or second sentence in each paragraph so that I get the gist.  Second, I go to bed early.  I usually am in bed by 8 and asleep by 9.  There are few things on this planet important enough for me to stay up late.  Sitting at my computer right now, I can hardly think of one.  Finally, I don’t like murder movies or murder TV shows.  I don’t like them as fiction or non-fiction.  I like happy stories, stories about romance (not books, though, see point number 1 above).  When I was a kid, my mom read all sorts of biographies and stories about serial killers.  I can remember her reading 'The Stranger Beside Me' and Anne Rules’ other books.  I thought she was crazy.

"When you gave me your book last night, I was excited.  I was excited for you that you had written a book, I was excited that you were kind enough to give me a signed copy, but I didn’t think I would read it (refer to rules 1 and 3 above).  Last night, I got into bed and read the acknowledgements and the jacket of your book.  I told my husband the story of you giving it to me and even statused about it on Facebook.  (Yes, status in this context is a verb).  Before I knew it, it was 1a.m.  I was up WAY past my bedtime.  I was 9 chapters into a story about a murder committed by the most notorious serial killer of my lifetime.  In one evening, your book had me break 3 hard and fast rules in my life. 

"I tell you all of that to tell you that your book is terrific.  It is so very interesting to me as a prosecutor.  I will suggest to all the young prosecutors I supervise that they read it.  I would actually like to buy another copy for my mother (yes, the crazy lady referenced under the rule section of my email).  Can I buy it from you?  Can I be so bold as to ask you to sign a copy for her?  She would love that and her birthday is coming up!!"

Quite naturally, I was flattered. Her email told me that the book could fulfill one of the objectives I had for writing it--to help young prosecutors find their way through the prosecution of a complex high-profile case. I replied:

"I think the reason this book didn’t meet your expectations is because it is not about Ted Bundy. It’s about the prosecution of [insert celebrity killer] and the problems confronted by both prosecution and defense. I’m researching for a book on the Lindbergh kidnapping right now, and the parallels between that case and the Bundy case are striking."

 On another subject, I had no idea that "status" was a verb. I must be a real fossil.