<Archive Obituaries> Ted Bundy (January 24th 1989)
Bill Schenley
Photo: http://home.cogeco.ca/~mrcarle/bundy.JPG
FROM: The Los Angeles Times (January 25th 1989) ~
By Barry Bearak, Staff Writer
Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer, died Tuesday in the
electric chair, just as the sun rose over the north Florida
plains.
Gone was the storied cockiness. He was ashen as two guards
led him into the death chamber. They strapped his chest and
arms and legs against the shiny wooden chair.
Bundy's blue eyes searched the faces behind the glass. He
nodded to some of the 42 witnesses, including the men who
had prosecuted him. His lips bounced with a faint mumble.
Then his head bowed. The shaved skull glistened where an
ointment had been applied. It would facilitate the work of
the electrodes.
Prison Supt. Tom Barton asked Bundy if he had any last
words. The killer hesitated. His voice quavered. "Jim and
Fred, I'd like you to give my love to my family and
friends," he said.
Jim Coleman, one of his lawyers, nodded. So did Fred
Lawrence of Gainesville, Fla., the Methodist minister who
had spent the night with Bundy in a vigil of weeping and
prayer.
With that, it was time. The last thick strap was pulled
across Bundy's mouth and chin. The metal skullcap was bolted
in place, its heavy black veil falling in front of the
condemned man's face.
Barton gave the go-ahead. An anonymous executioner pushed
the button. Two thousand volts surged through the wires.
Bundy's body tensed and his hands tightened into a clench.
A minute later, the machine was shut down, and the body went
limp. A paramedic unbuttoned Bundy's blue shirt and listened
for a heartbeat. A doctor aimed a light into his eyes.
At 7:16 a.m., Theodore Robert Bundy -- one of the worst
serial killers of all time -- was pronounced dead.
A witnessing newsman raised his hands in a signal as he left
the Q Wing of Florida State Prison.
Across the street, along the dewy grass of a cow pasture,
word spread among the 500 or so who had come to be near --
and almost all to cheer -- the death work.
Crowd Chants, 'Burn'
Some began chanting, "Burn, Bundy, burn!" Others sang or
hugged one another or banged on frying pans.
Fireworks kicked into the sky.
"I wish I could have been the one flipping the switch," said
David Hoar, a policeman from St. Augustine, Fla.
Mike Rands, one of the many college students present,
whooped: "Thank God it's Fry-Day!" He had been fascinated by
the Bundy case since studying it in his ninth-grade civics
class.
In a few moments, the witnesses began strolling about the
field. They were a somber bunch, and a few were shocked by
the celebration that filled the chilly morning air.
"Regardless of what Bundy did, he was still a human being,"
said Jim Sewell, the police chief of Gulfport, Fla.
But even Sewell, leaden from the sight of an electrocution,
said he felt a great relief that Bundy was dead.
"This is the first time I ever saw him when he wasn't really
in control," said Sewell, who had been an investigator in
three Bundy murders. "Ted was wily and street-smart and
understood the system."
Bundy, 42, was convicted only of three Florida murders,
although he was long blamed for dozens more in Washington
state, Oregon, Colorado and Utah.
Technically, he died for the 1978 murder of 12-year-old
Kimberly Leach of Lake City, whom he left dead under a
collapsed hog shed.
George Robert Dekle prosecuted that case -- and Tuesday he
witnessed Bundy's death:
"The thing that kept going through my mind was the awful
crime scene I saw 11 years ago. I kept saying to myself that
is where it started and this is where it ends."
Feels No Compassion
Florida State Trooper Ken Robinson, another witness, said:
"I felt no compassion for Bundy whatsoever. He had an easier
death than any of his victims."
Bundy was also under sentence of death for what were known
here as the Chi Omega murders, a gruesome rampage through
the bedrooms of a sorority house at Florida State
University.
Those two bludgeoning deaths -- and the murder of the Leach
girl three weeks later -- were Bundy's final killings.
Soon after, he was caught by a patrolman in Pensacola, Fla.
Bundy tried to run, but he slipped and fell in some sand.
Ever since, his notoriety has multiplied. The Chi Omega
trial was televised nationally. Five books about Bundy were
written. A TV movie was made.
He was a mass killer who on the surface seemed among
America's finest young men: likable, intelligent,
patrician-looking.
He had been a Boy Scout and a college graduate and a law
student. He was a rising Young Republican in Washington
state party politics.
That the boy next door yearned to kill the girls next
door -- preferably ones with long hair parted down the
middle -- made him seem both ironic and demonic, devilishly
handsome and fiendishly clever.
And there was a great mystery. How many had he really
murdered?
Investigators could only speculate until the last few days,
when Bundy opened up with a bloody stream of confessions. He
gave the details to as many as 50 murders in nine states --
information that will take months to sort out.
And one more thing: He said he was sorry.
Five hours before his execution, Bundy was allowed to make
two brief phone calls to his mother, Louise, in Tacoma,
Wash. He told her of his regrets, that he was really two
people -- the Ted she knew and the mutant Ted she did not.
"He said: 'I'm so sorry I've given you all such grief . . .
but a part of me was hidden all the time,' " Louise Bundy
said.
She told her boy: "You'll always be my precious son."
Had Stuttering Problem
The son was illegitimate, conceived in Philadelphia. Later,
Louise Cowell moved to Washington and married Johnnie Bundy,
a hospital cook. They would never suspect that young Ted had
problems far beyond his nail-biting and stuttering.
But, for a decade, Ted Bundy was the glib and engaging young
fellow who picked up women at parks, shopping malls and
college campuses -- and then killed them. Sometimes, he
posed as a fire examiner or a man with a broken arm. He had
the gifts of a lady's man.
Most often, he drove off for hundreds of miles with his dead
or unconscious victims. He dumped them in remote forests.
Most had been raped and mutilated. He left them for the
animals or his own return visits.
To the parents of some of the victims -- their daughters'
deaths now acknowledged by Bundy -- his execution brings
pitifully little solace.
"It's not important to me now," said Robert Campbell of
Dearborn, Mich., father of Caryn. "The thing I'd like to
have back, I can't get back."
On the other hand, Vivian Raincourt of La Conner, Wash., sat
up all night awaiting word that, at last, retribution had
been taken for her daughter Susan.
"I'm hoping that this will never happen again, this terrible
wait (for an execution)," she said. "We won't have to hear
any more stories of how he played the system . . . ."
Bundy was on Death Row for nearly 10 years -- and he became
a symbol for how long it takes to push a capital case to its
resolution. Monday night, his lawyers were still trying to
delay the execution, filing three separate appeals with the
U.S. Supreme Court. However, by votes of 5 to 4, 7 to 2 and
6 to 3, the justices rejected all of the pleas.
"We're tired of feeding that killer with our tax money,"
said Dorothy Solomons, one of the many who came to stand
across from the prison.
Actually, execution in this case was far more costly than
lifetime incarceration. Bundy's lengthy prosecution,
including the appeals, cost the state an estimated $5
million. Thirty years of jail time would cost about a fifth
of that.
Once convicted, Bundy seemed to taunt the system. He twice
escaped from Colorado prisons while awaiting a murder trial
there.
He showboated in Florida, reneging on a deal for a life
sentence in the Chi Omega case and then castigating his
lawyers in open court. He often acted as his own counsel.
Rapt groupies thought he was cute.
In the subsequent Leach trial, he put his girlfriend, Carole
Ann Boone, on the witness stand.
"Will you marry me?" he asked.
"Yes," she replied.
"Then I do hereby marry you."
Thus, with a notary present in the gallery, they were wed
under Florida law.
Bundy boasted that the romance produced a daughter,
conceived during a prison visit. The couple ultimately
became estranged.
"He was such a manipulator," said Sewell, who had worked on
the Bundy cases. "We'll never have a full understanding of
who he was and why he did things."
Many insist he was insane. That he was never ruled so may
have to do with his steely and cagey exterior, as well as
the law's difficulty in discerning criminal insanity in
compulsive brutality.
Oddly, until his last-gasp appeals, insanity was the one
legal argument Bundy would never permit. He always feared
the issue of his mental competence more than that of his
crimes.
Yet the murderous urges swelled within him and dominated his
life. The bright student of psychology grappled with his own
dark instincts -- and the torment of alternating periods of
reform and relapse.
In a remarkable series of prison interviews years ago with
journalists Hugh Aynesworth and Stephen Michaud, Bundy
agreed to "speculate" on what "might" have driven the killer
in the crimes in which he was a suspect.
"What really fascinated him was the hunt, the adventure of
searching out his victim," Bundy said. "And, to a degree,
possessing them physically as one would possess a potted
plant, a painting or a Porsche. Owning, as it were, this
individual."
No matter how hard he tried, this hypothetical killer could
never fully extinguish his desires to rape and murder.
Instead he rationalized.
"He would cling to the belief that there would be virtually
no furor over it . . . " Bundy said. "I mean, there are so
many people.
"It shouldn't be a problem. What's one less person on the
face of the earth, anyway?"
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Photo:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v423/n6939/images/423497a-f1.0.jpg
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Bundy Is Put To Death In Florida After Admitting Trail Of Killings
FROM: The New York Times (January 25th 1989) ~
By Jon Nordheimer, Special to the Times
STARKE, Fla., Jan. 24
Theodore Bundy, among the most notorious killers in recent times, was
electrocuted today, and about 200 people gathered outside the entrance
of the Florida State Prison cheered when they heard the news.
He went quietly to his death nearly 15 years after he embarked on a
trail of murder that investigators believe took the lives of 30 or
more young women across the nation.
''Give my love to my family and friends,'' the former law student told
his lawyer and a minister as guards strapped him into the wooden chair
in an execution chamber separated from two dozen official witnesses by
a large glass window.
He was pronounced dead at 7:16 A.M. after 2,000 volts of electricity
surged through his body for one minute, prison officials said.
Outside the prison gates, the crowd cheered lustily and whooped when a
signal came from the floodlit cellblock about 400 yards away, where
the execution took place, that Mr. Bundy was dead.
A few opponents of capital punishment were lost in the milling crowd
that had come in the predawn chill of northern Florida's piney woods
to applaud the death of a man whose ''boy-next-door'' good looks and
intelligence concealed the impulses that led him to hunt down women
and murder them.
''Buckle Up Bundy - It's The Law'' proclaimed one of the more tasteful
placards hoisted by men and a smattering of women gathered along a
two-lane blacktop road in an area set aside for them and a small army
of reporters and photograpers.
'Thought He Was So Clever'
''This is a big deal,'' said Carey Harper, 26 years old, of nearby
Gainesville. ''Some of us have waited 11 years for this moment.''
His companion, Jeannine Gordon, 21, expressed a widely held view that
reviled were not only Mr. Bundy's murderous acts but also his personal
demeanor. ''He thought he was so clever, so smart, that he could get
away with his crimes,'' she said. ''He was laughing at society in
court with all of his legal manuevering and delays.''
The execution came on the fourth death warrant signed by a Florida
Governor. Three of them were issued in 1986, only to be stayed while
his appeals were heard in the courts.
The final warrant was for the 1978 murder of Kimberly Leach, a
12-year-old Lake City, Fla., girl who was abducted, mutilated and
slain and whose body was dumped in an abandoned animal pen. He was
convicted in 1980 of her killing, a year after he had been found
guilty of murdering two Florida State University students who were
bludgeoned and strangled as they slept in their beds in a sorority
house in Tallahassee three weeks before Kimberly Leach was killed.
Spurt of Confessions
The condemned man spent the last few days confessing at least 16 other
killings to police detectives who had come here from the states of
Washington, Utah, Idaho and Colorado in an attempt to clear up
numerous murder investigations before Mr. Bundy was silenced by his
date with the executioner. Some of the confessions were made in
killings with which the authorities had not connected him, and Federal
and state officials still link him to a dozen or more similar crimes
since his spree began in February 1974 in Seattle.
Over the years he maintained his innocence, saying he had been drawn
into a web of circumstantial evidence woven by ''conniving
investigators.''
Finally running out of appeals that would be heard by the Federal
courts, his confidence apparently crumbled. Described as ''visibly
shaken,'' he supplied the detectives with the names of victims in four
Western states and the dates he killed them.
By the time he entered the death chamber shortly before 7 o'clock this
morning, he appeared tense but composed, apparently resigned to his
fate, according to the witnesses.
One of these, Jerry Blair, was the state prosecutor in the Leach
murder trial. Mr. Bundy nodded to him in recognition as he was being
strapped into the chair. ''I think he was trying to say there were no
hard feelings,'' Mr. Blair said later.
But Mr. Blair and a host of others who had worked on the Bundy crimes
over the years conceded they were no closer now than at the onset to
the central mystery of what had turned a handsome, articulate, urbane
young man into one of the most savage and unpredictable killers in the
nation's history.
'Killed for the Sheer Thrill'
''Ted Bundy was a complex man who somewhere along the line went
wrong,'' Mr. Blair said. ''He killed for the sheer thrill of the act
and the challenge of escaping his pursuers.
''He probably could have done anything in life he set his mind to do,
but something happened to him and we still don't know what it was.''
The killer, who stalked victims in the Pacific Northwest in the
mid-1970's terrorized several university communities, selecting coeds
for abduction from campuses at night or crowded parks in daytime when
their defenses were lowered in familiar settings.
Accounts of witnesses and other evidence in crimes he was believed to
have committed show that he typically used his good looks and
soft-spoken charm -often bandaging an arm or leg to gain sympathy or
help - to lure them to their death.
He usually throttled them and then sexually abused and mutilated them
before disposing of their bodies in remote areas. If the skeletons
were found months or years later there was nearly always evidence of
fractured skulls and broken jaws and limbs.
''This kind of mutilation reveals a hatred of the female body,'' said
Dr. David Abrahamsen a New York psychiatrist who is an authority on
those who kill people in a series and is author of ''The Murdering
Mind.''
''The victim is not really the target,'' he said in a telephone
interview. ''The victim is a substitute, and that is why these crimes
seem so random and capricious.''
Dr. Abrahamsen, who analyzed David Berkowitz, the ''Son of Sam''
murderer who terrorized New York in the 1970's with his random
slayings of young women, theorizes that when a man commits a violent
sexual crime against an unknown woman the real motive is rooted in
acting out ''strong and repeated fantasies of revenge and power''
subconsciously directed at his mother.
Mr. Bundy previously hinted that alcohol played a role in his mood
swings. On Monday he tearfully told James Dobson, a psychologist and
religious broadcaster who served on a Federal pornography commission,
that hard-core pornography become an obsession and drove him to act
out his fantasies in murder.
Theodore Robert Bundy was born to a young, single Philadelphia woman
who raised him in Tacoma, Wash. But his mother, Louise Bundy, said
there was never a shred of evidence in her son's first 28 years,
before he became a murder suspect for the first time, to hint at any
aberrant behavior.
Boy Scout and B-Plus Student
People familiar with his early years say he was a Boy Scout, a B-plus
college student; he loved children, read poetry and was a rising
figure in Republican politics in Seattle. The year the murders began
there he was the assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention
Advisory Commission and wrote a pamphlet for women on rape prevention.
''If anyone considers me a monster, that's just something they'll have
to confront in themselves,'' he said in a 1986 interview with The New
York Times. ''For people to want to condemn someone, to dehumanize
someone like me is a very popular and effective, understandable way of
dealing with a fear and a threat that is incomprehensible.''
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