A Life Ruled By 'Demons'

By David Finkel

St. Petersburg Times

Jan. 24, 1989

Every police officer who ever came in contact with Ted Bundy seems to have bitter memories that never quite go away. Norman Chapman's go back to a cold February night in 1978 when Bundy, bruised and exhausted, sat across from him at the Pensacola police station. "There are certain areas," Chapman said that night, after turning on a tape recorder, "that when you think about, you start crying."

"It was just so good to be around people, to be a part of people and not be looked at differently," Bundy tearfully answered. "I was doing everything I wanted, and it was all taken away from me. But it's my own fault. …"

Eleven years later, as Bundy neared execution for killing a 12-year-old girl in Lake City, Chapman can recall what Bundy said that night with the most vivid of detail. He can picture how Bundy was sitting. He can hear Bundy's voice as it rose and fell. Kimberly Leach, he knew as he peppered Bundy with questions, was dead in Lake City. So were Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, two Florida State University sorority sisters from St. Petersburg, and so were dozens of young women out west. In every one of the deaths, Bundy was the suspect. And here Bundy was, exhausted to the point of tears, vulnerable as he had never been before, seemingly on the verge of confession.

It is the regret of Chapman's career that the confessions never came.

Bundy, it turned out, wanted some assurances that he would be sent back to his home state of Washington and would never face the possibility of a sentence of death. When the assurances did not come, the tears dried, the vulnerability hardened and the hints of murder disappeared.

"I've thought about it a hundred times – if I did this different, if I did that different," Chapman said late last week. "I wish he had cleared up everything that night. But he didn't."

Instead, it has taken more than a decade. Now, over the past weekend, as Bundy's day of execution drew closer, word emerged from death row that the long-awaited confessions finally had begun. But just as had happened in Pensacola, there were suggestions the confessions came not as a cleansing, but as a maneuver.

Bundy, some of his lawyers argued, shouldn't be executed so he would have enough time to tell all. Or: The confessions prove it, Bundy is insane, so insane he's confessing to everything in sight, and – by the way – the law says an insane person can't be executed.

To Chapman and others, those maneuverings not only get to the heart of the way Bundy's mind has worked, they also explain why he has become so universally reviled.

The "enduring mystique" of Ted Bundy, they say, is rooted in his cleverness. He never seemed typical of a killer. His victims, young and filled with promise, weren't typical either. In a time when most murders can be explained by passion or revenge or drug-induced despair, Bundy has remained a mysterious aberration, the All-American Boy who for reasons unknown killed the Girl Next Door. The only explanation that people can seem to agree on is simply that Bundy is a psychopath who was motivated by any variety of demons, the worst of which was himself.

Apparently, it had been that way for years.

Born in 1946 in a home for unwed mothers, Bundy grew up in Tacoma, Wash., with his mother, Louise, and stepfather, John, who married Louise when Ted was 4.

In a series of tape recordings Bundy made in 1980 for the authors of one of five books published on his crimes, Bundy described his childhood in the most normal of terms. His mother was "doting." His stepfather "did the things that fathers are supposed to do." He and his dog, a collie named Lassie, "were inseparable." Life "was not unpleasant," he said. "Far from it."

But as Bundy also noted on the tapes, "My childhood is no easy affair."

Bundy never elaborated on what he meant, but various stories written about him over the years described how he sometimes skipped school, occasionally shoplifted and developed a strong attraction to pornography.

The thing was, though the problems were there just beneath the surface, they never were apparent to anyone. No matter what trouble Bundy might have gotten into, the appearance he gave off was of being in control and headed toward success. He graduated from high school with passable grades, graduated from college with a bachelor's degree in psychology and enrolled in law school. He became interested in politics, worked for the re-election of Washington Gov. Dan Evans and was considered by some to a rising political star in the Northwest.

Only later did investigators working in several western states realize that wherever Bundy went, bodies of young women showed up soon after.

There were bodies in Washington, bodies in Utah and bodies in Colorado. All were of young, white, attractive women who had long, dark hair worn parted in the middle. Beyond those similarities, the method of attack seemed to differ from case to case. Some of the women had been raped, some had been beaten, some had been strangled. Some had been found clothed, others had been nude. The one link: Many had last been seen talking to a handsome man who called himself Ted.

Descriptions of Ted varied, though. Sometimes he had his arm in a sling. Sometimes he spoke with a British accent.

The first victim Bundy has confessed to killing was Rita Lorraine Jolly, a 17-year-old Oregon resident who disappeared in June 1973. The last – dozens of victims later, it now seems apparent – was Kimberly Leach, 12, who disappeared from the play yard at her junior high school in Lake City on Feb. 9, 1978.

In all that time, Bundy had been convicted of only one charge – the kidnapping of a woman in Utah who said Bundy had lured her into his Volkswagen and attempted to handcuff and beat her before she managed to escape. That was in 1976.

In 1977, after a short-lived escape from jail, Bundy's reputation began growing, and not in a way that left people frightened. Instead, in the tradition of the western outlaw, people viewed Bundy as charismatic and charming. After one of his escapes, T-shirts were sold with the inscription, "Ted Bundy is a one-night stand." And one restaurant began offering what it called a Bundyburger: Two slices of bread, and, oops, the meat is gone.

To many, Bundy was less a criminal than a folk hero.

All of that changed, though, after Bundy got to Florida. As Steve Michaud, co-author of a Bundy book called The Only Living Witness, says, "When he was connected to the Chi Omega and the Leach case, his reputation turned. He evolved from an object of fascination to an object of revulsion."

Bundy arrived in Tallahassee in the first days of 1978 after escaping again, this time from a small jail in Colorado where he was awaiting his first trial for murder.

For a week, he kept a low profile and got in no trouble. Then, in the early hours of Jan. 15, he made his way into the Chi Omega sorority house, killed Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy as they slept and nearly killed two other sorority sisters. Minutes later, in a duplex near the sorority house, he beat another young woman nearly to death.

Three weeks after that, he abducted and murdered Kimberly Leach.

From the time of the Chi Omega attacks to the day of his arrest a month later, Bundy cruised endlessly around northern Florida. He was in Pensacola in the first dark hours of Feb. 15 when a police officer named David Lee saw a car without its lights on driving down a quiet street.

Lee turned on his blue lights. Bundy pulled over. Lee ordered him to lay face-down on the street and was trying to handcuff him when Bundy twisted around, kicked out Lee's legs and began to run. Lee fired one shot from his gun and saw Bundy drop, but it was another ruse. Once again, Bundy tried to kick Lee off balance, but this time Lee hit him hard in the face with the butt of his gun. Bundy fell back, looked up at Lee and said simply, "I wish you would have killed me."

What has happened since then has, of course, been well-chronicled in Florida. There have been books. There has been a TV miniseries.

There have been nine years of highly publicized legal delays.

Those events, all of them, have served to make Bundy the most well-known, and the most reviled, of Florida's 300 death row inmates.

But it is three lesser-known events that will ensure Bundy's reputation as one of the mystifying killers in modern times.

The first occurred at the conclusion of the Chi Omega trial when the judge in the case engaged Bundy in a last-minute exchange that recalled for those who knew Bundy exactly how far he had fallen.

"Take care of yourself, young man," Judge Ed Cowart said to Bundy moments after he had imposed two sentences of death. "You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer. I'd have loved to have you practice in front of me."

"Thank you," was all that Bundy could manage to say.

The second occurred toward the end of the Leach trial when Bundy, acting for the moment as his own attorney, questioned a longtime friend of his named Carole Boone.

"I want to make this very clear," he said to her as she sat on the witness stand and a crowded courtroom watched in fascination. "Will you marry me?"

"Yes," Ms. Boone said.

"I do hereby marry you," Bundy said back to her.

And just like that, Bundy had a wife.

The third occurrence came a year later, in 1981, when Ms. Boone gave birth to a baby girl.

Officials with the Florida Department of Corrections say there is no chance the father of the child is Bundy. People who have seen the child, however, say the resemblance to Bundy is uncanny.

Either way, until a move out of Florida last year, the child spent much of her life going with her mother on visits to Florida State Prison. Authorities call the man she would see there, who would hug her hello and hug her goodbye, one of the cruelest killers of our time. She would call him something else.

"To her," said a friend of the family, "Ted is 'Daddy."'