The Stranger Beside Me (49 page)

Things grew gloomier the next day when Judge Charles McClure refused to allow Millard Farmer to defend Bundy. There had been enough

"carnival," the state said, without allowing a man with Farmer's alleged reputation for courtroom histrionics into the case. Farmer was not licensed to practice law in Florida, and the state had the power to refuse such privileges.

Farmer argued vehemently that Ted was being deprived of his right to effective legal counsel, but Ted said nothing at all. He refused to answer any of the judge's remarks addressed to him, and McClure said implacably, "Let the record reflect that the defendant refuses to answer."

It was clearly a protest demonstration on Ted's part-a protest over his loss of Farmer. In all likelihood, he had expected the murder indictments; he probably did not expect that he would not have Farmer beside him, and that was a crushing disappointment. Like Buzzy Ware, Millard Farmer was the kind of lawyer Ted himself could respect. It was important to his sense of worth. To be an important defendant with a famous attorney could be dealt with; to be stuck with public defenders was more a blow to his ego than a threat to his life. The net cinched more tightly. On July 31st, the sealed indictment that had been handed down in Columbia County (Lake City) lay Citing in Judge Wallace Jopling's courtroom in Lake City»even as Ted pleaded not guilty in Tallahassee. Once again* Judge Rudd rejected Millard Farmer as defense attorney. Ted dismissed his public defenders. As before, he would go it alone.

No sooner were those proceedings ended than Judge Jopling opened the sealed indictment before him; Ted Bundy

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•was now charged with first degree murder and kidnapping in the Kimberly Leach murder.

The Tallahassee cases were set to go to trial on October 3, 1978, and it was rumored that Ted would probably be facing back-to-back trials. Ted did not retreat. Instead, he attacked. On August 4, 1978. Millard Farmer submitted a complaint charging the sheriff of Leon County, Ken Katsaris, and eight others (county commissioners, Art Golden, and Captain Jack Poitinger) with depriving Ted of his minimal rights as a prisoner. Ted sought $300.000 damages. Ted was asking that he be allowed a minimum of one hour of daily outdoor exercise--without chains-adequate cell lighting, removal from isolation, and that Katsaris and the other defendants be stopped from

"harassing" him. He also asked that he be awarded reasonable attorney fees. It was the audacious Ted Bundy back in action. The state responded by again blocking Farmer from Ted's defense. Farmer suggested that Judge Rudd was "in the middle of a lynch mob" and called the state of Florida "the Buckle of the Death Belt" for prisoners. There were, at the time, some seventy to eighty prisoners on death row in Florida, convicted of first degree murder.

In considering a place to run to back in December of 1977, Ted might have done well to weigh other factors beyond the weather. The headlines continued. Ted told an ABC reporter from Seattle that he had been cleared of suspicion in the 1974 cases in Seattle by an

"inquiry judge." That was not true. Inquiry judges do not make such decisions in Washington State, and he was stil! regarded as the prime suspect in the eight Northwest cases.

Ted asked that Judge Rudd disqualify himself from the case, after Rudd refused Farmer's bid to defend him, calling Farmer's courtroom demeanor

"disruptive." Rudd reacted to the motion that he step down succinctly,

"Motion read, considered and denied. File it." On August 14th, Ted appeared in Judge Jopling's Lake City courtroom and pleaded not guilty to the charges involving Kimberly Leach. "Because I am innocent."

Florida justice would not move swiftly. There were just too many murders, too many charges. The Chi Omega trial was put off until November, and there were indications that the Leach trial would also be delayed.

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The indications were right. Ted would not go on trial for either the Tallahassee or the Lake City cases until mid-1979. In the meantime, he languished in isolation in the Leon County Jail, still overseen by his arch enemy: Sheriff Ken Katsaris.

I received a phone call from Ted on September 26,

1978-a collect call, but one which I accepted readily. I had heard nothing from him and had been following events in Florida only through the media since July. The connection was blurred; I was not sure that we were alone on the line.

He explained that a new order had come down, an order that allowed him to have outdoor exercise. "For the first time in seven months, they took me outside for something other than going back and forth to hearings. Two armed guards with walkie-talkies took me up on the roof and let me walk in circles. Down below, they had three patrol cars and three attack dogs."

I suggested that even he couldn't leap four stories.

"Who do they think I am?" he laughed. "The Bionic Man?" He described his cell. "There's no natural light. It's an iron cell in the midst of other walls. There's one 150-watt recessed bulb in the ceiling with a plastic shield and a metal grating. By the time it filters down to me, there's hardly any light. It's I/60th of what it should be for humane purposes. I've got a bed, a combination sink-and-toilet, and a portable radio that gets two stations. It felt so good today to be out in the air without shackles, even to listen to the dogs bark-I haven't heard a dog bark in a long time."

Ted was adamant that "they" would never break him. "All the psychological evaluations they've done here ... in the last one, they told the sheriff that, if he read the indictment to me the way he did, that it would break me, and I'd talk. Immediately after they took me back to my cell, two detectives came in and said, 'Now you see how much we've got on you? There's no slace else to go-you might just as well make it easy on yourself and talk.' But they didn't break me then." I For the first time, Ted mentioned Carole Ann Boone to me, saying that he had become "very, very close" to her, and that he was listening to her advice on how to handle matters of interest to him. He talked of his chagrin at losing Millard Farmer. "The 338 THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

man's about thirty-seven-looks fifty-and he handles about twenty capital cases a year. He runs himself into the ground. But now I'm prepared to defend myself in both cases."

He was angry that he was "being paraded" both in Tallahassee and Lake City, where he went three times a week for hearings on the Leach case. And yet, there was an undercurrent of pride that he was in the public eye again, and would be for a long time to come. "The Chi Omega case is very bizarre. I'm not going to go into it-but the combination of Ted Bundy and a case like that! I'll be in the limelight for a long time. The evidence has all been fabricated. The people here are absolutely determined to get convictions-even if they know they'll be overturned later. All they care about is shackling me and getting me up in front of a jury. And back-to-back trials to boot." He'd said he was talking from the booking room in the jail, but he apparently had made his feelings about Florida lawmen vocal enough already so that he had no qualms about annoying them further. It was September 26th-Ted's anniversary with Meg. A year before he'd asked me to send the rose. Now, he said that Meg had finally left him.

"I guess she talked to some reporters ... I don't know. I haven't heard from her in a long time. She told me she just couldn't take this anymore, that she didn't want to hear anymore about it. How long since you've seen her?"

A long time, I told him. It had been more than a year. I'm sure he realized what day it was. Perhaps that was why he had called me-to talk about Meg. He had Carole Ann Boone now, but he hadn't forgotten Meg. I asked him what time it was in Florida, and he hesitated. "I don't know. Time doesn't mean anything any more."

Ted's voice drifted away, and I thought the line had been broken.

"Ted? Ted ..."

He came back on, and he sounded vague, disoriented. He apologized.

"Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation, I forget what I've said before ... I have trouble remembering."

It was the first time I had ever heard him so unsure, almost slipping away from what was here and now. But then his voice became strong again. He was anxious for trial, anxious to face the challenge.

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"Your voice sounds good," I remarked. "You sound like yourself." His answer was a little strange. "I usually am .. ." Ted had only one request. He asked me to send him the classified section of the Seattle Sunday Times. He didn't say why he wanted it. Nostalgia perhaps. Maybe reading the ads in his hometown paper would help to wipe out the sight of the iron walls with no windows.

I sent him the paper. I don't know if he got it. I wouldn't talk to him or hear from him again until just before his Miami trial in June, 1979.

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It is extremely doubtful that Ted Bundy could ever have received an impartial trial in the state of Florida. He was becoming better known than Disney World, the Everglades, and the heretofore all-time media pleaser: Murph the Surf. Paradoxically, Ted himself both courted and demeaned publicity. His very attitude made him ripe for headlines. On October 29, 1978, Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic odontologist-an expert in matching teeth impressions to bite marks, in dental identification-put on a demonstration at a forensic seminar that seemed premature, at best. Souviron, from Coral Gables, presented slides, slides he said proved that "this suspect's" teeth matched the bite marks on the victim's buttock. Naturally, this information was disseminated throughout the state's media and everyone knew that Ted Bundy was the suspect referred to. Predictably, Ted screamed "Foul!" Dr. Ronald Wright, chief deputy medical examiner fojr Dade County, equivocated when he tried to explain how such a gaffe could happen.

"You have to balance the kinds of problems which might exist in regards to talking about a case in litigation against teaching the best possible method for correctly identifying murderers or clearing people of murder charges," he remarked.

The obvious question of course was why this could not have been done without hinting broadly at the identity of the principals involved. Beyond that, there were other cases which could have been offered as examples where identification had been made through teeth imprints. A Brattleboro, Vermont man had been convicted in 1976 of the rape murder of sixty-two-year-old Ruth Kastenbaum-convicted because the twenty-five bite marks on her body matched his teeth. Souviron himself had another case where he had made bite mark matches: he had matched the teeth of a twenty-three-340

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year-old man from Columbia, South Carolina to the body of seventy-seven-year-old Margaret Haizlip who lived in a rural area south of Miami.

But Ted was more newsworthy than an itinerant laborer from South Carolina, and Ted's teeth got the publicity. The publication of Souviron's findings seemed to go far beyond normal pretrial publicity. It seemed, for a time, that charges against Ted for murder might well be dismissed because of Souviron's statements.

They were not, however, and the state moved ahead, preparing for the two trials. Pretrial publicity is a two-edged sword; it can prejudice an innocent man so that he cannot obtain a fair trial, and it can, occasionally, result in a guilty man's going free when charges are dismissed. In either instance, such publicity can be tragic. Two of Ted Bundy's most hated antagonists had dropped completely from the picture by late 1978, one through personal disgrace and the other when his health collapsed. I don't know if Ted knew about either of them, or if it would matter to him any longer.

Frank Tucker, the District Attorney from Pitkin County, Colorado was convicted-June, 1978, of two counts of embezzlement and acquitted of two counts. In December, 1978, he was convicted of one count of felony theft and two misdemeanor counts. Tucker cried-as Ted had about his own case-that the charges and convictions were all "politically motivated." He was disbarred, received five years probation, ninety days in jail (to be delayed,) and a thousand dollar fine. According to his attorney, Tucker planned to pursue a new career. He would go to morticians' school in San Francisco.

Now-Major Nick Mackie of the King County Police Major Crimes Unit in Seattle suffered a near-fatal heart attack in the spring of 1978, and paramedics had pronounced him clinically dead twice. Mackie survived but was forced to resign from the high-pressure job he'd handled so well for so long. The loss of Mactâe would be a blow for the department. Ted himself wasn't doing so well. As the Christmas season approached in 1978, he was again in jail, looking at a solid steel door-just as he had been a year before. But this year, there were no plans to escape; there was no way to escape. Again, he was faced with a murder trial--just as he had been

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in December, 1977. Indeed, he was faced with two murder trials. Bundy had moved to have Judge John Rudd removed because of prejudice, and shortly before Christmas the Florida State Supreme Court acquiesced. There had been claims by the defense that Rudd had improperly communicated with the State Attorney's Office, and that he had evinced hostility toward the defense team. Rudd stepped down. A new judge would be appointed in the coming year. Larry Simpson, an assistant state's attorney, would be chief prosecutor in the Chi Omega case and announced that he was ready to go to trial at any time, but a trial before February seemed unlikely.

Ted had grudgingly accepted the aid of the Public Defender's Office and his defense team was headed by Mike Minerva. Ted apparently was aware finally that he would be a fool to attempt to defend himself in two murder trials.

In January, a new judge was appointed: Judge Edward D. Cowart of the Florida Circuit Court. Judge Cowart, fiftyfour, is a great St. Bernard of a man, jowls bulging over his judicial robes, with a southern soothing voice. Cowart has been a navy bosun's mate and a policeman, before graduating from Stetson University Law School in St. Petersburg. His home court is in Miami, and he controls his courtroom with authority-authority that is often laced with sharp wit and homilies. He is given to saying, "Bless your heart" to attorneys and defendants alike. When an argument is not clear, he will say, "Cripple that and walk it by me slow." He is a man both benign and belligerent depending on the circumstance, and he knows his law inside out. In court, Cowart often seems to be giving instruction in law to the attorneys who appear before him. ~