The Stranger Beside Me (51 page)

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"What's on television in Seattle?" he asked. "Are they covering me very much back there?"

"Quite a bit. I watched you in Tallahassee when you introduced yourself to the prospective jurors there. You seemed very confident." He was pleased.

I have no way of knowing if Ted truly felt the confidence which he projected, but going into his Miami trial, he seemed to believe that he could and would win. After an hour's conversation, conversation which he told me was being monitored by Dade County jailers, we hung up, promising to meet again, this time in Miami.

To newspapermen, Ted declined to predict the trial outcome. "If I was a football coach, I'd say when you're in your first game of the season, you don't start looking for the Super Bowl."

Dr. Emil Spillman, the Atlanta hypnotist who had been Ted's jury expert, told the press that Ted truly had chosen his own jury. They had had to go through seventy-seven poA tential jurors before they reached a final selection on June

30th. Spillman felt that Ted had passed over seventeen or eighteen choices whom he-Spillman-termed "emotionally perfect. But I told him,

'It's your life-not mine,' " Spillman shrugged. "He passed up some absolutely fantastic jurors."

The final twelve were largely middle-aged, largely black. Ted, and Ted alone, had chosen. It was his life.

The jurors were:

*Alan Smith, a clothing designer, who leaned away from the death penalty.

*Estela Suarez, a bookkeeper. It was Ms. Suarez who had sparked laughter in the courtroom during jury selection when she failed to recognize Ted as the defendant.

*Vernon Swindle, a worker in the mailroom of the Miami Herald, who said he didn't have time to read the papers he helped to put out.f;

* Rudolph Trergl, a senior project engineer for Texaco, highly educated-«a man with a scientifically oriented mind who would become the jury foreman, a man who said he only read technical journals.

*Bernest Donald, a high school teacher, a deacon in his church. 350

*Floy Mitchell, a housewife, devout, who watched soap operas more than she read the daily headlines.

*Ruth Hamilton, a maid, a church-goer too. Her nephew was a Tallahassee policeman.

* Robert Corbett, a sports enthusiast who rarely read the paper beyond the sports page. He knew Ted was accused of murdering "somebody."

*Mazie Edge, just retired as an elementary school principal. Her bout with the flu would soon delay the trial.

*Dave Brown, a maintenance engineer for a Miami hotel.

*Mary Russo, a supermarket clerk, who seemed in awe of her call to jury duty, and who did not favor the death penalty.

*James Bennett, a truck driver, father of five, who had never considered Ted's guilt "one way or another."

These, then, along with three alternates, would be the jury of Ted Bundy's peers, the citizens of Bade County, Florida who would decide whether the young man from Tacoma, Washington would live or die. 42

I flew out of Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle, headed for Miami, at one in the morning on July 3rd. I had been promised press credentials when I arrived at my destination: the Dade County Metro Justice Center. I understood there were three hundred reporters already there, ready to digest and disseminate every scrap of information on Ted Bundy via phone and wire to the rest of America.

Once again, I felt the sense of unreality of it all, more so when I found the in-flight movie was Love at First Bite. The rest of the passengers flying thousands of feet above a sleeping country laughed aloud at the high camp of George Hamilton's' Dracula as he plunged his teeth into beautiful maidens. Under the circumstances, I found no humor in it.

It would be forty-two hours before I slept again. We crossed the Great Divide; to the left of the plane, I could see dawn beginning to break, but it was still pitch black to my right. Soon, I could see the historic rivers down below as they snaked their way to the sea, cities slumbering in the distance. We landed in Atlanta at 6 A.M., waited an. hour or so, and then flew south in a smaller plane. The vast isolation of the Everglades seemed endless. And then there was Miami ahead. So flat, so spread out; it was the very antithesis of Seattle which is built on a succession of hills.

The July heat of southern Florida rose up and seemed to knock me backward as I emerged from the Miami airport. During the weeks I spent in Miami, I would never adjust to that palpable heat. It was constant; even the sudden late afternoon thunder storms wept only great drops of hot water and left the air as oppressive as it had been before. Nor did evening bring respite a$it always did in the Northwest. The sight of palm trees assailed me with an attack of homesickness, reminded me of those long months in Los Angeles, and reminded me also that Ted could probably never go home again.

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I dumped my bags in my motel and took a cab to the Bade County Metro Justice Center, a lush, new complex which lies in the shadow of the Orange Bowl. As I entered the reception area of the Dade County Public Safety Department substation which housed the jail-connected by a sky bridge to the Metro Justice Building where Ted's trial was being held on the fourth floor-I was immediately aware of the intense security. No one was even allowed on the elevators to the upper floors without first being cleared and handed a badge.

I had to have that clearance badge before I could go upstairs to the Public Relations Office and get another clearance badge that would allow me into the trial! They were taking no chances of escape for Ted in Miami.

Henceforth, I would be "News Media, No. 15." I went first to the ninth floor of the Metro Justice Building, and found that the entire top floor of the huge building had been given over to the press. I have never seen anything like it. The activity there was frantic; three dozen closed circuit television sets blaring out every word of the trial five floors below, anchormen, anchorwomen, technicians, reportersscores of them-watching, broadcasting, editing, splicing. The cacophony seemed to bother no one. The rooms were thick with cigarette smoke, littered with coffee cups. The indooroutdoor carpet was a squirming network of wires and cables.

Cables from a single TV camera in the courtroom had been strung from the fourth-floor courtroom, secured to the building exterior, and fed into this central control room. There a series of distribution amplifiers split the signal so that what was happening could be fed to all three networks at once. The segments chosen by the networks were relayed to the eighth floor where Southern Bell had installed a

"microwave dish" to transmit the signals to downtown Miami for wire transmission to a special Florida TV system. The same signals went by wire to Atlanta where ABC transmitted them to New York via Telstar I satellite, and by Telstar II to California and the West Coast. CBS had provided the single courtroom camera, and it was being manned alternately by cameramen from all the networks.

Ted had told me he was the Golden Boy, and for the media he certainly appeared to be just that.

I looked around the room. Stations from Colorado, Utah, Washington, and Flnr-'-*-» had tacked up handwritten signs as

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they established their "territory." The ninth floor of the Metro Justice Building would run around the clock throughout the trial. I, who have always bemoaned the loneliness of writing-trapped all alone in my basement office at home--wouldn't be lonely here. I was amazed at the discipline of my fellow reporters who seemed able to turn out finished copy in this boiler room of noise and scurrying activity. I stashed my tape recorder upstairs; it would not be allowed in the courtroom. Later, I learned the trick of turning it on next to the closed circuit TV set in the backroom, and then racing down to the trial. That way, I would have both my notes from the "live" action, and the complete trial on tape.

I exited the elevators on the fourth floor and headed toward the courtroom. Quite frankly, I was terrified, venturing into totally uncharted territory, about to view the culmina.tion of four years of ambivalence and worry.

If Judge Edward Cowart is a St. Bernard, then his bailiff, Dave Watson, is a feisty bulldog, protective, and fiercely so, of Cowart. We would all come to fear and respect Watson's authority as he bellowed "Please be seated! Court will come to order!" and "Stay seated 'til the judge is out of the courtroom!" And woe be unto anyone who might have to visit the restroom during sessions. Watson would permit no aimless coming and going.

But now, bless him, he approached me as I stood tentatively outside the courtroom. In his seventies, white haired, he was wearing his

"uniform" of sparkling white shirt, dark trousers. I didn't know enough to realize this was the dread Bailiff Watson, and he smiled, put both his arms around me and said, "You go right on in, honey . . ." Cowart's courtroom is a vast, octagonal room, the walls panelled with tropical wood and brass rectangles behind the bench of marble. Fake?

Possibly. Light fixtures of white, aqua, red, and wine were suspended from the ceiling.

The thirty-three press seats were to the left as one entered; opposite them wer^ seats reserved for law enforcement officers. Beyond that .were a hundred or more seats for the gallery. No windows, lint it was air-conditioned.

I have always found a trial something of a temporary microcosm of life. The judge is the father, kindly, authoritative, guiding us all-and Edward Cowart would fill that role well. The rest of us-jury, defense, prosecution, gallery, press-354

were to be thrown together in an intense communal experience. When it ends, it is somehow sad; we will never be this close again. Most of us will never meet again.

This trial would be, for me, akin to having all the characters in a long, long book finally come alive. I knew the names of almost everyone involved, had heard of them for years, though Ted was the only character I had actually seen in person before.

I took a seat in the press section, among strangers who would become friends: Gene Miller, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner from the Miami Herald, Tony Polk from the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Linda Kleindienst and George McEvoy of the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, George Thurston of the Washington Post, Pat McMahon of the St. Petersburg Times, Rick Barry of the Tampa Tribune, Bill Knowles, Southern Bureau Chief of ABC News-all scribbling notes in their own particular fashion.

Ted glanced over, recognized me, grinned, winked. He looked barely older than the last time I had seen him, but was perfectly attired in suit and tie, styled haircut. It was odd, somehow-as if time had stood still for him. Dorian Gray flashed through my mind. I was a grandmother nowtwice over-and yet Ted was still the same outwardly as he had been in 1971, perhaps handsomer.

I looked around the courtroom. I saw faces that I have seen in dozens of trials, those whose whole life revolves around going to court; it is their only hobby, interest, avocation: neatly dressed old men, an old woman with garish make-up, her hair hidden by a wrapped stocking, a huge picture hat on top of it all. Housewives, playing hooky, a priest. Stolid rows of lawmen in uniform.

The front row-just behind Ted and the defense teamwas jammed with pretty young women, as it would be each day. Did they know how much they resembled the defendant's purported victims? Their eyes never left Ted, and they blushed and giggled with delight when he turned to flash a blinding smile at them, as he often did. Outside the courtroom, some of them would admit to reporters that Ted frightened them, yet they couldn't stay away. It is a common syndrome, this fascination that an alleged mass killer has for some women, as if he was the ultimate macho figure.

By tacit agreement, that one front row was somehow reserved for the

"Ted groupies," and indeed I would never

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see a trial with more attractive women present-the Chi Omegas, testifying about the night of January 14-15, 1978, the surviving victims, even the female detectives, deputies, and the court reporters. The jury was not present those first days; we were still in pretrial, and Cowart had yet to rule on what the court would allow in. The jury remained sequestered in a plush resort on Bay Biscayne. An uninformed observer would have difficulty distinguishing Ted from any of the young lawyers in the courtroomLynn Thompson, Ed Harvey, Bob Haggard, and for the prosecution, Larry Simpson and Danny McKeever, both from the State Attorney's Office.

The defense wanted many of the state's proposed witnesses out: Connie Hastings and Mary Ann Piccano, the girls who had seen the man in Sherrod's Disco earlier on that Saturday night; Nita Neary, the Chi O who had seen the man with the club; Dr. Souviron with his bite-mark testimony; Sergeant Bob Hayward on the Utah arrest; Carol DaRonch from Salt Lake City; Detective Norm Chapman and Don Patchen and their testimony about the conversations during the interrogation in mid-February in Pensacola.

Nita Jane Neary was on the witness stand as I entered the courtroom. She had been badgered by the defense and was almost tearful-but resolute. Asked if she saw the man in the courtroom that she'd seen that night, she said, "Yes, I believe I do." But she wanted a profile look. Cowart ordered every man in the room to stand and turn sideways. Nita Jane looked, but seemed reluctant to look directly at Ted. Then she raised her arm, somewhat mechanically and, still with eyes downcast, she pointed at the defendant.

Ted helped the court reporter by saying (about himself), "That's Mr. Bundy . . ."

The defense questioned Nita and her mother. Yes, her mother had shown her newspaper pictures of Ted Bundy taken after his artist. But she had also picked him out of a mug lay-down latej She was positive. Judge Cowart would subsequently rule to allow her eyewitness identification, possibly the worst blow that would be dealt the defense. Ronnie Eng, "the sweetheart" of Chi Omega-the man Nita Neary had first thought she recognized-had been