The Stranger Beside Me (52 page)

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cleared by a polygraph, but he too appeared in pretrial. As he stood beside Bundy, there was little resemblance. Ronnie was dark-complexioned, shorter, with black hair. He made a shy, smiling witness.

Carole Ann Boone, Ted's staunchest ally, sat in the courtroom, her eyes meeting his often. A tall, big-boned woman of about thirty-two, she wore thick glasses, had short dark hair-not parted in the middle. She seldom smiled, and usually carried sheaves of reports. Her connection to the defendant seemed to be her only interest.

When court ended that first day, I approached Carole Boone and introduced myself. She glanced at me and said, "Yes, I've heard of you" and turned abruptly on her heel and walked away. Somewhat bemused, I stared after her.. Did she dislike me so because I was wearing a press badge, or because I was an old friend of Ted's? I never found out; she never spoke to me again.

The next court session began with requests by Ted for more exercise, law library privileges, a typewriter.

Both the library and the exercise facilities were on the seventh floor of the jail building. Ted and his jail supervisor engaged in a little repartee.

"Can you have enough security for me?"

"We better have."

"How many? One? Two? Three?"

"We don't care to be specific. We'll have enough." Cowart asked, "Can you » read while you exercise, Mr. Bundy?" Ted, wearing on this day a Seattle Mariner's tee-shirt, laughed faintly. He wanted an hour a day in the law library, an hour's exercise a day, unlimited visits with Carole Ann Boone who is "relaying my messages to me from my lawyers out west" and Cowart does not concur. Nor will there be a typewriter.

A new figure appears, another name from the book in my mind : Sergeant Bob Hayward of the Utah Highway Patrol, in Miami to describe Ted's arrest in August of 1975. When Hayward refers to a "panty hose mask," Judge Cowart objects for "Attorney" Bundy, saying, "You missed that, my friend-but we'll catch 'em together."

And now began one of the most bizarre sequences I have ever seen in a courtroom. Ted Bundy would be, at the same

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time, the defendant, the defense attorney, and then the witness. Ted rose to cross-examine Hayward. He questioned the witness closely about the Utah arrest, the gear^in his car, what was said, and tried to point out that he had never given permission to have his VW bug searched. Hayward, a bit put off by being questioned by the defendant, answered gruffly. "You told me to go ahead." And then Ted questioned Deputy Darryl Ondrak of the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office, arguing about whether the items found in his car were burglary tools, pointing out that, though he was charged, on that count, he was never tried on that count.

Cowart intervened: "You can argue that to the hills of Utah: if they were burglary tools. It's not relevant here. Quit when you're ahead . . . but I didn't say how far ahead."

Ted himself now became the witness and took the stand. He testified that Hayward's first words to him were, "Why didn't you get out of your car and run? I could have taken your head off." He explained that he had been intimidated by the number of officers present and that the search was illegal hi his estimation. He opened himself up to cross-examination by Danny McKeever and the admission that he had lied about going to the drive-in before being stopped. Ted wanted the Utah arrest suppressed insisting its evidence was seized through an illegal search. Judge Cowart would suppress it-but not for that reason; he found that arrest too "remote" from this trial.

"You may step down, Mr. Bundy. But you may not be excused." These transactions would result in a blow against the prosecution. They would not be able to compare the Utah pantyhose mask with the Dunwoody Street pantyhose mask in front of the jury.

The score now stood one-to-one.

Judge Cowart \4t>uld rarely betray his own feelings during the trial, but he slk>ped a little as he glanced at a composite picture drawn by In artist from Nita Neary's description, a picture Peggy Good argued was meaningless.

"I may be blind," Cowart began, "but, looking at that last picture, I see a striking resemblance to ... ah ... whoever it was." 358

After hearing the tapes taken in Pensacola, and the testimony offered by Detectives Norm Chapman and Don Patchen of statements alleged to have been made by Tedafter the tape recorder was turned off-Judge Cowart made another ruling to suppress, a ruling that caused prosecutors Simpson and McKeever to sag in their chairs. The jury would not be allowed to hear or know of any of it. Nothing of the escape, the credit card thefts, the statements about "vampirism," "voyeurism," "fantasies." Cowart found that too much of the alleged conversations was missing, unrecorded. He would not allow the portions that were on tape. The credit card thefts were not part of the murder charges in Cowart's judgment. The fantasy tape is out too.

The state is left with Nita Neary's eye-witness identification and Dr. Richard Souviron. The rest will be principally circumstantial. There are rumbles in the press section that Bundy may be back in the ball game.

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Judge Cowart was ready to begin the actual trial; the defense was not. On July 7th, Ted and his attorneys argued that they had not had time to prepare the opening arguments.

"We need time between your rulings and our opening statement," Peggy Good argued. "We're exhausted; we've had only five hours sleep a night. You're turning this into a trial by endurance."

"You have four lawyers in Miami, one investigator, two law students helping you. As far as the court is concerned, I care about the entire system. I'm very satisfied that there is no reason to delay any further. In this circuit, it's not unusual to proceed until midnight. We vary the tune, but we've got the same fiddler, the same music. Every minute you've been here, I've been here; and I'm fresh as a daisy." Ted tried another tack. "I'm concerned about Your Honor, how you're going to do this by one o'clock." "You just watch us. I appreciate your concern." And then, Ted was angry. It was Saturday noon, and he wanted to start Monday. Cowart did not. "My attorneys are not ready!" "We will begin, Mr. Bundy."

"Then you'll start without me, Your Honor!" Ted flared. "As you like," Cowart said imperturbably, while Ted muttered, "I don't care who he is . . ."

But Ted was sitting at the defense table as the jury was brought in for the first time.

Larry Simpson made the opening statements for the prosecution, only after «porters had sent the youthful state attorney back out to cornb his hair and re-enter for the benefit of the cameras. |

He did a gooa job, diagramming the four Chi Omega cases, the Dunwoody Street case on a blackboard, listing the victims' names, the charges: Burglary (of the Chi Omega

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house); first degree murder, Lisa Levy; first degree murder, Margaret Bowman; attempted first degree murder, Kathy Kleiner; attempted first degree murder, Karen Chandler; attempted first degree murder, burglary, Cheryl Thomas. He was workmanlike and showed little emotion, but he was clear and concise.

Ted had picked Robert Haggard, the thirty-four-year-old Miami attorney who'd been on the case only two weeks, to make the opening statements for the defense. Judge Cowart had urged the defense to wait until their

"half" of the trial to make the opening remarks, as was their option, but they forged ahead.

Haggard spoke for twenty-six minutes, rambled, and the prosecution objected twenty-nine times, an almost unheard-of number. Cowart sustained twenty-three of those objections.

Finally, Cowart threw up his hands and said to Haggard, "That's argument. Bless your heart. Come aboard."

I felt Ted himself could have done a better job of it. Ted did choose to cross-examine Officer Ray Crew about his actions when he had gone to the Chi Omega House on the morning of the murders. I have no idea what was in the minds of the jury as Ted elicited information about the condition of the death rooms, the condition of Lisa Levy's body, but it seemed to me somewhat grotesque. If this calm, glib, young attorney might have been there to see Lisa's body himself, might have done that terrible damage to her, he was completely dispassionate as he questioned the officer.

"Describe the condition of Lisa Levy's room."

"Clothing strewn about, desk, books . . . some disarray."

"Any blood in any area in the room other than what you testified about earlier?"

"No sir."

"Describe the condition of Margaret Bowman's body."

"She was lying face down, mouth and eyes open. Nylon stocking knotted around her neck, head bloated and discolored." Ted had been trying to show that the policeman had left his own prints in the room, that he had not proceeded carefully; instead he had only succeeded in impressing a horrible picture in the jury's minds. And then the young women-victims, witnesses-were a steady parade through the courtroom doors. Melanie Nelson, Nancy Dowdy, Karen Chandler, Kathy Kleiner, Debbie Cic-

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carelli, Nancy Young, Cheryl Thomas. Dressed in bright cottons, they all had an innocence about them, a vulnerability.

There were no outward signs that Karen and Kathy had ever been injured; the pins in their jaws, the concussions, the bruises, had long-since healed. Only when they told of what had happened to them could one picture the horror.

They never glanced at Ted Bundy.

Cheryl Thomas had more difficulty. She limped as she made her way to the witness chair, sat with her right ear toward the prosecutor, so that she could hear him; she was still completely deaf in the other. She did not testify about the struggle she had had to regain her health, of the moments of jogging, sit-ups. When she'd first started to walk, she had fallen to one side, but she'd learned to compensate by using her other senses-sight and feeling; she'd learned to develop a sense of balance with her mind. She did not mention how she had fallen again and again when she resumed ballet classes, that she'd had to start over from scratch. She testified very softly, often smiling shyly. The defense wisely chose not to question the victims.

Dr. Thomas Wood testified about the autopsies he had done on the dead victims, and then, over objections from Peggy Good, produced 11-by 14-inch color photos of the bodies, pointing out the damage to the jury. It is standard for defense attorneys to protest autopsy pictures, declaring them "inflammatory and with no probative value," and it is standard too that the pictures are admitted.

I watched the faces of the jury as those terrible pictures were passed silently through their tiers of seats. The female jurors seemed to be managing better than the males, who paled and winced. There were several shots of Lisa Levy's buttocks-with the teeth imprints clearly visible. There was one close-up of Margaret Bowman, called the

"hole-in-the-head" picture by Judge Cowart, for want of a better term. There was a photograph of Lisa Levy's right breast, the nipple bitten through.

I had neither se|n nor talked to Ted privately. He did not have the freedom ato hold conversations with those in the courtroom that hetiad expected. At each recess, he was led, manacled, to a small room across the corridor. When court recessed for the day, that day when the post-mortem reports and the victims' pictures had been introduced into evidence, I stood outside in the hallway for a moment. Ted, carrying his

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usual pile of legal papers in his cuffed hands, emerged and walked within a few feet of me. He turned to me, smiled, shrugged, and disappeared. In Florida reporters are allowed to view all the evidence that has been admitted. A group of us waited for Shirley Lewis, the court clerk, to trundle a huge cart full of physical evidence to her office, and there it was spread out on a table. A miasma, real or imagined, seemed to rise from the clutter there, and the laughter and black humor common among the press corps was silenced.

"We're not laughing now, are we?" Tony Polk of Denver said quietly. We were not.

All the panty-hose masks were there-including the one Sergeant Bob Hayward had brought from Utah-strikingly similar to one another. The garotte from Margaret Bowman's neck, still bearing her dried blood, was there. And all the pictures . . .

I had long since managed to deal with the photographs that are part of homicide cases with a degree of detachment; they no longer upset me as they once did, although I make it a point not to dwell on them. By the time I stood in Shirley Lewis's office, I had seen thousands of body pictures.

I had seen pictures of Kathy Devine and Brenda Baker in Thurston County, but that was months before it was known there was a "Ted." Of course, there were no bodies to photograph in the other Washington cases and I had had no access to Colorado or Utah pictures. Now, I was staring down at huge color photographs of the damage done to girls young enough to be my daughters-at pictures of damage alleged to be the handiwork of a man I thought I knew. That man who only minutes before had smiled the same old grin at me, and shrugged as if to say, "I have no part of this."

It hit me with a terrible sickening wave. I ran to the ladies' room and threw up.

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The cloyingly hot days in Miami's July took on a pattern. First, the mass exodus from the Civic Center Holiday Inn by most of the principals-barring the defendant-to the Justice Center three blocks away. Virtually all of the defense team, the prosecution team, the media people from out of town, Carole Ann Boone and her teenage son, the television cameramen and technicians were headquartered at the Holiday Inn, and some of the best quotes reporters elicited came in the evening when the little bar on the first floor was jammed with participants quaffing cold beers and gin and tonics. Here, the demarcation lines were not as pronounced as they were in the courtroom. The dash to the Justice Center. "Get in there before Watson shuts the door!" The journey was not without its dangers. It was necessary to cross six lanes of rush-hour traffic, balancing on center islands as the commuters of Miami whooshed by, inches away. "Don't walk under the viaduct-a reporter from Utah got mugged the other evening by some guy on a bicycle with a six-inch blade."