The Stranger Beside Me (57 page)

"It wasn't easy sitting through this trial for a number of reasons. But the main reason it was not easy in the early part of the case was the presentation of the state case on what took place in the Chi Omega House, the blood, the pictures, the bloodstained sheets. And to note the state was trying to find me responsible was not easy. And it was not easy, nor did I ignore the families of these young women. I do not know them. And I do not think it's hypocritical of me, God knows, to say I sympathize with them, to the best I can. Nothing like this has ever happened to anyone close to me.

"But I'm telling the court, and I'm telling those people close to the victims in this case: I'm not the one responsible for the acts in the Chi Omega House or Dunwoody Street. And I'll tell the court I'm really not able to accept the verdict, because, although the verdict found in part that those crimes had been committed, they erred in finding who cornmitted them.

"And as a consequence I cannot accept the sentence even though one will be imposed and even though I realize the lawful way the court will impose it-because it is not a sentence of me; it is a sentence of someone else who is not standing here today. So / will be tortured for and receive the pain for that act ... but I will not share the burden or the guilt." Ted continued with a diatribe against the press: "It is sad but true that thetmedia thrives on sensation and they thrive on evil and they thrive on things taken out of context"

And Ted, as Always, could see the drama of his legal battles: "And now the burden is on this court. And I don't envy you. The court is like a hydra right now. It's been asked to dispense no mercy as the maniac at the Chi Omega House dispensed no mercy. It's asked to consider this case as a man and a judge. And you're asked also to render the wisdom of a

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god. It's like some incredible Greek tragedy. It must have been written sometime and it must be one of those ancient Greek plays that portrays the three faces of man."

And so, at long last, there was no one left but Ted Bundy and Judge Edward Cowart. Antagonists, yes, but the two men had a kind of grudging admiration for one another. Another time, another place, and it might have all been so different. Never before had Cowart had such a literate, educated, wryly humorous defendant come before him. He too could see the waste, the roads not taken, and yet he had to do what he had to do. "It is ordered that you be put to death by a current of electricity, that that current be passed through your body until you are dead." At that moment, it was clear that Cowart would have wished that things might have been different. He looked at Ted and said softly, 'Take care of yourself, young man."

"Thank you."

"I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It's a tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity that I've experienced in this courtroom. You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer, and I'd have loved to have you practice in front of me-but you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don't have any animosity to you. I want you to know that."

"Thank you."

"Take care of yourself."

"Thank you."

I watched that scene-not from my seat in the press section-but in front of my television set at home in Seattle, and I felt the chilling incongruity of it as keenly as if I had been there. Judge Cowart had just sentenced Ted to die in the electric chair; there was no way Ted could "take care of himself."

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Peggy Good had pleaded in vain for Ted Bundy's life as the Miami trial neared its close, "The question and the choice is how to punish in this case. It is necessary that you consider the protection of society, but there are less drastic ways to consider the protection of society than taking another life. To recommend death in this case would be to admit failure with a human being. To recommend death is to confess the inability to heal, or to consider that there could be no healing." I have been asked a hundred-a thousand-times what I truly believed about Ted Bundy's guilt or innocence, and until now I have always demurred. Now, I would like to attempt to express my thoughts on what made Ted run. It may be presumptuous on my part. I am neither a trained psychiatrist nor a criminologist. Yet, after almost ten years of knowing Ted through all the good times, the bad times, after researching the crimes he has been suspected of and those he has been convicted of, after agonizing reflection, I realize that I may know Ted as well as anyone has ever known him. And I can only conclude, with the most profound sense of regret, that he can never be healed.

I doubt that Ted will understand the depth of my feeling for him. The knowledge that he is undoubtedly guilty of the grotesque crimes attributed to him is as painful to me as if he were my son, the brother I lost, a man as close to me in many ways as anyone I have ever known. There will never be a time in my life when I will not think of him. I have felt friendship, love, respect, anxiety, sorrow, horror, deep anger, despair and, at the end, resigned acceptance of what has to be. Like John ttenry Browne, and Peggy Good, like his mother and the women who loved him romantically, I have tried to save Ted's life . . . twice. Once he knew it, and once he didn't. He received the letter I mailed in 1976 when I begged him not to kill himself, but he never knew that I had

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tried to arrange a plea bargain in 1979 that might have meant confinement in a mental hospital instead of the trials that led him inexorably toward the electric chair. And, like all the others, I have been manipulated to suit Ted's needs. I don't feel particularly embarrassed or resentful about that; I was one of many, all of us intelligent, compassionate people who had no real comprehension of what possessed him, what drove him obsessively.

Ted came into my life, however peripherally, at a time when all the beliefs I had held smugly for many years had been shattered. True love, marriage, fidelity, selfless motherhood, blind trust-all those marvelous truths were suddenly only wisps of smoke blowing away in a totally unforeseen gust of wind.

But Ted seemed to embody what was young, idealistic, clean, sure, and empathetic. He seemed to ask nothing but friendship. He was, in 1971, a decisive factor in the verification that I was a person of worth, a woman who still had a great deal to give and to reap. He was most assuredly not a predatory male eager to "hit on" a newly divorced woman. He was simply there, listening, reassuring, giving credibility to what I was trying to become. Such a friend is not easy to turn one's back on.

I have no idea what I was to him, what I seemed to remain to him. Perhaps I only gave back to him what he had given to me. I saw him then as quite perfect, and he must have needed that. Perhaps he could sense an emotional strength in me, although I surely did not feel it myself at the time. He may have known that he could count on me when the going grew perilous for him. In times of deepest stress, he would turn to me, again and again. And I did attempt to help him, but I could never really assuage his pain because Ted could never bring himself to expose the soft underbelly of his anguish. He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him.

It must have taken incredible effort.

The parameters of that shadow man were constructed with such care; one misstep and they could all come apart.

The Ted Bundy the world was allowed to see was handsome, his body honed and cultivated meticulously, a barrier of strength against eyes that might catch a glimpse of the terror inside. He was brilliant, a student of distinction, witty, glib, and persuasive. He loved to ski, sail, and hike. He fa-

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vored French cuisine, good white wine, and gourmet cooking. He loved Mozart and obscure foreign films. He knew exactly when to send flowers and sentimental cards. His poems of love were tender and romantic. And yet, in reality, Ted loved things more than he loved people. He could find life in an abandoned bicycle or an old car, and feel a kind of compassion for these inanimate objects-more compassion than he could ever feel for another human being.

Ted could-and did-rub elbows with the governor, travel in circles that most young men could never hope to enter, but he could never feel good about himself. On the surface Ted Bundy was the very epitome of a successful man. Inside, it was all ashes.

For Ted has gone through life terribly crippled, like a man who is deaf, or blind, or paralyzed. Ted has no conscience.

"Conscience doth make cowards of us all," but conscience is what gives us our humanity, the factor that separates us from animals. It allows us to love, to feel another's pain, and to grow. Whatever the drawbacks are to being blessed with a conscience, the rewards are essential to living hi a world with other human beings.

The individual with no conscience-with no superego at all-has long been a focal point for study by psychiatrists and psychologists. The terms used to describe such an individual have changed over the years, but the concept has not Once it was called a "psychopathic personality," and then it became "sociopath." Today, the term in vogue is "antisocial personality."

To live in our world, with thoughts and actions always counter to the flow of your fellow men, must be an awesome handicap. There are no innate guidelines to follow: the psychopath might well be a visitor from another planet, struggling to munie die feelings of those he encounters. It is almost impossible to pinpoint just when antisocial feelings begin, although molt experts agree that emotional development has been arrested hi early childhood-perhaps as early as three. Usually, the inward-turning of emotions results from a need for love or acceptance not filled, from deprivation and humiliation. Once begun, that little child will grow tall-but he will never mature emotionally. He may experience pleasure on only a physical level, an 398

excitable "high," and a sense of euphoria from the games he substitutes for real feelings.

He knows what he wants, and, because he is not hampered by guilt feelings or the needs of others, he can usually achieve instant gratification. But he can never fill up the lonesome void inside. He is insatiable, always hungry.

Hie antisocial personality is mentally ill, 'but not in the classic sense or within our legal framework. He is invariably highly intelligent and has long since learned the proper responses, the tricks and techniques that will please those from whom he wants something. He is subtle, calculating, clever, and dangerous. And he is lost. Dr. Benjamin Spock, who worked hi a veterans' hospital dealing with emotional illnesses during World War H, cornmented at the time that there was a pronounced cross-sex problem hi dealing with psychopathic personalities. The male psychopaths had no difficulty in bewitching female staff members, while the male staff picked up on them rapidly. The female psychopaths could fool the male staff-but not the women. Ted's retinue of friends and companions was always heavily weighted with women. Some loved him as a man. Some women, like myself, were drawn to his courtly manners, his little boy quality, his seemingly genuine concern and thoughtfulness. Women were always Ted's comfort-and his curse.

Because he could control women, balance us carefully in the tightly structured world he had manufactured, we were important to him. We seemed to hold the solution to that dead hollow place inside him. He dandled us as puppets from a string, and when one of us did not react as he wanted, he was both outraged and confused.

I believe men, on the other hand, were a threat. The one man whom he felt he could emulate, the man whose genes and chromosomes dictated who he was, had been left behind. When Ted told me for the first time about his illegitimate birth, I sensed that he seemed to consider himself a changeling child, the progeny of royalty dumped by mistake on the doorstep of a blue-collar family. How he loved the thought of money and status, and how inadequate he felt when he found himself with women who were born to it.

Ted never really knew who he was supposed to be. He'd been taken away from his real father, and then taken away from his grandfather Cowell whom he loved and respected.

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He could not, would not, use Johnnie Culpepper Bundy as a role model. I think his feelings toward his mother were marked with a raging ambivalence. She had lied to him. She had robbed him of his real father, although rational consideration shows that she had no choice. But half of Ted was gone, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to make up for mat loss.

Still, he clung to his mother, tried to live up to her dreams that he must excel, that he was her special child who could do anything. Of aU the women that Ted was involved with romantically, it was Meg Anders who lasted the longest-and it was Meg who was the most like Louise Bundy. Both of them are small, almost frail, women. And each was left alone with a child to raise. Each of them traveled far from their family homes to start a new life with that child. Meg Anders and Louise Bundy are the two women who, I believe, suffered the most agony when Ted's facade shattered.

The men that Ted was drawn to were all men of power, either through their accomplishments, their intellect, or their easy mantle of masculinity: his lawyer friend in Seattle; Ross Davis, head of the Washington State Republican Party; John Henry Browne, the dynamic public defender; John O'Connell, his Salt Lake City attorney; Buzzy Ware, the brilliant Colorado attorney he lost; Mfflard Farmer, denied to him by the Florida courts. Policemen had that same kind of powerespecially Norm Chapman of Pensacola, who exuded strength, masculinity, and, yes, the ability to love.

Like a little boy who yearns to be important, to be noticed, Ted played perverse games with policemen. In many of his crimes, he would assume their mantle, their badges, and he would, for that time, be one of them. Although he often called policemen stupid, he needed to know that he was important to them, if only in a negative sense. If he could not please them, then he would displease them so much that he had to be noticed. He had to be so notorious that all other criminals would pale in comparison.