It had all happened in a matter of minutes. The attacker had moved from room to room, beating each woman in a violent frenzy, then pulling the covers up to her chin and moving on. After he left the sorority house, he went to a duplex eight blocks away and assaulted Cheryl Thomas, a 21-year-old dance student who lived there, in the same way that he had attacked Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler—and then he was gone again. Thomas, Kleiner, and Chandler had no memory of their assaults, let alone of their assailant. The only description the police had came from Nita Neary, a Chi Omega sister who caught a momentary glimpse of the killer as she returned from a date. She described him as a white male in his early 20s, between five eight and five ten, weighing around 150 pounds, with brown hair. In other words, he could have been any one of countless students on FSU’s own campus.
When the Florida Flambeau printed a front-page story on the attack, it had no more information to report, nothing that could make the community feel safer. “So far,” FSU’s student paper told readers, “he has managed to elude a dragnet that has every detective in Leon County working around the clock.” The rest of the issue was shot with ads for self-defense devices (“Every 10 minutes, an American Woman is attacked . . . DON’T THINK IT COULDN’T HAPPEN TO YOU!”). On sorority row, university officials visited each house to warn the girls about the danger that might still lurk on campus. “We’re here because we want to tell you the facts,” they told the sisters at Pi Beta Phi, “and we want to put the fear of the Lord in you.”
Students withdrew from the university. Some never returned. “It was a very dark time,” remembered Ron Eng, the Chi Omega house’s handyman. “I can remember walking across campus a few days [later], trying to make a class or something like that, and no girl would look a man in the eyes.”
Three weeks after the murders at Florida State, 12-year-old Kimberly Leach disappeared from her school in Lake City, a small town east of Tallahassee. She had forgotten her purse after homeroom that morning, and she and her friend Priscilla left their PE class so she could retrieve it. On the way back to the gym, Priscilla was momentarily distracted, and looked up just in time to see Kim walking toward a stranger’s car. Two months later, her friend’s remains were found in an abandoned hog shed.
Six days after Leach disappeared from her junior high school, Ted Bundy was captured in Pensacola. For the second time, he was arrested because he’d gotten lost. At 1:30 in the morning on February 15, 1978, patrolman David Lee noticed an orange Volkswagen Beetle driving down an alley behind a restaurant he knew to be closed. Deeming this behavior suspicious, Officer Lee, like the Salt Lake City Police had before him, acted on a gut instinct and followed the driver. When he radioed the license plate and found that the car was stolen, he gave chase. The driver tried to speed away. Lee followed. Finally, the driver pulled over and cooperated as Lee began cuffing him. Then he escaped Lee’s grasp and tried to run away. Lee fired a warning shot, then fired at the man. He missed, but the man fell to the ground as if he had been injured. After Lee handcuffed him and pushed him into the back of his patrol car, the man remained silent, save for one phrase.
“I wish you’d killed me,” he said.
The Pensacola police initially had no idea who the man was, though by then he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. At first, he refused to give his name. Then he told police he was willing to confess—but he had conditions. If they wanted to know what happened, he said, then “it would all come out. I mean not—and again I know what you want—but I’m interested in the whole thing. I’m interested in everything. OK? . . . And it’s—it’s got to be dealt with.” He was transferred to Tallahassee before the Pensacola police could bring him any closer to a full confession.
As it turned out, they didn’t need one. From this point forward, there would be few surprises: not when Ted Bundy was indicted for murder, not when he insisted on representing himself at trial, not when he decided to accept counsel after all, not when his trial attracted a crush of media attention that put him in living rooms across the country, and least of all when he was sentenced to death not once but three times: first for the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, and then for the murder of Kimberly Leach.
“That he most probably looked normal and walked among us seemed the greatest of horrors,” a Florida State student wrote in the Florida Flambeau. The murders, he wrote, “stripped away a little of the humanity from most of us. Right now, Tallahassee is a town of open wounds. We are like sharks, excited by the smell of our own blood . . . Quite correctly, many have said these murders are one of the strongest arguments ever for capital punishment.”
TED BUNDY LOOKS AT SHERIFF KEN KATSARIS, WHO stands behind him, reading aloud the list of atrocities for which he will soon stand trial. Bundy’s smile vanishes. For a moment, he seems near tears. Then he looks back at the cameras.
This is the picture you have seen: the man looking out from under a lowered brow, his mouth quirked in a half smile, his eyes deep-set, shadowy, but still focused directly on the camera lens, looking through the flash, through the decades, and into you. This is the Ted Bundy we know today: the man who was pure evil, and proud of his evil, and wanted the world to witness just how evil he was. This is the man who, in the words of one of the countless TV specials dedicated to his life and crimes, “had the capability of being virtually anything he wanted, but . . . instead chose to become a monster obsessed with murder.”
This picture was taken on July 28, 1978, when Bundy was indicted for the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. Katsaris made the unusual decision of inviting the press to watch as he read the indictment to the defendant. Katsaris was dressed for the occasion in a sharp black suit. Bundy wore a jail-issued jumpsuit and sandals.
“What do we have here, Ken?” Bundy asks as he is led out to stand beside Katsaris. “Let’s see. Oh, it’s an indictment! All right. Why don’t you read it to me?”
“Mr. Bundy—” Katsaris says.
“You’re up for election, aren’t you?” he interrupts.
“Mr. Bundy—”
“You finally got it, didn’t you?”
“Mr. Bundy—”
“You told me that—you told them you were going to get me,” he says, gesturing to the reporters and camera crews arrayed before them. Suddenly, he seems a little calmer: he has an audience to play to. “He said he was gonna get me,” Bundy says, and turns back to Katsaris. “OK, you’ve got the indictment. It’s all you’re gonna get. Let’s read it. Let’s go.”
As Katsaris reads the charges, the defendant walks out in front of him, as if to replace the entity described in the indictment with the real Ted Bundy, who could never have done these things. “My chance to talk to the press,” he says, and smiles for the cameras, or tries to. It looks painful to sustain.
“I’ll plead not guilty right now,” he says, and raises his hand, smiling again. The shutters click.
ONE SUMMER, WHILE RESEARCHING A STORY ABOUT Florida, I found myself at the prison where Ted Bundy died. I had already done everything else I could think to do in the state. I had watched trained dolphins perform to “Footloose,” then taken a boat tour of the Everglades and watched wild dolphins perform for no one, and tried not to eavesdrop too much on the other passengers’ conversations. (“It’s like catching snowflakes,” a lawyer from Miami said about his work.) I had lined up with all the other tourists at Key West and taken a picture of the end of America. I had sustained mosquito bites above my hairline and on the soles of my feet. I had gone to the Florida Citrus Center and contemplated alligator claw key rings and back scratchers, alligator tooth necklaces, and dried alligator heads, and I had finally seen the LIVE BABY GATORS promised on all the billboards, where they appeared in cartoon version, wearing diapers and pink bows and looking as rosy-cheeked as reptiles can be imagined. I had done everything on my list, but I still felt that something was missing—and so, instead of going to Disney World, I went to the unremarkable patch of grass that had once been, for a few hundred citizens, the happiest place on earth.