Florida State Prison is often called Starke, taking its name from the closest nearby town, and maybe it was because of this name that I always thought it would look stark in its own way: dry and heat-tortured, glimmering with mirage but incapable of sustaining real life. I didn’t know I was imagining such a place until I saw it contradicted by reality. I had been reading about Ted Bundy since I was a high school student in Oregon, when I became fascinated by the endless true-crime books and TV specials and tabloid spreads about all the terrible things it seemed were always happening to girls not so different from myself. But the more I learned, the more I found myself trying to move beyond dread and into something harder to find in the pages of a paperback: comprehension. Ted Bundy had been a person, too, I realized. I wasn’t so different from the girls he murdered, but I also wasn’t so different from him. We were members of the same species. Was it truly impossible to understand his actions beyond simply attributing them to evil? Was it dangerous even to try? I didn’t understand how it could be, but it seemed to me that most people thought it was. Gaze long enough into the abyss, everyone knows, and the abyss gazes into you—and its gaze is apparently enough to destroy you. I didn’t understand how that worked, but it seemed like everyone around me did.
I had pictured Ted Bundy spending the last years of his life in a place that was the opposite of the Washington forests where he had grown up, but Starke is in central Florida, and, for sheer verdancy, central Florida puts the Pacific Northwest to shame. It is a land that dares things not to grow. Kudzu snakes across power lines and dangles from the trees, kissing the flat surfaces of carefully mown lawns. As you travel north toward the prison, the vines do not just choke the trees but swallow them whole. The 357 prisoners on Florida’s death row as of this writing make it the second most populous in the nation, and in the area surrounding the prison, seemingly every roadside sign advertises gas, boiled peanuts, or God. FROGS ARE COMING, reads one. THERE’S ALWAYS FREE CHEESE IN THE DEVIL’S MOUSETRAP, reads another. WHEN SATAN COMES KNOCKING AT YOUR DOOR, a third sign instructs, SIMPLY SAY, “JESUS, WOULD YOU PLEASE GET THAT FOR ME?” In the end, they all say the same thing: you could be good, if only you wanted to be.
Ted Bundy’s postconviction lawyer Polly Nelson traveled this same highway in April 1986, when she met her client for the first time. She had been practicing law for only a few months, and neither she nor Jim Coleman, Ted Bundy’s principal postconviction lawyer, had any idea who Bundy was when they agreed to take his case. “Which one was he, the guy who killed the nurses in Chicago?” Nelson recalls wondering when a coworker asked if she wanted to help a Florida inmate apply for a stay of execution. After she and Coleman looked over the petition the inmate had prepared, they decided to represent him. Ted Bundy—who had been painted in the press as a legal mastermind even after his spectacular defeat in both of the capital murder trials at which he had served as a member of his own counsel—was representing himself just as ineffectively as he had since his indictment in Tallahassee.
The comparison between Ted Bundy’s legal reputation and his behavior in court paralleled his reputation as a criminal mastermind: both were directly contradicted by his actions. While living in Utah, he had saved receipts for the small quantities of gas he purchased close to the Wildwood Inn in Colorado, where Caryn Campbell disappeared, around the time she disappeared. The receipts were discovered neatly collected in his desk—not far from a ski resort brochure with an “X” beside the Wildwood Inn—after Bundy consented to a search. The police asked him if he had ever been to Colorado. Bundy swore he hadn’t, not long before they found the receipts and brochure.
During the penalty phase of his trial for the murder of Kimberly Leach, Ted had called in Carole Ann Boone as the defense’s sole witness. Acting as his own counsel, Ted questioned her about his good character. Then, while she was still on the stand, he married her. The newlyweds even found a way around the prison’s lack of conjugal visits, and in October of 1981, Carole gave birth to a healthy baby girl.
“The effect of [his daughter] in Ted’s life,” Polly Nelson wrote, “was to give him his first glimmer of heartfelt love. Until then I think he had believed that no such emotion truly existed, that the rest of us had been faking it too. [His daughter’s] unconditional, unguarded, uncomplicated, real love for him touched him very deeply and elicited a strange new feeling that opened his mind to the possibility of the existence of love.” When I spoke to Nelson nearly three decades later, Ted’s transformation in these moments was still fresh in her mind. “He just lit up,” she said.
Nelson’s descriptions of meeting Ted Bundy for the first time—and of all the hours they spent together as she worked on his appeal—are remarkably different from other writers’ depictions of the same experience. She believed he was guilty just as fervently as she believed in her duty to save him from the death penalty, and the difference between her view of him and the impressions that others described to the public was based not on what Ted Bundy had done, but what he might be. “He fascinated me,” Michaud wrote, “like a viper motionless in a crevice: a black, palpable malignancy . . . Often he made me literally sick to my stomach, and sometimes it was all I could do to get out of the prison and back to the car before I vomited.”
During their first meeting, Nelson wrote, Ted did his best “to impress me, please me, block out for the moment what he knew I knew about him. He wanted me to see him as he liked to think of himself: sophisticated, urbane, polite, respectful.” Yet she always saw him not as the man he wanted her to see him as, but as a person trying to pretend he was someone else. “I always had the impression,” she wrote, “that he was consciously creating himself, his persona. His natural instincts, I think, gave him no clue how a normal person would act.”
By the time Nelson and Jim Coleman took Ted Bundy’s case, their client had become a character in the American imagination—a transformation helped in no small part by a crime desk reporter–turned–thriller author named Thomas Harris. Harris’s time observing Bundy’s trial influenced his creation of Hannibal Lecter, the cold, calculating, erudite villain of the bestselling series that included The Silence of the Lambs. “Nothing happened to me . . .” Lecter explains. “I happened.” Hannibal Lecter, born bad, believes he is superior to the people around him, having transcended their pointless attachments to each other—and, remarkably, Harris’s other characters agree with him. They are frightened, it seems, that if they listen too closely to Hannibal Lecter, they will be swayed by his logic and become evil themselves. As Ted Bundy sat on death row, and as the legend of the genius serial killer grew up around him, the public came to view him with the same fear.
Yet when Nelson met Ted Bundy, she felt not terror or revulsion, but pity. In appealing their client’s death sentences, Coleman and Nelson chose to focus on his mental health, and on whether he had been competent not just to act as his own counsel in his Florida trials but even to make the decisions required of a defendant. Bundy’s new lawyers argued that their client’s mental illness had destroyed his right to a fair trial, and that both trials’ prosecutors and judges had been either unable to comprehend his mental illness or unwilling to address the issue.