Perhaps the most glaring evidence supporting this theory came in the form of a plea deal Bundy rejected before he went to trial for the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. Had he accepted it, he would have pled guilty to both murders and to the murder of Kimberly Leach in exchange for three life sentences. Instead, he decided at the last minute to reject the plea, then complained bitterly about the inadequacy of his counsel. The case went to trial, and Bundy served on his own defense team, alongside a group of lawyers who were forced to work without a coherent defense strategy, since their client—and cocounsel—refused to address any of the evidence against him.
“When Bundy sabotaged the plea agreement,” Coleman told me, “it was pretty clear at that point that there was something going on that was related to mental illness, and that this was not a rational thing that he had done: trying to fire his lawyers on the grounds that they didn’t believe in his innocence, when he was about to plead guilty.” In the course of rejecting the plea deal so that he could stand trial, Coleman and Nelson argued, Bundy had already proven that he was not competent to do so.
This logic either makes sense to you or it doesn’t. It makes sense if you are willing to believe that Ted Bundy really was mentally ill, and that his mental illness affected his ability not just to defend himself at trial but to make rational decisions about any aspect of his life. It makes sense if you are willing to consider applying a new diagnosis to Ted Bundy, and moving away from one that has been applied to him to the exclusion of all others: psychopath.
“Psychopathic killers,” Dr. Robert D. Hare writes in his 1993 bestseller Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us—published two years after the film adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs, starring Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, swept the Academy Awards—“are not mad, according to accepted legal and psychiatric standards. Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings.” Psychopaths, according to Hare, are incapable of experiencing even the faintest tremors of love or empathy, and can never be taught to feel any differently. If you encounter a psychopath, Hare says, you can do only one thing: flee. “If we can’t spot them,” he writes, “we are doomed to be their victims.”
In addition to solidifying the public’s understanding of psychopaths, Hare invented the most widely used tool for diagnosing them: the Psychopathy Checklist, first published in 1980, and known as the PCL-R since its only revision, in 2003. The checklist comprises twenty questions whose answers trained examiners rate on a scale of zero to two, typically after talking with the patient for about two hours. In the context of a prison diagnosis, some scored criteria—like “shallow affect” and “lack of empathy”—may be bolstered by an examiner’s assessment of state-provided information such as a trial transcript or police record, while others—like “juvenile delinquency” and “revocation of conditional release”—are based entirely on a patient’s past interactions with law enforcement. Because of its frequent use in criminal sentencing, the PCL-R necessarily conflates the concepts of “criminal” and “psychopathic”: a PCL-R score of thirty out of forty makes you a psychopath, and at least five of the list’s items can be scored solely on a subject’s history of trouble with the law. Today, since black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate of white Americans, a black American is also five times likelier to have a ten-point head start on the Psychopathy Checklist.
Despite this, the PCL-R—which Hare sells on his website for $460, in a bundle that includes an interview guide, a rating booklet, and a set of QuikScore™ forms (with webinar training available for an additional $499)—is regarded by laypeople and legal insiders alike not as a highly subjective questionnaire but as an infallible means of separating good from bad. Today, the diagnosis of “psychopath” is meted out as freely in the courtroom as it is during prime time, and its effect is always the same: instant dehumanization.
When it comes to assigning blame, no designation could be more comforting. The psychopath is born bad. Nothing can fix him. Society cannot be at fault, and there is no point in wondering whether timely treatment could have averted the inevitable. He does what he wants to do. He knows it is wrong. He can control himself; he simply chooses not to. The idea that the psychopath is somehow more deserving of blame because he was born bad—that his lack of empathy serves as proof of his evil, despite a diagnosis that says he cannot feel it, no matter how he tries—is a paradox few have attempted to address.
THE EVIDENTIARY HEARINGS CONCERNING THE ISSUE OF Ted Bundy’s mental competence began on October 22, 1987. Jim Coleman started by questioning Mike Minerva, the public defender who had been appointed to represent Ted Bundy after his indictment in Tallahassee, regarding a note he made in the case file soon after he began preparing for the Chi Omega trial. “I believe,” Minerva wrote, “[Bundy] has a basic defect in his reasoning process which prevents him from reviewing the case in a realistic manner.” Throughout both their preparation for the trial and the trial itself, Minerva testified, Ted was “keeping everybody off balance,” and demanded that his entire defense team come to see him for several hours each night, in visits that served no purpose but to keep him from being alone.
“Did you believe that insanity might be an issue in the case?” Coleman asked.
“Yes, I did,” Minerva said.
“Were you able to pursue the insanity defense?”
“We were not able to pursue it. No, sir.”
“Why was that?”
“Mr. Bundy did not want us to do that.”
Despite his client’s refusal to address the issue, Minerva hired Wayne State University psychiatry professor Dr. Emanuel Tanay to evaluate Ted, and to advise the defense team on whether their client would be capable of accepting the plea deal they were negotiating. After Tanay interviewed Ted, Minerva testified at the evidentiary hearings, he “expressed great reservations [about whether] Mr. Bundy would actually be able to go through with the agreement because of his mental illness.” At the time, Tanay wrote: “I would anticipate that in the unlikely event that the prosecution’s case against [Bundy] would weaken, he would through his behavior bolster the prosecution’s case.”
Yet for a brief period, Minerva testified, it seemed as if Ted Bundy really would take the plea. “We went through the whole thing with him, and his mother talked to him, and Carole Boone talked to him,” Minerva told me. “They all were trying to convince him that it was OK with them . . . because they were going to still believe that he was innocent, that he was entering a plea so he could stay alive. He agreed to it. And then he comes in the very next morning and takes it all back in open court.”
I asked Minerva why he thought Bundy had rejected the plea deal.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s over my head. I don’t know.”
Bundy’s abilities as a lawyer were, Minerva recalled, “scattershot.” Mostly, he said, Ted “knew the performance”: when to stand, which phrases to use. After his trial began, Ted continued to dictate his lawyers’ actions and require their nightly visits, leaving them not just unprepared but increasingly sleep-deprived. He was not only unwilling but also apparently unable to comprehend the evidence against him, and refused to discuss it with his lawyers, instead talking to the press and performing for the media at every opportunity. He also impulsively cross-examined a prosecution witness before his lawyers could stop him, leading the witness to describe the horrific aftermath of the Chi Omega murders, including the pains paramedics had taken to ensure that Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler didn’t choke to death on their own blood. To the public—and to the jury—it was hard to imagine that Bundy had a motive for such questioning beyond the desire to revel in his own destructive power. What other rational motive could there be?