The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History (44 page)

The bloodied criminal gave his name as Kenneth Raymond Misner of 982 West Brevard Street in Tallahassee, Florida. It would be a couple of days before Lee would learn with whom he had been fighting this night. The stolen car was driven by another officer to the Pensacola impound lot and locked, and the keys were placed in an envelope and the envelope placed in the evidence room.

It was inevitable that the true identity of Theodore Bundy would eventually be revealed. He would keep the charade going for a time. But at this point it hardly mattered, as even Bundy realized he wasn't going anywhere for a long time. Having been apprehended in a stolen car and having in his possession 21 stolen credit cards and numerous items which didn't belong to him (some of which would ultimately be traced to burglaries in the Tallahassee area) meant Ted Bundy would be a guest of Florida's correctional system for a very long time.

When Detective Norman Chapman of the Pensacola Police Department began going over the items from "Misner's" stolen car, it became apparent Tallahassee authorities would need to be involved because of the credit card theft from that area. It also was of keen interest that this Misner fellow would have the credit cards and ID's of FSU coeds in his possession.

Once again, the credit card trail would incriminate Bundy. After his first arrest he was surprised at what investigators were able to do with such information, but this time he was fully aware of the danger of being linked to any location at a particular time by a credit card purchase. Indeed, it was almost suicidal for Bundy to hold onto credit cards and other items which would link him to the murders, but he did. Just as his deterioration had caused his modus operandi to change when it came to murder, so too, he had lost his ability to hide his tracks.

Two of the items discovered by investigators among the things Bundy had discarded from the VW while stuck at Eglin were an electrical cord and tire iron. Neither of these items automatically stood out as anything special (they retrieved lots of things Bundy had ditched, including the Bug's rear seat), but they would make perfect sense to Florida investigators later.

It wasn't long after Chapman's call to Tallahassee that Detective Don Patchen of the Tallahassee Police Department and Stephen Bodiford of the Leon County Sheriff's Office were headed over to Pensacola to meet with "Kenneth Misner." There must have been a sense of anticipation as the two seasoned investigators headed west along the same route Ted Bundy had traveled only days before. Thus far, the investigation into the Chi Omega murders had led them nowhere. If there were a connection between the coed material being held by their counterparts in Pensacola and the events in Tallahassee, it would be made rather quickly. What they couldn't have known was that the credit card and identification cards of the FSU students were but the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and the break they'd been looking for was even now on the horizon.

As Bundy sat in his cell, he asked for and received permission to see a doctor. He had a knot on the back of his head, a cut under his left eye, and his face was swollen; yet as sore as he was, his outward appearance suffered little and he didn't resemble a man who'd been pistol-whipped. But internally, he was very much whipped. What Officer Lee couldn't do with the heavy steel barrel of his .38 revolver, the pressure of being on the run for the past forty-six days did. Bundy soon discovered the depths of his exhaustion when he was taken by a guard (singular) to a hospital from which, he quickly determined, he could escape. But he just didn't have it in him. He just couldn't continue in the same vein as he'd been in for the past six weeks. He would dummy up and say nothing as to his true identity. He would make them work for it.

At 7:50 A.M. February 16, Don Patchen and Steve Bodiford sat down with the man they now referred to as Mr. Doe, since the real Kenneth Misner had revealed himself in a call to Norman Chapman. Detective Patchen would do the questioning as Bodiford listened. The initial questions were about the various credit cards and the documents pertaining to Kenneth Misner, including a notebook where Bundy had written down information about Misner's parents. But then Patchen started discussing the FSU coed items, including a diploma. Bundy tried to lump everything together, as if these things were no different from any other stolen item. And then Patchen cranked things up a notch:

PATCHEN: Okay is there ... on the, somewhere around the 12th do you recall in Tallahassee you stooping behind a car and getting a tag ... trying to obtain a tag and a deputy sheriff telling you to halt?

DOE: No. Nothing, 1-1-le, let's not talk about it, I don [sniff]...

PATCHEN: You don't want to discuss it?

DOE: I,

PATCHEN: You're not denying it, is that right?

DOE: I don't want to discuss it.

Within seconds of this exchange, Bodiford jumps in by asking about the van.

BODIFORD: How about a white [cleared throat] van that belongs to Florida State University?

DOE: What about a white van that belongs to Florida State University?

BODIFORD: One that was stolen from off campus.

DOE: No sir.

BODIFORD: Okay.

DOE: No, I have stolen ... a Volkswagen but I you know [laughs] [indiscernible] not going to try to pin every missing vehicle on me either.

At this point, Bundy realized how close these detectives were to pinning the Leach girl as well as Chi Omega on him. He could deny all day long, but he understood what direction this was headed and he would need to take measures to protect himself from the coming onslaught. Worse, he wasn't rebounding emotionally; he was in the middle of an extended (but somewhat controlled) meltdown. He needed to reach out to an Atlanta attorney, Millard Farmer. Farmer was known for defending clients in capital cases. Even prior to Bundy's contacting him, people were discussing why this individual who had fought so furiously to get away from Officer Lee had so freely admitted to so many credit card thefts, when the combined total of felonies committed could result in a lengthy sentence in Florida's prison system. But the questions as to his identity would soon be settled, and the city of Pensacola would have the dubious honor of having nabbed the country's most prolific and mobile killer of women.

Having arranged a deal through his attorney, a public defender by the name of Michael Koran (and in conjunction with a representative from Millard Farmer's office), Bundy agreed to reveal his name if the police promised to wait until 9:00 A.M. the following morning before telling the news media his true identity. As part of the deal, Bundy was allowed the use of a telephone for as much as two hours. After the deal was made, Bundy, perhaps expecting to be greeted by gasps from those now gathering around him, declared his name to be Theodore Robert Bundy, but he was met with little more than silence. Almost immediately the FBI, which, thanks to the tireless efforts of Mike Fisher, had recently added Bundy to its Ten Most Wanted list, confirmed through fingerprints that he had in fact been apprehended. When the news broke, it did so with lightning speed, and a virtual frenzy of activity from the news media quickly swept down upon this Gulf Coast town, looking for answers about Theodore Robert Bundy and his possible involvement in the latest string of coed killings. Once Chapman, Bodiford and Patchen were brought up to speed on the trail of bodies Bundy had left behind him, they knew they were dealing with the person responsible for the horror in Tallahassee.

Bundy used a good deal of those two hours reaching out to Liz Kendall. In an interview conducted later by Detective Bob Keppel, Liz spoke of the incriminating statements Bundy made concerning his involvement in the Chi Omega murders. But like all of his "confessions," they are guarded, and stop just short of actually admitting to the crimes. Still, they are revealing, as Bundy had reached a point mentally where he needed to confess, in however veiled a manner. He wouldn't stay in this mode forever, but during this extended period of mental and physical exhaustion, Ted Bundy allowed incriminating statements to escape him occasionally. He would come to regret them down the road.

Some of his admissions of guilt came when the tape recorder was turned off, but these statements were jotted down by the detectives as Bundy spoke. For instance, when asked about his involvement in the Chi Omega slayings, both Norman Chapman and Don Patchen testified that Ted Bundy said the following: "The evidence is there. Look for it."3 What is profoundly interesting about this particular utterance is that it is similar to what Bundy had said to Jerry Thompson about gathering straws and building of a broom. The only difference was the spirit in which it was said. The statement to Detective Thompson was but a slight admission of possible guilt, spoken in a mockingly sarcastic way, and was presented to the detective as a taunt. The Chi Omega admission appears to be utterly genuine, given without malice, and challenges the officers to look for the evidence Bundy said was there.' Other fascinating admissions (admissions Bundy made after requesting that the tape recorder be turned off) can be gleaned from the notes of these veteran investigators. They would later be entered as evidence and used against Bundy during his trials. "I want you to understand me so you can understand my problem." "He never enjoyed the act-but he had to do it to keep the fantasies up. The act is a downer. What was the act - I'm not going to tell you modus operandi." Concerning a girl Bundy spotted walking while he rode his bicycle, he said, "I had to have her at any cost." "Sometimes I feel like a vampire." "I never hurt anybody I know." The notes say that Bundy "talked about his problem." That he was "going west at somebody else's expense." And that "you don't understand [the] significance of Lee catching me & Utah case-you will when it all comes out."'

The official record reveals Ted Bundy's partial attempt at honesty; an honesty which resulted entirely from his depleted mental and physical condition. Indeed, Mike Fisher had told his counterparts in the panhandle that if they were going to get anything from the killer it would have to be during such a time. If they waited till he was rested and ready for action, he'd clam up, and Fisher was right.

To understand Bundy's state of mind during this time we will return to the interview between Liz Kendall and Detective Keppel:

KEPPEL: Would you begin on February 16, '78 about 5:00 A.M. Thursday and describe a telephone call you received from Ted Bundy?

Liz: Yes. It was 5:00 P.M. on Thursday.

KEPPEL: OK.

Liz: And he called collect and my daughter accepted the charges. I told him that he shouldn't be calling me that my phone had a tap on it and he said he was in custody. I asked him "where?" And he said Florida. And later in the conversation, he said, he repeated over and over again, that this was really going to be bad when it broke, that it wasn't going to break until tomorrow morning in the press but it was going to be really ugly. I asked him if he was referring to the murders of some sorority girls in Florida. And he said that he wouldn't talk about it.

Liz Kendall goes on to explain how she talked with Bundy that night for about an hour before Bundy ended the conversation with her so he could call his mother, promising Liz he would call her as soon as he completed the call to his family. But when he phoned again she refused to answer, and immediately took the receiver off the hook after the last ring. However, she did take his call on Saturday, February 18. Bundy spoke of what had been driving his actions for several years:

Liz: Then the next Saturday morning at 2:00 he called again, collect, and he said he wanted to talk about what we'd been talking about in the first phone call. And I said, "You mean about being sick?" And he said "yes...." He told me that he was sick and was consumed by something he didn't understand, and that ah, that he just couldn't contain it.

[Here Keppel asks why Bundy couldn't control himself.]

Liz: Well, he said that he tried, he said that it took so much of his time, and that's why he wasn't doing well in law school; and that he couldn't seem to get his act together, because he spent so much time trying to maintain a normal life and he just couldn't do it, he said that he was preoccupied with this force. Ah, he told me that, I asked him if I somehow played a part in what happened, and he said that no, for years before he met me he'd been fighting the same sickness and that when it broke we just happened to be together. Ah, he mentioned an incident about following a sorority girl, ah, he didn't do anything that night, but ah, he just told me that's how it was, that he was out late at night and he would follow people like that, but that he'd try not to but he just did it anyway.... Ah, he did talk about Lake Sammamish, he told me that he was, he started by saying that he was sick, and he said: "I don't have a split personality, and I don't have black-outs." He said: "I remember everything that I've done." And he mentioned the day, July 14, when two women were abducted from Lake Sammamish and we went out to eat around 5:00 and he was saying that he remembered that he ate two hamburgers and enjoyed every bite of it. And that we went to Ferrell's and he said that it wasn't that he had forgotten what he'd done that day or that he couldn't remember, but just said that it was over.

Later in the interview, Liz presses him for an answer concerning the murders in Tallahassee:

Liz: I asked him specifically about the Florida murders. And he told me he didn't want to talk about them, but then in the phone conversation he said that he felt like he had a disease like alcoholism or something like alcoholics that couldn't take another drink, and he told me it was just something that he couldn't be around and he knew it now. And I asked him what that was and he said: "Don't make me say it."'

Bundy's response to Liz, not to admit the obvious, was similar to what he told detectives concerning the murders at Chi Omega. Detective Don Patchen remembered it this way:

He at one point uh - I asked him whether or not directly if he had killed the girls at the Chi Omega house in Tallahassee, and he had stated that if he was pressured into giving an answer that that answer would be no. And in that context of saying that, he would tell us that he didn't want to lie to us. But again if he was pressured into answering, he would have to say, no. Of course he explained to us the facts that he had built up in his mind never [to] reveal certain information, that he wanted to tell us but he couldn't.'