Both events took place in the school’s gymnasium.
Following the ball on Sunday night, Janet and her friends hosted a party at an old farmhouse in a pasture near a lake out on the desolate rural route of Highway 71. Witness statements vary widely on when Janet arrived at or left the party—or if she even came. Some of the kids report never having seen her there at all, while others claim she was there most of the night and didn’t leave.
Early the following morning, when her stepdad, Ronnie Lester, got up for work and noticed she wasn’t home, he began calling her friends, beginning with her boyfriend, Ben, and her best friend, Kathy. Both kids were asleep in bed and said they thought Janet was too.
Waking his wife and calling the police, Ronnie began to hunt for Janet, retracing her steps from the previous night as best he could, but a search of the school and farmhouse yielded no clues as to her whereabouts.
Later that morning, as Ted Bundy was attempting to pay for his breakfast at the Holiday Inn in Crestview with a stolen credit card with a woman’s name on it, Janet’s Mercury Monarch was discovered in an empty field off Highway 71 about halfway between the farm where the party had been and the I-10 exit where a man matching Bundy’s description in an orange VW had gassed up late the night before.
The red Monarch, left to her by her grandmother who had passed away the previous year, looked eerie in the empty field as the sun streamed in behind it, but any exterior appearance of oddness of the abandoned boxy car in the vacant field paled in comparison to the horrors it held inside.
The entire interior of the car was covered in blood. Sprayed across the roof. Splattered across the windows. Smeared across the seats. The car dripped with blood. The passenger side floorboard held Janet’s bloody tiara with strands of her blood-soaked hair in it, and there on the center of the front seat, a blood-drenched heart of Valentine candy lay ripped in half, its contents cascading out in a bloody chocolate broken-hearted mess on the seat.
It appeared that most of Janet’s blood was in the car, but her body was nowhere to be found—and still hasn’t been nearly four decades later.
From all accounts, Janet Leigh Lester was as beautiful within as she was without—and that’s saying something.
I look up from the murder book to the enlarged yearbook picture of Janet tacked to the wall in front of the makeshift desk I’m seated at.
She had long, straight brown hair, parted in the center—just the way Bundy liked—big brown eyes, smooth skin with the slightest hint of a caramel complexion, and striking features, particularly her full lips, wide-mouth smile, and the depth and shape of her eyes.
She was genuinely good. Authentically kind. Consistently friendly. Popular with every segment of the population at Marianna High School.
She was a cheerleader, played volleyball, and was on the yearbook staff—this last because she was quite the photographer and planned on studying photojournalism in college.
Her high school sweetheart, Ben Tillman, had been her boyfriend since eighth grade, and her small circle of close friends were loyal and diverse.
Her best friend, Kathy Moore, said Janet was the single best person she had ever known, and the only possible motive for her murder was madness.
Her stepdad, Ronnie Lester, the only father she had ever known, owned a farm center and tractor supply place, where she worked part-time. He said she was the sweetest soul he’d ever encountered.
She helped her mother, Verna, who was somewhat sickly, with both the housework and taking care of her mentally and physically disabled little brother, Ralphie.
She was actively involved in both the Methodist church and 4-H, and treated Cinnamon Apple Ice Cream, her red-and-white-dappled Appaloosa, better than most parents do their children.
A handwritten note in the margin in Dad’s small, neat print says, I was doubtful at first that Janet was as good as everyone said she was, but I’ve come to believe she was even better.
The first and most obvious suspect was her boyfriend, Ben Tillman, and he remains the prime suspect to many to this day.
The case was complicated because Ben was the son of Kenneth Tillman, the Jackson County sheriff at the time of the murder. Almost immediately, Sheriff Tillman, seeing the obvious conflict of interest with his department handling the case, called in his friend and fellow sheriff, Jack Jordan, to conduct the investigation.
For personal reasons—his distant cousin and goddaughter was a resident at Chi Omega at the time of the attacks—Sheriff Jordan was already involved in the case in Tallahassee, but gladly took the Jackson County case, having no idea when he did that he’d soon become convinced that the same killer was responsible for both.
Of course the first thing he did was look at Janet’s boyfriend, family, and friends, eventually clearing them all. He then looked at those who attended the farmhouse party that night and even Marianna’s usual suspects, the little collection of career criminals in town—though none had ever before done anything like this, or anything that would indicate they could.
Ultimately, Dad had concluded that Ted Bundy killed Janet Lester, and had even attempted to get Bundy to confess to it and reveal the whereabouts of the remains, from the time he was arrested right up until his execution in Florida’s electric chair in the early morning hours of January 24, 1989.
I know my dad. I have witnessed his integrity over many, many years. I know if he didn’t think Ted Bundy killed Janet he wouldn’t have said it. But he paid one hell of a price to do so, and it was believed by many both in town and regional, and in a few cases national, media who covered it, that he was only doing what so many had expected he would—cover up for his sheriff friend and his son, Ben, who they all believed to be guilty of the brutal murder of his kind, sweet, pretty girlfriend, Janet Leigh Lester.
Was I wrong? Dad had written on the first page of the composition book. Did I let the murderer go free? Have there been other victims since then that I could have prevented? Is their blood on my hands? God, I want to find out before my time here is done.
58
On Monday, January 2, 1978, both Ted Bundy and Janet Lester watched the Rose Bowl on TV—Ted in Ann Arbor, Michigan at a little local pub, after having escaped from jail in Colorado three days before, Janet on a large wooden cabinet console TV with her boyfriend and his family at their home.
On Sunday, January 8, 1978, when Ted was arriving at the bus station in Tallahassee, Janet was still fast asleep in her warm bed after a late night at a friend’s birthday party.
During the week leading up to the Chi Omega massacre, while Ted Bundy was securing a place at a rooming house known as The Oak, unsuccessfully seeking employment, stealing credit cards and other personal property of others, and stalking the unsuspecting prey of his new hunting ground, Janet Lester was doing homework, hanging out with her friends, helping her mom, babysitting her brother, taking pictures, riding her horse, working at her stepdad’s store, and being a truly kind and generous person.
During the early morning hours of January 15th, just a little less than a month before she would vanish off the face of the earth forever, Janet was sleeping the restful, peaceful sleep of the guileless as Ted Bundy was bludgeoning and biting and brutalizing. Earlier in the day, she and Kathy had driven into Dothan and spent the day shopping. Among other things, Janet had found the dress she would wear in the Miss Valentine pageant and a silky, sexy negligee to surprise Ben with on their upcoming anniversary.
Truly happy, Janet had no reason to doubt that her ecstatic existence would go on for at least another fifty years or more. Like the young women sound asleep in their beds in their rooms at the Chi Omega house, there was nothing in her experience to suggest that evil like that inside of and unleashed by Ted Bundy existed anywhere but horror films—or that, even if it did, it could enter uninvited a life like hers.
As Margaret Bowman, Lisa Levy, Kathy Kleiner, and Karen Chandler lay sleeping in their beds, dreaming sorority girl dreams, they couldn’t have dreamt of the tran
sformation and deterioration of the handsome young man who used to lure his victims into his car by pretending to be injured and in need of help. Nor could that same nightmare have revealed that the killer of women in Colorado was close enough to call on them that very night.
The demon inside Bundy was devouring him. No longer confident, suave, sophisticated, his demeanor was that of a disheveled man on his way to presenting as fully deranged.
In Sherrod’s, the nightclub close to Chi Omega and where many of the sorority sisters went on a regular basis, he leered lasciviously, all but licking his lips like a gross glutton at a buffet trough.
Bundy, who used to blend in, who had actually believed himself to be invisible, now stood out as odd, strange, not quite right.
Both Chi Omega murder victims were there. Had Ted seen them? Is this where predator spotted prey? Or had he already planned to visit Chi Omega later that night? Sometime after midnight and before the attacks, a man in the parking lot of Sherrod’s asked a passing young woman, “Are you a Chi O?” When she responded that she wasn’t, he said, “You’re lucky.”
At around three in the morning, Nita Neary, an attractive, young blond coed returned to Chi Omega following a date with her boyfriend and found the door unlocked.
After kissing her boyfriend goodnight, she closed and locked the door behind her, then began turning off lights that had been left on in the lower level of the sorority house. As she did, she heard up above her the sound of someone running down the hallway. Moments later, as she was headed to the stairs, she abruptly stopped in the foyer as a man wearing a blue toboggan cap, blue jacket, and light-colored pants rushed down the stairs and crouched at the door. He was carrying what she later described as a large stick—the thick piece of oak firewood still dripping with blood he had used as a weapon of unbelievable brutality.
Unaware of the unimaginable slaughter awaiting discovery just up the stairs, Nita locked the front door and made her way up to the upper floor, waking her roommate, Nancy Dowdy, and returning downstairs with her to double check everything and ensure it was truly secure.
When the two young woman went back upstairs, they woke up Jackie McGill, the house president, to let her know what Neary had witnessed. As they did, Karen Chandler staggered out of her room holding her bleeding head, dazed, in shock, moaning quietly, pleading for help and understanding.
As Janet Leigh Lester still slept in her bed some sixty-six miles away, the sorority sisters of Chi Omega phoned the Tallahassee Police Department and Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, and then discovered Kathy Kleiner, Karen Chandler’s roommate, sitting in her bed, rocking back and forth, bleeding, hurting, uncomprehending.
Inside Chandler and Kleiner’s room, there was blood on the beds, blood on the walls, blood on the windows, blood on the light fixture, blood on the ceiling—blood and oak bark everywhere.
Slowly, the sorority house woke up from all the noise and activity, one by one the young women waking and wandering out of their rooms.
There was no way they could know or realize its significance at the time, but the most telling detail during this period was which girls didn’t wake, didn’t open their doors, didn’t stumble out sleepily to see what all the commotion was about.
Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy didn’t open their doors. They weren’t able to and never would again.
Bludgeoned, beaten, bitten, garroted, assaulted, sodomized, violated in unconscionable ways while sleeping in their beds—a sleep that would soon become the eternal sleep of death. But did that sleep of death end their heartache and the thousand natural shocks their flesh was heir to, and what dreams came when their mortal coils had been so savagely shuffled off for them?
As police and EMTs were dealing with the massacre at Chi Omega, Bundy was still out in the night, stalking prey beneath cover of darkness, the bloody oak log still in his hand.
At some time around four that morning in an apartment off Dunwoody Street, Debbie Ciccarelli heard her neighbor, Cheryl Thomas, crying and pleading, followed by a loud pounding sound. Then nothing—an eerie, frightening silence. Debbie and her roommate, Nancy, tried calling Cheryl’s apartment to check on her.
They could hear the phone ringing through the thin wall between them and the sounds of someone walking around the apartment, but Cheryl didn’t answer.
She couldn’t.
She had been savagely assaulted with the oak log, her face and head pounded with brutal blunt-force trauma.
The footsteps were those of Theodore Bundy prepping to strangle and rape Cheryl Thomas—he already had her pajama bottoms and panties down and a pair of nylon stockings at the ready—but the movements of Debbie and Nancy next door and their incessant phone calls had interrupted him. Now unable to anally rape her while choking the life out of her, the acts that seemed to have given Bundy the most sick satisfaction, he quickly masturbated on the bed beside her and crawled back out of the window he had entered through just a short while before.
With a dislocated shoulder, a broken jaw, a skull fractured in five places, and permanent deafness and equilibrium issues that ended her dance career, Cheryl Thomas was traumatized but alive—thanks to her friends, escaping a far, far worse fate at the hands of the man who would later describe himself as “the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.”
But Bundy was far worse than that. Cold-hearted doesn’t begin to describe the cruel evil he was capable of, the pitiless savagery and sexual sadism he practiced and perfected without regard or remorse.
When day broke on the morning after the massacre, Tallahassee and FSU in general and the lives of certain coeds in particular would never be the same, but as Janet Lester opened her eyes on that Sunday morning, her idyllic existence seemed exactly as it was when she had drifted off into peaceful sleep the night before. And maybe it was. But it wouldn’t be for long. For the fateful clock of her allotted time was already running backward, counting down toward the D-day of her tragic destiny.
59
On Sunday morning, January 15th, Janet Lester wasn’t the only one whose days were numbered. Ted Bundy, too, had a date with destiny. He was exactly one month away from finally being captured and kept in a cage for the remaining eleven years of his loathsome life.
Of course, he didn’t know it at the time.
For him, life continued in much the same way it had since he had escaped from the jail cell in Colorado. It wasn’t just stolen time he was living on, but stolen property and identities too. He continued pilfering cash, credit cards, identities, cars, and anything else his bent mind told him he was entitled to.
He continued living large, frequenting fancy restaurants, sports equipment stores, tobacco shops, buying, at other people’s expense, any and everything that suited his unhinged whimsy.
Who did he kill during this time? How many attempted assaults did he commit?
I knew Dad believed there were other open unsolved homicides that were most likely the work of Bundy—and he had often mentioned trying to clear them too—but he was personally responsible for the Janet Lester case and felt a much greater responsibility over it. It would always come first. He couldn’t even consider investigating any others before solving once and for all the one he was ultimately answerable for.
On February 8th, Bundy stole a white FSU van and drove one hundred fifty miles east on I-10 to Jacksonville. He approached fourteen-year-old Leslie Parmenter, the daughter of a Jacksonville detective, in a Kmart parking lot across from Jeb Stuart Junior High School. Flashing her an unconvincing badge and identifying himself as “Richard Burton, fire department,” he attempted to converse with the young teen, who described him as unkempt and agitated as he awkwardly tried to engage her. Unlike his early suave and sophisticated approaches of young coeds, Bundy, wearing dark-framed glasses, plaid pants, and a blue navy pea coat, abruptly stopped his van in front of the teen, leaving the door open.
Immediately suspicious of the odd and awkward man, Parmenter was guarded and confused.
&
nbsp; As Bundy continued his attempt at inane conversation, Leslie’s brother, Danny, pulled up in his truck, stuck his head out the window, and asked Leslie what the man wanted. After instructing Leslie to get into his truck, Danny approached Bundy and asked him what he wanted. “N-Nothing . . .” Bundy stammered. “I just asked if she was somebody else and just asked who she was.”
As Bundy jumped back into his van, rolled up the window, and drove away, Danny quickly jotted down his license plate number and attempted to follow the van, but soon lost him in the heavy traffic.
That night, Bundy checked into a Holiday Inn in Lake City. As he ate dinner at the hotel and had drinks in the bar, the staff and other guests described him as weird, either drunk or spaced out, and unkempt, his hair greasy, dark, and dirty.
Leaving the Holiday Inn the next morning, Bundy headed down US 90 for a couple of miles and saw Lake City Junior High School.
As if the day was crying for what was about to befall little Kimberly Diane Leach, rain drops fell out of a gray sky of clouds.
Moving slowly down Duval Street in the rain, Bundy spotted the twelve-year-old crossing the schoolyard between the main building and a detached portable. She was returning to her first-period classroom to retrieve her purse, which she had left there in her rush to get to her second-period class. Jerking the van around to the other side of the road and jumping out, Bundy rushed up to the startled and vulnerable young girl. Grabbing her by the arm, Bundy pulled the frightened young girl over to his van and thrust her inside.
The vicious inhuman and all-too-human killer transported the young girl nearly thirty miles to Live Oak, where he pulled the van into a secluded rural area to rape, kill, and dump the body of what had just a short while before been a happy child looking forward to going shopping for her Valentine’s Day dance after school.
True Crime Fiction Page 26
