On 6 April, Denise Oliverson disappeared after leaving her home for her parents’ house in Grand Junction, Colorado. Her bike and sandals were found under a nearby viaduct. On 15 April, Melanie Cooley, 18, was last seen in Nederland, Colorado. She was found eight days later 20 miles away, dead from head injuries. Her hands had been bound and a pillowcase tied around her neck.
Still the murders continued. On 6 May, Lynette Culver, 13, went missing in Pocatello, Idaho, from the grounds of her junior high school. While on death row, Bundy later confessed that he had kidnapped Culver and had taken the girl to a room he had rented at a nearby hotel. He stated that after raping her, he had drowned her in the motel room bath and later dumped her body in a river.
Susan Curtis, 15, vanished on 28 June. She was abducted from the campus of Brigham Young University while attending a youth conference. She left her friends to walk back to a dormitory and was never seen again. Tragically, Curtis was from Bountiful, Utah, the same town from where another victim, Melissa Smith, had been abducted in November the previous year. The bodies of Cunningham, Culver, Curtis and Oliverson have never been recovered.
Bundy’s luck was about to run out. Sometimes murderers find themselves initially arrested for lesser offences, and this was the case with Ted Bundy. On 16 August 1975, Bundy failed to stop for a police officer in Salt Lake City. A search of his car revealed a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs, rubbish bags and other items that were thought by the police to be burglary tools. Bundy remained cool during questioning, explaining that he needed the mask for skiing and had found the handcuffs in a skip. Detectives were suspicious, however, and obtained a search warrant for his apartment. The search uncovered a brochure from a hotel in Snowmass, Colorado. Bundy denied having been to Colorado, but the police decided to put him on an ID parade, believing that he was responsible for the Carol DaRonch kidnapping and assault. Carol DaRonch and two other witnesses all picked out Bundy.
Bundy’s girlfriend, Liz Kendall, was interviewed by Utah detectives. She told them about his nocturnal sleeping habits, rough sexual practices and odd possessions, such as crutches, plaster of Paris and a fake moustache. It was becoming obvious to officers involved that Bundy could have something to do with the murders and disappearances in Utah, Washington and Colorado. Bundy soon made bail and, incredibly, moved in with Kendall at her Seattle apartment until his Utah trial for kidnapping.
Following a week-long trial, Bundy was convicted of DaRonch’s kidnapping on 1 March 1976 and was sentenced to 15 years in Utah State Prison.
In the meantime, police knew that Bundy was the prime suspect for the murders of young girls in three states. There had been too many coincidences, but they needed hard evidence. They began speaking to Bundy’s ex-girlfriends to try to obtain more information about him, in an effort to obtain evidence connecting him to the murders of Caryn Campbell and Melissa Smith. Detectives discovered in Bundy’s Volkswagen car hairs that were examined by the FBI and found to match Campbell’s and Smith’s hair. Further examination of Caryn Campbell’s remains showed that her skull bore impressions made by a blunt instrument and that those impressions matched the crowbar discovered in Bundy’s car a year earlier. Colorado police decided to file charges against Bundy on 22 October 1976 for the murder of Caryn Campbell.
In April 1977, he was transferred to Garfield County Jail in Colorado to await trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell. He sacked his lawyer and elected to represent himself. His trial was set for 14 November 1977. Bundy was granted permission to leave the confines of the jail on occasion and utilise the courthouse library in Aspen to conduct research. What police didn’t know was that he was planning an escape. On 7 June, during one of his trips to the library at the courthouse, Bundy jumped from an open window, injuring his ankle in the process, but still managing to escape. He was not wearing any leg irons or handcuffs, so he did not stand out among the ordinary citizens in the town of Aspen. It was an escape that Bundy had planned for a while. Aspen police were quick to set up roadblocks surrounding the town, yet Bundy knew to stay within the city limits for the time being and to lie low. Police launched a massive search, but he was able to evade capture. Bundy thought he had found a way to escape from the town – he discovered a car with the keys left in it. However, his luck did not last long. While trying to flee Aspen in the stolen vehicle, he was spotted and recaptured.
Almost seven months later, Bundy again attempted an escape, this time with more success. On 30 December 1977, he crawled up into the ceiling of the Garfield County Jail and made his way to another part of the building. He managed to find another opening in the ceiling that led down into the wardrobe of a warder’s apartment. He sat and waited until he knew the apartment was empty, then casually walked out of the front door to his freedom. His escape went undiscovered until the following afternoon, more than 15 hours later. By the time police learnt of his escape, Bundy was well on his way to Chicago. Chicago was one of the few stops that Bundy would make along the route to his final destination, sunny Florida. By early January 1978, Ted Bundy, using his newly acquired name of Chris Hagen, had settled comfortably into a one-room apartment in Tallahassee, Florida. He stole on a regular basis to survive.
On the night of Saturday, 14 January, his urge to kill manifested itself again. At 3am, a student returning home found the front door open and heard screams coming from inside. She heard footsteps approaching the staircase near her so she hid in a doorway, out of view. She watched as a man with a blue knitted cap pulled over his eyes, holding a log with cloth around it, ran down the stairs and out the door. She immediately ran up the stairs to wake her room-mate and told her of the strange man she had seen leaving the building. Unsure of what to do, the girls made their way to the housemother’s room. Yet, before they were able to make it to her room, they saw another room-mate, Karen, staggering down the hall. Her entire head was soaked with blood. They tried to help Karen and woke up the housemother and the two of them went to check on another room-mate nearby. They found their other room-mate, Kathy, in her room, alive but in a horrific state. She was covered in blood that was seeping from open wounds on her head. They phoned the police at once, who on attending found two other girls dead in their rooms lying in their beds. Someone had attacked them while they slept. Lisa Levy was the first girl who officers found dead. Pathologists who later performed the autopsy on her found that she had been beaten on the head with a log, raped and strangled. Upon further examination, they discovered bite marks on her buttocks and on one of her nipples. In fact, Lisa’s nipple had been so severely bitten that it was almost severed from the rest of her breast. She had also had a can of hairspray inserted into her vagina. Post-mortem reports on Margaret Bowman, the other girl found dead, showed that she had suffered similar fatal injuries, although she had not been sexually assaulted and she showed no signs of bite marks. She had been strangled with a pair of tights found at the scene. She had also been beaten on the head, so severely that her skull was splintered and a portion of her brain was exposed.
Less than a mile from the scene of these horrific assaults, a young woman was awakened by loud banging noises coming from the apartment next to hers. She wondered what her friend in the adjoining apartment was doing to make so much noise at four in the morning. As the banging noises persisted, she became suspicious and woke her room-mate. As they listened, they heard Cheryl Thomas next door moaning. Frightened, they called to see if she was all right. When no one picked up the phone, they immediately called the police. They entered Cheryl’s apartment and walked to her bedroom, where they found her sitting on the bed. Her face was just beginning to swell from the bludgeoning to her head. She was still somewhat conscious and half-naked, but lucky to be alive. Her skull had been fractured in five places, her jaw broken and her shoulder dislocated. She suffered permanent hearing loss and equilibrium problems. A mask made of tights similar to one found by detectives in Utah five months earlier was found wrapped up in Thomas’s bed sheets, which were also stained with semen.
On 9 February 1978, Lake City police received a report of a missing 12-year-old girl, Kimberly Ann Leach, who had disappeared that day from her school. Police launched a massive search to find her. Her friend Priscilla saw Kimberly get into the car of a stranger the day she disappeared. Unfortunately, she was unable to accurately remember anything about the car or the driver. Police found Kimberly’s body eight weeks later in a state park in Suwannee County, Florida. The young girl’s body yielded little information due to advanced decomposition. However, police were to later find the evidence they needed in a van driven by Ted Bundy. Several days before Kimberly Leach disappeared, in another incident, a strange man in a white van approached a 14-year-old girl as she waited for her brother to pick her up. The man had claimed he was from the fire department and asked her if she attended the school nearby. She found it strange that an on-duty fireman was wearing check trousers and a navy jacket. She began to feel uncomfortable. She had been warned on many occasions by her father – the Chief of Detectives for the Jacksonville Police Department – not to talk with strangers. She was relieved when her brother drove up. Suspicious of the man, her brother ordered her into the car, followed the man and wrote down his number plate to give it to his father.
The police had the number plate checked; it belonged to a man named Randall Ragen, and the police decided to pay him a visit. Ragen informed the officers that his plates had been stolen and that he had already been issued new ones. Police later found out that the van the children had seen was also stolen and that they had an idea who it might have been. They took the children to the police station to show them photographs, Bundy’s picture being among them. Both the children identified Bundy as being the man in the van.
By now, Bundy had made good his escape and abandoned the van. He set out towards Pensacola, Florida, in a new stolen car. This time he managed to find a vehicle he was more comfortable driving, a Volkswagen Beetle. A police officer was patrolling an area in West Pensacola when he saw an orange Volkswagen at 10pm on 15 February. He knew the area well, and most of the residents, yet he had never before seen that car. The officer decided to run a check on the number plates and soon found out that they were stolen. Immediately, he turned on his blue lights and began to follow the Volkswagen. Once again, as had happened in Utah several years earlier, Bundy started to flee, but then suddenly pulled over and stopped. The officer ordered him out of his car and told Bundy to lie down with his hands in front of him. As the officer began to handcuff Bundy, he rolled over and began to fight the officer, then managed to fight his way free and run. Just as soon as he did, the officer fired his weapon at him. Bundy dropped to the ground, pretending to have been shot. As the officer approached him lying on the ground, he was again attacked by Bundy. However, the officer was finally able to overpower Bundy and he was handcuffed and taken to the police station.
In the months following his arrest, police were able to obtain critical evidence to use against Bundy in the Kimberly Leach case. The white van that had been stolen by Bundy was found and they had three eye-witnesses who had seen him driving it the afternoon Kimberly had disappeared. Forensic tests conducted on the van yielded fibres of material that had come from Bundy’s clothes. Tests also revealed Kimberly Leach’s blood type on the van’s carpet and semen and Bundy’s blood type on her underwear. A further piece of evidence was Bundy’s shoe impressions in the soil located next to the place Kimberly’s body was found. Police felt confident with the information they had tying Bundy to the Leach murder and, on 31 July 1978, he was charged with the girl’s murder. Soon after, he was also charged with the murders of the two students while he had been on the run. Facing the death penalty, Bundy would later plead in his own defence that he was not guilty of the murders.
Theodore Robert Bundy faced two murder trials within three years of each other. His first trial date was set for 25 June 1979, in Miami, Florida. The case related to the brutal attacks on the two students. The second trial was to take place in January 1980 in Orlando, Florida, where Bundy was to be tried for the murder of Kimberly Leach. However, it was to be the first murder trial that would seal his fate forever. Bundy defended himself in this trial. During the trial, a forensic dentist told the court that he had matched the bite marks found on the body of one of the victims to Bundy. On 23 July, Bundy was found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair.
After many delays, the Kimberly Leach trial began in Orlando, Florida, at the Orange County Courthouse on 7 January 1980. This time, Bundy decided not to represent himself, instead handing over the responsibility to defence attorneys Julius Africano and Lynn Thompson. Their strategy was to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, a plea that was risky but one of the few available options open to the defence. The tactics failed and, faced with strong evidence, Bundy was found guilty on 7 February. After less than seven hours of deliberation, again he was sentenced to death.
After numerous appeals were turned down, his execution finally took place on 24 January 1989 at approximately 7am. Outside the prison walls stood hundreds of onlookers and scores of news media representatives awaiting the news of Bundy’s death. Following the prison spokesman’s announcement that Bundy was officially dead, sounds of cheers came from the jubilant crowd and fireworks lit the sky. Shortly thereafter, a white hearse emerged from the prison gates with the remains of one of the country’s most notorious serial killers. As the vehicle moved towards the crematorium, the surrounding crowd cheerfully applauded the end of a living nightmare.
RICHARD CHASE, AKA THE VAMPIRE OF SACRAMENTO
Having been abused by his mother from an early age, by the time Richard Chase (b. 1950) reached the age of 10, he was exhibiting the early signs that a serial killer might show: bedwetting, pyromania and zoo sadism (pleasure derived from cruelty to animals). In his adolescence, he took to drink and drugs. This led to him becoming impotent and he was unable to hold down a stable relationship. It was deemed that his erectile dysfunction was caused by ‘psychological problems stemming from repressed anger’.
In his youth, Chase went to college and shared an apartment with other teenagers, but his irrational behaviour compelled them to move out, leaving him alone. This was the turning point in his life. Now alone in the apartment, he began to capture, kill and disembowel various animals, which he would then devour raw. He would put the entrails of the animals he had killed into a blender in order to make a drinkable paste of them. Chase reasoned that by drinking this he was preventing his heart from shrinking; he feared that if it shrank too much, it would disappear and then he would die.
In 1975, Chase was involuntarily committed to a mental institution after being taken to hospital with blood poisoning, which he contracted after injecting rabbit blood into his veins. He escaped from the hospital and went home to his mother; he was apprehended and sent to an institution for the criminally insane, where he often shared fantasies about killing rabbits with the staff. He was once found with blood smeared around his mouth; hospital staff discovered that he had captured two birds through the bars on his bedroom windows, snapped their necks and sucked their blood out. Among themselves, the staff began referring to him as Dracula. After undergoing treatment, Chase was deemed no longer a danger to society and, in 1976, he was released into the recognisance of his parents. His mother, deciding that her son did not need to be on the anti-schizophrenic medication that he had been prescribed, foolishly weaned him off it. Now, roaming free and with no medication to help control his mind, he was a human time bomb – and it wasn’t long before the fuse was lit.
On 29 December 1977, Chase killed his first victim in a drive-by shooting, in an apparent rehearsal for the crimes that followed. The victim was Ambrose Griffin, a 51-year-old engineer and father-of-two, who was helping his wife carry groceries into their home.
On 11 January 1978, Chase approached a female neighbour and asked for a cigarette, and then forcibly restrained her until she gave him the entire pack. Two weeks later, he attempted to ente
r the home of another woman but, finding that her doors were locked, went into her back yard and walked away. Chase later told detectives that he took locked doors as a sign that he was not welcome, but that unlocked doors were an invitation to come inside. While wandering around one day, he met a girl named Nancy Holden, with whom he had attended high school. He asked her for a lift but, frightened by his appearance, she refused. He walked down the street, where he broke into the home of a young married couple, stole some of their valuables, urinated into a drawer of their infant’s clothing and defecated on their son’s bed. The couple came home while Chase was still in the house. The husband attacked him, but Chase escaped.
Chase continued entering homes until he came across the home of David and Teresa Wallin. David was at work. Teresa was three months pregnant. She was in the middle of taking out the rubbish and had left her front door unlocked. Chase surprised her in her home and shot her three times, killing her – he used the same gun with which he’d killed Ambrose Griffin. He then dragged Teresa’s body to her bedroom and raped it post-mortem while repeatedly stabbing it with a butcher’s knife. When he had finished, he carved the corpse open and removed several of her internal organs, using a bucket to collect the blood and then taking it into the bathroom to bathe in it. He then sliced off her nipple and drank her blood, using an empty yoghurt container as a drinking glass. Before leaving, he went into the yard, found a pile of dog faeces and returned to stuff it into the corpse’s mouth and throat.
On 23 January 1978, two days after killing Teresa Wallin, Chase purchased two puppies from a neighbour, then killed them and drank their blood, leaving the bodies on the neighbour’s front lawn.
On 27 January, Chase committed his final murder. He entered the home of 38-year-old Evelyn Miroth, who was babysitting her 22-month-old nephew, David. Also present was Evelyn’s six-year-old son Jason, and Dan Meredith, a neighbour who had come over to check on Evelyn. At the time, Evelyn was in the bath while Dan was looking after the children; he went into the front hallway when Chase entered the house. Dan Meredith was shot in the head at point-blank range with Chase’s .22 handgun, killing him. Chase then turned the body over and stole the wallet and car keys. Jason ran to his mother’s bedroom, where Chase shot him twice in the head at point-blank range; on the way to killing Jason, Chase also shot David in the head. Chase then entered the bathroom and fatally shot Evelyn once in the head. He dragged her corpse onto the bed, where he simultaneously committed buggery and drank her blood from a series of cuts to the back of the neck, which he had made. When he had finished, he inflicted on the body other mutilations with the knife, penetrating the anus and the uterus. This caused blood from her internal organs to flow into her abdomen, which he then cut open, draining the blood into a bucket; he then drank all of the blood. Chase then went to retrieve David’s body. He took it to the bathroom, split the skull open in the bath and consumed some of the brain matter. Outside, a six-year-old girl with whom Jason Miroth had a play-date knocked on the door, startling Chase. He fled the residence, stealing Dan Meredith’s car; the girl alerted a neighbour. The neighbour broke into the Miroth home where he discovered the bodies and contacted the police. A crime scene examination revealed handprints and footprints of the person whom the police believed to have been the killer.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 19
