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.
Chapter Eight
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 transformation 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.
Chapter Nine
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.
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.
Returning to Tallahassee with his mask of sanity back in place, Ted went on a date with a young woman from his rooming house that night. After abducting, subduing, brutalizing, raping, stabbing, cutting, killing, and dumping the body of little Kimberly Diane Leach in an old pigpen earlier in the day, Bundy dined at Chez Pierre with Francis Messier, eating good food and drinking fine wine in the company of an attractive young woman—all on a stolen credit card, of course.
From out in the other room, I hear Dad cough and say something.
Jumping up, I go check on him.
Chapter Ten
The dim, quiet house is warm and stuffy.
In the living room I find both men snoring.
Lying flat out on the couch, his hand over his heart as if saying the pledge of allegiance, Jake appears not to have moved at all since I eased him down there.
Dad stirs and starts coughing again.
Stepping into the tiny kitchen, I run a glass of water from the tap, and return with it to find him snoring again.
In another moment he moans and says something incomprehensible in his sleep.
The next time he coughs, he stirs and opens his eyes. Seeing me standing there startles him and he jumps, bringing up his hands in a defensive posture.
As a child, I was always startled by the way he so often startled awake, and some of the old familiar feeling fluttered deep inside me now.
“Dad, it’s me. You were coughing. Here’s some water.”
“Huh?”
His eyes are bloodshot, the brows above them in need of trimming and, like the graying brown hair on his head, standing up.
Narrowing his eyes and blinking a bit, he seems to be having difficulty focusing.
“What’re you doing here?” he asks.
Like his cough, I wonder if his bloodshot eyes and trouble focusing have anything to do with him being sick and are really signs of a deeper, darker infirmity beneath—a thought that would not have occurred to me had Jake not said what he did.
“Brought Jake home from the bar,” I say.
He nods knowingly. �
�Knew someone would have to when he left to go out there. Figured I’d get a call. Must have fallen asleep.”
He still hasn’t taken the water from my outstretched hand.
“Drink some water,” I say. “How are you feeling?”
He takes the water and drinks some, a small rivulet of which runs down the red-hued skin of his white-whiskered chin.
Coughing again, he chokes a little, but only pauses a moment for it to pass before finishing off the glass.
Jake stirs for the first time, licks his lips, adjust his body on the couch a bit, but doesn’t wake.
“How bad was he?” Dad asks.
I shake my head. “He was fine. Just a little lost at the moment.”
He nods and holds the glass out for me. “Thanks.”
I take it. “Can I get you anything else? Help you to bed?”
He shakes his head. “I’m good here.”
“Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be in the spare room looking through the Janet Lester case.”
His eyes widen. “Really?”
“We’ve been back a while. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
He nods, a small suppressed smile twitching his lips a bit. “I missed something. Hope you find it. Want to close it once and for all this time.”
“Jake said you were sick,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Don’t want to talk about it. Going back to sleep.”
I nod and head back toward the kitchen with the empty glass.
With his eyes closed, he says, “Been having a few symptoms. Brown sent me for blood work.”
Our GP, Raymond Brown, is the old country doctor in Pottersville.
“Results are on the table,” he adds. “We can talk about it tomorrow. Night.”
“Night.”
“And John,” he adds, still without opening his eyes, “thanks for looking at the book on Janet.”
“Should have sooner,” I say. “Sorry I didn’t.”
BLOOD WORK: a John Jordan Mystery (John Jordan Mysteries Book 12) Page 4
