“I became expert at projecting something very different. That I was very busy. It is clear now, I think, that a huge part of my life was hidden from everyone – secret, as it were. It didn’t take much effort at all.
“While I may have been left to myself a lot in high school, it was not as singular and pronounced as the pattern I later developed, in the early ’70s. I may have been a bit inward, but I was not entirely an introvert in high school. I certainly didn’t have a secret life that nobody knew about then. That’s the truth! I didn’t have a life that I was shielding from anyone.”
January 14
The opposite of the depression was the manic high, as Ted described it in his recounting of his successful escape from the Glenwood Springs (Colorado) jail on New Year’s Eve of 1977. He had already been convicted of kidnapping in Utah the preceding year and was awaiting trial for the murder of a nurse, Caryn Campbell.
“I felt that way when I popped out of jail in Glenwood Springs. I had the feeling that things were just happening! Everything was just going my way. The stars were right! How can I explain it? My karma was good! I mean, nothing went wrong. If something did go wrong, the next thing that happened was so good it compensated. It was even better.
“People say it was such a sly escape. Well, it wasn’t. Yet my karma was so right that it compensated for all my errors. I mean, I just walked out the front door of the jailer’s quarters. I didn’t hide behind a trash can, like they said. I just walked right down the street. I didn’t walk toward Main Street. I walked (in) the other direction and up the dark streets toward this large apartment complex by the railroad tracks. There were several cars parked there.
“I checked out several of them, crunching along in the frozen snow. Couldn’t find any cars with keys in them. I don’t know how to hot-wire a car, right? So I kept looking in all these cars, opening the doors and checking around for keys under the mats and so on. I got out of the damn jail at seven-thirty and at eleven I was still looking for a car!
“I must have tramped up and down every side street, honest to God now. . . I walked every side street and neighborhood in Glenwood Springs. No lie. In fact, I walked up and down some of them twice.
“I walked from the jail to the high school and past. Up by where the used-car lots are. Over across to the east side of town and down to the river again. And back up and around and down. And I couldn’t find a car. And it started to snow, very, very hard.
“Dig this! I found a car with keys in it. It was an old jalopy. This was maybe about nine o’clock. I was looking for a car with snow tires. I was no dummy. I said, ‘Let me look some more.’ I looked some more and said, ‘Well, I’d better take that car.’ As I was walking back to get it, somebody came hurrying out of a building, hopped in the car, and drove away.
“It was one of those nights. You see, if I had taken that car, it would’ve been reported almost immediately.
“Finally, around eleven p.m., I found this little MG. It had a front-wheel drive with studded snow tires on the front. I hopped in and revved it up. It went like ‘bud-d-d-d-d-d. . . buh-buh-buh-buh-buh.’ There was no second gear. The gear shift was chattering away. I got it in first; there’s no reverse. The heater didn’t work and windows immediately steamed up. But I was goin’ for it.
“It was parked on a residential street by the river. I cleaned off the windows as best I could. Got everything set – and drove right down the wide street by the police station! Stopped at the stoplight. Made a right turn. Drove over the bridge spanning the Colorado River. It was low on gas, so I stopped and filled up just over the bridge. Self-serve. Paid my money and got moving.
“The snow was falling heavily. But I got this thing up to first and then on into third. Vroom! Vroom! Vroom! The thing wouldn’t get out of third. It took me about twenty minutes to get it into fourth. And then there’s an incline, you know. There were cars all over the place – semis, cars, buses – sideways and slipping. People puttin’ chains on.
“I just put this damn thing into third and floored it. I’m zooming around, weaving here and there, like a slalom course. I closed my eyes because there were state patrolmen all over the place, helpin’ people. Flares and everything! I didn’t even slow down. Vroom!
“I knew that if I stopped in this little fucker on the hill, I wouldn’t get anywhere because I couldn’t get it in second. It’s a four-lane highway most of the way to Vail. Couldn’t see the road. After a while, I couldn’t drive it in fourth. I could only go in first. The snow was deeper than the hood of the car, right? Finally, it just goes ‘phhheeeew.’ It wouldn’t move.
“I had tennis shoes on, from the jail. I couldn’t push the car off the side of wherever I was. Couldn’t tell where the highway was! I was scared to death a highway patrolman would come along. A couple cars passed me in the middle of nowhere. I was, for a while at least, more scared of dying of exposure than anything else.
“I was about twenty-five miles from Vail and at least that far from Glenwood Springs. In a blizzard – a bona fide blizzard!
“This guy comes along in a Mazda. I waved at him and he slowed down. Helped me shove my car – get that, my car! – off the highway. ‘Best to leave the car because my wife’s having a baby in Denver. I gotta get to Denver,’ I told him. “He said he was from Ogden – in the army, returning from some base in Kentucky. He said, ‘Hop in. I’d enjoy the company.’ We had trouble getting moving because his tires were almost slick. Just about then a huge snowplow came along, hooked a chain to us, and got us moving. We followed him, pretty close, the rest of the way to Vail.
“When we got to Vail, we found out the pass was closed. Since he didn’t have chains, they wouldn’t let us try, so we came back down.
“There was a Vail cop right off the freeway as we came back down the mountain. As he pulled over, I rolled down the window and asked him where we could hang out for a while. It was probably about two a.m. He directed us to the Holiday Inn, where they had a nice big fire going. But it was clear the pass was going to be closed for quite a while. Nothing was getting any better.
“I got back out and tried to hustle a couple of rides, to no avail. Finally a Trailways bus was scheduled to leave. I said,
‘Sorry, Buddy, I gotta get moving.’
“When I got to Denver, I was still feeling those good vibrations. I shared a cab with three other guys to the airport. I was feeling so good, I paid for it!
“I walked in the airport and directly to the row of counters, looking for the first flight to Chicago. I had planned to go to a big city. Lots and lots and lots of traffic. No way to trace me. It was New Year’s Eve. I knew they didn’t have much of a chance to trace me.
“TWA had an 8:55 flight. I plopped down my money and didn’t even slow down because there was less than five minutes to make it. I had a Bell Telephone plastic carrying bag with an extra shirt, some underwear, and miscellaneous items in it.
“I just kept on movin’. Settled in on the plane. Slowly buckled up and said, ‘I need a scotch and soda, fast!’ It felt just right – the whole time, just perfect. You see, there was nothing clever about the escape. Nothing clever about the engineering. In fact, it was sloppily done.”
The high lasted only a few more days.
“In Ann Arbor,” he went on, “it was just boom, boom, boom! I was just cool. I was talking to people in bars. Oh, I felt good! I felt the drive, the power. I had what it took.
“I lost that. I felt it slip away like in the old movies where you see the ghost lift out of the body lying on the ground. It slipped away from me a few days later in the bus station in Atlanta. It just evaporated. I could just feel it go.
“I was waiting for the bus in the Omni (Auditorium), watching a convention on the main floor there. There were all these people going to a Hawks game. And I was watching these people – these people who had real lives, backgrounds, histories, girlfriends, husbands and families. Who were smiling and laughing and talking with each other. Who seemed to have so much
of what I wanted!
“All of a sudden I felt smaller and smaller and smaller. More insecure. And more alone! Watching groups of couples talking with one another, strolling toward the gate. Bit by bit by bit, I felt something drain out of me. And by the time I got off the bus in Tallahassee, things just did not feel right. From the time I first set foot on Tennessee Street, I kept saying to myself, ‘I gotta leave here.’”
The depression came just days before Bundy, in a drunken rampage, committed bludgeon attacks on five coeds, two of whom were Chi Omega sorority sisters who died.
January 15
Bundy compared his disintegration to that of the protagonist in James Clavell’s early novel King Rat.
“A marvelous, marvelous book,” Bundy remarked, “about a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. King Rat himself masters the environment. But when they’re liberated, he’s worse than nothing. He’s back to his old self again. He’s nowhere. I might be there. I don’t know.
“My first test of that confirms that I’m a master of this (prison) environment, much more than the other. I sort of reverted to type. I felt overwhelmed by things. I felt out of control. I felt I couldn’t manipulate, if that’s the word, the environment around me. I couldn’t get hold of the things I needed to get hold of. I couldn’t get a job. I didn’t do the things that I should have done.
“I knew what I had to do and I didn’t do it. It just boggles my mind. I failed miserably. I did everything I shouldn’t have done. You have to remember, I was on the run, so I couldn’t truly be myself. If I was truly shrewd and in control of myself, I would not have done the things that I did, which were terribly stupid.”
I told Ted that it sounded as if he actually enjoyed being locked up.
“Anybody matures,” he answered, and then he went into another speech. “I’m sure, no matter where they are. So many times in these past couple years I felt like I was looking down from atop a mountain and seeing so many things I had never seen before. And appreciating so many things I never appreciated.
“I feel so much more confident about myself. It’s really marvelous. But here I am – in here.
“I think that at last I have perspective. And a sort of self-confidence. It may be borne, in part, out of this immense publicity. I don’t know. I’m recognized in a terribly bizarre kind of way. I feel immune. I feel nobody can hurt me.
“I’m not sure why I feel that way. Maybe I would have reached this new perspective without being in prison. Anyway, everything from changing my diet – which is a real trip – I take very seriously. I feel comfortable, so much more confident when I talk to people. I know who I am.
“I know I don’t have to apologize to people for anything. Nobody can spring anything on me. Not that people do this. But nothing’s going to come out of left field. I feel like I’m a cat. I feel aware of things. Diet is one thing. Yoga. Some of the more esoteric things I overlooked before.
“Being in prison has helped me understand a lot about human behavior, because in prison behavior is very elemental, and it’s very blatant. Very brutal. But it’s an analog to the more subtle, more sophisticated behavior on the streets. Nobody surprises me anymore. I believe I know why people act the way they do. I understand incentive. I understand the profit motive for the very first time, having been around drug dealers. I understand economics in a way I never understood it before.
“I understand violence – and I am not afraid. I am not afraid of a thing. And it’s a terribly secure thing. I am not afraid of death. Maybe that’s a function of it, also. I’m not intimidated by anything or anybody. And I used to be very intimidated by situations. And people. Not understanding motivations. I can now speak my mind and be not at all self-conscious about it.
“I don’t think people perceived me this way, but I saw myself as meek. I perceived myself to be easily intimidated. And somewhat unsophisticated. Uninteresting – even unattractive. Not in a gross, accentuated way that would keep me shuddering in my apartment all day, but in a mild way that sort of took the edge off things.
“When people were genuinely interested in me, I seldom picked up on it. Simply, I just didn’t appreciate my worth. It’s strange, isn’t it, that under these circumstances, today I probably have a stronger self-image that I ever did before?
“It’s a revelation. It’s marvelous. Now I’m not certain that if you took me out of this environment and put me back on the streets that I might not revert back to my former, Walter Mitty-like kind of thing. I’m not a Walter Mitty. That’s not a proper comparison.
“I was scared to death in the Salt Lake City jail (where Bundy was taken after his first criminal charge for the kidnap of an intended murder victim, nineteen-year-old Carol DaRonch, the only woman known to have escaped Bundy once he had her in his car.) I thought I was going to die every night the first few days I was in jail back in October of 1975. I was scared to death! Daily. I thought they were going to kill me.
“Animals sense it. Just like the old adage that a dog can tell when somebody is afraid of it. They sensed it – and some guys jacked me up on it. I mean, nothing happened. But they said, ‘Hey, Bundy, did you really do that?’ This or that. Nobody fucks with me anymore about that.
“I’ve come up against the toughest, meanest dudes on Death Row. They’d slit your throat in a second. I count them as my friends. They give me no trouble. I don’t expect I’ll ever have any trouble with ’em unless I try to fuck ’em somehow. It’s not really men they’re in awe of. It’s the reputation or something that goes along with it.
“After I was sentenced in Salt Lake City, I was put on “A” Block at Utah State Prison, where Truman Capote filmed The Glass House. I was scared to death for a while. A couple of guys kept chanting, ‘We don’t like rape-os.’ Gave me the bad eye. Called me a baby raper and all that shit.
“Nobody would ever do that to me now. They might talk a lot. But they won’t say anything to my face. The reputation stops ‘em. They’re afraid I’ll do something to them. And I probably would, if it came down to it. It may be the way I carry myself. They may have respect for me the way I handle the authorities. The way I fucked with them. The way I made them pay to get me. No one has said a cross word to me. Not even has there been a mean word.
“They – all of ’em – will try to get over on you when you first come in. They’ll jam on you. They’ll try to get you to get them drugs and promise to pay you back. They’re always trying to hit on the new guy for candy and cigarettes. I tell ’em to fuck off.
“Sydney Jones is a stand-up convict. About 260 pounds of mean, black sonuvabitch who they built a special pair of handcuffs for because he tears the ordinary ones apart. Sydney asks me for stuff and I say – in a humorous way – ‘Fuck you, Sydney.’ My Christmas package came and Sydney said, ‘Bundy, I want some cookies.’ I told Sydney, ‘Listen, I gotta take care of myself.’
“He was after my law books. He’s after everybody’s law books. It’s nothing personal. I said, Sydney, if you want those law books, tear your cell door off, come rip mine off, tear the window out – and we’ll take the law books with us!’
“He once took over “Q” Wing. In September of 1978. He and his buddy, John Jefferson. The doors in “Q” Wing are not remotely operated. Each cell door has its individual key. So they found a way of screwing with the lock mechanism so all they had to do was jiggle the door and it would open.
“They did this for a year or two. All they’d do at night was open the door or go smoke dope or screw each other or whatever they were into. But none of them, surprisingly enough – it just burned me up – tried to escape or anything. They just fooled around.
“So then these two guys one day decided to take over the wing. They didn’t know what for! Neither of ’em had a murder beef. They were just doin’ these things because they were hell-raisers. They just lost their heads. They didn’t know what to do, so eventually they gave up.”
January 23
As the Leach trial ground into its third week, T
ed began to lose his poise. In a conversation with Carole Boone (whom he’d marry at the end of the trial), he complained of the strains of being a defendant in a case where the verdict is a foregone conclusion.
“Vic (Africano, his lead lawyer) gives me a speech at lunchtime. He says, ‘What’s going on? Why are you so upset?’ I told him why. He said, ‘It puts us on edge when you’re so upset. People might notice.’
“I said, ‘Who do you want to be on edge? Me or you?’ He said, ‘Your demeanor. . . it’s important. It can hurt you.’
“Fuck that bullshit! We lost this thing two years ago. What kind of shit is this? He’s trying to talk to me like we have a fighting chance.
“I told Vic I’m coming unglued. I just can’t keep it together anymore. I’m sorry. I’m just starting to lose it. I was strong as long as I can be strong. He said, ‘Do you think the nurse might be able to get you something to calm you down?’
“I don’t know what these guys expect of me. Not only to go through jury selection and listen to all that rot, but then to listen to witness after witness lie, lie, lie. I’m fed up with it. I need some goddamn special attention. I demand it!
“What makes me mad is I’m allowing myself to be played into a corner on this. Like there’s really something at stake here. I’m letting myself be forced to play a role. And I sit there eating every second of it! I’m starting to hate myself for doing it. It’s the goddamn phoniest set-up. And yet I allow myself to play that role. I feel awful. There doesn’t seem to be a point to anything.
“It might be the best thing for me to try to go to sleep. Because all I want to do right now is be unconscious or loaded or fucked up. Or something. I just can’t deal with it.”
Then his mood shifted.
“One of my fondest dreams,” he told Carole, “is to have all the underwear and socks I ever could conceivably use. It’s one of my fantasies. To be able to wear new socks every day! And I must admit, I have had three or four dozen socks, all purchased on (stolen) credit cards.
Ted Bundy Page 3
