The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History (41 page)

Yomi Segun said he was drawn to the man as he appeared to be drunk and appeared to be intentionally trying to conceal the object he carried. This caused him to slow down and take a better look at the man. When pictures started to appear in the local papers after Bundy's arrest, Segun told investigators he believed the man he saw on the street that morning was in fact Theodore Bundy. "Mr. Segun states," Detective West wrote as he concluded his report, "that Sherrod's was closed and that the only person he noticed was the subject walking.""

As the car carrying Yomi Segun slowed down, accelerated, and continued heading west on Jefferson Street, Ted Bundy, who would have noticed his momentary interest, kept his eyes on this car as it drove away. Still in a sexually charged and homicidal state of mind, Bundy continued walking west and would have heard the sirens of the police cars and the unmistakable wail of the ambulances from the hospital rushing to Chi Omega. You would think Bundy might have chosen a location for his next attack far from where he was now. But Bundy was not thinking clearly, nor was he following a plan. His inner drive to commit another murder kept him searching for victims, not on the streets of the city, for the streets were practically deserted by this time of the morning, but in the homes and apartments of a geographically very small area. It was his hunting ground, and it would soon be swarming with police.

The apartment of 431-A Dunwoody Street is but four blocks west and one block south of Chi Omega. The street runs north and south between West Pensacola Avenue and West St. Augustine Street. It was where Bundy would find his next victim.

Sometime around 4:00 A.M., Debbie Ciccarelli of 431-B Dunwoody Street thought she heard her neighbor, Cheryl Thomas, crying and "pleading with someone" and then, she said, there was a "loud pounding noise coming from the apartment .1121 After this, all was silent. Troubled, Ciccarelli and her roommate, Nancy Young, both of whom were FSU students attempted to get their friend to answer by calling out Cheryl's name through the thin walls of this older duplex they shared, but there was still no response. Even repeated telephone calls to Thomas got no answer. The sound of someone walking around quietly in the apartment increased the anxiety of her neighbors. Their only choice now was to call the police. These footsteps were the sounds of Ted Bundy being disturbed in the middle of what surely would have been the act of finishing Thompson off. After hammering her face, head, and jaw with the log, he was preparing to do that which gave him the most satisfaction. Having disrobed, at least from the waist down, he was about to strangle her with a pair of pantyhose while having anal intercourse with her. He was pleased she was not dead; he wanted her to die during the sexual act, as the tightening of her muscles heightened his orgasms and overall sense of delight. After hearing the phone ring, and the sounds of the women talking and moving around next door, he only had time to relieve himself through masturbation while he viewed his work, now sprawled out before him. His semen stain was later discovered on Thomas's bedsheet. The pantyhose with which he intended to strangle her was found by authorities lying next to the bed on the floor. No doubt feeling cheated and somewhat unfulfilled, Bundy went back out through the window from which he had come.

The first to respond were Tallahassee Police Officers Mitch Miller and Gerald Payne, quickly followed by additional units from their department and cars from the Leon County Sheriff's Office. Within minutes, the place was literally crawling with cops. While Payne, Miller and others attempted to enter the apartment without having to break down the door, Debbie Ciccarelli produced a front door key.

Cheryl Thomas was located on the bed in her room in a semi-conscious state. At first glance, investigators on the scene knew for a certainty that the Chi Omega killer had been here as well. Not only had Cheryl Thomas been bashed about the head and face, leaving her bloody and moaning, but the log Bundy had carried from Chi Omega was resting on her bedroom floor. Like those of Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler, Cheryl Ann Thomas's jaw was shattered during the frenzied attack. While the jaw would heal, she sustained permanent hearing loss in one ear and has had periodic struggles with her balance. But thanks to the concern of her friends on the other side of a very thin wall, she would survive her encounter with Ted Bundy.

His night of mayhem over, Ted Bundy returned to The Oak. But instead of going up to his room, he stood out in front of the house in an odd manner, and was unable to respond to the greetings of other returning residents in a normal fashion. This illustrates the degeneration of his personality from his days in Washington, Utah, and even Colorado. Heretofore, Bundy would have been able to pull himself together after the murders, as he did when he took Liz Kendall and her daughter out for hamburgers and ice cream after killing Janice Ott and Denise Naslund at Lake Sammamish on that hot July Sunday. Now Budy was not able to perform even the simplest of social interactions. His failure to relate properly with those around him is testimony to his uncontrollable downward spiral.

According to later testimony by Russell Gage and Henry Palumbo, who returned to The Oak sometime after 4:00 A.M., they found "Chris" standing on the front porch of the rooming house, staring blankly towards the university. When they said hello to him, he did not answer. Gage told the jury that Bundy joined a group of residents just a short time later to discuss the Chi Omega murders, news of which was now being heard over the Tallahassee radio stations. Gage said that Bundy made a statement that "this was probably a professional job, and this guy has done it before."22

The city of Tallahassee was about to awaken to a nightmare.

12

LAKE CITY

Theodore Bundy could not have known it, but as he was attacking Cheryl Thomas in the early morning hours of January 15, he had exactly one month of freedom left to him. Somewhere within his compartmentalized mind he understood he could not go on killing young women forever and escape justice. At some point, he understood, he'd be captured again, or killed, and the lifestyle he loved would finally come to an end. But it's just as certain he didn't expect it to come crashing down around him so soon.

Bundy's life after Chi Omega was quite similar to his life before his night of murder. He continued to steal credit cards, cars, and whatever he could lay his hands upon. Like a ghost he would float through libraries, malls, discos, and anywhere a careless patron was willing to give him a crack at cash and identities. Bundy would spend freely, visiting smoke shops (purchasing a pipe and tobacco), athletic stores, and restaurants, both the fancy and the mundane. (Just as Bundy had chosen to breakfast at Uncle Hank's Pancake Cottage when passing through Louisville, he became a regular at Uncle John's Pancake House in Tallahassee, and praised the service he'd received there.) It was always on someone else's dime. But he was still about killing. And for Theodore Bundy, killing, and possessing those he had killed in a strange metaphysical way is what brought the greatest satisfaction to his life. Being able to create intense horror and fear in his victims (at least in the ones he didn't render unconscious by a whack on the head) did for his soul what food does for the body. Now that the genie of murder was out of the bottle in Florida, it would be something he'd continue to do until society put a stop to it and to him.

As can be expected, the highly publicized attacks on Chi Omega and Dunwoody Street, leaving a total of two dead and three seriously injured, jolted the city of Tallahassee, and the end result was a community in fear. That someone could be as bold and ruthless as to enter a sorority house filled with young sleeping women and proceed to beat and strangle them to death, was too horrible for most people to contemplate. That the killer was still on the loose kept people looking over their shoulders.

Although Bundy took great pleasure in the excitement of a city turned upside down, and would even make himself a part of the conversation about it at The Oak, he also knew he was creating a familiar problem for himself. He'd driven himself out of every place he'd called home since his life of murder began. When Washington State became a hotbed of investigative activity, he fled to Utah. When things became uncomfortable in Utah, he began killing in Colorado, with excursions into Idaho, and now he was turning up the heat on himself in his new home, Tallahassee, Florida. From the moment he landed in Chicago after escaping his jailers in Colorado, he was entering a world where people may have heard of the murders of young women out West, but did not recognize him - not in Ann Arbor, not in Louisville, not in Atlanta after he ditched the stolen car and made his way to the Trailways bus station, and not in his new home of Tallahassee.

In anticipation of yet another move, Bundy had obtained a duplicate of Kenneth Raymond Misner's birth certificate, with the intention of obtaining a driver's license in that name. Misner, a former track star and FSU student, was both popular and well known, and Bundy had no trouble finding out many things about his life. When the real Misner later learned of Bundy's success at duplicating his identity, he was quite naturally disturbed about it. Identity theft was foreign to Misner. But Ted Bundy thought of little else, and this is why he was so proficient at stealing objects, identities, even lives.

Bundy paid the greatest attention to what was around him at all times, even down to the tiniest of details, all for the wrong reasons. His ability to take advantage of the mistakes of others, or their kindness, or their lack of concern, made murder much easier, stealing less risky, and escape from Colorado a certainty. Ted Bundy wasn't just a sociopath. He was a very efficient sociopath. He was not, in any regard, like most of the people you come into contact with, although he appeared so, and this is what made him so exceedingly dangerous.

February 6, 1978, Tallahassee was a city of locked doors and worried minds. The authorities were working around the clock hunting for the man Nita Neary had described to them three weeks earlier, yet it seemed they were no closer to catching him now than when they first stormed up the steps to the second floor at Chi Omega. Even so, Tallahassee was not the place to commit another murder, at least not the kind that Bundy was yearning for. Still living the life of Chris Hagen, he went about his business and didn't create a stir. But that cyclic desire to kill was building in him once again, and he knew if he were to feed the desire he needed to go elsewhere. And so, on Sunday, February 5, Bundy walked over to the campus and headed straight to the parking lot adjacent to the Seminole building. As he reached the parking lot, he dipped into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys fitting the FSU media center van. Only a week before Bundy had taken the keys from the vehicle and had made a set for his own use, only to replace the original set a day or so later.

Sliding behind the wheel of the boxy white van, he already had a plan in mind. He would leave on Monday and travel the 160-plus miles to Jacksonville, and there he would find his next victim. It was far enough away from Tallahassee that most people, he believed, would not be as edgy about strange faces, and there certainly wasn't an ongoing investigation in Jacksonville. After replacing the van's plates with stolen ones, Bundy expected a successful trip. After a brief shopping spree the following morning, the former law student turned on the entrance ramp leading to 1-10 heading east, and sat back and savored anticipation of the meal to come. In his wallet were numerous stolen credit cards which he would continue to use on this excursion. Once again, investigators would be able to track his movements, just as they had in Colorado, something he should have taken into consideration, given what he was about to do.

But like Pocatello, Idaho, Jacksonville, Florida, would not be so willing to give up victims to the madman from Tacoma. No one knows just how many attempts he made on that Monday afternoon and perhaps long into the night. But it is certain Theodore Bundy did not want to waste any time in his quest for a kill. This need to murder was already rising, and without question, the closer he came to the Jacksonville city limits, the stronger that desire became, as he realized that his craving was about to be met. It is quite possible that as he began mixing with people on that day of hunting, his altered state of mind was again causing weird body and eye movements and that strangeness that was so easily recognized by the women at Sherrod's on the night of the murders. His properly controlling the monster within was becoming difficult indeed, and it is certain no one in Jacksonville succumbed to his wiles on that day.

What we do know is that he spent Tuesday traversing Interstate 10 in search of prey and that he purchased gas just north of Lake City, which means he had left Jacksonville and was driving back towards Tallahassee. Using a different stolen card later that day, he bought more gas in Jacksonville. He was quite busy and perhaps very frustrated as he failed to find a victim. Records show he stayed at a Holiday Inn overnight using an assumed name, with a stolen card with which he would later be apprehended.