On Jan. 15, 1978, Mary Ann Picano had to raise her voice to make herself heard above the loud music of a Tallahassee, Fla., disco:
”I think I`m about to dance with an ex-con,” she told her friend. She didn`t know it, but the curly-haired, blue-eyed man waiting for her on the dance floor was Ted Bundy, the man police in four states believe to be the most prolific mass murderer in the nation`s history and the subject of a factual four-hour mini-series airing at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday on NBC-Ch. 5. Within three hours after that dance, five young Florida State University students, four of them Chi Omega sorority sisters, would be bludgeoned, raped and strangled, two of them savagely bitten, as if by a wild animal. Two died
(Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy).
The disco scene made it into the Lorimar-Telepictures` script; the ex-con line did not.
In the NBC movie, Mark Harmon, making his break from ”St. Elsewhere” to take the role of ”The Deliberate Stranger,” plays Bundy as the handsome, charming, articulate, athletic, Kennedyesque former law student and ladies man Bundy was. Sometimes.
That same Theodore Robert Bundy today stands convicted and sentenced three times to death for the murders of Levy and Bowman in Tallahassee, in January, 1978, and that of Kimberly Diane Leach in Lake City, Fla., three weeks later. In addition he was sentenced to 198 years in prison for two attempted murders in the Tallahassee case.
He was also serving a 1-to-15 year sentence for the aggravated kidnaping of Carol DaRonch in January, 1976, before his escape from a Utah jail.
But for three years in Seattle, his home town, those who knew him insisted that there must be some mistake. It couldn`t be. This young man was going to be in the Senate some day, not in prison.
And that is the irony that NBC explores for two nights. No one would mistake Mark Harmon`s Ted Bundy, at least not visually, for a convict. But Picano was right.
The real Ted Bundy was a chameleon, a man who could–and did–change his appearance often. He cultivated a derelict`s stubble; grew various beards, moustaches; wore glasses.
He gained and lost weight so rapidly as to change his facial features dramatically. Often he fasted for days to make those changes more rapid, and once, in a Glenwood Springs, Colo., jail, he did it so he could fit through a foot-square opening above his jail cell lighting fixture to make good his second escape–the one that brought him to Florida.
”It`s true. Bundy was amazing,” says Dick Larsen, a Seattle Times editor and author of the well-researched book ”Bundy: The Deliberate Stranger,” on which the mini-series is faithfully based.
For the sake of time, according to Larsen, not all of Bundy`s disguises appear in the movie. ”I guess if they tried to show all the faces of Ted Bundy in four hours, the viewers could get hopelessly lost.”
Larsen first got to know, and like, Bundy more than a decade ago when he was a political writer at the Times. Bundy, then a young pre-law student, worked in various Republican campaigns. Larsen later asked to cover what became known as the the ”Ted Squad” investigations when Bundy became a prime suspect in 34 murders in three western states.
But Harmon`s physical resemblance to Bundy is startling, sometimes eerie, even to the way he used his eyebrows; the loping stride, head tilted forward; the straight, sharply etched nose and especially the precise duplication of Bundy`s slightly curly hair.
”More than once I slipped and called Mark `Ted` on the set,” Larsen said, still amazed by the resemblance between the two. ”Especially walking away–the shoulder carriage, the hair . . . I had to ask him about it. Mark said, `Of course you know Bundy has a double cowlick?` ”
Larsen just looked at him. Of course he didn`t. But he did know the investment of time Harmon had made in the role.
”It was a very emotionally involving part,” Harmon has said. ” . . . I was so immersed in the character it was sometimes hard for me to separate myself from it . . . People I`ve known for 20 years would come over to my house, take one look at me, turn around and leave. Even my dogs thought I was getting a little weird.”
Perhaps the central figure in the western manhunt was Det. Michael J. Fisher (played by Ben Masters in the mini-series), a no-nonsense state investigator from Aspen, Colo., who joined the probe in 1975 after the first disappearance in that state–a young Michigan woman on a ski vacation.
It was Fisher who charted Bundy`s travel pattern through credit card receipts. He read part of the script for accuracy–at Lorimar`s request–and suggested some changes. ”But they got most of it right,” he says. Fisher doubts he ever really drank a toast that Bundy might one day ”burn in hell,” as did his character.
”But it wasn`t too far off . . . I do hope his own legal brilliance earns him the shortest run at the electric chair in history,” Fisher recently said.
Bundy, ego-maniacal would-be lawyer, invariably defended himself in court. He never won a case.
Larsen`s book emphasized the western crimes, in Washington, Utah and Colorado, but devoted its final third to Florida, where Bundy ”exploded,” as Fisher says he knew he would one day.
The mini-series devotes just about 20 minutes to the Florida crimes, their investigation, Bundy`s recapture and the two trials that saw him sentenced three times to death by electrocution.
Three weeks after the Chi Omega murders, a sobbing 12-year-old girl was shuffled into a van 90 miles east of Tallahassee by a man who looked to one witness like an ”impatient father.” In the mini-series she skips playfully beside him.
The girl was Kimberly Diane Leach. The man was not her father.
And it was in the nearby swampland where her body was ultimately found that Larsen finally lost forever the resolutely maintained, juror-like professional objectivity that let him to presume his old friend`s innocence for four years.
”I was actually making discoveries in person, talking to people, and it became apparent Ted was involved. It was obviously no longer a matter of argument,” Larsen says now. That hurt, he admits.
The newsman–who keeps trim despite a fondness for Budweiser and has only streaks of gray unlike the silver-maned George Grizzard who portrays him in the movie–was in Pensacola, Fla., within 36 hours of Bundy`s arrest by a local patrolman who routinely pulled his car over, chased him on foot and got much the better of the ensuing struggle.
Investigators from the western states arrived quickly, too, but the Florida cops kept this one for themselves.
”We were left cooling our heels outside the jail,” Fisher recalls. ”We were afraid they didn`t know what they had. I was gnashing my teeth down to the gums,” but he never spoke to Bundy again.
Florida police were prepared to question him all night. They were not prepared for what they would hear. ”Ted looked like hell,” Larsen recalls, worse even than the bloodied Harmon looked in the movie. ”But (Director Marvin) Chomsky (”Attica,” ”Holocaust,” ”Peter the Great”) really caught the flavor of that scene.”
That night, weary from lack of sleep, Bundy told his interrogators he favored Volkswagen bugs because they were so common and their passenger seats could be removed to better manage ”damaged cargo.” He told them there were two other states that should begin investigations, too; that the nation`s police had better start thinking in ”three digits” to tally the victims of his insatiable desire to ”cause great bodily harm to females.”
But Bundy got his questioners to turn their tape recorders on and off on command that night, which rendered the tapes inadmissable as evidence.
It didn`t matter. A sorority sister had seen him enter the house; a dental surgeon matched his teeth to the bite wounds.
The first half of the mini-series establishes Bundy`s squeaky-clean hometown image, then begins, one-by-one, to introduce the randomly selected, attractive, long-haired brunette victims he favored–deliberately strangers
–first in Washington state, then in Colorado and Utah. Some are stalked by a shadowy figure; most leave with Bundy and simply disappear. There is little violence depicted until the Chi Omega murders late in part 2.
A series of quick cuts of the discovery of body after body–skulls and bones, in most cases–follows.
Glimpses of victims` families trying to cope with uncertainty and compact scenes from the ongoing, multi-state investigation are interspersed. One cop`s marriage founders, another is hospitalized with depression, a third suffers a heart attack–all true.
”Those were the things most important to me,” Larsen says. ”I wish there could have been more detail of the individual cases, the victims`
families, the investigators` incredible sacrifices. It had such a profound effect on four states . . . . ”
We miss such bizarre sidelights as Bundy watching the `78 Rose Bowl game between Washington and Michigan–in a Chicago tavern–on his sojourn east after the escape, or his legal exchange of marriage vows with girlfriend
`Martha Chambers` in a crowded Orlando courtroom–on the anniversary of Kim Leach`s death–in front of the open-mouthed jurors who would that day sentence him to death for her murder.
Time is compressed; three and four characters are merged to one; names are changed. Location shots are limited to a few amid Utah`s snow-capped peaks.
But Bundy`s was a six-year, cross-country saga; Chomsky had but four hours–less commercials–to recount it. Bundy, 39, Florida State Prison inmate No. 069063, survived the signing of his first death warrant March 4, thanks to a federal stay. He has exhausted his state appeals.
Federal appeals, even if unsuccessful, should assure him of at least another year on death row at the Florida State Prison at Starke.
