Bundy fled the scene. ‘I felt lethal, on the verge of frenzy. My nightly bloodlust overflowed into my days and I had to leave the city. My mask of sanity was a victim of impending slippage. This was the bone season for me and I needed a vacation.’[198] A mile or so away from the sorority house, roommates were woken at 4am by loud noises from the adjoining apartment of their neighbour Cheryl Thomas (21). They called the police, and officers found Cheryl half naked, beaten and bloody, her shoulder dislocated, her jaw broken and her skull fractured in five places. While searching the apartment, they found a mask by the bed. Investigators had evidence—the mask, sperm, hairs, teeth marks, and witnesses but Bundy was not known in the state of Florida. ‘Confronted by a power that is law, the subject who is constituted as subject—who is “subjected”—is he who obeys. To the formal homogeneity of power in these various instances corresponds the general form of submission in the one who is constrained by it—whether the individual in question is the subject opposite the monarch, the citizen opposite the state, the child opposite the parent, the disciple opposite the master. A legislative power on one side, and an obedient subject on the other.’[199]
Bundy transgressed all law. Subjected by state, society, family, and lover, he stole, lied, denied, and raped. He who obeys—son, student, assistant—became he who should be obeyed—dominant partner, lawyer, police officer. His victims became the subjects opposite the monarch, the disciples opposite the master; in his trials, Bundy became the citizen opposite the state but with the full power of the law—he became both in his killings and in the trials of his killings both legislative power and obedient subject.
Having failed to lure 14-year-old Leslie Parmenter into a van he had stolen from FSU, Bundy travelled south to Lake City where he abducted Kimberly Leach on the 9th of February. Two months later, police discovered her decomposed body in a Suwannee County state park. Bundy later confessed to kidnap, murder, and rape of the young girl. A Pensecola police officer arrested Bundy for driving a stolen orange VW on the 15th of February. Subsequent searches and investigation found fibres, semen, and blood linking Bundy with the Florida killings.
Bundy once again defended himself but the evidence—including eyewitnesses, dental identification, and forensic evidence—swayed the jury. They found him guilty of two accounts of murder and two of assault and battery. On the 30th of July, he received two life sentences for the assaults and two deaths sentences for the homicides. On the 7th of January, Bundy stood trial for the killing of Kimberly Leach. As the plea was guilty by reason of insanity, Bundy did not represent himself but—in front of the judge, jury, prosecutors and his own defence team—put on a mask (one of the many real and psychological ones he would wear) of insanity, acting agitated, losing his temper, and shouting at witnesses. As in the sorority house trial, forensic evidence and eyewitnesses proved too much for the defence and, on the 9th of February, Bundy received another death sentence.
During the sorority house trials, Bundy’s estranged mother pleaded for her son’s life. While the Leach court was in session, Bundy asked Carole Ann Boone (a witness for the defence) to marry him and—because she accepted within a court of law—they were officially married. Bundy had asked his mother to officially pledge that he was her son, and asked his long-term partner to be his wife despite fears of rejection.
After a number of appeal requests and stays of execution, Bundy spent his time awaiting death by electric chair on Raiford Penitentiary’s Death Row. While there, he confessed to writers Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, FBI Special Agent William Hagmaier, and attorney Polly Nelson. In a series of meetings, Bundy assisted Detective Bob Keppel in his hunt for the ‘Green River Killer.’ He confessed to Keppel the seriousness of his crimes, going into details about locations, sequence of events, and his feelings at the time of the crimes. Bundy revealed for the first time that he had sex with the bodies of his victims, that his extreme perversion had become compulsive. ‘My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this—and I have countless times, in just about every act I’ve committed—and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing.’[200]
Bundy used blunt-force trauma and strangulation to incapacitate and murder his victims. He raped and sodomized them pre-, peri-, and post-mortem. He mutilated them, dismembered them, decapitated them, and returned to their bodies to rape and sodomize them again. In his early crimes, he completely eradicated any signs of himself—the double non-existence—police found no fingerprints or blood. In his break-in murders, the victims were killed before they could cry out, he raped them in silence, sodomized their bodies in the night, inserted things into their vaginas—‘Lacanian symbolic Law prohibiting direct access to the Thing… in which the central place of Power is also empty… the Thing is prohibited, its place is empty, and the same danger lurks: that of direct contact with the Thing (libidinal incest, political totalitarianism)…’[201] Each of Bundy’s actions involved rituaclass="underline" the mask, the cast, the uniform, the stripping of the bodies, the return to the corpse to re-enact the transgressive contact with the Thing, to relive his always repressed double libidinal incest with his sister/mother. As well as heads, he took photographs of the bodies as trophies. Psychiatrists determined variously that Bundy suffered from bipolar disorder, psychoses, multiple personality disorder. Bundy admitted that he found it impossible to feel guilt or remorse and he blamed the killings on many other factors, distancing himself from responsibility for the events. He blamed the machinery of power—his father/grandfather, his unknown father, his mother, police, courts, the media. He blamed society for his necrophiliac murders and, at 7am on January the 24th, society—in the form of police, doctors, lawyers, journalists and cheering crowds inside and outside the prison walls—witnessed or heard reports of his death by electrocution. ‘Hence capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility, and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.’[202]
Sergeant François Bertrand as classic necrophile received a one-year prison sentence then disappeared from history. 120 years later, Ted Bundy, as homicidal necrophile, fried in an electric chair. Both men driven to release their sexual and violent urges in the presence of a corpse. ‘In fact some, if they noticed my absence, might feel an odd, indefinable sense of relief. This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is crock. Some people truly do not need to be here.’[203]