Bundy's Message

ON January 25, a man was murdered.

With a dozen witnesses present, his assailants strapped him to a wooden chair and placed a black hood over his head.

At 7:07 a.m., 2000 volts of electricity pulsated through his body for one full minute, causing his body to surge back in violent reaction, pressing him against the back of the chair.

At 7:16 a.m. Theodore Robert Bundy, the nation's most notorious serial killer, was pronounced dead.

Outside Florida State Prison where Bundy was executed, something equally gruesome occurred. Some 300 spectators gathered in the early morning hours to celebrate Bundy's death.

People who ordinarily would have been lying in bed sleeping or comuting to work abandoned their daily routines to hold sparklers and signs reading, "Burn, Bundy Burn," "BBQ," and "Bundy, Catch the Current."

When Bundy's execution was announced, a large cheer went up. One man waved an American flag.

Ted Bundy, who fought until his end for a stay of execution, lost the battle. But Bundy, whose life was made significant by the joy he found in death, won the war.

BUNDY was one of the most gruesome serial killers in memory. In 1980 he was convicted of the murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. Leach had been abducted, mutilated, slain and abandoned in a pig sty. In 1979, Bundy was found guilty of the murders of two Florida State students, whom he bludgeoned and strangled in their sorority house. All told, Bundy was suspected of over 30 murders in Florida and the Pacific Northwest.

But Bundy was never what a serial killer was supposed to be like. He didn't hear voices or look like a violent sociopath on the Charles Manson model. He wasn't raised in the streets, learning crime as a way of life. The Bundy case throws sociology texts out the window; Ted Bundy was a nice guy.

Ted Bundy was the kind of guy fathers like their daughters to date or the kind of guy that buttoned-down law firms prefer to hire. In college, Bundy was a B-plus student who reportedly loved children and poetry. Before he began his killing spree in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, Bundy, then the assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Commission, was a rising star in Seattle Republican Party politics.

A judge who presided over an early Bundy trial reportedly scoffed at a later Bundy attempt to use the insanity defense, saying that Bundy was a sane and intelligent man who knew exactly what he was doing when he abducted and murdered his victims.

As Bundy prosecutor Jerry Blair told The New York Times last week, "[Bundy] killed for the sheer thrill of the act."

IN both his life and his death, Bundy demonstrated the fragility of our society and our self-image. As Bundy told The New York Times in 1986, "if anyone considers me a monster that's just something they'll have to confront in themselves. For people to want to condemn someone, to dehumanize someone like me is a very popular and effective and understandable way of dealing with a fear and a threat that is incomprehensible."

The fear that Bundy spoke of is the fear that we are so similar to him. He was sane, charming, intelligent and yet pure evil. There is nothing in his life that we can point to as a reason for why this man is such an aberration. Ted Bundy could be our parent, our lover, our friend--or even ourselves.

Ted Bundy was executed because the judicial system believed he did not belong to our vision of an ordered society. Where we believe that we respect the sanctity of human life, he was a man who found pleasure in that fleeting, tragic moment when life is extinguished.

If Bundy's life is to have any positive impact, it is to warn us how short is the path from civilization to savagery, and how easily traveled.

At the moment of Bundy's death the 300 men and women gathered outside the prison started down that path. How much resepct for the sanctity of human life did they have, as they sang to the tune of "Old Smokey": "He bludgeoned the poor girls/all over the head/Now we're all ecstatic/Ted Bundy is dead"?

Ted Bundy never really died. His charred corpse may now be long buried, and the families of his victims may have found some satisfaction in his execution. But Bundy's spirit--his bloodlust--lives on, if not in a society that preserves capital punishment, than certainly in the hearts and minds of those standing in the pre-dawn light, hawking electric chair pins and cheering as Bundy's hearse drove away.