Ex-Law Student Bundy Faces Electric Chair in Florida Deaths

Theodore Bundy, a onetime law student believed responsible for the murders of several women across the country, is scheduled to die next week in the state’s electric chair, eight years after he strangled two sleeping sorority sisters.

Unless lawyers win a stay, the 39-year-old Bundy will be executed on March 4 for the Jan. 15, 1978, beatings and strangulations of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy as they slept in the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University.

The former law student also has been sentenced to death in Florida for the killing of a child, convicted in a Utah kidnapping, charged in a Colorado slaying, and once was sought by the FBI for questioning in 36 slayings of young women, mostly in the West.

“Bundy is like a plague. Everywhere he goes, death follows,” Assistant State Attorney Jack Poitinger said at a December hearing before the Board of Executive Clemency.

Prosecutors said Bundy entered the Chi Omega house and beat four women with a club, killing two and seriously injuring two others. They said he then broke into a nearby house, where he severely beat another woman.

On behalf of Bundy, three lawyers are searching 85 volumes of court transcripts for a trial error that could bring a reprieve or a delay of execution. The lawyers work for the Office of Capital Collateral Representative, a state agency that provides lawyers for indigent inmates once death warrants have been signed.

Larry Spalding, head of the office, said last week that Bundy probably would get a stay since it was his first death warrant; no one in Florida has been executed on a first warrant since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976.

Bundy, a graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle, studied law at the University of Puget Sound and the University of Utah. He once helped design a program in King County, Wash., to crack down on habitual criminals.