The Nation - News from Oct. 23, 1987

Theodore Bundy chewed gum and smiled in federal court in Orlando, Fla., while his former lawyer testified the suspected serial killer was mentally incompetent and unqualified to stand trial when he was convicted of three murders. Investigators and prosecutors in Washington, Utah and Colorado have linked Bundy to at least a score of disappearances and murders of young women in the 1970s. The competency hearings, ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this month, marked the first time that Bundy, now 40, had been outside Florida State Prison near Starke in seven years. Michael J. Minerva had led Bundy’s first court-appointed defense team but was fired by him in May of 1979.