High Court Refuses 3 Times to Block Bundy Execution

Theodore Bundy, his facade of innocence finally collapsing around him, on Monday grew more and more emotional, depressed and penitent as his scheduled execution neared.

The clean-cut, college-educated serial killer is set to be electrocuted here in North Florida at 7 this morning. He has been on Death Row 9 1/2 years, and he--like prison officials--seems to believe his time has come.

“It appeared to me that he realizes there is only a few hours left, and he realizes the finality of the situation,” prison spokesman Bob MacMaster said.

“He is somewhat emotional . . . bowed his head quite a bit . . . it appeared he cried.”

Bundy, 42, waits in an isolated cell 30 paces from the electric chair nicknamed Old Sparky. Two guards watch him full time.

High Court Rejects Requests

Monday night, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to block the execution. By votes of 5 to 4, 7 to 2, and 6 to 3, the justices rejected emergency requests aimed at keeping Bundy alive until a formal appeal could be filed with the nation’s highest court.

Justices William J. Brennan Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun, and John Paul Stevens voted to spare Bundy’s life in the 5-4 decision. The court’s five-member majority voted to let him die.

Bundy went about the business of a condemned man in his final hours. He met with a few friends, a Methodist minister and California religious broadcaster James Dobson--the only member of the media granted an interview.

In that talk, the killer blamed pornography for placing him on the road to sexual perversion and murder, Dobson, an anti-pornography crusader, said.

“He feels he began to run into trouble when he was 12 or 13 years of age and he began to find pornography in drugstores,” said Dobson, who videotaped the conversation.

Bundy then moved on to hard-core material that included depictions of violence, Dobson said.

“He eventually came to the point where there was nothing else he could see visually that gave him that high, and he thought about that . . . for a year or two and then made that tragic jump to acting out his behavior and actually killing someone,” Dobson said.

The past few weeks, Bundy has exhaustively recalled those killings in a remarkable series of conversations with investigators.

Giving up all pretense to innocence in what seems an effort to purge his demons, Bundy has reportedly confessed to about 30 murders in nine states.

“What I’ve heard the past couple of days is the premier serial killer,” said Bob Keppel of the Washington state attorney general’s office. “He’s the model. There is not another man like him--of his magnitude of killings . . . . “

Young Female Victims

Bundy’s victims were all young women or girls, most of them pretty with hair parted down the center. He sexually molested them before taking their lives. Then he usually dumped their bodies in remote forests.

Bundy told the investigator of revisiting the corpses many times--gruesome details of continuing assaults and mutilation.

“He was totally consumed with murder . . . “ Keppel said. “He had to be.”

Until last Friday, most of Bundy’s misdeeds were still, technically, unresolved crimes. He was an unrepentant killer who refused to admit his part in even the three Florida murders for which he had been condemned.

Since, he has admitted to even some murders to which he had never been tied.

Idaho Atty. Gen. Jim Jones said Bundy described two homicides to his chief investigator on Sunday.

“One seems to be fairly possible,” Jones said. “The other is tough to tell at this time.”

Eight Utah Murders Admitted

Sheriff Pete Hayworth of Salt Lake County, Utah, said Bundy admitted to eight murders in his state, “which is a few more than we suspected.”

Do the confessions stem from an attack of conscience or are they yet another tactic to forestall execution?

“I don’t think he cares that much about people,” said Florida Atty. Gen. Bob Butterworth. “He is trying to manipulate the system again. This time, I don’t think it’s going to work.”

Author Hughe Aynesworth, who wrote a remarkable book about Bundy after interviewing the killer, said: “I’m surprised he didn’t hold out for the last minute and then start shouting out confessions as they dragged him to the electric chair. That is Ted’s style.

“He is a great manipulator, but he is also whiny and a wimp.”

Bundy is perhaps the best-known killer on any Death Row in America. He has been the subject of five books and a made-for-TV movie.

Great Intelligence Cited

Rapt groupies have always had a fondness for his patrician looks--and lawmen have often credited him with great intelligence.

U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp, brushing aside one of Bundy’s many appeals, called him “probably the most competent serial killer in the country . . . a diabolical genius.”

Florida Gov. Bob Martinez last week refused to grant the killer a stay in return for information about unsolved crimes, saying he would “not negotiate over the bodies of Bundy’s victims.”

Soon after, the condemned man began to confess. Louise Bundy, his mother, said Sunday in Tacoma, Wash., that his admissions shocked her. “If he did those things, it’s a mental illness . . . if, indeed, he is substantiating it with facts that he really did do these things--oh, it’s the most devastating news of our lives.”

No family members came to be with Bundy on Monday. He is married to the former Carole Anne Boone, but the two have not visited since 1986.

Meal of Steak and Eggs

Bundy refused to give a preference for his last meal. So he will be given the “traditional steak and eggs, orange juice, hash browns and coffee,” MacMaster, the prison spokesman, said.

Breakfast is served at 5 a.m. Half an hour later, Bundy’s head will be shaved, as well as the skin on his right calf. Daubs of conductant will be applied--the better to speed the electricity.

Then he will be dressed in a white shirt and the trousers of a blue suit.

The jacket will be withheld until later, draped over his shoulders for the funeral.