James Coleman on what might have caused Bundy to murder, and on Bundy's urge to confess

From a January 27, 1989 article by J. Craig Crawford, published in The Orlando Sentinel:

 

Ted Bundy probably "sabotaged" any hope of persuading the courts to stop his execution when he made a calculated last-minute bid to trade murder confessions for his life, the killer's lawyer said Thursday.

Attorney James Coleman, who knew for some time that Bundy had committed "two or three dozen" murders, said he advised his client against "trading over the victims' bodies."

"I told him it was a waste of time, and that it would look offensive because it was offensive," Coleman said in his first interview since Bundy's execution.

When Bundy ignored his advice and began confessing to 23 murders, Coleman began his last desperate attempt to keep the killer alive. He arranged for Bundy to meet with his psychiatrist on Monday instead of more detectives who were looking for details of unsolved murders.

Coleman, who has represented Bundy since 1986, also said he didn't believe his client's videotaped statements Monday that pornography and alcohol drove him to violent crime. Bundy made the statements in his last public interview before being executed in Florida's electric chair Tuesday for killing a 12-year-old Lake City girl.

"I don't think he even believed it," Coleman said. "That was vintage Bundy. It was Bundy the actor. He didn't know what made him kill people. No one did."

Coleman also did not believe Bundy when he warned in the videotape that many others like him are roaming the streets of the United States.

"It was very complex," Coleman said. "Ted Bundy was unique."

In his years with the killer, Coleman said he became convinced that Bundy was mentally ill - "manic depressive." He and others also became convinced that Bundy suffered something traumatic early in his childhood. Yet no one could ever provoke him to discuss it.

"There had to be some history of violence against him," Coleman said. "He didn't get that way by reading Playboy."

For years after his arrest, Coleman said, the killer sought the answer to his own riddle by confessing to his lawyers and psychiatrists about the numerous killings. Along the way, however, his attorneys convinced Bundy to stop short of confessing to detectives.

"He wanted them to try and understand, but he didn't understand himself, either," Coleman said. "He spent a lot of time trying."

Since 1986 Bundy privately confessed to "two or three dozen" murders in talks with his attorneys and psychiatrists, the lawyer said. He discounts recent speculation of 50 or 100 killings.

But Bundy would not talk about the murders for which he was convicted in Florida, Coleman said. "There was something significantly different about what happened in those. He was out of control at that point. So he never discussed the details."

Although Coleman said Bundy had an "urge to confess," the lawyer was surprised to learn last week of talk about trading the information of other murders for a delay in the execution. Coleman said he knew nothing about such a plan until Jan. 18, six days before the execution.

That was the day after Gov. Bob Martinez signed Bundy's death warrant.

Bundy and Sarasota lawyer Diana Weiner, who handled civil matters for the death row inmate, thought Martinez would delay the execution if Bundy talked about unsolved crimes, Coleman said. Volusia State Attorney John Tanner, Bundy's spiritual adviser, was to relay the offer to Martinez.

Coleman argued against it.

"All you had to do was say it out loud and you realized how bad an idea it really was," said Coleman. He said he felt such a plan might work if it came from officials of the states where Bundy committed the crimes.

"But coming from Bundy it would look like what it was - a pathetic ploy," said Coleman.

After a lengthy discussion with Bundy at the Florida State Prison near Starke, Coleman thought he had persuaded his client to keep silent. The lawyer then left for three days of traveling the state to pursue Bundy's cause.

"I told him that the spectacle of peddling information for time would turn the courts against us," said Coleman. "I thought we had it under control."

But Weiner and Tanner were at Bundy's side during the next few days, urging him to talk to police about other murders.

It wasn't until Coleman and the defense team flew to Orlando on Saturday for a hearing that he learned of Bundy's confessions in The Orlando Sentinel. Already convicted of three murders and one kidnapping, Bundy was telling detectives from across the nation about other crimes.

"Until I stepped off that plane in Orlando and read in the newspaper about all these confessions, I thought it was behind us," said Coleman. "That's when I found out."

At that moment Coleman felt "we didn't have a chance," he said. "It didn't matter what our arguments were. Nobody gave a crap what we did.

"Our only hope was to convince some judge that Bundy's constitutional rights were violated" in imposing the death sentence, said the Washington attorney. "But once the courts heard he was describing more and more murders, they probably thought, 'why bother?' "

Coleman said he thought Bundy understood that the public outcry for his death would get louder if he talked about murders he had never been charged with.

"I don't know what happened," he said.

Ever since his 1978 arrest in the killings of two Florida State University sorority sisters, Bundy always had "an urge to confess" that his lawyers tried to block, Coleman said. He compared last weekend's ill-fated confessions with the way Bundy sabotaged his 1980 trial for the murder of Lake City schoolgirl Kimberly Leach.

About halfway through the trial Bundy, a law school dropout who represented himself on the defense team, started pushing his attorneys to use tactics they disagreed with. He badgered witnesses and strutted around the courtroom.

"He took over," said Coleman. "And that's what he did here."

After the confessions began Friday, Coleman arranged for psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis to visit Bundy, hoping he would rather talk to her than to more detectives. Bundy agreed.

"He was disappointed that the detectives didn't want to talk about why he did these things," said Coleman. "They only cared about details, such as where the bodies were buried."

But Bundy knew that Lewis was more interested in trying to understand him, Coleman said. So Bundy agreed to meet with her Monday.

"But by then it was too late," said Coleman. "The damage was done."