Larry Peoples talking about Ted Bundy’s 1984 failed escape, and about witnessing Ted’s execution

Larry Peoples was a correctional officer at Florida State Prison when Ted Bundy was a death row inmate there, and in 2019 he was a special guest of the podcast “Murder and Mysteries with Massnick” and talked about Ted. The podcast was uploaded on my Internet Archive site:

https://archive.org/details/bonus-for-bundy

Peoples can be heard saying: “Schaefer and Bundy were very similar in their intelligence, but they were different on the row. Bundy was a different person. He was a very quiet person. He kept to himself. On the outside of the cell block, we had this catwalk, we called it... where people can walk down in case we’d have to fire tear gas or whatever, or get scolded by staff or whatever... And people would come in for tours at the prison, and the very first thing they wanted to see was Bundy, of course. So they would walk down the row and every time they walked down the row, Bundy would have a sheet up over his bars, because he didn’t want to be seen. And he would get angry and say, ‘look, I’m not an animal in a zoo, I don’t want you coming down here and looking at me! Why don’t you just turn around and go back!’... And he’d close the sheet, and that would be the end of that. So after a while, they just stopped taking the tours down there because he just kept putting the sheet up over his bars.

So he was very quiet, very private, and he did not make a lot of trouble, as far as I can remember, other than some medical issues that he had with the administration... for his medical care...”

Then Peoples remembered how Ted and Manuel Valle, who were celling next to each other (Peoples thinks Ted was in cell 3 and Manuel Valle was in cell 2), tried to escape back in 1984... According to Peoples, he and other guards went down there beating the bars, meaning they took a pallet and went down there and just banged the bars to make sure they weren’t cut. And when they got down, they started with the runner’s cell, cell no 1, and they got to cell 2, which was Manuel Valle’s cell, and they hit the bars and then all of a sudden half the bars fell out, because they’d been cut, and Manuel Valle had taken tooth paste and filled it in, and then the runner allegedly gave Manuel some paint to match the bars. The guards then handcuffed Manuel and put him in the shower on that row, and they kept banging and banging, and they got to Ted’s cell, and a section of his bars also fell out. Ted was then also handcuffed and put in the shower. And then Peoples remembered how the sergeant on that wing said, “We’d better get off this row, because we don’t know how many people have their cell bars cut”... Peoples also remembered how the whole crew got down there, about 10-15 officers, and they all beat the bars.

In 1984, Peoples understood that the Ted’s and Manuel’s plan was to take an officer hostage on the nightshift and then try to get out through the bars. And the guards found bars cut in the windows, on the grill gates, meaning that the prisoners were just about ready to leave. And Peoples said that they found out later that Ted and Manuel used hacksaw blades smuggled in through maintenance or brought in by a “dirty” officer, to cut the bars. According to Peoples, those are usually the two ways anything like that gets inside the prison: either smuggled in through maintenance, or brought in by a “dirty” officer.

Peoples then said that the guards made it their habit to be vigilant and make sure the bars were intact and security wasn’t compromised.

Then Peoples is also heard recalling how the death row wing in the Florida State Prison had no air conditioning, and wasn’t heated, and so the jail standards weren’t modern for the inmates, while Ted was an inmate there. Peoples remembered that during the summer, when it was very hot (upper 90’s), the inmates would break the windows on the outside to get more wind and more air in, and then when it got really cold, in January and February, it would be freezing on death row at FSP (temperatures would be in the 20’s), because there were no windows. The officers like Peoples, who had to work in that environment, would go into one of the supply closets and would take a butt can and put paper in it sometimes and would light a fire to cope with the cold. Peoples remembered they’d have their hands over this butt can with the paper burning just to be able to get their hands warm, because it was so cold.

Peoples then is heard talking about Ted’s execution. He remembered that he was the van driver that day, for Ted’s execution, and was at the Death Chamber when Ted died. Peoples was among those who watched him die. He remembered that Ted was shaved and a part of his body was tanned while another part was white (the tan was from the times when he walked around in the yard). Then Ted sat in the electric chair, which was within 6-7 ft of the people on the other side of the glass. Ted could see the people in front of him very well, and he could also see himself in the chair, in the reflection on the glass. Peoples was also present when the prison staff lifted the leather apron off Ted’s face.

Peoples had become familiar with the whole death process in the years he worked as a correctional officer.

Peoples is also heard saying that he felt that the death row inmates “put themselves there” and the law said that they had to be executed, and so he seemed to have easily agreed to work with the other correctional officers as a team to make that happen. However, Jesse Tafero’s execution bothered Peoples, and he ended up writing a book about it, called “Execution Day Journal”. Jesse’s hair was caught on fire, after the maintenance superintendent at the time replaced the natural sponge with a synthetic (plastic) one. Also, years after his execution, Jesse was declared innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and executed. Peoples however was affected by the fact that Jesse’s execution was done badly, but it didn’t change his opinion on the death penalty and the electric chair. Peoples was working the Death House security the day Jesse Tafero died.