Ted Bundy’s legal studies
Richard Gray in his paper "Psychopathy and Will to Power" published on Academia (https://www.academia.edu/17868303/PSYCHOPATHY_AND_WILL_TO_POWER_Ted_Bundy_and_Dennis_Rader) makes the claim that Ted Bundy failed the “grammar” section of the bar exam.
I don’t think Ted qualified to take the bar examination, which required attendance and graduation with a first degree in law from a law school in the United States which was approved by the American Bar Association (ABA).
To verify Gray’s claim, I checked the police files related to Ted’s studies, published on Internet Archive, which provide good insight about Ted’s law school studies. I have compiled here a selection of police files related to Ted’s law school studies: https://archive.org/details/he-was-to-attend-the-university-of-utah-in-the-fall-of-1973-but-didnt
Ted entered Univ. of Puget Sound (Tacoma) on Sept. 1965 and left on June 1966, with no Law degree, because he never graduated (Ted’s only degree was a B.S. in Psychology at Univ. of Washington in 1972).
Among the subjects he studied there: Procedure, Contracts, Property, Torts, Criminal Law, Legislation, English Comp., World Lit., General Economy, American National Govt, Comp. Govt.
So he did his first year of law school at the University of Puget Sound, but dropped out. According to one of his UPS professors, Thomas R. Heitz, who was interviewed on video many years later and his interview can be watched on Youtube, Ted dropped out when he was about to be failed.
And between Dec. 1972 and May 1974, Ted worked for the King County Law & Justice Planning.
Then he was accepted as a first year student at the University of Utah, College of Law (Salt Lake City) for the Fall semester 1974.
The subjects he studied at the University of Utah College of Law between 1974-75 were: Introd. to Law, Civ. Prac., Contracts, Criminal Law / Proc., Property, Torts, Legal Writing, Constitutional Law...
Interestingly, I haven’t even encountered Grammar among the subjects he studied in law school, either at the University of Puget Sound or at the University of Utah, College of Law. And I also don’t remember having come across any comment from his professors suggesting that he had had a poor command of the English grammar.
According to Gray's controversial claim, Ted's poor grammar use undermined his chance of passing the bar exam... But judging from Ted’s personal letters from the 70’s and 80’s (available on various websites on the Internet), Ted seemed to be writing compellingly and I’d have said he had a strong command of the English language. A strong command of the English language is often described as an in depth knowledge of grammar.
Available on Youtube is also an
interview with J. Wendell Bayles, who taught Legal Writing & Torts for freshman students at the U
of U, Ted started having some problems attending not long into the semester,
and Wendell Bayles himself sent him a warning letter that his grade was in
danger because of non-attendance, and Ted nearly risked not being allowed to
sit for Bayles’ exam (because he had missed many classes), but allegedly begged
Bayles to let him sit for the exam and Bayles agreed on condition that from
then on he’d attend every class session until the end of the semester. So Ted
attended class regularly at that point and sat for Bayles’ exam and he was
“very capable”, according to Bayles. Bayles also remembered that Ted passed his
exam, “he did quite well actually”, said Bayles...
I read a bit about Legal Writing, and learned that introduces the process of legal analysis and reasoning and teaches students to produce written documents in the style and format appropriate for the audience and purpose, with an emphasis on objective analysis and writing.
And besides the Legal Writing & Torts, there were more exams that Ted needed to take at U of U and the other professors agreed to let him take their exams too.
Ted didn't complete his legal studies and dropped out after his first year at U of U just like he had done at the Univ. of Puget Sound. A one-year stint in both cases.
Had Ted continued on to the 3rd year in Law School, at the University of Utah, he might have gotten to preparing for the bar exam eventually.
In the 70’s it would have taken him graduating from the University of Utah's law school and clerking for a judge, to get a chance at passing the bar exam and working as an attorney.
So to sum it up, Ted would have needed to graduate from a Law university to be eligible to pass the bar exam.
But even though he hadn't pass the bar exam, Ted was allowed to represent himself in the Chi Omega and Leach trials. Jerry Blair, one of the lead prosecutors in the Leach trial, remembered Ted as a former law student who argued his own case with lawyerlike skill (Ted was representing himself in the Leach trial and had been given an office to work on his defense, and Blair's office was nearby). Blair was interviewed for The Mayo Free Press of January 15, 2009.
And reading up on Ted’s
legal studies history, I also came across Randy Dryer’s interviews about Ted. Dryer,
current Law Professor at the University of Utah and graduate of the program, was
law student at the College of Law in 1974, and served as student bar
association president the year that he and his classmates dealt with the
initial shock and denial, and ultimately the horrifying realization, that a
fellow college of law student who they all knew and liked -Ted Bundy - was a
serial killer. That notorious piece of Dryer’s history landed him on 20/20 with College
of Law alumna and Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells in the winter of 2019, and
the 20/20 episodes featuring Dryer can be watched on my Internet Archive channel:
https://archive.org/details/bundy-2020-pt-4
https://archive.org/details/bundy-2020-pt-5
And Dryer also remembered Ted Bundy as a friendly figure, in an interview published in The Daily Utah Chronicle in 2019: https://dailyutahchronicle.com/2019/02/18/stories-of-a-serial-killer-u-law-professor-remembers-ted-bundy/
“He was a year behind me in [the program.] I knew his name and he knew mine”, he told The Daily Utah Chronicle... “I was the President of the Student Bar Association at the time, and the dean called me into his office, swore me to secrecy and said, ‘The police believe we have a murderer in our law school. One of his escaped victims will be coming with plainclothes policeman to see if she can identify him.’ So, the dean and myself and this woman and two policemen were there waiting for Ted Bundy to come out of criminal law class. The bell rang. About 80 students walk out. No Ted Bundy — he was absent that day.”
But the next day, Dryer hosted a party that Bundy attended...
“When the party was winding down, some people were headed to an afterparty,” said Dryer. “Ted says to Brooke [Wells, another student] ‘I’ll give you a ride.’ I can’t say anything, but I’m not going to let her go. So, I convinced her to stay and help me clean up. She later became a Federal Magistrate Judge, and mentioned in her swearing-in-ceremony, ‘I might not even be here today but for Randy Dryer not letting me get into Ted Bundy’s car.’”
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