Ted Bundy’s unease at being looked at by strangers
Larry Peoples, former
correctional officer at Florida State Prison, said in a 2019 interview that
Bundy was a very quiet person who kept to himself and didn’t like to be looked
at:
“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...”
The full interview can be heard here: https://archive.org/details/bonus-for-bundy
Interestingly, Michael Lambrix, former death row inmate at
Florida State Prison, wrote in a blog article that the prison authorities “just liked to keep him [Bundy] on the second floor
near the officers’ quarter deck so that when the occasional ‘four group’ of
politicians or judges would come through, they could be paraded down the outer
catwalk and get their peek at ‘Bundy’. Most of the time we would know when a
tour group was coming and when we heard that outer catwalk door open, we would
quickly throw on our headphones and pretend to watch TV as none of us cared to
be their entertainment.”
So according to Lambrix, the
prison authorities conspired with the politicians and judges who visited
the prison, so that they could get direct access to Bundy. But the inmates
learned the prison’s rituals and they tried to find ways to protect
themselves. Lambrix’ full account is
available here:
https://doinglifeondeathrow.blogspot.com/2015/09/alcatraz-of-south-part-7-redemption-in.html
I thought Ted’s unease at being looked at by strangers (the
people who came in for tours at the prison) and his comparison of himself with
a caged animal in a zoo, was interesting.
I wondered about the motives of the people who came to the
prison specifically to see Ted Bundy. Why
did they want to see death row, this otherwise hidden territory in the American
criminal justice system, and Ted Bundy specifically? Did they have a fascination with the unusual conditions
death row inmates found themselves in? Did they go down there to pass
moral judgment? Was it a voyeuristic trip for them?... Their gaze was most likely based on distance, on privilege,
on a feeling that what they looked at was really other (pathetic,
pitiable, repulsive in some cases). Prurient voyeurism, rather
than a way of understanding the world and shedding new light on its fringes
or the Florida prison system, was what made
most people visit death row at Florida State Prison, and Ted apparently sensed
their voyeurism in some cases and the fact that they wouldn’t identify with
him, and even confronted them from his cell allegedly (according to former
correctional officer Larry Peoples).
On death row, the prisoners have the least mobility out of
all the other places in the penitentiary. They’re put in lockdown most of the
time (they can only go to exercise in a small yard for a few hours a week, and to meet their lawyers in a specially
designated room), and coming to look at them like characters in a peep
show, reveals people’s predatory impulses.
Filmmaker Bruce Jackson, who had unsupervised access to the
Row in Texas in the 70’s and made a documentary called “Death Row”, said in an
interview published on the American Suburb X website, that Death row is
different from every other prison in this critical regard: there is less to do
on Death Row than any other kind of prison, and everyplace else in the
penitentiary people are doing time. If you say to somebody, “What are you
doing?” “I’m doing a nickel, I’m doing a dime, I’m doing a quarter.” Death row,
they’re just waiting. They’re pending. Everything about the place is different.
The men on death row spend their time waiting for the State to kill them or
fighting as hard as they can to prevent that death from happening. Their
hardest job is staying sane, I expect, and trying not to be confused or angry
when they come out of the small one-man cells they’re constantly locked in.
Death row, unlike ordinary prison, operates under Bruce
Jackson would call the madhouse rules. On death row, time doesn’t count.
Madhouse time doesn’t count. Death row, you’re not serving a sentence; you’re
there while they decide what they’re going to do with you, whether they‘re
going to execute you or cut you loose. In the madhouse, you’re not there for a
sentence; you’re there until they decide what they’re going to do with you.
For Bruce Jackson, who visited
Death Row to make a documentary, that trip was an emotionally
exhausting experience. His documentary was broadcast on PBS stations in the US
and also in Germany and in France (President François Mitterand used it in
France as part of his campaign to get rid of France’s capital punishment, a
successful campaign).
Jackson pushed the burgeoning of the prisons back to slavery,
to how do you legitimize slavery in an ostensibly democratic society.
Ted no doubt must have sensed the voyeur lurking in the people interested to see him, being accustomed to infamy and its effect on people. And if he didn’t remain passive and indeed confronted those people who were curious to see him, as Larry Peoples said, it would have been all the more interesting. He was most likely sensitive to the issues of normalcy and freak.
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