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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