I was in Florida when Ted Bundy was on trial. My mother was right about his, and every, execution
Tallahassee was still in shock when my family arrived from Melbourne at the start of 1979, just 12 months after Ted Bundy hideously murdered two young women asleep in their college dorm.
My father was going to do his PhD at Florida State, the university where the victims studied, and Bundy’s blank, handsome features still featured regularly on the front page of the Tallahassee Democrat.
Adults talked in whispers about what happened to those poor girls and conversations stopped when children entered the room. I had turned 10, just old enough to start paying attention to adult matters and curious to find out more.
It was easy enough to glean the details – two sorority sisters were discovered in their beds, clubbed to death, two others barely alive. Girls at the elementary school speculated, in languid accents I could barely understand, that there was a victim our age. What happened to her used words we didn’t understand.
Bundy was locked up two hours away in Florida State Penitentiary but the most famous convict in America loomed over the town as everyone waited for his trial to begin.
Rape, serial murder, capital punishment: all these words entered my vocabulary that year.
Just as I graduated from elementary school in May 1979, Florida’s governor signed the death warrant for John Spenkelink, a drifter who’d killed a man he claimed had robbed and raped him, but he had convinced no judge and exhausted all his appeals.
He would be the first involuntary execution since the US Supreme Court restored the death penalty in 1976 after a four-year moratorium and the first man to die in Florida’s antique electric chair, “Old Sparky”, in 15 years.
Almost two-thirds of Americans supported the death penalty by 1979 but the debate divided Tallahassee. The horror of the Chi Omega murders was more than enough to galvanise the many who believed in justice, damnation and hellfire. But my parents, like many people in the liberal post-graduate student village where we lived, were opposed.
So too were many Christian groups, organising vigils outside the capitol’s courthouses for the right to life, before that phrase was subsumed by the anti-abortion crusade.
At the urging of one of our neighbours, my mother joined the small vigil overnight outside the prison the night before Spenkelink was executed.
“They are killing him in your name,” our neighbour said as they talked about the case at the communal laundry.
“Not in my name,” my mother said. “I’m not an American.”
“If you don’t protest, it will be in your name.”
For my mother, May 25 was a night of candles, prayers and chants: “Death row must go”. She says people yelled at them from passing cars but it was peaceful. Within the prison, an Associated Press stringer improbably named Thomas Slaughter reported the condemned man “looked terrified and helpless. His eyes were wide open.”
I remember my parents talking about how wrong it was for the government to kill someone, how sad, how dangerous. “It degrades us all,” my mother said.
But this stance was sorely tested six days later, when Bundy was shipped to town for his first pre-trial hearings, a former law student showboating in the first nationally televised trial, demanding a new defence attorney, seeking delays, playing the lead. On June 12, Judge Edward Cowart relocated the trial to Miami on the grounds it would be impossible to field an impartial jury in Tallahassee.
At night I eavesdropped on the heated discussions downstairs, my mother saying even someone as evil as Bundy should not be executed, our neighbours adamant someone guilty of such horrendous crimes should die.
So I’ve been thinking about Bundy this week, ever since US War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced there would be a livestream of the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the US Army major who betrayed and shot dead 13 unarmed comrades in 2009.
Here is another man undeniably guilty of terrible crimes. The US is on the threshold of another step change in how it metes out justice for the worst crimes. The idea of an execution broadcast live has horrified many, even those who believe in the death penalty as something that must be carried out in medical doses before only a dozen witnesses.
Now the debate has moved from the legitimacy of the death penalty to the corrupting influence of a televised execution. Fuelled by the algorithm of extremes, this is a show that will leave some viewers craving more.
But the botched execution of Christa Pike, who had to be hospitalised when death by injection failed, exposes the nightmare logic of capital punishment even when it is supposed to be sombre and clinical.
Forty-seven years after my mother lit a candle outside the state penitentiary, Florida is leading America’s state-sanctioned killing spree, executing a record 19 prisoners last year and fatally injecting another 16 already in 2026, more than all other states combined.
The cause she believed in back then, is so far a lost cause. The 800-strong crowd gathered for Bundy’s execution in 1989, a decade later, let off fireworks as they celebrated his death with an all-night party.
But she was and is still right. Every execution, public or secret, degrades us all.
Michelle Griffin is the Herald’s federal editor.
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