Tonight, our topic will be murder as a growth industry.
Murder has become an epidemic in America.
In the last ten years, the homicide rate has increased by leaps and bounds.
My God, somebody fired a shot!
These tragedies keep getting closer and closer to home.
I'm afraid to let my kids walk out the door.
Each urban crime wave will touch off a new round of gun buying.
- Step out, Mr. Bundy. - I'll plead not guilty right now.
There has been a disturbing growth in cult phenomenon in this country.
I shall be God. There shall be no other.
All the elements are present for one of the most sensational murder trials in American history.
Seven people brutally murdered in the glare of Hollywood publicity.
Young girls supposedly under the spell of a bearded Svengali
who allegedly masterminded the seven murders.
The '70s was a decade of just brutal violence
on every front and anywhere that you look in America.
At the time of a mass murder, there is a lot of media coverage,
but usually after a brief period of time,
the identity of the perpetrator tends to fade from the public's consciousness.
But not so with the Manson case.
It was the biggest publicity case the DA's office had ever had.
The Manson trial begins the 1970s on such an evil sadistic note.
Seven innocent people died.
Steve Parent, a teenager. Abigail Folger, Folger Coffee.
Jay Sebring. Wojciech Frykowski.
The LaBiancas and Sharon Tate.
All of you know how beautiful she was,
but only few of you know how good she was.
And you had Charles Manson himself, the charismatic leader of the family
who didn't show any remorse or any respect for the system.
- Are you all happy with your court? - Yeah.
- Good. It's funny. - Are you happy with it?
Am I happy? It's your court. I wouldn't accept it.
The problem was that he did not physically participate in these murders.
But only Manson had a motive to commit these murders,
and that motive was Helter Skelter.
Manson envisioned that white people would turn against the black man
if they thought the black man had committed these seven murders.
And ultimately there would be a civil war between blacks and whites.
Manson foresaw that the black man would win this war,
But later on he said the black man, because of inexperience,
would simply not be able to handle the reins of power,
so he would have to look around at those white people who had survived,
who had escaped from Helter Skelter.
In other words, turn over the reins of power to Charles Manson and his family.
When the words "Helter Skelter" were found printed in blood,
I argued to the jury this was tantamount
to Manson's fingerprints being found at the murder scene.
Manson sat through all this saying nothing.
But today he had an "X" scratched in his forehead.
It is his way of saying that he has exed himself out of society.
Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten
sang as the went to and from court today,
as if to show they are with Manson and he is with them.
The three women were coached by Charlie every morning.
"Here's things I want you to do."
So they would do everything from sing mocking songs to the judge
to when Charlie is making one of his impassioned speeches,
mouthing the words along with him.
I don't have any guilt. I know what I've done.
And no man can judge me. I judge me.
- Are you bitter? - Bitter? No. No.
You've paid some price so far.
Price? You have eyes? Open them.
Charlie Manson is a great presenter.
But Vincent Bugliosi was better.
And when you put these two antagonists into a courtroom,
America thought this is entertainment.
People who are curious about the Tate murders
go to the Los Angeles Hall of Justice, where they wait in long lines.
Some people are so interested that they get to the courthouse at 4:00 AM.
Something else this trial has done is gather together again
those members of Manson's family who are not in jail.
The world is getting crazy.
One read part of a letter that Manson wrote to the District Attorney.
I am writing to you because I don't think I am getting a fair trial.
I am an individual. One man standing alone, defending myself.
Contrast this with the facilities you have available to you.
I noted, for example, the coverage of the Charles Manson case.
Here was a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly,
of eight murders without reason.
Here was a man yet, who as far as the coverage is concerned,
who appeared to be rather a glamorous figure.
The LA Times next morning, "Manson guilty, Nixon declares."
Manson got a hold of the paper,
stands up in front of the jury with a silly little smile on his face,
and he shows the jury the headline.
A tight ring of security surrounds the Hall of Justice today
as the Manson jury deliberates.
Meanwhile, members of the Manson clan
continue their vigil outside the Hall of Justice.
They've been there since the start of the trial.
If Charlie were convicted of these charges,
what happens to the rest of the members of the family?
There's no "if." Charlie will get out.
All the people in jail will get out and we'll all go to the desert together.
The jury hearing the charges against Charles Manson
and three girl members of his so-called "family"
brought in its verdict this afternoon.
And outside the court, Manson's girl followers got the news by radio.
Uh, they've convicted these people and you are next, all of you.
There's a revolution coming very soon.
Today the judge formally passed sentence of Charles Manson and his girls.
The death penalty he said, "for seven senseless murders."
He said not only was the sentence appropriate, but almost compelled in this case.
So death in the gas chamber, he said.
The very name Manson has become a metaphor for evil,
catapulting him to almost mythological proportions.
And there's a side to human nature, for whatever reason,
that is fascinated by pure unalloyed evil.
But if the death penalty is to mean anything in the state of California,
other than two empty words, this unquestionably was a proper case
for the imposition of the death penalty.
The California Supreme Court ruled today that the death penalty is unconstitutional.
That will save five women and 102 men,
including Charles Manson, from the gas chamber.
Should there be a supreme penalty for committing a crime?
What do you think?
I'm the one who's asking you.
Yeah, but if I don't give you the answer that you want...
- Doesn't matter to me. - Doesn't matter.
- It's your opinion. - Well, uh...
I don't have the authority to say anything like that.
You have the authority to believe.
I believe what I'm told to believe.
Don't you?
The boy was shot right at the side of the car.
The girl apparently tried to run.
She was shot and found 28 feet further on.
Do you have any idea what the possible motive might be for this killing?
We have no motive at this time.
The Zodiac Killer, this unknown person,
committed dozens of murders in the 1960s and the 1970s.
We really don't know the full dimensions of the case.
But we know he's the Zodiac because he started writing to the police,
claiming credit in great detail,
articulating and explaining what he did to these victims.
The Chronicle received two letters. They notified us immediately.
The criminologist was sent over to the newspaper, as were inspectors,
and the two letters were examined and opened.
The Zodiac's reaching out to the police,
repeatedly, and in great length, was something new.
The psychotic killer has already murdered five.
One at a lovers' lane near a lake just north of San Francisco.
Three others in nearby Vallejo.
The latest, a taxi driver in San Francisco.
The Zodiac Killer seems to crave publicity.
He's sent letters and cryptograms to newspapers and the police,
recounting his crimes, threatening more murders,
and making Bay Area residents very edgy.
In the '70s there was a certain kind of killer
who had the skill to get away with murder
long enough to assemble a body count
where they would be classified a serial killer.
In Los Angeles, a killer the police are calling the Hillside Strangler
has murdered ten young women
and left their bodies on the hillsides along the highways.
Today the police found another. Number eleven, they think.
Two young paper boys discovered what appeared to be the latest victim.
The body had been dumped 15 feet down an embankment in a residential neighborhood.
The victim was a woman about 20 years old, and the body was nude.
This series of murders has had a chilling effect among the people in the city.
In Los Angeles, more women than ever before are learning how to defend themselves.
Susan Ball skipped night school for a week. She says she can't sleep because of the murders.
I guess I just want to learn how to maybe give myself a few seconds so I can live.
There have been enough bodies found over a wide enough area
to strongly suggest more than one killer.
But police say they really don't know.
Today the Los Angeles Police say they have a suspect.
A man in jail in another state.
Los Angeles Police say they have enough evidence
to charge 27-year-old Kenneth Bianchi with ten of the hillside stranglings.
Police focused on Bianchi only after he was arrested last January
for the murder of two college students in Washington state.
What the police did not know was that there was not one Strangler, but two.
Today in a Bellingham, Washington courtroom
Kenneth Bianchi, in the hope of avoiding a death sentence,
confessed to participation in the Los Angeles hillside stranglings
and went on to accuse his cousin, Angelo Buono, of being his accomplice.
Kenneth Bianchi told us that he was motivated
because he was trying to show his older cousin,
who he revered, that he was tough.
And for Angelo Buono,
he enjoyed the fact that he had his younger cousin listening to him.
He saw him as a mentee. And we saw this time and time again.
Pairs of killers who urge each other on.
And together they are extremely vicious and violent.
Is there any doubt that this is a body?
No doubt. There's a skull and tailbone and everything.
When did you first get word that there might be some bodies buried here?
This morning.
Had you had any indication before?
The man behind the killings was Dean Corll. He's 33 years old.
Or was. He was shot and killed Wednesday evening
by Wayne Henley, 17 years old.
Henley was one of two teenagers who lured young boys to Corll's home.
Dean Corll would pick up kids and once he had them in his house,
he would incapacitate them and put them on what he called his "death board,"
and rape and kill them.
The Texas sex and torture killings
now have become the worst mass murders in American history.
Four more bodies of young boys were dug up today.
That brings to 27 the number of bodies discovered so far.
Some people trying to make it appear that the police department
has not done all that it could or should have done in these cases.
This police department feels that these parents
are not exactly discharging their own responsibility,
so far as raising and disciplining their children.
These shocking murders finally focus national attention on a major problem,
that of runaway children and what can happen to them.
The children who run away from home today
are not the children that we had running away in the '60s.
In the '60s we had what we called then "flower children,"
and they ran away basically for sociopolitical reasons.
Today children are running from a situation rather than to a situation.
Kids were disappearing and the police would say, "well, they probably ran away."
It was to the demise of many
who in fact were picked up by sexual sadists like John Wayne Gacy.
In Des Plains, Illinois, near Chicago,
a man who served time in prison for sex crimes was let out.
Today they found the bodies of at least three young boys
buried under his house.
Police today found six more bodies under the John Gacy house.
Illinois authorities today made their first positive identification
of the 28 bodies unearthed so far.
This grisly search ended tonight and will be resumed after Christmas.
Prior to his arrest, Gacy was well known in the community.
He frequently dressed in a clown outfit for the benefit of youngsters.
He was generally seen as a man young people liked.
The coroner of this county has seen nothing like it.
It's frightening.
That's the only word I can use. Frightening, frightening.
From New York, this is ABC News.
Good evening. The Supreme Court ruled today
that there is nothing unconstitutional in the death penalty.
The court says the death penalty is an expression
of society's moral outrage at particular crimes.
In the 1970s, we had a four-year moratorium on the death penalty.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional.
Eventually in 1976, with new statutes,
the U.S. Supreme Court said it's constitutional,
and then we started seeing the death penalty back in place.
Death row was repopulated with new criminals like Gary Gilmore.
It seems that the people of Utah, they want the death penalty,
but they don't want executions.
Well I took it literal and serious when they sentenced me to death.
His crimes were not especially extreme.
It was two robbery-murders. But when he was convicted, he wanted to die.
He wanted to go out in a blaze of glory.
So two years later, he was put to death by a firing squad,
and became the very first person in America
in this new era, to be executed.
And his words were, "let's do it."
The order of the 4th Judicial District Court of the State of Utah has been carried out.
Gary Mark Gilmore is dead.
Tonight, our topic will be murder as a growth industry.
These are the national homicide figures.
For the past ten years,
every year has set a new high for murder in America.
The statistics were stupendous. Violent crime of all kinds were soaring.
The spectacles that people were seeing on their TV screen
were unlike anything they'd had to absorb before.
A small grocery store has been robbed.
The owner of the grocery store, Nathan Kurt,
has been shot and killed.
What happened yesterday?
As I understand, a man came into the store,
and had a gun, and asked for the money.
And my grandfather reached for a gun that he had,
and grabbed the man's gun and it went off.
He shot him twice and my grandfather fell to the floor.
Why did he feel he had to have a gun?
Because there were so many robberies in this area.
And he just thought he needed it for protection.
Today, ordinary citizens who would not otherwise dream of having a gun
are buying one because they are scared out of their wits.
William Rubiak is a Ukrainian immigrant
who owns a store outside Washington, D.C.
He has been robbed at gunpoint four times in the past two years.
Now William Rubiak has bought a gun,
and he says next time, he will use it.
I will shoot, and I will shoot to kill.
Fear is the biggest seller of guns.
Studies has shown each urban crime wave has touched off a new round of gun buying.
He have German Lugers, derringers, small revolvers, Magnums,
Some of these Saturday night specials are small. They can be palmed in your hand.
It was shortly after 10:00 California time
when the President left his hotel.
Not seen by the following cameras,
but spotted by Secret Service Agent Larry Buendorf
was a hand with a gun in it coming through the crowd.
The commotion erupted.
Secret Service agents forced the assailant to the ground and then handcuffed her.
She was identified as 27-year-old Lynette Alice Fromme,
one of the earliest followers of Charles Manson
who was involved in the Tate/LaBianca murders of 1969.
About the same time Gerald Ford becomes President,
Charlie, in prison, writes to Squeaky that he's got new rules.
They want to do one big thing that's going to get the nation's attention back on Charlie.
So Squeaky, wearing a red robe,
comes up to the President of the United States with a big gun,
points the gun in his face. The Secret Service men wrestle her to the ground,
and Squeaky's first words were, "can you believe the gun didn't go off?"
Following your own close brush with death in Sacramento a couple of weeks ago,
I wonder if this has convinced you at all
that we need tough gun control legislation in this country?
I prefer to go after the person who uses the gun for an illegal or criminal purpose.
That, to me, is a far better approach
than the one where you require registration of the individual or the gun.
Just minutes after making those statements,
Gerald Ford walked into the street and heard the sound of gunfire.
My God! My God, there's been a shot.
There's been a shot!
We're being pushed back by the police.
Somebody has fired a shot here.
We don't know if anybody's been hit.
My God. Somebody fired a shot!
The President was not hit.
Witnesses heard the sound and saw a puff of smoke.
The woman, identified by police as Sara Jane Moore,
was immediately seized.
Sara Jane Moore jumped out of the crowd, fired off a weapon,
and was tackled by another citizen.
Her background, it turned out, was as a sort of eccentric lower-rung political figure.
She was kind of an odd duck.
When Gerald Ford became President,
within the space of one month were two attempts on his life.
Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore both tried to shoot him.
It's like, "what's going on? Why can't this be stopped?"
So once again this nation has narrowly escaped the tragedy, the trauma,
of assassination of our President.
Above all else, this points out the need for some additional measures,
some additional precautions to protect the life
of the highest elected official in the country.
Will it take another assassination in our lifetime to finally force some action?
In the '70s, New York was really in danger.
The whole social fabric seemed to have been torn in half
and crime was just one of the many indications that we were lost.
I would say in the last ten years, the homicide rate has increased by leaps and bounds.
We hit our peak probably in 1972,
when the Bronx had 430 homicides.
In the '70s the Bronx looked like Berlin after World War II.
Literally looked like Berlin.
1.5 million people live in this borough.
Once that smoke on the horizon signified industry, progress, jobs.
Now it means someone is burning down a building.
It has become the arson capitol of the world.
It happens 30 times a day,
and the flames are the signal of a national disaster.
Is there anything that can change the situation?
The Bronx, in my own estimation, is doomed with a capital D.
A lot of gritty stuff went down in New York.
And when you think of New York in the '70s, you of course think of the Son of Sam murders.
Christine Freund, 26 years old, soon to be married, is dead today.
Dead in a shooting that has no apparent motive.
In the end of 1976, they transfer me to Queens homicide.
And the first victim that I came across was a woman named Christine Freund,
who was sitting in a parked car with her boyfriend after coming from a movie.
She got her head blown off.
There was a series of these random shootings,
and the ballistics comparison determined that there was indeed
the same killer using the same gun, a 0.44 caliber weapon, on these homicides.
Therefore the police nicknamed it the 0.44 Caliber Killer.
He struck again on April 17th at 3:00 in the morning,
killing 18-year-old Valentina Suriani and her fiance, 20-year-old Alexander Esau,
as they sat in a parked car in the Baychester section of the Bronx.
We get the shooting back in the Bronx. A girl named Valentina Suriani.
But at that scene where that shooting occurred left a note addressed to my supervisor.
And he called himself the Son of Sam.
Well he talked about being possessed by a man he refers to as Sam,
the man he refers to as his father.
And he says that his father requires blood.
This got people's attention. I think it was just the sheer randomness of it.
The fact that you could be doing something as simple as sitting in a car talking to a friend
and someone would come behind you and open fire.
It was pretty terrifying. It was frightening.
I was in charge of the nighttime operations.
I was one of the task force that wanted to shoot him on sight.
That was our job, take him out on the street.
We flooded the streets of New York.
All these people are dying and we're trying to stop it.
It's everybody. It's not you, it's everybody. That's all we're trying to do.
In terms of the victim count, that doesn't place him at the top of the list,
in terms of the most deadly serial killers.
But it was New York City, and what happens in New York City,
well, that's international news.
Good evening. Harry is on vacation. Here are our top stories.
100 more police join the hunt for the Son of Sam killer in New York.
The search continues for the 0.44 Caliber Killer
who has come to be known as the Son of Sam.
He warned in one of his sick and threatening letters to the press and to the police,
"Sam's a thirsty lad and he won't let me stop killing
until he's had his fill of blood."
It was a really miserably hot summer in New York.
And everything went dark.
I heard someone on the street go, "oh, it's a blackout!"
The looters were out almost instantly.
And it felt apocalyptic.
I remember going to bed that night thinking it was the end of the world.
New York City in the early morning after a night of no electric power.
What it did have in the dark streets was a wild outburst of crime.
When the greatest city in the world goes black, it showed a crumbling America.
Then you have the Son of Sam on the loose.
We always look for patterns in victims,
and there was this belief that he was only killing women with long dark hair.
I know the 0.44 Killer's after girls with long brown hair,
so when me and my friends go out at night, we put our hair up.
My hair was about down to my shoulder.
It was about this length. I cut it short because of the 0.44 Caliber Killer.
Well, his last victim was actually a blonde.
A 20-year-old New York City girl died this evening
a day and a half after she and her companion were shot by the Son of Sam.
He's a nighttime killer who has stalked New York residential boroughs for a year.
A postal worker walked out of his Yonkers apartment last night,
turned the ignition key in his car, and found himself surrounded by police.
"Well," he said, "you got me."
Police say those words ended the biggest manhunt in New York City history
with the capture of Son of Sam.
And this is what they say tripped up the 0.44 Caliber Killer.
A parking ticket.
David Berkowitz drove this cream-colored Ford Galaxy
from his home in Yonkers to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.
Then police say he went to stalk his 12th and 13th victims.
But in the place he parked was this fire hydrant,
and police had the lead they needed.
Well, we get him, and I interrogate him.
My attitude at this time... I want to take him and throw him out the window.
This guy was so pathetic. It was like talking to a zucchini.
Never blinked. Constant smile on his face.
So after a while, I start to feel sorry for the guy.
You know he's gone, right?
I feel great. I think the people of our city will feel great relief.
Praise the Lord, it's over.
We're very, very happy. That was the first thing I heard this morning.
It was fantastic. It was great.
Serial killers tend to be cunning. That allows them to stay at large.
And when they get caught, it's usually because of luck.
Good luck for us. Bad luck for them.
When we caught him, we searched his car.
In the bag on the seat is the 0.44 caliber gun that did all the shootings.
What more do you need?
Then we found a machine gun, fully loaded, in the back seat.
And the night of the interrogation that I directed
I said, "well what were you going to do with the machine gun?"
He says, "I was on my way to the Hamptons,
and I was going to spray the place and kill as many people as I could."
There are so many miracles in this church
that it's hard to tell about one without telling about two or three
because they blend together. They make a beautiful flow of miracles.
And you know, for 30 years I prayed to the sky God
and I got nothing but disappointment and heartache.
And now we have a father who loves each one of us so much.
How thankful we are for him. Thank you.
The '70s were a very fertile period for these new religious movements.
What was so interesting about the rise of cults in our country
is how many people wanted to align themselves
with these stigmatized and fanatical organizations.
And I must say it is a great effort to be God.
I'd wish it upon another, but no one else has the faculty that I do.
When they do, I will be glad to hold their coat. In the meantime, I shall be God.
And this I be. There shall be no other.
Jim Jones was an extraordinary figure.
He was a community leader, a social worker, and then a minister.
He carried his ministry to California.
♪ Walk with me, walk with me... ♪
What was particularly distinctive about him at that time
is that he created a community that was united between whites and blacks.
And this came at a time when the country was still very racially divided
and churches were not integrated.
Some leading scientists say we have to have euthanasia.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
Who is going to decide who and when a person is going to die?
We must never allow that,
because this is the kind of thing that ushers in the terror of a Hitler's Germany.
We must not allow these kind of things to enter our consciousness.
I wanted to write a story very much about this guy and his power and the reach he had.
So I began to contact ex-members,
and they said that all was not so good inside,
that there were beatings if you got out of line. There was a lot of sex abuse.
And the story took on a new life at that point.
Very soon afterward,
the church members began leaving San Francisco for Guyana.
He figures if I'm in Guyana,
it really doesn't matter what's said or written.
Nobody is going to get me here.
♪ We're a happy family. We're a happy family, yes we are... ♪
It was an escapade that's almost unparalleled
in the history of religious movements.
They had very little communication with their loved ones at home,
and naturally there was concern
about where they had gone and what was happening out there in the jungle.
I think that Jim Jones took his group down there
because he was afraid to face publicity and answer the questions
that are here in this country.
He was talking integration. He was talking helping people.
He was talking better this and better that.
What about now? What's your impression now?
My impression now is that those are fronts for him.
I think he's gone crazy.
Congressman Leo Ryan started hearing the name Jim Jones more regularly.
And he wanted to expose
what he believed was going on down there that was wrong.
And he thought it was certainly worth inviting members of the press to join him.
Very glad to be here. This is a Congressional inquiry.
I can tell you right now that whatever the comments are
there's some people here who believe that this is the best thing that ever happened in their whole life.
So it's towards the end of the evening.
Don Harris, who was the NBC reporter, had been walking around the pavilion.
And two people slipped him a note.
And he hands the notes over to Congressman Ryan who opens them
and says, "oh my God, it's true. Everything we've been told is true."
And then the word spread and more and more people wanted to leave.
And then I remember seeing this couple with a child between them.
Don't break us! Get back here!
You bring him back!
Don't you take my kid!
You could feel the tension.
Last night, someone came and passed me this note.
People play games, friend.
They lie. They lie. What can I do about liars?
And you people going to... Leave us. I just can't. Please leave us.
Instead of just letting that plane take off with minimal damage to his movement,
Jones snapped.
Good evening. For about the last 30 hours
we here at NBC News have been trying to establish
what happened last night at the airstrip at a place called Port Kaituma.
We do have a particular interest in the two NBC newsmen who were shot to death there.
Don Harris was killed. Bob Brown was killed.
Congressman Ryan was shot 45 times.
Every time somebody would fall down wounded,
they would walk over and shoot them in the head with a shotgun.
I was shot five times.
I was lying on my side with my head down pretending I was dead.
And then all of a sudden they just came
and shot me at point blank range.
They're shooting. People die, including Leo Ryan.
And back in Jonestown, Jim Jones is calling for a revolutionary suicide,
where we're all going to kill ourselves and make a statement to the world.
I first went to Jonestown last evening around sunset.
There was absolute silence. Nothing living was around.
Jonestown last evening was the city of the dead.
They found tremendous quantities of potassium cyanide poison.
It had been mixed with Kool-Aid.
It killed quickly, within five minutes.
We will never know how many people voluntarily drank the poison.
But other people were either coerced, brainwashed or took it against their will.
They were murdered.
I was lifted into this Medevac plane
and I was so grateful.
Good evening. The searching American soldiers have finished counting the bodies in Jonestown, Guyana.
910 died in the poison ritual of the Peoples Temple last week.
This was Americans killing other Americans and themselves.
In its own interest, for its own well-being,
this nation will have to find out why.
There were a lot of strange people who committed a lot of strange crimes in the 1970s.
But none of them was as mediagenic as Ted Bundy.
- You said you were surprised to be going to jail. - Surprised? I don't know.
I didn't know what to expect. Never been to jail before. Never been arrested before.
Theodore Bundy was a prolific serial killer.
We don't know exactly how many he killed. We know it's dozens.
He was handsome, very involved with politics, he was in law school.
He didn't seem like the glassy-eyed lunatic that many Americans believed a serial killer would be.
We still don't believe it. This can't be.
I keep shaking my head day after day saying, "how can this be?"
Our son is the best son in the world.
What the press wrote about Bundy and his crimes
wasn't the full details, the full extent of the barbarism...
The fact that he would have sex with their corpses, mutilate the victims...
That didn't quite fit with his image of this boy next door.
You issued a statement saying you feel that everything will turn out all right.
That you are innocent. Do you still feel that?
Yeah. Yeah. More than ever.
Do you think about getting out of here?
Well, legally, sure.
Bundy was to stand trial on the charge of murdering a young woman in Aspen.
That trial never completed.
During a court hearing break, he was left alone in a law library.
Bundy bailed out of a second floor window and escaped.
He high-tailed it up into the hills where they chased him around for nearly a week.
He got lost out there and he probably would have died of exposure if they hadn't have arrested him.
So they caught him and he was put back in jail.
And in Christmastime 1977, he escaped again.
Bundy, starved down to less than 140 pounds,
slipped through a hole in the ceiling of his cell and was free again.
The FBI responded by putting Bundy on its Ten Most Wanted list.
Posters with the picture of Ted Bundy were circulated throughout the nation.
Ted did not have a plan when he escaped.
He just wanted to get as far away from where he might be identified as he could.
So he stole a car and went to Florida.
His new quarters are cramped. He is under 24-hour guard
and he faces intense questioning.
He is Theodore Bundy and he's jailed in Florida.
Bundy was living in Tallahassee
at the time when five Florida State University co-eds were attacked on or near the campus.
Two of the young women died as a result of the attacks.
The police in Pensacola, Florida stopped a man driving a stolen car
and found to their surprise and perhaps pleasure, it was Bundy.
Step out, Mr. Bundy.
What do we have here? Let's see. Oh, it's an indictment.
All right. Why don't you read it to me?
You're about due for election, aren't you?
Mr. Bundy?
You told me that you were going to get me.
He said he was going to get me. Okay, you've got the indictment.
It's all you're going to get.
Bundy, having had some law training and a great deal of arrogance,
decided to represent himself.
For him, he was the star in the courtroom.
As I am living in Dade County...
Don't shake your finger at me, young man.
Inside the courtroom, the trial will be covered
by a still photographer and one television camera.
Upstairs there are some 250 reporters and television technicians from around the country.
Bundy's personality is fascinating to a lot of people.
He doesn't fit the usual profile of a criminal.
When he defends himself in court it's fascinating for people to watch.
Each day the courtroom is filled with spectators
drawn by a fascination with Theodore Bundy himself,
or by the gruesome details of the crimes.
What is unusual to see is that many of the onlookers are women. Young women.
- You're fascinated by him? - Very.
I'm not afraid of him. He just doesn't look like the type to kill somebody.
You try to imagine yourself in his place, see how he's feeling.
The bizarre spectacle of Ted Bundy as a sex symbol
really bummed out feminists, as you can imagine.
I mean, he became folk hero. There were t-shirts because he was handsome.
But on the other hand, his violence was so incredibly woman-hating.
And his enthusiasm about that... We wound up being pretty depressed.
I had broken facial bones. I had a broken arm and a crushed finger.
I had five skull fractures and multiple contusions in my head.
Is that man in the courtroom today?
- Yes he is. - Would you point him out for us, please?
Are you prepared for a guilty verdict?
I think so, but you never know.
I've never had to go through this before.
After 6 1/2 hours of deliberation, the jury had a verdict.
32-year-old Theodore Bundy remained composed as he listened.
Guilty of first degree murder in the strangling deaths of two Florida State University sorority sisters 19 months ago.
It is therefore the sentence of this court that you be sentenced to death by a current of electricity,
and such current of electricity shall continue to pass through your body until you are dead.
In some ways Ted Bundy is an icon of the '70s.
He mixed kind of showbiz and violence
in a way that had never been done before.
At the end of the '70s, we'd had a destruction of our innocence
that we had at the beginning of the '70s.
It became an era when Americans began to expect the worst.
America certainly had lost is way.
Criminals were lauded and killers were romanticized.
It was the news media that helped carry this message that America was a dangerous place.
Americans had a love affair with violence.
Actually it was much more like a marriage.
And that marriage, for some people, was till death do they part.
For a time social scientists described the wave of violence that struck our cities
as an epidemic.
And they identified some of the causes.
Poverty, broken homes.
For some violence has become a permanent part of the fabric of life.
Sociologists call it a subculture of violence.
The current wave of violent crime is well into its second decade.
While we have deplored violence,
we've not done much about it.
Perhaps this is because
confronting the problem of violence
forces us to confront the most serious defects in our society.