The End of Evil

The crowd was growing. Hundreds had gathered across the road from the prison, bundled against the midwinter chill and warming themselves with a clever vendor’s coffee and doughnuts. Though dawn had not yet broken, the ground was littered with beer cans. Celebrants lit sparklers, strangers joined in song, and children did their best to stay awake. One family, the Cochrans, told reporters they had left their home in Orlando, Florida at two o’clock in the morning so they could be sure not to miss the festivities. They had brought their six-year-old twins, Jennifer and May Nicole, because, Mrs. Cochran said, “I thought it would be educational for them, kind of like a field trip.”

The throng had appeared as if from nowhere: the day before, there was only one man waiting outside Florida State Prison. His name was George Johnson, and when the camera crews found him, he was standing beside the trunk of his car, selling T-shirts for ten dollars apiece. “Do you think it’s appropriate,” a reporter asked him, “to be making money off some man’s execution?”

“I don’t see why not,” George said. “He—”

The broadcast cut him off. Everyone already knew what he did.

Within hours, George was doing a brisk business. Printed in the bright red of cartoon blood, his T-shirts showed a sweating, wide-eyed man strapped into an electric chair, staring out at the viewer with an expression that managed to seem both helpless and imperious. The words splashed above him read BURN BUNDY BURN. The shirts were selling particularly well, George said, among women.

Ted Bundy had been on Florida’s death row for nearly a decade, after receiving three death sentences in two separate trials, for the 1978 murders of three victims who could be called young women but could also just as fairly be called girls: twenty-year-old Lisa Levy, twenty-one-year-old Margaret Bowman, and twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. Now, in the early hours of January 24, 1989, it seemed Bundy’s time was finally about to run out.

When Ted Bundy was apprehended in Pensacola in the early hours of February 15, 1978, six weeks after he escaped from a Colorado jail, the FBI had already publicly linked him to thirty-six murders across five states. In the ensuing decade, both the random speculations of onlookers and the educated guesses of law enforcement often pushed the number far higher. Many said it had to be a hundred or more, and cited Bundy’s own enigmatic statement to the Pensacola detectives who had questioned him about the FBI’s claim. “He said the figure probably would be more correct in the three digits,” Deputy Sheriff Jack Poitinger said.

Ron Holmes, a criminal justice professor who interviewed Bundy on two...