Why Did Colorado Give Ted Bundy a Law Library and No Handcuffs During His Murder Trial?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is History's Hidden Killers. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
June 7th, 1977, Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, Colorado, a small mountain courthouse. During a court recess, the defendant in a first-degree murder trial walks out a second-floor window. Half an hour passes before anyone actually notices. By that afternoon, the police chief of Aspen has, by some accounts, suspended handgun sales in the town. The lines outside the Aspen Sporting Goods stores are women.
That happens because the system was holding the wrong version of a man in not secure enough custody.
There's a wrong question people ask about what happens next in this case, and then there's the right one. The wrong question is, how Ted Bundy escaped from a second floor window, from custody twice in six months? The right question is why the system both times gave him exactly what he needed to escape. He didn't have a brilliant escape plan. He didn't have a Confederate on the outside. He had two different courthouses in two different counties. Both of them handed him the opening he needed, and both times he walked through it. This is our third conversation in Ted Bundy, History's Hidden Killers. Your thoughts are welcome in the comment section on Substack and YouTube as we continue to work our way through this story and this series. And The Hiding Place this time is the most procedural, the most bureaucratic, most preventable thing imaginable. It's a charge sheet that was too narrow really to describe him.
To get there, we have to go back to 1976, February, Salt Lake City. A bench trial in front of Judge Stuart Hanson. Bundy is on trial for the aggravated kidnapping of Carol Duranche. He waives a jury trial. He'd rather take his chances with one judge than 12 civilians. His own attorneys, John O'Connell and Bruce Lubeck, reportedly try to talk him out of it. He insists Ted knows best. He thinks he can work the room.
That's the read Bundy has of himself in February of 1976 That he's the smartest person in the room. That a single judge will be easier to charm than 12 civilians. And he is wrong. Duranche identifies him from the witness stand. Hanson takes about 90 minutes to disagree with him. And June 30th, 1976, Bundy is sentenced to 1 to 15 years in Utah State Prison for kidnapping.
The state of Utah that in 1976 holds Ted Bundy for one count, one, kidnapping. The other Utah names, Melissa Smith, Lauren Amy, Debbie Kent, Nancy Wilcox, they are not on that indictment. Utah doesn't have yet enough to charge. The Washington names, eight of them by now, aren't on that indictment either. Washington is a different jurisdiction, a different prosecutor's office and another world away. On paper, the state of Utah has a kidnapper. In the cell, Utah has somebody who by the end of 1975 had killed a minimum 16 women across five states, maybe more, and then Colorado comes calling. October 1976, Pitkin County, Colorado, charges Bundy with the murder of Karen Campbell. He's extradited from Utah, and by January 1977, he's sitting in the Pitkin County jail in Aspen as a defendant facing one count of first-degree murder. One count from Colorado, one count from Utah, and the court he's walking into doesn't know what the actual man is. In Pitkin County, Bundy decides to fire his court-appointed lawyers and represent himself. The six of them and gives him that right.
And as his own counsel, he also gets other rights and courtesies. A defendant mounting his own defense gets, and he knew how to weaponize that. Time in the law library to prepare. No leg irons in court. No cuffs in the building. Access to legal documents, motions, books. It was a calculated choice to represent himself. It wasn't ego alone. Now the Constitution isn't wrong about any of that, about giving rights. The problem is who those courtesies are aimed at. They are appropriate.
For someone who's not necessarily the one that's charged, they're appropriate for the man. Are they appropriate for the man on the charge sheet?
Bundy will prove the answer to that question is no, they're not. And in 1977, that gap was lethal. The Pitkin County Courthouse was small. The Sheriff was a thoughtful man named Dick Kynast. Kynast was, by some accounts, a well-read former Jesuit. He ran his jail like a man who believed the man in front of him.
The court did not know what was actually in it. Bundy used every privilege the charge sheet gave him.
He filed his own motions. He was in the library every day. He was reading death penalty case law, and he was also reading about Aspen, about the back roads, about the mountains. And on the morning of June 7, 1977, during a court recess, he stepped up onto a desk in that second-floor law library that he wasn't being monitored in. He opened the window. He went out feet first, 25 feet to the alley. He landed on his ankle hard. He limped down the alley and across the bridge over the roaring Fork River and into the county of East Aspen. He spent six days on the mountain. He broke into a vacation cabin near Castle Creek belonging to a man named Fritz Kaiser. He took a.22 rifle and food. He slept rough.