March 13, 2024 • 58 mins
In this episode of Zone 7, Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum sits down for a part II series with Kathy Kleiner, a survivor of Ted Bundy's infamous 1978 attack on the Chi Omega sorority house, and Ken Katsaris, the former Leon County Sheriff whose determination led to Bundy's capture. Ken and Kathy share their experiences, insights, and the emotional aftermath of that night, we're given a unique perspective on the case that rocked Tallahassee and the world.
If you missed part I of this series listen here - https://omny.fm/shows/zone-7-with-sheryl-mccollum/kathy-kleiner-rawson-part-1-edited
Ken Katsaris is the Leon County Sheriff, instrumental in the investigation and capture of Ted Bundy.
Kathy Kleiner is a remarkable survivor who endured one of the most notorious crimes in American history - the brutal 1978 attacks by serial killer Ted Bundy at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University.
Show Notes:
- [0:00] Welcome back to Zone 7 with Crime Scene Investigator, Sheryl McCollum.
- [0:30] Sheryl introduces Kathy Kleiner and Sherrif Ken Katsaris to the listeners
- [1:00] If you missed part one with Kathy Kleiner listen here: Surviving Ted Bundy | Kathy Kleiner Rubin Shares Her Story: Part I
- [2:00] Ken details the night he received the phone call about the Ted Bundy attack at Chi Omega sorority house
- [6:00] Ken’s role on the night of the attack
- [13:15] Kathy joins the conversation
- [17:30] Bundy's bite impressions are explained as his signature
- [24:00] The capture of Ted Bundy and the pivotal moments leading to it
- [31:00] The strategy for interrogation and securing Bundy
- [34:00] Ted Bundy's bizarre requests to talk only at midnight by a window on a full moon
- [39:30] “I didn't get my doctorate but I got my serial killer.”
- [42:30] Reflections on the psychological impact of Bundy's crimes
- [50:00] Closing thoughts from Kathy and Sheriff Katsaris on justice and healing
- [57:30] “Obviously, I was very motivated to work the case. I had two young daughters at home and I vowed that this person would be stopped. I put everything: my heart, my soul, my skills to work on it. And together with a big team of people who came up with leads, a person, and eventually a conviction.”
- Thanks for listening to another episode! If you love the show and want to help grow the show, please head over to iTunes and leave a rating and review!
---
Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award-winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Sheryl is also the founder and director of the Cold Case Investigative Research Institute, a collaboration between universities and colleges that brings researchers, practitioners, students and the criminal justice community together to advance techniques in solving cold cases and assist families and law enforcement with solvability factors for unsolved homicides, missing persons, and kidnapping cases.
You can connect and learn more about Sheryl’s work by visiting the CCIRI website https://coldcasecrimes.org
Social Links:
- Email: coldcase2004@gmail.com
- Twitter: @ColdCaseTips - https://mobile.twitter.com/coldcasetips
Facebook: @sheryl.mccollum - https://www.facebook.com/sheryl.mccollum/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
Y'all. There are times in this business where your heart
just gets pulled in and tonight is one of those times.
We have the opportunity to hear from a victim and
her sheriff while they talk about the incident that bonded them,
bonded them like battle buddies. We have Kathy Kleiner and
(00:31):
the former Leon County Sheriff Ken Cassaris. It is an
absolute honor for me to welcome both of them, and
I want to tell you a little bit about the sheriff.
I know y'all know Kathy Kleiner. She was in the
last episode, but the sheriff was elected in nineteen seventy six.
He trained as an officer. He was later a teacher.
(00:52):
He has great skills in forensics. He taught college and
started a criminal justice program. Sheriff Casaris stood in front
of the house on Jefferson Street and listened to the
details of this unspeakable, unimaginable, horrific crime. He took the
reins of this investigation. There was a team. There was
(01:15):
an unbelievable team, professional team, more than one agency involved.
But don't make the mistake of who was in charge.
He had people describing the scene to him. He heard
all of it, and then he heard there was more
than one victim, two that survived for now, two that
were already deceased. He saw Kathy Kleiner that night, he
(01:40):
watched her get loaded and put into an ambulance. He
never stopped praying for her. Now, y'all, he's a probe
He's a dedicated lawman that refuses to use the word hero,
But that's exactly the word I'm going to use. He's
a hero in every sense of the word. If there
is anybody that you would want in your Zone seven,
(02:03):
it's Ken Cassaris. Welcome to Zone seven.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Thank you for the invitation to be here. My heart
has swelled knowing that Kathy is also talking at the
same time. There was a time when I did not
know she would survive, much less forty plus years later
than I would be talking with her.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Well, Sheriff, Let's talk about your role that night. I mean, you,
in that moment, had such a chaotic scene, an unimaginable scene,
a quadruple attack with four victims, two murdered, and like
you said, you didn't know if the others were going
to survive in that moment, and you had to take
(02:46):
command of the command center, the search for the killer,
the forensic evidence. I mean, you had quite an undertaking, sir.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Who it was. There's no question, of course that it
was a complicated murder case. My first inkling that I
had to get involved was when I got a phone
call past two thirty in the morning. My Sheriff's office
staff in the dispatch room said, Sheriff, we have an
(03:14):
attack on young ladies at the Cayomega Sorority tag house
on Jefferson Street. And I said, tell me about it.
What do you mean that was an attack? He said,
somebody went into the house. We don't know whether there's
two or four. It looks like there's going to be
potentially for murder cases. Tallahassee had not had a serious
(03:39):
crime like that, Although you know, I hate to say typical. Unfortunately,
we've learned that crimes are going to occur, and you're
going to have shootings, and you're going to have beatings,
you're going to have rapes, and I don't want to
say that they're necessarily isolated, but they are not of
the big nature like massive kind of attacks like this,
(04:03):
mass attacks. We didn't know if it was mass murder
or not. The last one was in nineteen sixty six
in Tallahassee, where the superintendent of Florida's school system. He
his wife, and twelve year old daughter were attacked, murdered
in their home, shot after being tied up and stabbed.
(04:25):
Nineteen sixty six was the year I moved to Tallahansee
and I was at a football game when it occurred,
and I had heard about it. I had just finished
serving four years as a police officer in Saint Petersburg
at that time, so I became very interested in that case.
And Tallahassee was going berserk. People were, I mean, blocks
(04:51):
were not to be found, screen door locks, interior door locks,
dead bolts were replaced, sliding locks were put on top
of the dead bolts. It just, I mean, the town
freaked out in a sense over that murder case. So
you can imagine fast forward now to nineteen seventy eight
(05:13):
and January and all of a sudden, I'm hearing now
I'm the sheriff. Then I was the department chair of
Criminal Justice at what is now called Tallahasee State College.
It was Tallahassee Community College. But I remembered that case.
It never left my mind, and now I was called
(05:35):
to thirty plus in the morning when this attack occurred,
and I quickly dressed and made my way to the
university and to the front of the Cayomega House and
jumped out and I met my chief deputy and the
Captain of detectives and who was also an attorney and
the legal advisor for the department. I met with some
(05:57):
Tallahassee police officers and FSU police officer. At the same time,
there was already an officer, a detective that had gone
in and had reviewed the circumstances, had called for EMS
the Emergency Medical System ambulances were dispatched, and I was
being brought to up to date, and I was being
(06:18):
informed about the status of each of the rooms. The
young ladies that were attacked. At the time, they indicated
to me, I don't think any of them will survive.
The injuries, the wounds, the beatings, the blood does not
look good. We know there are two that are deceased
(06:39):
at this time, and there are two that were you know,
we called EMS for And about that time the ambulance
has arrived. I saw Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner both
coming out on gurney's and we were loaded for the hospital.
I was stunned. I was heartbroken. I was shocked, not
(07:02):
that I hadn't seen crime before, but coming out of
a school sorority house, just a university sorority. I mean,
it was just too much. I mean, I just couldn't
believe it was happening. I said a prayer for Kathy
and Karen, and I had hoped, but I looked at
them and I didn't know that they would survive. I prayed.
(07:25):
I just didn't know. It didn't look good. Later I
did check in on them, and it appeared that, you know,
they were able to have pulse and life, and although
they looked like it would be a long time for
rehabilitation and surgeries and efforts to pull them back together,
(07:47):
so to speak, from the massive injuries that were inflicted
upon them. So I was briefed on everything that they knew.
There was a door that apparently was an entrance that
was not the front door. It was a side door.
We don't know. I'm not going to say it was
propped open. That happens often in sorority houses, where the
(08:09):
doors are propped open so the ladies either can come
in late, or sometimes they have boys slip in afterwards.
I mean, you know, these are all things that shouldn't happen,
but after all, this is college life, and things like
that do happen. We also thought that it's possible that
the lock could have been worked on and picked because
(08:32):
at the time the locks were more let's say, easier
to handle, even with a credit card to slide them
back and open the doors. They don't make locks like
that anymore, and these were older locks. So how he
got in we didn't know. But I was briefed about
the door. I was briefed about the fact that we
(08:53):
had an eyewitness that was coming in late, perhaps through
that same door, I'm not sure, but she was tiptoeing
through when all of a sudden she saw a male
figure coming down the stairway. She got a very good
look at him. He apparently did not see her, and
he was carrying a pretty big chunk of a limb
(09:19):
of a tree, and he had something white wrapped around it,
like a towel or t shirt or something, as if
he was either aware he needed something to make certain
he could hang on to it with tension, or he
didn't want to leave any DNA on the wood or something.
We didn't collect DNA. Then we did collect, of course,
(09:39):
sweat what have you for blood typing, but he and
he was aware of blood typing as a matter of fact,
because we had an incident later in the jail where
he thought we were trying to obtain his blood type,
but we couldn't collect things from him without a warrant.
But he did say that he wondered why he was
(10:00):
getting so many pieces of fruit. He thought we were
trying to get a blood type. I got briefed on
everything and I was brought up to date, and I
did not go in at that time because as a
professional sheriff with the education and law enforcement background I
had being department chair for ten years prior teaching it forensics,
(10:22):
advanced forensics, Criminal investigation, Advanced criminal Investigation, I knew better
than to go inside. I didn't have a role inside
the Cairomega house. And we teach and preach if you
don't have something you're going to do, don't go in
because what's called transfer evidence. I could bring in on
(10:44):
my shoes, something that could taint the scene, or drop
some threads or something off of my clothing. Everything was
important so the least number of people in the scene
the better. So I stood outside and started direct I
turned to my chief deputy and my Captain of detectives,
(11:05):
and I said, tonight we are going to set up
a major crime squad for this investigation. I turned to
Jack Pottinger, who was my lead investigator, captain of investigations
and an attorney, and I said, you will be in
charge pulling together the major crime squad. We the Leon
(11:27):
County Sheriff's Office will be the lead agency. I want
you to bring in the FSU Campus Police, the Tallahassee Police,
the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Florida A and
M Police. We want to make sure, if necessary, even
the Florida Highway Patrol. And we did end up using
(11:48):
the recruit class from the Florida Highway Patrol to search
for evidence. I called the colonel and asked him if
he would dismiss the recruit class of fifty five new
recruit roots for the Florida Highway Patrol to do a
crime scene search. I was their instructor at the time,
(12:08):
and I taught them crime scenes the week before, so
I knew that this Highway Patrol class knew how to
handle crime scenes. So I called the colonel, got them
dismissed from class, and they were assigned to me to
do crime scene search. And they did it grid by
grid by grid, very carefully. We were looking for that
piece of wood, of course, but Ted Bundy was smarter
(12:31):
than we were in a sense. He got that wood
off the woodpile. It was January and cold when he left,
he threw it back on the woodpile. Were convinced, and
in the morning, the first things the sororities and fraternities
do is they start fires, and of course the wood
on top gets burned first. So we're sure that the
wood that was used to beat Kathy, Karen and the
(12:56):
victims in this case, Margaret and Lisa. We were sure
that the evidence was gone as far as that piece
of wood. But that's what happened that night. That was
the beginning. That was how I took charge, and from
there it got more complicated.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Well, sir, I think at this moment what I would
love to do is I want to bring Kathy in
because something that is just extraordinary to me is how
she felt about you that night. So you're talking about
somebody only twenty years old that's had a traumatic, horrific event,
(13:40):
and seeing you she had an immediate reaction. So, Kathy,
would you please join us, and I just want you
to talk directly to Ken for a minute.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yes, I would love to Ken. I don't remember seeing
you that night, but I remember hearing about you, and
in my room in the hospital, your name kept coming up,
and I felt so safe knowing someone in such a
high position was really involved in what had happened to me,
and how involved you were that finding this person and
(14:11):
securing FSU and making sure that I was going to
be okay. And I remember in my hospital room there
was a police officer that stood outside the door and
he made me feel so safe. It felt like he
was just protecting me. And I knew I wasn't going
to get hit again. I knew whomever did this was
(14:33):
not going to come back into my room and hurt me.
And your police officers were wonderful, they really were. They
just they were so good at their job and they
did it and I always felt comfortable with them. And
I'd like to thank you for having such a good
group of men that was and women that were working
for you.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Well. Thank you for feeling that way, but you know,
if it's done right, that's what you do. You protect
the innocent, you protect the victims. We assigned deputies to
be at your door and to let no one in,
not the press, not other law enforcement officers. We didn't
want you interrogated or interviewed. You know. We let doctors
(15:13):
and nurses that were going to tend to you each
were asked what they were going to do before they
could go in, because we didn't want even the medical
staff to be curiosity seekers to find out what was
going on. It was most important that you had your privacy.
It was most important that you had all the care
that you could get, and it was very important that
(15:35):
your strength be kept for the purpose of helping us
when you were capable of it. I was praying for
divine intervention and that you know, I would get the
word that the two of you who went to the
hospital that we weren't you know, confirmed at the scene,
were already deceased, but that you would, you know, one day,
(15:58):
be able to talk about it and be healed and
back to your life. I know that it transformed you.
It didn't leave you as you were before. Because an
incident like that never would. But thank you. We just
did our job no more. And that's just what should
(16:21):
be done, no matter who it is, no matter where
they are, you just just should get that kind of care.
And I cared and they should care, and I believe
that everybody does. Sometimes there's confusion and sometimes things fall through,
but I was going to make certain it didn't. Let
(16:42):
me tell you one of the reasons why I thought
about all of you at home. I had a daughter
that was born December the fourteenth, nineteen seventy seven, and
this occurred December the fifteenth, nineteen seventy eight. She was
(17:03):
a month and a day old. I had a daughter
that was two years old, born in November. The first
one was Natalie. The older girl was Monica. When I
went to the morgue to look at Margaret and Lisa,
and they were on a big marble slab. Because I
was going to do this investigation myself, I had been
(17:26):
involved in the first serial murder case in Saint Petersburg's history.
We had five elderly women, all over eighty at that time,
attacked and strangled with their pantyhose and killed in their homes.
They were all single, living alone and I worked all
those crime scenes, and I ended up finding myself personally
(17:49):
who did it through fingerprints, because I did the fingerprint
analysis in comparison. So I had already solved one serial case,
and I knew how complex they could be. I worked
all those crime scenes, so I was aware. But I
went to investigate the bodies myself. I didn't trust the doctors.
I didn't trust the other investigators. I just felt like
(18:12):
I had more experience than they did. And when I
reviewed the bodies, two things. Number one was I obviously
saw the mutilated breasts of Margaret, and I saw the
mutilation somewhat of the breast of Lisa. But I also
saw a very good bite impression on Lisa's buttocks. And
(18:37):
it was not just a normal bite mark. It was
a double bite. In other words, he opened his mouth
very wide, came down on the buttocks, and bit hard,
not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to
bruise really well. And then he opened his mouth and
came back again and did a double But I believed
(19:02):
from that moment that I saw that that was a signature.
Now I learned later that we never had a warm
body to evaluate anywhere in the country. From Ted Bundy.
But I learned that because of what I saw, he
was putting his signature on the crime scene. And the
(19:27):
other thing that went through my mind was I looked
at these two girls twenty and twenty one, I believe
they were, and I thought, easily, those could be my daughters,
my two little girls, one month old Natalie and two
year old Monica. I said, what if they were my daughters?
(19:48):
I said to myself, what would you want the sheriff
to do? And I knew because I could instruct myself
because I was thinking, those are my daughters. What am
I telling them to do? Basically, if I didn't have
knowledge of law enforcement, I would be telling them, please
(20:09):
do everything and anything possible. You go beyond the budget,
get all the help, get everybody and anything that you
can in line to take care of this and take
this monster off the street. So I was committed because
I was having flashbacks that my two daughters could be
(20:31):
there on that slab and that Morgan. I couldn't take it.
I just said, this is my job, and this is
going to be my job. I won't let loose of it.
I'm not going to allow this person to escape because
as a parent, that's what I would want the sheriff
to do. And I said, I'm the sheriff and I
(20:54):
can do it, because well, obviously as a sherifter, there's
nobody tell me I can't. The very next morning, I
went to Saint Thomas Moore Co Cathedral, which is where
Governor asked you of the state of Florida attends church.
I waited for him outside. He came out of church
when the service was over, saw me, came to me.
(21:18):
He was a big, strapping man and a statesman that
we don't have anymore in our politics. It doesn't seem
like but he was a real statesman. Put his arm
around me and said, Sheriff, what can I do for you?
I said, Governor, I want you to clear a pathway
for me at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Crime
(21:39):
Lab and through your office. I want the power of
the Governor's office to help me get what I need,
be it resources, manpower, equipment, money, whatever it takes. And
he said, Sheriff, you have my word, and if you
(22:00):
don't get cooperation from the state in any way, shape
or form, you call me personally and I will make
certain that you get whatever you need. And I had
that commitment. I also met with Chief Justice Jimmy Adkins
of the Florida Supreme Court, and he was a friend
(22:23):
of mine. He and his wife both were friends. And
I met with him on a Sunday in his office
at the Supreme Court Building, and I asked him to
help me. And at the time I didn't think about it,
and neither did he, because I was asking for advice
from the highest court in Florida. And who knows, it
(22:46):
may get appealed, you know, later conviction or something, and
he may have to rule on it. And in the
middle of our conversation, he says, yeah, he's legs kicked
up on his desk and sitting back. He said, oh
my god. And I said what he says, Ken, you
realize I have to recruise myself now if this case
comes before me. I said, well, I said, let's hope
(23:10):
we have a case to come before you. I said,
I sure need your help. So I was stretching it.
I wanted to get all the help I could. I
knew I needed resources, I needed to lead legal minds.
I needed the power of the office of the Governor.
And all that came from the night where I investigated
the two bodies and the commitment I made to the parents.
(23:34):
And by the way, both Margaret and Lisa were from
Saint Petersburg and I was a Saint Petersburg comp and
an investigator, and that's where I saw the crime. I
couldn't believe it. It was like, is this can this
be possible? A sheriff in Tallahassee encountering two victims from
Saint Petersburg, And you know, I made certain, of course,
(23:57):
the proper communications were made to the family as well.
So it was it's broken into pieces. It was at
the crime scene, then it was at the morgue, then
it was at the Saint Thomas more Co Cathedral with
the governor, then it was at the Supreme Court building.
(24:18):
I was moving, I was moving fast, and I got
to tell you a lot of law enforcement was wondering.
They had never seen, you know, a sheriff number one
leading an investigation, because it's always you know, a sergeant
or someone in the investigative ranks. And they had never
seen someone going to the governor and the Chief Justice
(24:40):
of the Supreme Court, you know, and handling a file
as I was. So there was some criticism of me
but I was a big boy, and I said, you know,
criticism of me is not what this is about. They
can criticize me all they want. I want the person
did this to pay with his life, if it's possible,
(25:04):
through the justice system criticism.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
This sounds like the greatest investigation I've ever seen. I
have a mantra, and my mantra is every test on
every case, every time you use everything you've got, and
if you don't have it and somebody else does, go
ask them for it. What I am hearing is such
an extraordinary boots on the ground, just crawling and scrapping
(25:32):
to get everything you need from everybody you can get
it from. And nobody told you know, which is equally
extraordinary because as a twenty year old Kathy, did you
know this was even happening that he was going to
these links for you at the time, praying for you
every day, going to the governor, going to the Supreme Court,
(25:53):
going to everybody he could and every single agency that
he could.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
I didn't know at the time. Excuse me, I was
recovering on a big basis. But I'm not surprised because
of all all he has shown me, but all he
has done for us, for the families, and in the
background kind of in my mind, I was good that
this is going to be taken care of. This guy
(26:19):
is not going to get away, and that kid's in
charge of it.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
And then Sheriff Casaris, you didn't stop there. Once he
was captured and you had him. He didn't escape again.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
No, he didn't escape again. It was interesting, of course
I let him stay in Pensacola. When he was first arrested.
He was arrested in the stolen Volkswagen from nearby the
Cayamega Sorority House, and you know, Ted Bundy was take
(26:55):
me out of the picture for a minute. I was
the investigation. I wasn't the officer that used good old
as they call a shoe leather and practical police patrol procedures.
But he saw the vehicle going rather slowly and just
had a hunch it was suspicious, that's all it was.
(27:15):
Now today we're not allowed to stop a car for that.
We have to have some type of traffic infraction or crime,
or reason to believe that a crime has is or
is about to be committed before we can stop a car.
But at the time this occurred, he could stop a car,
just on a hunch and to talk to the person,
(27:35):
and he did. He just felt like this didn't look
right for some reason. He switched his interior radio to
his light bar on top of his car where the
speaker was for his PA system, and he approached the car.
After he stopped it, he called in the license plate
(27:56):
and as he's talking to Ted Bundy in the car,
the license plate came back and it was broadcast over
the speaker so Ted Bundy could hear it, and it
came back as a stolen vehicle. Ted Bundy jumped out
of the car and ran from him, and the officer
was one of those patriots. He was a reserve military
(28:22):
member of the Armed Forces and trained on weekends. It
was in good condition and he out ran Ted Bundy
took him down and I think Ted Bundy got the
first beating of his life that night. So much credit
goes first to the patrol officer that just had a hunch.
(28:46):
It resolved in a bunch, and I'm not a poet,
but hunched a bunch, I'll tell you, because it was.
I mean, it resulted in a lot going on. But
Ted Bundy was brought into the Escambia County jail well
that night because he was driving a stolen car, and
he identified himself as Ken Meisner, and Ken Meisner was
(29:09):
a Florida state athlete, a swimmer, and he had his
driver's license and he showed it to him, said he's
Ken Meisner. A resemblance was similar enough. You know, photographs
weren't that great. That's what they put down. Well, we
got a call from Ken Meisner and he said it
was put out over the obviously the airwaves that Ken
(29:30):
Meisner was in jail, fsu athlete, a star swimmer. He said, Hey,
I'm not in Pensacola. I'm in Tallahansee and I didn't
do anything. And I don't know who you got, but
it's not me. He said, I will tell you that
while I was practicing, my wallet was stolen, and so
(29:50):
somebody has my ID, and I think that's what this is.
You know, at the time, things were very open, very loose.
Security was weak. We didn't lock our lockers, we didn't
lock our doors. Tallahassee had just gotten over the nineteen
sixty six murder, mass murder of a family in their home,
(30:12):
and we were finally calming down from nineteen sixty six.
Now to nineteen seventy eight, and you know things were
somewhat getting back to normal, but you know again the
doors were unlocked and cars weren't locked, and lockers weren't locked.
So now we have somebody who is knocked Ken Meisner
(30:36):
and we don't know who it is. Eventually, Ted Bundy
said to the people in the Pensacola jail, the Escambia
County Jail, he said, you don't know who you have
in custody. They said, really, who are you? And I
want to remind you that at the time you had
to take fingerprints on a card. You took all the
(30:58):
fingers and two thumbs and then you would mail that
to the FBI. The FBI would get it, it would
go into the stack for fingerprint identification, and then they
would classify the fingerprints. Then they would come back and
tell us who it was. Today, it's done in a
matter of seconds on the scene in a patrol car
(31:19):
called aphis afis Automated Fingerprint Identification system. You just roll
one finger onto it and it goes immediately into supercomputers
and it comes back and tells you everything you want
to know about the person, if they've ever been fingerprinted before,
but we didn't have that. He said, well, I'll tell
you who I am. I'm somebody that you're probably going
(31:42):
to be interested in. I want to talk to an
investigator from Tallahassee, and I want to talk to a priest.
When he did that, in combination with the Volkswagen nearby,
the Cayomega house was stolen, I was in Saint Petersburg
the time, and I got a call my chief Deputy,
(32:03):
Leonard Turrito. Doctor Leonard Tarto said, Sheriff, if I had
to tell you to get back to Tallahassee as quickly
as you can, what would you want the reason to be.
Did we arrest somebody for the ky Omega case? He said,
it's possible. We've got somebody driving a stolen car who
(32:25):
won't tell us who he is. We haven't identified him,
and he's asking for an investigator from Tallahassee, and he's
asking for a priest. I got on my radio. I
was in my unmarked Sheriff's patrol car in Saint Petersburg,
and I got on my radio, my statewide frequency, and
(32:47):
I told all the law enforcement agencies and the Florida
Highway Patrol to look out for our white nineteen seventy
seven Ford four door Crown Victoria. I said, I'm going
to be coming with a red light on my dashboard
through all the communities from Saint Petersburg to Tallahassee. And
(33:08):
I did it. I did it very fast. I went
as quickly as I possibly could. Obviously there was no
air service. So I got back to Tallahassee and immediately
took charge of what was going on, sending investigators over
to the Escambia jail. And they told me what they
(33:28):
encountered and what the individual was like. And he ended
up saying, my name is Ted Bundy. That's all I'm
going to tell you, And were you involved in the
Kyomega murders and assaults and batteries and beatings? And he says,
I'm not saying anything else. So they told me and
(33:50):
then they said that he would talk to them, and
I said, great, see what he'll say. And they came
back and said, sure, if we've got a problem, he said,
what's the problem. He only wants to talk to us
straight up at midnight, and he only wants to talk
to us in front of a window, and he only
wants to talk to us when the moon is full.
(34:13):
I said what, and he said, yep, that's what we
got on our hands. So I said, well, make sure
the window is locked and that he's handcuffed and leg
shackled and talked to him. So he started his I
(34:33):
don't want to be crass, but I'm going to say
at his bs and that's what it was. He now
was in his element. It's almost what he was living for,
was to start being Ted Bundy the lawyer. He was
Ted Bundy the student, he was Ted Bundy the killer,
(34:54):
he was Ted Bundy the monster. He was now Ted
Bundy the lawyer. And he was going to show these
police officers how smart they are so to speak, if
you know what I mean. So he was giving them
a tough time. They called me and said, we're getting nowhere.
(35:16):
We're bringing him to the full moon in front of
the window, and you know we're getting nowhere. He's just ridiculous.
And I said, okay, you tell him that he's coming
back to the Leon County Jail and there will be
no more fooling around. We played his game. I said,
he's going to start playing by my rules from now on.
I think that was a headline in the Democrat and
(35:40):
Ted Bundy was transferred back and I was waiting for him.
There's video tape that has been shown widely of me
receiving him at the jail. When he was driven up.
He had a big mold on his face, a little dishevel.
They had on a sweater, hair was a little messed up,
and he had partial growth of a beard. I grabbed
it arm when he got out of the car and
(36:02):
I said, you're at the Leon County Jail and I'm
the Leon County Sheriff, and I just want you to
know you're not going anywhere from here. We brought him in,
we talked to him, and I brought him up to
a cell that we had that was steel lined with
armor proof steel ceilings, walls, and floor, and it was
(36:24):
a slammer door, which is a solid steel door with
a small window and a port for putting food inside.
We had two additional locks on the door, so it
was three locks. And what I did was I distributed
the keys to three different people on each shift. I
did not want one person able to open his door.
(36:46):
And I told the shift at the jail, if I
do a check and an inspection and I find all
three keys in the hands of one person, the whole
shift will be fired. Because I knew that he was bright.
I mean, that's how he got out of the other
two jails. They left him in a library all by
himself while the deputy went outside the smoke, and he
(37:08):
jumped out of the window and was gone. So I
knew that he had the ability to sweep talk people
and get away with things. He was smart. So he
was in a steel lined cell now that had no
ability to take a lighte fixture down like he did
in the first jail. He escape from and went up
through the plumbing and air conditioning system and made his
(37:32):
way to an outside opening and jumped out and escaped
in the first time. But it was steel lined in
three locks, and I didn't want one person to go
to the jail door. But I was afraid he would
talk somebody into it, so I didn't allow it. It
had to have three of my people at the door.
(37:53):
I figured three of mine would handle him.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Here's what's really cool. I want you to confirm for me.
You have a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and doctoral work. Correct.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
I have all my doctoral work finished. Let me tell
you what happened. I don't have the DPA, the Doctor
of Public Administration because of Ted Bundy. Okay, I was
writing my dissertation. I had completed five years of studies,
defended my dissertation topic, I passed all my comprehensive exams
(38:34):
and my orals and everything, and I was doing my
dissertation part time. I mean, I had a little time
to devote to it, and I would have finished and
been doctor Kenkassarus. I obviously didn't have time to run
this investigation and make sure that everything went well twenty
four hours a day, that he didn't escape, and that
we were collecting and processing the evidence and handling the
(38:57):
major crime squad the way we should, and work on
a dissertation. Frankly, my mind wasn't there. So I waited
until obviously I was out of office. Ted Bundy was
at the prison, and I went back to the school,
Novah University, and I said I want to re enroll
to complete my dissertation. And they looked at the files
(39:18):
and they said, oh, you can't do that, And I said, what, No,
you've timed out. You had seven years to finish the degree,
and you've gone over that time period. That's because I
put it aside. So I didn't get my doctorate, but
I got my serial killer. And frankly, I would not
(39:39):
trade ever a degree. I have the course of studies.
That's why I list my background as DPA with an
ABD after it, which means all but dissertation.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
But that's what I find extraordinary because everybody says, oh,
Ted Bundy was so smart, he was such a genius
that he picked the wrong lawman.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Well, I don't know. I know that he picked the
wrong lawman with the commitment. I had a commitment. I'm
confident he's probably smarter than me. I'm confident he has
more intelligence than me. But he didn't know more about
law enforcement than me, and he didn't have the power
that I had because as chief law enforcement officer and
being elected, nobody could tell me what to do. The
(40:27):
only constraints I had were budget, and that's why I
went to the governor, and that's why I went to
the Chief Justice. I went to the two main power
sources for the state, and I said, I want your
help because I need resources, equipment, manpower and budget. But
one of the first things I did was I went
(40:48):
to a friend of mine named Si Deeb and side.
Deeb was a philanthropist, a very wealthy man in tallahasse
He still has family here. In fact, one of his
granddaughters was a student of mine at the community college.
And I went to him and I said, you have
a building across from the Tallahassee Police Department, a big
(41:10):
brick building. It's empty, and it's for sale. I said, Si,
I want you to give me that building for as
long as I need it, because I want a place
to work out of so that all the law enforcement
agencies can come together in one place. I don't want
them going to work at the Tallahassee Police Department, the
Leon County Sheriff's Department, the fam U Campus Police Department,
(41:34):
the FSU Campus Police Department, the Highway Patrol, the Florida
Department Law Enforcement, and then meeting somewhere at some meeting room.
I want them to be assigned to this case permanently,
and I want their new offices to be in one building.
So we drew straws for the placement of the stickers
(41:57):
of our agency, you know, the things to go on
the side of the car that identify the Leon County
Sheriff's office or Tallahassee Police Department the agency's logo. So
we drew straws as to where they should go on
the front door of this new building. He gave it
to me, and that was the new command post, and
(42:17):
it was bigger than the Tallahassee Police Department, and we
had plenty of rooms. So we set up rooms for
victim investigators, We had rooms for evidence investigators, we had
rooms for the interview investigators. We had room for those
that were going to be out of town working and
(42:40):
those that were going to be in town working. The
command staff. I mean, I set up a whole nother
police agency made up of all these different agencies, and
then I would pair them by different agencies so that
I didn't have two of the same agency working together
(43:01):
out in the field, because it would be cross pollination.
One would know something the other one didn't know, and
that way there would be no secrets or keeping something
to the side so that maybe later they could you
try to solve the case themselves. So I took away
that ability, and I made them all believe that they
(43:21):
were working on the same team because they didn't go
to work where they work. They went to work at
the command post for this serial murder investigation of this
individual that committed this painous, monstrous crime at the Cayomega House,
and that's where we worked from and that had never
been done as far as I know in Florida ever.
(43:44):
But it was an idea that I thought would work.
I wanted anything that would work. I wanted everybody's mind
in unison. I didn't want them, you know. I didn't
want each individual agency head to be sending different people
and not knowing who's going to show up. I wanted
him assigned. I had offices for them, and it was
(44:05):
in a free building from a philanthropist, So I think side.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Kathy, I have a sister, Charlene, who you know, and
she is a Level one trauma nurse, and often once
somebody leaves trauma, she never knows what happened to him.
That's true for detectives and responding officers and prosecutors oftentimes,
and in your case with the officers that you first
(44:33):
saw and Ken Cassaris, you know, y'all even had to
be separated at trial because y'all were all witnesses. Y'all
couldn't be in the same room and you didn't have
an opportunity to really see him again and talk to him.
So before we close tonight, you take your time and
just talk directly to him after everything you've heard him
(44:53):
say tonight, all of his extraordinary work, his groundbreaking way
of doing an investigation of this magnitude for a serial killer.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Well, I just being at home and recuperating and everything
I knew police work was going on. I knew agencies
were going to work on making sure that this Bundy
person at that point was going to be caught. And
hearing you talk tonight, I am amazed the level of
(45:26):
people you had working for you and whom you started
as a group that really turned into the best group
because they got ted Bundy. And I'm just amazed at
all the work you did and all the foresight you
had to know what to do and when to do it.
And I appreciate very much, Sheriff. You've been in our
(45:49):
hearts for many years. My parents would talk about you,
and life goes on and I don't have a chance
always to thank the people that mean the most to us,
and you've always been in that group, And thank you
very much for helping me then and for all these years.
That I have known you, but not been close. I
(46:09):
appreciate your friendship.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Now to say you're welcome is just not enough. It's
so obligatory in terms of what we say, and it's
almost disingenuine to just say you're welcome from the bottom
of my heart. From the moment I saw you and
(46:31):
prayed for you, because I didn't know whether you were
alive or dead frankly at the moment, but they were
taking you out and you weren't confirmed dead, so I
knew they found a pulse. I prayed that it would
continue and that your heart would be on. And I'm
so happy that forty plus years later, your heart is
beating on, and so is Cheryl Thomas. I hadn't mentioned Cheryl.
(46:55):
She was a victim at another location the same night
while we were investing gating the Kyomega case. She was
in a separate duple like six blocks away. And this
monster had the ability to attack again with all those
police cars in the area and all the work we
were doing in that area, all the red and blue
(47:15):
lights that were flashing, he you know, he busted in
on Cheryl Thomas and attacked her as well too. I'll
say the three survivors, Karen and you and Cheryl. I mean,
I just you know, my heart goes out to you,
and you're welcome. Isn't enough to say I did it
(47:37):
for all humanity. I did it for you. I did
it because law enforcement couldn't fail on this. I feel
for law enforcement. I'm still in law enforcement, and I
understand that every shariff can't take on a major investigation.
They've got agencies to run. I don't know what drove
me to do this. I was directed by God, I'm sure,
(48:01):
because my message was coming from somewhere. After all, I
was an elected official, and you know I was supposed
to be taking care of everything, and you can't take
care of everything, but the image of my two daughters
and the possibility that that was them on that slab
of marble that night, and I promised that I would
(48:23):
do what I had to do, what parents would expect
from a sheriff, from the surviving daughters, or more from
those that didn't survive, that justice had to be done.
And you know what we ended up with was, of course,
an invisible monster. He lived amongst us, and he got
(48:43):
along with everybody. He was charismatic, he was witting he
was funny. I mean, some say he was handsome. I
think at times he was. At times I didn't like
the way he looked, but when he dressed up, he
was a pretty handsome guy. And he handled himself well.
He smiled through court, and he took advantage of being
(49:04):
his own attorney after firing eighteen attorneys during the time
I had him in custody for two years. He fired
eighteen attorneys because they wouldn't do it his way. And
you know, I just know that law enforcement can't do
it that way. Every time. There's not enough money, there's
(49:26):
not enough resources, there's not enough budget. The sheriffs have
too much to do. There's too much crime set upon
us today. But at that moment, in that day, at
that location, it had meaning to me. I shut out
all the naysayers. When I found the bite marks on
(49:47):
Lisa Leivi, my people kind of laughed at me because
I said, this is going to solve the crime. They
had no idea that I had forensic codeontology background and
was teaching bitemark identification. It was so new, wasn't used.
And you may not know this, but forensicode intology had
never been introduced in the courts anywhere in the world.
(50:08):
This was the first case, so it wasn't easy to
introduce it. Not only that, but I got a search
warrant for Ted Bundy's mouth. Never in the history of
this country did anybody get a search warrant for a
man's mouth. I needed a search warrant because if I
went and got a warrant, I'd have to serve it
on his attorneys or him. And then if he chipped
(50:30):
a tooth and there was one anomaly, we couldn't use
his teeth. So you can't have any anomalies because if
you say, well this isn't consistent, but we don't know
when it occurred, well goodbye for that evidence, because it's
not going to work. So I went to the judge
and I said, Judge, I judge justice in this case,
(50:52):
the Chief Justice Supreme Court. And I said, Jimmy, we
need to figure this out. And I don't know whether
he came up with it or I came up with it,
but somehow, somebody or jointly we just had the same
idea at the same time. How about a search warrant
for his mouth? You have his bite impressions from the
prison in Salt Lake City where he was serving a
(51:14):
fifteen year sentence when he escaped from the two Colorado
jails where he was being held temporarily for the investigation
of other crimes. I got his dental impressions from the prison,
and with that I could show the court that I
had reason to believe that in his mouth there was
evidence that would be relevant to the processing of this
(51:36):
scene and that could prove that he was the per
person involved in the case. So they had granted the warrant,
and then they granted a warrant that let me use
force if necessary to remove the bide impressions. So that
was a whole nother story. Going to the dental office,
and when he found out that his BikeE marks were
(51:57):
going to be taken his bite impressions because he had
been taunting me. He always told me at least a
dozen times, Ken, Ken, the evidence is there. He called
me Ken. He liked that. He thought that was demeaning.
He said, Ken, the evidence is there. You just can't
find it. The evidence is there. Well, I want to
(52:19):
tell you, I always thought that he thought the evidence
was the bite impression. And when the doors opened that
my dentist's office where I took him and there was
three dentists, my dentist, a doctor, an internal medicine doctor,
and doctor Suvaron who did the forensic odetology. I had
(52:41):
confirmed that that's what he was talking about when he
kept harassing me about the evidence was there. Because he
didn't say, what are you going to do? What's this
all about? He started screaming, you can't do this, you
can't do this. I don't have an attorney. Attorney, and
(53:01):
I said, ted, you can't have an attorney. I'm serving
a warrant on you. That's the end of that. And
he realized that we were going to use force if necessary.
He jumped into the dental chair, looked up at me,
opened his mouth and said, Ken, you know I'm not
a violent person. Do what you have to do.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
What a story?
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Well, I do not think that I could thank the
two of y'all anymore for allowing us to hear this
beautiful friendship. I know that y'all admire each other, you
respect each other, you adore each other, But this friendship
is so important. And I think that there's law enforcement
across the country it's going to be able to hear this,
(53:50):
and perhaps they will reach out to their victim, and
maybe the victims will reach out to their detectives and
you know they can share those moments too, that this
is what happened to me that night, this is what
happened to you that night, and we are forever bonded
because of it. And this was just a beautiful thing.
Mister Can I got to tell you, I am going
(54:11):
to drag you into my zone seven. I need you, honey.
You are just an extraordinary person. And I thank you
for being with us and sharing your experience when you
called and captured and put in prison Ted Bundy.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
Well thank you. As I spoke. Of course, I put
myself into the moment, which is why I talked more
than I thought I was going to, because I was
reliving and experience. And I did so for Kathy, especially
since she's here tonight, and certainly you know, for Karen,
(54:48):
for for you know, Lisa and Margaret who did not survive,
and for Cheryl who did. Beautiful women, beautiful lives, you know,
to be termedated so early, or to have been abused
and attacked in such vicious manner and have to live
with that for their life. At least they did live.
(55:12):
And I know they're making the best of their lives
they can. The psychological impact must be beyond my understanding
of how you can deal with it. I've never had
a bruised eye, much less to go through what any
of them did, So my heart's out to all of them.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
Ken.
Speaker 3 (55:34):
I want to thank you very much. You've always been
special to me. But hearing the background of all the
work you did and getting all the agencies together in
my mind you talking about it, I can see how
you did it.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
You spoke so well.
Speaker 3 (55:48):
I can see the room with all the agencies put together,
and just to know that you did all that. You
did it for us, but you did it for everyone.
And I appreciate you very much. And I know just
by saying you're welcome, it's not enough for you to say,
but it means the world to me.
Speaker 2 (56:05):
It means the world to me that I have you
and Karen and Cheryl. Thank you. I'm getting choked up
here thinking about it because I'm being brought back to
that night myself. Ted Bundy was captured. He was held
(56:26):
for two years in my jail. He was convicted, he
was sentenced, he lost all of his appeals. He went
to prison. He was only there ten years. I know
that sounds like a long time, but not for death row,
and he was executed. It just simply the only way
I could have gone better is that Ted Bundy was
(56:48):
a decent young man and went out and was dating
and became a terrific lawyer and made a real, you know,
professional out of himself, contributed to life instead of taking life.
Speaker 1 (57:03):
Ken Cassaris, thank you so much for being so open
and so honest about your experience. Thank you for your
years of service, devotion and dedication to not just your department,
but all those young people that went on to have
careers themselves. Kathy Kleiner, my friend, thank you for being
(57:23):
so open and so honest and taking so much time
to share your story. It is powerful. I love you,
I adore you, I respect you, and again I thank
you both. I'm going to end Zone seven the way
that I always do with a quote. Obviously, I was
very motivated to work the case. I had two young
(57:45):
daughters at home, and I vowed that this person would
be stopped. I put everything my heart, my soul, my
skills to work on it, and together with a big
team of people that came up with Lee needs a
person and eventually a conviction. Ken Cassars. I'm Cheryl McCollum
(58:08):
and this is Zone seven H
Y'all. There are times in this business where your heart
just gets pulled in and tonight is one of those times.
We have the opportunity to hear from a victim and
her sheriff while they talk about the incident that bonded them,
bonded them like battle buddies. We have Kathy Kleiner and
(00:31):
the former Leon County Sheriff Ken Cassaris. It is an
absolute honor for me to welcome both of them, and
I want to tell you a little bit about the sheriff.
I know y'all know Kathy Kleiner. She was in the
last episode, but the sheriff was elected in nineteen seventy six.
He trained as an officer. He was later a teacher.
(00:52):
He has great skills in forensics. He taught college and
started a criminal justice program. Sheriff Casaris stood in front
of the house on Jefferson Street and listened to the
details of this unspeakable, unimaginable, horrific crime. He took the
reins of this investigation. There was a team. There was
(01:15):
an unbelievable team, professional team, more than one agency involved.
But don't make the mistake of who was in charge.
He had people describing the scene to him. He heard
all of it, and then he heard there was more
than one victim, two that survived for now, two that
were already deceased. He saw Kathy Kleiner that night, he
(01:40):
watched her get loaded and put into an ambulance. He
never stopped praying for her. Now, y'all, he's a probe
He's a dedicated lawman that refuses to use the word hero,
But that's exactly the word I'm going to use. He's
a hero in every sense of the word. If there
is anybody that you would want in your Zone seven,
(02:03):
it's Ken Cassaris. Welcome to Zone seven.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Thank you for the invitation to be here. My heart
has swelled knowing that Kathy is also talking at the
same time. There was a time when I did not
know she would survive, much less forty plus years later
than I would be talking with her.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Well, Sheriff, Let's talk about your role that night. I mean, you,
in that moment, had such a chaotic scene, an unimaginable scene,
a quadruple attack with four victims, two murdered, and like
you said, you didn't know if the others were going
to survive in that moment, and you had to take
(02:46):
command of the command center, the search for the killer,
the forensic evidence. I mean, you had quite an undertaking, sir.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Who it was. There's no question, of course that it
was a complicated murder case. My first inkling that I
had to get involved was when I got a phone
call past two thirty in the morning. My Sheriff's office
staff in the dispatch room said, Sheriff, we have an
(03:14):
attack on young ladies at the Cayomega Sorority tag house
on Jefferson Street. And I said, tell me about it.
What do you mean that was an attack? He said,
somebody went into the house. We don't know whether there's
two or four. It looks like there's going to be
potentially for murder cases. Tallahassee had not had a serious
(03:39):
crime like that, Although you know, I hate to say typical. Unfortunately,
we've learned that crimes are going to occur, and you're
going to have shootings, and you're going to have beatings,
you're going to have rapes, and I don't want to
say that they're necessarily isolated, but they are not of
the big nature like massive kind of attacks like this,
(04:03):
mass attacks. We didn't know if it was mass murder
or not. The last one was in nineteen sixty six
in Tallahassee, where the superintendent of Florida's school system. He
his wife, and twelve year old daughter were attacked, murdered
in their home, shot after being tied up and stabbed.
(04:25):
Nineteen sixty six was the year I moved to Tallahansee
and I was at a football game when it occurred,
and I had heard about it. I had just finished
serving four years as a police officer in Saint Petersburg
at that time, so I became very interested in that case.
And Tallahassee was going berserk. People were, I mean, blocks
(04:51):
were not to be found, screen door locks, interior door locks,
dead bolts were replaced, sliding locks were put on top
of the dead bolts. It just, I mean, the town
freaked out in a sense over that murder case. So
you can imagine fast forward now to nineteen seventy eight
(05:13):
and January and all of a sudden, I'm hearing now
I'm the sheriff. Then I was the department chair of
Criminal Justice at what is now called Tallahasee State College.
It was Tallahassee Community College. But I remembered that case.
It never left my mind, and now I was called
(05:35):
to thirty plus in the morning when this attack occurred,
and I quickly dressed and made my way to the
university and to the front of the Cayomega House and
jumped out and I met my chief deputy and the
Captain of detectives and who was also an attorney and
the legal advisor for the department. I met with some
(05:57):
Tallahassee police officers and FSU police officer. At the same time,
there was already an officer, a detective that had gone
in and had reviewed the circumstances, had called for EMS
the Emergency Medical System ambulances were dispatched, and I was
being brought to up to date, and I was being
(06:18):
informed about the status of each of the rooms. The
young ladies that were attacked. At the time, they indicated
to me, I don't think any of them will survive.
The injuries, the wounds, the beatings, the blood does not
look good. We know there are two that are deceased
(06:39):
at this time, and there are two that were you know,
we called EMS for And about that time the ambulance
has arrived. I saw Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner both
coming out on gurney's and we were loaded for the hospital.
I was stunned. I was heartbroken. I was shocked, not
(07:02):
that I hadn't seen crime before, but coming out of
a school sorority house, just a university sorority. I mean,
it was just too much. I mean, I just couldn't
believe it was happening. I said a prayer for Kathy
and Karen, and I had hoped, but I looked at
them and I didn't know that they would survive. I prayed.
(07:25):
I just didn't know. It didn't look good. Later I
did check in on them, and it appeared that, you know,
they were able to have pulse and life, and although
they looked like it would be a long time for
rehabilitation and surgeries and efforts to pull them back together,
(07:47):
so to speak, from the massive injuries that were inflicted
upon them. So I was briefed on everything that they knew.
There was a door that apparently was an entrance that
was not the front door. It was a side door.
We don't know. I'm not going to say it was
propped open. That happens often in sorority houses, where the
(08:09):
doors are propped open so the ladies either can come
in late, or sometimes they have boys slip in afterwards.
I mean, you know, these are all things that shouldn't happen,
but after all, this is college life, and things like
that do happen. We also thought that it's possible that
the lock could have been worked on and picked because
(08:32):
at the time the locks were more let's say, easier
to handle, even with a credit card to slide them
back and open the doors. They don't make locks like
that anymore, and these were older locks. So how he
got in we didn't know. But I was briefed about
the door. I was briefed about the fact that we
(08:53):
had an eyewitness that was coming in late, perhaps through
that same door, I'm not sure, but she was tiptoeing
through when all of a sudden she saw a male
figure coming down the stairway. She got a very good
look at him. He apparently did not see her, and
he was carrying a pretty big chunk of a limb
(09:19):
of a tree, and he had something white wrapped around it,
like a towel or t shirt or something, as if
he was either aware he needed something to make certain
he could hang on to it with tension, or he
didn't want to leave any DNA on the wood or something.
We didn't collect DNA. Then we did collect, of course,
(09:39):
sweat what have you for blood typing, but he and
he was aware of blood typing as a matter of fact,
because we had an incident later in the jail where
he thought we were trying to obtain his blood type,
but we couldn't collect things from him without a warrant.
But he did say that he wondered why he was
(10:00):
getting so many pieces of fruit. He thought we were
trying to get a blood type. I got briefed on
everything and I was brought up to date, and I
did not go in at that time because as a
professional sheriff with the education and law enforcement background I
had being department chair for ten years prior teaching it forensics,
(10:22):
advanced forensics, Criminal investigation, Advanced criminal Investigation, I knew better
than to go inside. I didn't have a role inside
the Cairomega house. And we teach and preach if you
don't have something you're going to do, don't go in
because what's called transfer evidence. I could bring in on
(10:44):
my shoes, something that could taint the scene, or drop
some threads or something off of my clothing. Everything was
important so the least number of people in the scene
the better. So I stood outside and started direct I
turned to my chief deputy and my Captain of detectives,
(11:05):
and I said, tonight we are going to set up
a major crime squad for this investigation. I turned to
Jack Pottinger, who was my lead investigator, captain of investigations
and an attorney, and I said, you will be in
charge pulling together the major crime squad. We the Leon
(11:27):
County Sheriff's Office will be the lead agency. I want
you to bring in the FSU Campus Police, the Tallahassee Police,
the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Florida A and
M Police. We want to make sure, if necessary, even
the Florida Highway Patrol. And we did end up using
(11:48):
the recruit class from the Florida Highway Patrol to search
for evidence. I called the colonel and asked him if
he would dismiss the recruit class of fifty five new
recruit roots for the Florida Highway Patrol to do a
crime scene search. I was their instructor at the time,
(12:08):
and I taught them crime scenes the week before, so
I knew that this Highway Patrol class knew how to
handle crime scenes. So I called the colonel, got them
dismissed from class, and they were assigned to me to
do crime scene search. And they did it grid by
grid by grid, very carefully. We were looking for that
piece of wood, of course, but Ted Bundy was smarter
(12:31):
than we were in a sense. He got that wood
off the woodpile. It was January and cold when he left,
he threw it back on the woodpile. Were convinced, and
in the morning, the first things the sororities and fraternities
do is they start fires, and of course the wood
on top gets burned first. So we're sure that the
wood that was used to beat Kathy, Karen and the
(12:56):
victims in this case, Margaret and Lisa. We were sure
that the evidence was gone as far as that piece
of wood. But that's what happened that night. That was
the beginning. That was how I took charge, and from
there it got more complicated.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Well, sir, I think at this moment what I would
love to do is I want to bring Kathy in
because something that is just extraordinary to me is how
she felt about you that night. So you're talking about
somebody only twenty years old that's had a traumatic, horrific event,
(13:40):
and seeing you she had an immediate reaction. So, Kathy,
would you please join us, and I just want you
to talk directly to Ken for a minute.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yes, I would love to Ken. I don't remember seeing
you that night, but I remember hearing about you, and
in my room in the hospital, your name kept coming up,
and I felt so safe knowing someone in such a
high position was really involved in what had happened to me,
and how involved you were that finding this person and
(14:11):
securing FSU and making sure that I was going to
be okay. And I remember in my hospital room there
was a police officer that stood outside the door and
he made me feel so safe. It felt like he
was just protecting me. And I knew I wasn't going
to get hit again. I knew whomever did this was
(14:33):
not going to come back into my room and hurt me.
And your police officers were wonderful, they really were. They
just they were so good at their job and they
did it and I always felt comfortable with them. And
I'd like to thank you for having such a good
group of men that was and women that were working
for you.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Well. Thank you for feeling that way, but you know,
if it's done right, that's what you do. You protect
the innocent, you protect the victims. We assigned deputies to
be at your door and to let no one in,
not the press, not other law enforcement officers. We didn't
want you interrogated or interviewed. You know. We let doctors
(15:13):
and nurses that were going to tend to you each
were asked what they were going to do before they
could go in, because we didn't want even the medical
staff to be curiosity seekers to find out what was
going on. It was most important that you had your privacy.
It was most important that you had all the care
that you could get, and it was very important that
(15:35):
your strength be kept for the purpose of helping us
when you were capable of it. I was praying for
divine intervention and that you know, I would get the
word that the two of you who went to the
hospital that we weren't you know, confirmed at the scene,
were already deceased, but that you would, you know, one day,
(15:58):
be able to talk about it and be healed and
back to your life. I know that it transformed you.
It didn't leave you as you were before. Because an
incident like that never would. But thank you. We just
did our job no more. And that's just what should
(16:21):
be done, no matter who it is, no matter where
they are, you just just should get that kind of care.
And I cared and they should care, and I believe
that everybody does. Sometimes there's confusion and sometimes things fall through,
but I was going to make certain it didn't. Let
(16:42):
me tell you one of the reasons why I thought
about all of you at home. I had a daughter
that was born December the fourteenth, nineteen seventy seven, and
this occurred December the fifteenth, nineteen seventy eight. She was
(17:03):
a month and a day old. I had a daughter
that was two years old, born in November. The first
one was Natalie. The older girl was Monica. When I
went to the morgue to look at Margaret and Lisa,
and they were on a big marble slab. Because I
was going to do this investigation myself, I had been
(17:26):
involved in the first serial murder case in Saint Petersburg's history.
We had five elderly women, all over eighty at that time,
attacked and strangled with their pantyhose and killed in their homes.
They were all single, living alone and I worked all
those crime scenes, and I ended up finding myself personally
(17:49):
who did it through fingerprints, because I did the fingerprint
analysis in comparison. So I had already solved one serial case,
and I knew how complex they could be. I worked
all those crime scenes, so I was aware. But I
went to investigate the bodies myself. I didn't trust the doctors.
I didn't trust the other investigators. I just felt like
(18:12):
I had more experience than they did. And when I
reviewed the bodies, two things. Number one was I obviously
saw the mutilated breasts of Margaret, and I saw the
mutilation somewhat of the breast of Lisa. But I also
saw a very good bite impression on Lisa's buttocks. And
(18:37):
it was not just a normal bite mark. It was
a double bite. In other words, he opened his mouth
very wide, came down on the buttocks, and bit hard,
not hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to
bruise really well. And then he opened his mouth and
came back again and did a double But I believed
(19:02):
from that moment that I saw that that was a signature.
Now I learned later that we never had a warm
body to evaluate anywhere in the country. From Ted Bundy.
But I learned that because of what I saw, he
was putting his signature on the crime scene. And the
(19:27):
other thing that went through my mind was I looked
at these two girls twenty and twenty one, I believe
they were, and I thought, easily, those could be my daughters,
my two little girls, one month old Natalie and two
year old Monica. I said, what if they were my daughters?
(19:48):
I said to myself, what would you want the sheriff
to do? And I knew because I could instruct myself
because I was thinking, those are my daughters. What am
I telling them to do? Basically, if I didn't have
knowledge of law enforcement, I would be telling them, please
(20:09):
do everything and anything possible. You go beyond the budget,
get all the help, get everybody and anything that you
can in line to take care of this and take
this monster off the street. So I was committed because
I was having flashbacks that my two daughters could be
(20:31):
there on that slab and that Morgan. I couldn't take it.
I just said, this is my job, and this is
going to be my job. I won't let loose of it.
I'm not going to allow this person to escape because
as a parent, that's what I would want the sheriff
to do. And I said, I'm the sheriff and I
(20:54):
can do it, because well, obviously as a sherifter, there's
nobody tell me I can't. The very next morning, I
went to Saint Thomas Moore Co Cathedral, which is where
Governor asked you of the state of Florida attends church.
I waited for him outside. He came out of church
when the service was over, saw me, came to me.
(21:18):
He was a big, strapping man and a statesman that
we don't have anymore in our politics. It doesn't seem
like but he was a real statesman. Put his arm
around me and said, Sheriff, what can I do for you?
I said, Governor, I want you to clear a pathway
for me at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Crime
(21:39):
Lab and through your office. I want the power of
the Governor's office to help me get what I need,
be it resources, manpower, equipment, money, whatever it takes. And
he said, Sheriff, you have my word, and if you
(22:00):
don't get cooperation from the state in any way, shape
or form, you call me personally and I will make
certain that you get whatever you need. And I had
that commitment. I also met with Chief Justice Jimmy Adkins
of the Florida Supreme Court, and he was a friend
(22:23):
of mine. He and his wife both were friends. And
I met with him on a Sunday in his office
at the Supreme Court Building, and I asked him to
help me. And at the time I didn't think about it,
and neither did he, because I was asking for advice
from the highest court in Florida. And who knows, it
(22:46):
may get appealed, you know, later conviction or something, and
he may have to rule on it. And in the
middle of our conversation, he says, yeah, he's legs kicked
up on his desk and sitting back. He said, oh
my god. And I said what he says, Ken, you
realize I have to recruise myself now if this case
comes before me. I said, well, I said, let's hope
(23:10):
we have a case to come before you. I said,
I sure need your help. So I was stretching it.
I wanted to get all the help I could. I
knew I needed resources, I needed to lead legal minds.
I needed the power of the office of the Governor.
And all that came from the night where I investigated
the two bodies and the commitment I made to the parents.
(23:34):
And by the way, both Margaret and Lisa were from
Saint Petersburg and I was a Saint Petersburg comp and
an investigator, and that's where I saw the crime. I
couldn't believe it. It was like, is this can this
be possible? A sheriff in Tallahassee encountering two victims from
Saint Petersburg, And you know, I made certain, of course,
(23:57):
the proper communications were made to the family as well.
So it was it's broken into pieces. It was at
the crime scene, then it was at the morgue, then
it was at the Saint Thomas more Co Cathedral with
the governor, then it was at the Supreme Court building.
(24:18):
I was moving, I was moving fast, and I got
to tell you a lot of law enforcement was wondering.
They had never seen, you know, a sheriff number one
leading an investigation, because it's always you know, a sergeant
or someone in the investigative ranks. And they had never
seen someone going to the governor and the Chief Justice
(24:40):
of the Supreme Court, you know, and handling a file
as I was. So there was some criticism of me
but I was a big boy, and I said, you know,
criticism of me is not what this is about. They
can criticize me all they want. I want the person
did this to pay with his life, if it's possible,
(25:04):
through the justice system criticism.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
This sounds like the greatest investigation I've ever seen. I
have a mantra, and my mantra is every test on
every case, every time you use everything you've got, and
if you don't have it and somebody else does, go
ask them for it. What I am hearing is such
an extraordinary boots on the ground, just crawling and scrapping
(25:32):
to get everything you need from everybody you can get
it from. And nobody told you know, which is equally
extraordinary because as a twenty year old Kathy, did you
know this was even happening that he was going to
these links for you at the time, praying for you
every day, going to the governor, going to the Supreme Court,
(25:53):
going to everybody he could and every single agency that
he could.
Speaker 3 (25:57):
I didn't know at the time. Excuse me, I was
recovering on a big basis. But I'm not surprised because
of all all he has shown me, but all he
has done for us, for the families, and in the
background kind of in my mind, I was good that
this is going to be taken care of. This guy
(26:19):
is not going to get away, and that kid's in
charge of it.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
And then Sheriff Casaris, you didn't stop there. Once he
was captured and you had him. He didn't escape again.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
No, he didn't escape again. It was interesting, of course
I let him stay in Pensacola. When he was first arrested.
He was arrested in the stolen Volkswagen from nearby the
Cayamega Sorority House, and you know, Ted Bundy was take
(26:55):
me out of the picture for a minute. I was
the investigation. I wasn't the officer that used good old
as they call a shoe leather and practical police patrol procedures.
But he saw the vehicle going rather slowly and just
had a hunch it was suspicious, that's all it was.
(27:15):
Now today we're not allowed to stop a car for that.
We have to have some type of traffic infraction or crime,
or reason to believe that a crime has is or
is about to be committed before we can stop a car.
But at the time this occurred, he could stop a car,
just on a hunch and to talk to the person,
(27:35):
and he did. He just felt like this didn't look
right for some reason. He switched his interior radio to
his light bar on top of his car where the
speaker was for his PA system, and he approached the car.
After he stopped it, he called in the license plate
(27:56):
and as he's talking to Ted Bundy in the car,
the license plate came back and it was broadcast over
the speaker so Ted Bundy could hear it, and it
came back as a stolen vehicle. Ted Bundy jumped out
of the car and ran from him, and the officer
was one of those patriots. He was a reserve military
(28:22):
member of the Armed Forces and trained on weekends. It
was in good condition and he out ran Ted Bundy
took him down and I think Ted Bundy got the
first beating of his life that night. So much credit
goes first to the patrol officer that just had a hunch.
(28:46):
It resolved in a bunch, and I'm not a poet,
but hunched a bunch, I'll tell you, because it was.
I mean, it resulted in a lot going on. But
Ted Bundy was brought into the Escambia County jail well
that night because he was driving a stolen car, and
he identified himself as Ken Meisner, and Ken Meisner was
(29:09):
a Florida state athlete, a swimmer, and he had his
driver's license and he showed it to him, said he's
Ken Meisner. A resemblance was similar enough. You know, photographs
weren't that great. That's what they put down. Well, we
got a call from Ken Meisner and he said it
was put out over the obviously the airwaves that Ken
(29:30):
Meisner was in jail, fsu athlete, a star swimmer. He said, Hey,
I'm not in Pensacola. I'm in Tallahansee and I didn't
do anything. And I don't know who you got, but
it's not me. He said, I will tell you that
while I was practicing, my wallet was stolen, and so
(29:50):
somebody has my ID, and I think that's what this is.
You know, at the time, things were very open, very loose.
Security was weak. We didn't lock our lockers, we didn't
lock our doors. Tallahassee had just gotten over the nineteen
sixty six murder, mass murder of a family in their home,
(30:12):
and we were finally calming down from nineteen sixty six.
Now to nineteen seventy eight, and you know things were
somewhat getting back to normal, but you know again the
doors were unlocked and cars weren't locked, and lockers weren't locked.
So now we have somebody who is knocked Ken Meisner
(30:36):
and we don't know who it is. Eventually, Ted Bundy
said to the people in the Pensacola jail, the Escambia
County Jail, he said, you don't know who you have
in custody. They said, really, who are you? And I
want to remind you that at the time you had
to take fingerprints on a card. You took all the
(30:58):
fingers and two thumbs and then you would mail that
to the FBI. The FBI would get it, it would
go into the stack for fingerprint identification, and then they
would classify the fingerprints. Then they would come back and
tell us who it was. Today, it's done in a
matter of seconds on the scene in a patrol car
(31:19):
called aphis afis Automated Fingerprint Identification system. You just roll
one finger onto it and it goes immediately into supercomputers
and it comes back and tells you everything you want
to know about the person, if they've ever been fingerprinted before,
but we didn't have that. He said, well, I'll tell
you who I am. I'm somebody that you're probably going
(31:42):
to be interested in. I want to talk to an
investigator from Tallahassee, and I want to talk to a priest.
When he did that, in combination with the Volkswagen nearby,
the Cayomega house was stolen, I was in Saint Petersburg
the time, and I got a call my chief Deputy,
(32:03):
Leonard Turrito. Doctor Leonard Tarto said, Sheriff, if I had
to tell you to get back to Tallahassee as quickly
as you can, what would you want the reason to be.
Did we arrest somebody for the ky Omega case? He said,
it's possible. We've got somebody driving a stolen car who
(32:25):
won't tell us who he is. We haven't identified him,
and he's asking for an investigator from Tallahassee, and he's
asking for a priest. I got on my radio. I
was in my unmarked Sheriff's patrol car in Saint Petersburg,
and I got on my radio, my statewide frequency, and
(32:47):
I told all the law enforcement agencies and the Florida
Highway Patrol to look out for our white nineteen seventy
seven Ford four door Crown Victoria. I said, I'm going
to be coming with a red light on my dashboard
through all the communities from Saint Petersburg to Tallahassee. And
(33:08):
I did it. I did it very fast. I went
as quickly as I possibly could. Obviously there was no
air service. So I got back to Tallahassee and immediately
took charge of what was going on, sending investigators over
to the Escambia jail. And they told me what they
(33:28):
encountered and what the individual was like. And he ended
up saying, my name is Ted Bundy. That's all I'm
going to tell you, And were you involved in the
Kyomega murders and assaults and batteries and beatings? And he says,
I'm not saying anything else. So they told me and
(33:50):
then they said that he would talk to them, and
I said, great, see what he'll say. And they came
back and said, sure, if we've got a problem, he said,
what's the problem. He only wants to talk to us
straight up at midnight, and he only wants to talk
to us in front of a window, and he only
wants to talk to us when the moon is full.
(34:13):
I said what, and he said, yep, that's what we
got on our hands. So I said, well, make sure
the window is locked and that he's handcuffed and leg
shackled and talked to him. So he started his I
(34:33):
don't want to be crass, but I'm going to say
at his bs and that's what it was. He now
was in his element. It's almost what he was living for,
was to start being Ted Bundy the lawyer. He was
Ted Bundy the student, he was Ted Bundy the killer,
(34:54):
he was Ted Bundy the monster. He was now Ted
Bundy the lawyer. And he was going to show these
police officers how smart they are so to speak, if
you know what I mean. So he was giving them
a tough time. They called me and said, we're getting nowhere.
(35:16):
We're bringing him to the full moon in front of
the window, and you know we're getting nowhere. He's just ridiculous.
And I said, okay, you tell him that he's coming
back to the Leon County Jail and there will be
no more fooling around. We played his game. I said,
he's going to start playing by my rules from now on.
I think that was a headline in the Democrat and
(35:40):
Ted Bundy was transferred back and I was waiting for him.
There's video tape that has been shown widely of me
receiving him at the jail. When he was driven up.
He had a big mold on his face, a little dishevel.
They had on a sweater, hair was a little messed up,
and he had partial growth of a beard. I grabbed
it arm when he got out of the car and
(36:02):
I said, you're at the Leon County Jail and I'm
the Leon County Sheriff, and I just want you to
know you're not going anywhere from here. We brought him in,
we talked to him, and I brought him up to
a cell that we had that was steel lined with
armor proof steel ceilings, walls, and floor, and it was
(36:24):
a slammer door, which is a solid steel door with
a small window and a port for putting food inside.
We had two additional locks on the door, so it
was three locks. And what I did was I distributed
the keys to three different people on each shift. I
did not want one person able to open his door.
(36:46):
And I told the shift at the jail, if I
do a check and an inspection and I find all
three keys in the hands of one person, the whole
shift will be fired. Because I knew that he was bright.
I mean, that's how he got out of the other
two jails. They left him in a library all by
himself while the deputy went outside the smoke, and he
(37:08):
jumped out of the window and was gone. So I
knew that he had the ability to sweep talk people
and get away with things. He was smart. So he
was in a steel lined cell now that had no
ability to take a lighte fixture down like he did
in the first jail. He escape from and went up
through the plumbing and air conditioning system and made his
(37:32):
way to an outside opening and jumped out and escaped
in the first time. But it was steel lined in
three locks, and I didn't want one person to go
to the jail door. But I was afraid he would
talk somebody into it, so I didn't allow it. It
had to have three of my people at the door.
(37:53):
I figured three of mine would handle him.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
Here's what's really cool. I want you to confirm for me.
You have a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and doctoral work. Correct.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
I have all my doctoral work finished. Let me tell
you what happened. I don't have the DPA, the Doctor
of Public Administration because of Ted Bundy. Okay, I was
writing my dissertation. I had completed five years of studies,
defended my dissertation topic, I passed all my comprehensive exams
(38:34):
and my orals and everything, and I was doing my
dissertation part time. I mean, I had a little time
to devote to it, and I would have finished and
been doctor Kenkassarus. I obviously didn't have time to run
this investigation and make sure that everything went well twenty
four hours a day, that he didn't escape, and that
we were collecting and processing the evidence and handling the
(38:57):
major crime squad the way we should, and work on
a dissertation. Frankly, my mind wasn't there. So I waited
until obviously I was out of office. Ted Bundy was
at the prison, and I went back to the school,
Novah University, and I said I want to re enroll
to complete my dissertation. And they looked at the files
(39:18):
and they said, oh, you can't do that, And I said, what, No,
you've timed out. You had seven years to finish the degree,
and you've gone over that time period. That's because I
put it aside. So I didn't get my doctorate, but
I got my serial killer. And frankly, I would not
(39:39):
trade ever a degree. I have the course of studies.
That's why I list my background as DPA with an
ABD after it, which means all but dissertation.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
But that's what I find extraordinary because everybody says, oh,
Ted Bundy was so smart, he was such a genius
that he picked the wrong lawman.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Well, I don't know. I know that he picked the
wrong lawman with the commitment. I had a commitment. I'm
confident he's probably smarter than me. I'm confident he has
more intelligence than me. But he didn't know more about
law enforcement than me, and he didn't have the power
that I had because as chief law enforcement officer and
being elected, nobody could tell me what to do. The
(40:27):
only constraints I had were budget, and that's why I
went to the governor, and that's why I went to
the Chief Justice. I went to the two main power
sources for the state, and I said, I want your
help because I need resources, equipment, manpower and budget. But
one of the first things I did was I went
(40:48):
to a friend of mine named Si Deeb and side.
Deeb was a philanthropist, a very wealthy man in tallahasse
He still has family here. In fact, one of his
granddaughters was a student of mine at the community college.
And I went to him and I said, you have
a building across from the Tallahassee Police Department, a big
(41:10):
brick building. It's empty, and it's for sale. I said, Si,
I want you to give me that building for as
long as I need it, because I want a place
to work out of so that all the law enforcement
agencies can come together in one place. I don't want
them going to work at the Tallahassee Police Department, the
Leon County Sheriff's Department, the fam U Campus Police Department,
(41:34):
the FSU Campus Police Department, the Highway Patrol, the Florida
Department Law Enforcement, and then meeting somewhere at some meeting room.
I want them to be assigned to this case permanently,
and I want their new offices to be in one building.
So we drew straws for the placement of the stickers
(41:57):
of our agency, you know, the things to go on
the side of the car that identify the Leon County
Sheriff's office or Tallahassee Police Department the agency's logo. So
we drew straws as to where they should go on
the front door of this new building. He gave it
to me, and that was the new command post, and
(42:17):
it was bigger than the Tallahassee Police Department, and we
had plenty of rooms. So we set up rooms for
victim investigators, We had rooms for evidence investigators, we had
rooms for the interview investigators. We had room for those
that were going to be out of town working and
(42:40):
those that were going to be in town working. The
command staff. I mean, I set up a whole nother
police agency made up of all these different agencies, and
then I would pair them by different agencies so that
I didn't have two of the same agency working together
(43:01):
out in the field, because it would be cross pollination.
One would know something the other one didn't know, and
that way there would be no secrets or keeping something
to the side so that maybe later they could you
try to solve the case themselves. So I took away
that ability, and I made them all believe that they
(43:21):
were working on the same team because they didn't go
to work where they work. They went to work at
the command post for this serial murder investigation of this
individual that committed this painous, monstrous crime at the Cayomega House,
and that's where we worked from and that had never
been done as far as I know in Florida ever.
(43:44):
But it was an idea that I thought would work.
I wanted anything that would work. I wanted everybody's mind
in unison. I didn't want them, you know. I didn't
want each individual agency head to be sending different people
and not knowing who's going to show up. I wanted
him assigned. I had offices for them, and it was
(44:05):
in a free building from a philanthropist, So I think side.
Speaker 1 (44:11):
Kathy, I have a sister, Charlene, who you know, and
she is a Level one trauma nurse, and often once
somebody leaves trauma, she never knows what happened to him.
That's true for detectives and responding officers and prosecutors oftentimes,
and in your case with the officers that you first
(44:33):
saw and Ken Cassaris, you know, y'all even had to
be separated at trial because y'all were all witnesses. Y'all
couldn't be in the same room and you didn't have
an opportunity to really see him again and talk to him.
So before we close tonight, you take your time and
just talk directly to him after everything you've heard him
(44:53):
say tonight, all of his extraordinary work, his groundbreaking way
of doing an investigation of this magnitude for a serial killer.
Speaker 3 (45:04):
Well, I just being at home and recuperating and everything
I knew police work was going on. I knew agencies
were going to work on making sure that this Bundy
person at that point was going to be caught. And
hearing you talk tonight, I am amazed the level of
(45:26):
people you had working for you and whom you started
as a group that really turned into the best group
because they got ted Bundy. And I'm just amazed at
all the work you did and all the foresight you
had to know what to do and when to do it.
And I appreciate very much, Sheriff. You've been in our
(45:49):
hearts for many years. My parents would talk about you,
and life goes on and I don't have a chance
always to thank the people that mean the most to us,
and you've always been in that group, And thank you
very much for helping me then and for all these years.
That I have known you, but not been close. I
(46:09):
appreciate your friendship.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
Now to say you're welcome is just not enough. It's
so obligatory in terms of what we say, and it's
almost disingenuine to just say you're welcome from the bottom
of my heart. From the moment I saw you and
(46:31):
prayed for you, because I didn't know whether you were
alive or dead frankly at the moment, but they were
taking you out and you weren't confirmed dead, so I
knew they found a pulse. I prayed that it would
continue and that your heart would be on. And I'm
so happy that forty plus years later, your heart is
beating on, and so is Cheryl Thomas. I hadn't mentioned Cheryl.
(46:55):
She was a victim at another location the same night
while we were investing gating the Kyomega case. She was
in a separate duple like six blocks away. And this
monster had the ability to attack again with all those
police cars in the area and all the work we
were doing in that area, all the red and blue
(47:15):
lights that were flashing, he you know, he busted in
on Cheryl Thomas and attacked her as well too. I'll
say the three survivors, Karen and you and Cheryl. I mean,
I just you know, my heart goes out to you,
and you're welcome. Isn't enough to say I did it
(47:37):
for all humanity. I did it for you. I did
it because law enforcement couldn't fail on this. I feel
for law enforcement. I'm still in law enforcement, and I
understand that every shariff can't take on a major investigation.
They've got agencies to run. I don't know what drove
me to do this. I was directed by God, I'm sure,
(48:01):
because my message was coming from somewhere. After all, I
was an elected official, and you know I was supposed
to be taking care of everything, and you can't take
care of everything, but the image of my two daughters
and the possibility that that was them on that slab
of marble that night, and I promised that I would
(48:23):
do what I had to do, what parents would expect
from a sheriff, from the surviving daughters, or more from
those that didn't survive, that justice had to be done.
And you know what we ended up with was, of course,
an invisible monster. He lived amongst us, and he got
(48:43):
along with everybody. He was charismatic, he was witting he
was funny. I mean, some say he was handsome. I
think at times he was. At times I didn't like
the way he looked, but when he dressed up, he
was a pretty handsome guy. And he handled himself well.
He smiled through court, and he took advantage of being
(49:04):
his own attorney after firing eighteen attorneys during the time
I had him in custody for two years. He fired
eighteen attorneys because they wouldn't do it his way. And
you know, I just know that law enforcement can't do
it that way. Every time. There's not enough money, there's
(49:26):
not enough resources, there's not enough budget. The sheriffs have
too much to do. There's too much crime set upon
us today. But at that moment, in that day, at
that location, it had meaning to me. I shut out
all the naysayers. When I found the bite marks on
(49:47):
Lisa Leivi, my people kind of laughed at me because
I said, this is going to solve the crime. They
had no idea that I had forensic codeontology background and
was teaching bitemark identification. It was so new, wasn't used.
And you may not know this, but forensicode intology had
never been introduced in the courts anywhere in the world.
(50:08):
This was the first case, so it wasn't easy to
introduce it. Not only that, but I got a search
warrant for Ted Bundy's mouth. Never in the history of
this country did anybody get a search warrant for a
man's mouth. I needed a search warrant because if I
went and got a warrant, I'd have to serve it
on his attorneys or him. And then if he chipped
(50:30):
a tooth and there was one anomaly, we couldn't use
his teeth. So you can't have any anomalies because if
you say, well this isn't consistent, but we don't know
when it occurred, well goodbye for that evidence, because it's
not going to work. So I went to the judge
and I said, Judge, I judge justice in this case,
(50:52):
the Chief Justice Supreme Court. And I said, Jimmy, we
need to figure this out. And I don't know whether
he came up with it or I came up with it,
but somehow, somebody or jointly we just had the same
idea at the same time. How about a search warrant
for his mouth? You have his bite impressions from the
prison in Salt Lake City where he was serving a
(51:14):
fifteen year sentence when he escaped from the two Colorado
jails where he was being held temporarily for the investigation
of other crimes. I got his dental impressions from the prison,
and with that I could show the court that I
had reason to believe that in his mouth there was
evidence that would be relevant to the processing of this
(51:36):
scene and that could prove that he was the per
person involved in the case. So they had granted the warrant,
and then they granted a warrant that let me use
force if necessary to remove the bide impressions. So that
was a whole nother story. Going to the dental office,
and when he found out that his BikeE marks were
(51:57):
going to be taken his bite impressions because he had
been taunting me. He always told me at least a
dozen times, Ken, Ken, the evidence is there. He called
me Ken. He liked that. He thought that was demeaning.
He said, Ken, the evidence is there. You just can't
find it. The evidence is there. Well, I want to
(52:19):
tell you, I always thought that he thought the evidence
was the bite impression. And when the doors opened that
my dentist's office where I took him and there was
three dentists, my dentist, a doctor, an internal medicine doctor,
and doctor Suvaron who did the forensic odetology. I had
(52:41):
confirmed that that's what he was talking about when he
kept harassing me about the evidence was there. Because he
didn't say, what are you going to do? What's this
all about? He started screaming, you can't do this, you
can't do this. I don't have an attorney. Attorney, and
(53:01):
I said, ted, you can't have an attorney. I'm serving
a warrant on you. That's the end of that. And
he realized that we were going to use force if necessary.
He jumped into the dental chair, looked up at me,
opened his mouth and said, Ken, you know I'm not
a violent person. Do what you have to do.
Speaker 3 (53:23):
What a story?
Speaker 1 (53:28):
Well, I do not think that I could thank the
two of y'all anymore for allowing us to hear this
beautiful friendship. I know that y'all admire each other, you
respect each other, you adore each other, But this friendship
is so important. And I think that there's law enforcement
across the country it's going to be able to hear this,
(53:50):
and perhaps they will reach out to their victim, and
maybe the victims will reach out to their detectives and
you know they can share those moments too, that this
is what happened to me that night, this is what
happened to you that night, and we are forever bonded
because of it. And this was just a beautiful thing.
Mister Can I got to tell you, I am going
(54:11):
to drag you into my zone seven. I need you, honey.
You are just an extraordinary person. And I thank you
for being with us and sharing your experience when you
called and captured and put in prison Ted Bundy.
Speaker 2 (54:26):
Well thank you. As I spoke. Of course, I put
myself into the moment, which is why I talked more
than I thought I was going to, because I was
reliving and experience. And I did so for Kathy, especially
since she's here tonight, and certainly you know, for Karen,
(54:48):
for for you know, Lisa and Margaret who did not survive,
and for Cheryl who did. Beautiful women, beautiful lives, you know,
to be termedated so early, or to have been abused
and attacked in such vicious manner and have to live
with that for their life. At least they did live.
(55:12):
And I know they're making the best of their lives
they can. The psychological impact must be beyond my understanding
of how you can deal with it. I've never had
a bruised eye, much less to go through what any
of them did, So my heart's out to all of them.
Speaker 1 (55:33):
Ken.
Speaker 3 (55:34):
I want to thank you very much. You've always been
special to me. But hearing the background of all the
work you did and getting all the agencies together in
my mind you talking about it, I can see how
you did it.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
You spoke so well.
Speaker 3 (55:48):
I can see the room with all the agencies put together,
and just to know that you did all that. You
did it for us, but you did it for everyone.
And I appreciate you very much. And I know just
by saying you're welcome, it's not enough for you to say,
but it means the world to me.
Speaker 2 (56:05):
It means the world to me that I have you
and Karen and Cheryl. Thank you. I'm getting choked up
here thinking about it because I'm being brought back to
that night myself. Ted Bundy was captured. He was held
(56:26):
for two years in my jail. He was convicted, he
was sentenced, he lost all of his appeals. He went
to prison. He was only there ten years. I know
that sounds like a long time, but not for death row,
and he was executed. It just simply the only way
I could have gone better is that Ted Bundy was
(56:48):
a decent young man and went out and was dating
and became a terrific lawyer and made a real, you know,
professional out of himself, contributed to life instead of taking life.
Speaker 1 (57:03):
Ken Cassaris, thank you so much for being so open
and so honest about your experience. Thank you for your
years of service, devotion and dedication to not just your department,
but all those young people that went on to have
careers themselves. Kathy Kleiner, my friend, thank you for being
(57:23):
so open and so honest and taking so much time
to share your story. It is powerful. I love you,
I adore you, I respect you, and again I thank
you both. I'm going to end Zone seven the way
that I always do with a quote. Obviously, I was
very motivated to work the case. I had two young
(57:45):
daughters at home, and I vowed that this person would
be stopped. I put everything my heart, my soul, my
skills to work on it, and together with a big
team of people that came up with Lee needs a
person and eventually a conviction. Ken Cassars. I'm Cheryl McCollum
(58:08):
and this is Zone seven H
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