When Dade County Circuit Court Judge Edward Cowart sentenced Theodore Robert “Ted” Bundy to death for brutally murdering two Florida co-eds, he said something.
“Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity, I think, as I’ve experienced in this courtroom.”
Ted thanked him.
In the minute after Judge Cowart sentenced him to die by electric chair, Ted Bundy thanked him.
Folded into the atoms of our existence a heart thumps against our chest cavity and sends oxygenated blood to a brain full of neurons that can fire between 60-12,000 times per minute. From this gray matter flows humanity and compassion that reveal themselves in shadowy places where little hope remains. Lights shining into darkness.
Pay attention, lest you miss them. Or worse, dismiss these as common courtesy or simple manners.
In that courtroom where legal teams and jurors and spectators and families of victims rubbed elbows and wore the long, middle-parted hair and extra-large collars and patterns and prints and sideburns and mustaches of the dying seventies, where months-long fatigue over revisited tragedy reigned, Judge Cowart demonstrated compassion toward a man whose actions he had seconds before described as “extremely wicked, shockingly evil, vile and the product of a design to inflict a high degree of paint and utter indifference to human life.”
When he was convicted of the murders after representing himself, Ted Bundy’s face had reflected the condescending disbelief of a narcissist finding out that not everybody likes them after all.
But when he was later sentenced to death, it was different.
Judge Cowart, having performed his duties, looked over the horizon of justice to something bigger. His vision pierced the imposition of his job, the heavy burden of taking a life for a life. His words popped through the hate cloaking that courtroom like a sharp stick bringing with it a thread of something tender.
Judge Cowart said more in those moments. “You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. I don’t feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Once again, take care of yourself.”
Other judges do it different. They stick to the punitive words against the offender, a future fraught with payment for their sins.
Evidence. Facts and circumstances. The law.
An application.
A result.
Quite formulaic when you look at it like that. Devoid of the beating heart.
Yet, when I listened to Judge Cowart talk to Ted Bundy, I related to it.
Violent people with a propensity to repeat their crimes should not be free on the streets. It tears apart the fabric of society upon which we all rely. How can we live together if proven killers with disregard for others’ lives are free to continue their terror?
To be fair, Judge Cowart didn’t know that Ted had killed at least thirty young women over the previous decade. Cowart died two years before Bundy was executed. Bundy didn’t confess to all those murders until shortly before they strapped him to the chair on that early Florida morning in January, 1989, when Ted looked up at the window and listened to the crowd standing outside in the cold scream, “Burn, Bundy, burn.”
Would Judge Cowart have expressed the same compassion to Ted if he had known about Bundy’s path of destruction from coast-to-coast?
Whether the harshest killer is not ever again deserving of another small dose of humanity is a personal decision we must all make within ourselves.
I’ve had people in front of me connected with horrible things involving children. Testimony. Images. It’s the subject matter those of us in child welfare listen to and read about every day on the job, and that we think about nearly every day we’re off the job, too.
It’s a privilege to connect with other humans in their darkest moments. When they perhaps believe that there is no one left in the world who might smile at them. When they feel they’ve used up all their shots at redemption. Too far gone, they might think of themselves.
How will I send them on their way?
There is no decoy for genuine compassion. It might need the refinement that comes with age. But as an imposter, it is an easy mark.
If the indictment and the evidence had shown the murders of 30 rather than two, I want to believe that the end result would have been the same. Perhaps not. Let us suppose it was.
Convictions for over two dozen brutal first degree murders.
Multiple death sentences.
The beating heart. Neurons firing. The ability to choose.
“Take care of yourself, young man.”
“Burn, Bundy, burn.”