Post by marionumber1 on Dec 28, 2020 12:51:29 GMT -6
Bundy was suspected of committing several murders in Colorado, but the only one he ever stood trial for was the January 12, 1975 murder of Michigan nurse Caryn Campbell while she was staying at the Wildwood Inn in Aspen. The primary evidence against Bundy was a purported sighting by star witness Lizabeth Harter. But things didn't really work out for the prosecution (Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, "Aspen court action for Bundy opens", 1977/04/05):
Every mainstream chronicler of the Bundy case has labeled this a fluke. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Bundy was sitting at the defense table, so it would have been pretty obvious to Harter who she was expected to identify. And while DA's office investigator Mike Fisher tried to claim that Harter had previously identified Bundy's picture when he met with her, there's a lot that doesn't add up (Pitkin County District Court, no. C-1616: THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO v. THEODORE ROBERT BUNDY, MOTION FOR CERTIFICATE OF JUDGE REQUESTING ATTENDANCE OF OUT-OF-STATE WITNESS PURSUANT TO C.R.S. 16-9-203, 1977):
Per Harter's recollection, the photo she identified (Bundy) was not of the man by the elevator, and the first time she made an identification of that man in court, she ended up choosing Meyers, not Bundy. Fisher insists that she did identify the man by the elevator and is left claiming that the state's star witness is "wrong or mistaken in her recollection". Should we believe Harter or Fisher? Hard to say, but Fisher is known to have put something else in his sworn affidavit that wasn't true (from the previous Grand Junction Daily Sentinel article):
If Meyers can't be brushed off so easily, who is he to begin with? Turns out he doesn't have the most credible history, dating back to his time as police chief of Grand Junction CO (kenbotham.com/overview.htm):
During 1975, Grand Junction experienced a string of murders, described in that Ken Botham website overview. Most were young women involved in the drug scene and a number of them knew each other, raising the likelihood that these murders were not random. And as mentioned above, it appears that many of them were also associated with Grand Junction cops, including Meyers, who would be motivated to protect their involvement in sex and drugs-related debauchery.
This is quite the bizarre string of events to occur under the watch of Ben Meyers, who would later be singled out by a witness as the likely suspect in Caryn Campbell's murder. And it is yet more bizarre that, just as Meyers made an appearance in Bundy's murder case, so too did Bundy make an appearance in two of the Grand Junction murder cases — of Denise Oliverson and of Linda Benson (and his connection to this case, up until now, has barely been publicized as all) — where Meyers is reasonably suspected of sanctioning the underground criminality that forms the backdrop to these crimes.
Indeed, the rumors about Meyers became so serious and troubling that the city council president actually asked one of the cops on Linda Benson's murder to do a secret investigation of their own chief (l.900 of French):
Making everything quite curious too is the fact that Meyers also ties somewhat indirectly to yet another Bundy murder: that of Julie Cunningham on March 15, 1975 in Vail CO. Ann Rule describes in The Stranger Beside Me how Cunningham was close to the daughter of top Salem OR cop Jim Stovall:
And Meyers, before becoming the police chief of Grand Junction, was the police chief of...Salem OR! He had even nominated Stovall for an award and accompanied him to the ceremony in Atlantic City NJ (Salem Capital Journal, "National Police Award to Stovall", 1970/10/03):
At the end of 1973, Meyers resigned as chief of the Salem Police Department to become the chief of the Grand Junction Police Department (The Capital Journal (Salem OR), Salem police chief takes Colorado position, 1973/12/10). This mirrors the move that Bundy would make not too many months later of moving from the Pacific Northwest to further inland, and moving his crimes there as well. And it is little incidents like these, of not just Meyers but also Hugh Joseph Michael Temos (will probably talk about him in a future thread) and reportedly others mirroring Bundy's movements, that make me suspect Bundy was somehow in a larger murderous group.
So to recap: At Bundy's Colorado trial, the star witness instead identified Ben Meyers. Meyers was formerly police chief in Grand Junction, where he appears to have covered for drug trafficking and prostitution operations whose existence was protected through the 1975 murders of several local women and men who knew too much. Meyers is indirectly connected to two other Bundy victims (Cunningham and Oliverson), while Bundy showed up as a possible suspect in a murder case (Benson) very compellingly linked to Meyers. Bundy was accused of involvement in the dope business in Grand Junction, matching a similar accusation made against him in Washington state as I describe on the Donna Gail Manson thread.
It's adding up to a disturbing picture: that Bundy was part of a larger network and that some of these killings may not have been random. Caryn Campbell, for instance, had a brother Robert Campbell who was a Fort Lauderdale police officer. Major drug networks operated in Fort Lauderdale at the time, and one of them, that of Allen Rivenbark, was known to have a mob-connected hideout near Vail CO where Julie Cunningham was killed (Fort Lauderdale News, "Crime figure tied to six drug rings", 1982/11/11: pages 1a, 4a, 5a).
One of the key prosecution witnesses in the Caryn Campbell murder case identified the wrong man Monday during a preliminary hearing for Theodore R. Bundy, charged with the slaying. Instead of identifying Bundy, she singled out Pitkin County undersheriff Ben Meyers as the man she saw standing near an elevator where Miss Campbell was last seen. [...] Bundy was sitting at the defense table when Lizabeth Harter of Chico, Calif., was called to the stand Monday in district court. Prosecutor Milton Blakey asked if one of the men she had seen outside the elevator at the Snowmass lodge, where she and Miss Campbell were staying, was in the courtroom. "I cant be sure," she said, then asked to have one man stand up and singled him out. That man was the undersheriff, who wasnt in uniform.
Every mainstream chronicler of the Bundy case has labeled this a fluke. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Bundy was sitting at the defense table, so it would have been pretty obvious to Harter who she was expected to identify. And while DA's office investigator Mike Fisher tried to claim that Harter had previously identified Bundy's picture when he met with her, there's a lot that doesn't add up (Pitkin County District Court, no. C-1616: THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO v. THEODORE ROBERT BUNDY, MOTION FOR CERTIFICATE OF JUDGE REQUESTING ATTENDANCE OF OUT-OF-STATE WITNESS PURSUANT TO C.R.S. 16-9-203, 1977):
4. In this regard, an assessment of the probativity of the Harter identification testimony begins with the serious discrepancies which exist between her version of the facts versus the version testified to by Micheal Fisher, the investigator who displayed the photographs to Mrs. Harter on January 9, 1976, from which was picked Defendant's photograph. A summary of the discrepant testimony is as follows:
* Fisher testified that when interviewed at the Wildwood Inn on January 14, 1975, Harter reported that she had seen nothing unusual on the afternoon or evening of January 12, 1975 (the evening the deceased disappeared). (T. 114)
** Harter testified that she had told Fisher about the two men upon their first meeting in January, 1975. (T. 52)
* Fisher testified that Harter had first indicated something unusual on January 9, 1976, when upon her return to the Wildwood Inn 3 year later she picked Defendant's picture as being the "strange man by the elevator". (T. 115)
** As Harter recalled this January 9 meeting, the picture she identified resembled that of the second man standing farther back by a refrigiration unit. (T. 44, 46, 57)
* Fisher indicated that the first time Hater had revealed the existance of a second man standing farther back was in a letter to him dated March 19, 1976, wherein she estimated that this individual was about 17 years old. (T. 119)
* When confronted with Harter's discrepant version of events Fisher stated that she must be wrong or mistaken in her recollection. (T. 117)
5. The value of Harter's alleged identification is lessened further by her own testimony that:
[...]
** When asked to see if anyone in the courtroom looked like either of the two men she saw, she picked an undersheriff as a person who looked like the man by the elevator. (T. 40)
** At the time she looked at photographs of Defendant she questioned his resemblance to the second man on the basis of coloring of hair, size, and the general appearance. (T. 46)
[...]
* Fisher testified that when interviewed at the Wildwood Inn on January 14, 1975, Harter reported that she had seen nothing unusual on the afternoon or evening of January 12, 1975 (the evening the deceased disappeared). (T. 114)
** Harter testified that she had told Fisher about the two men upon their first meeting in January, 1975. (T. 52)
* Fisher testified that Harter had first indicated something unusual on January 9, 1976, when upon her return to the Wildwood Inn 3 year later she picked Defendant's picture as being the "strange man by the elevator". (T. 115)
** As Harter recalled this January 9 meeting, the picture she identified resembled that of the second man standing farther back by a refrigiration unit. (T. 44, 46, 57)
* Fisher indicated that the first time Hater had revealed the existance of a second man standing farther back was in a letter to him dated March 19, 1976, wherein she estimated that this individual was about 17 years old. (T. 119)
* When confronted with Harter's discrepant version of events Fisher stated that she must be wrong or mistaken in her recollection. (T. 117)
5. The value of Harter's alleged identification is lessened further by her own testimony that:
[...]
** When asked to see if anyone in the courtroom looked like either of the two men she saw, she picked an undersheriff as a person who looked like the man by the elevator. (T. 40)
** At the time she looked at photographs of Defendant she questioned his resemblance to the second man on the basis of coloring of hair, size, and the general appearance. (T. 46)
[...]
Per Harter's recollection, the photo she identified (Bundy) was not of the man by the elevator, and the first time she made an identification of that man in court, she ended up choosing Meyers, not Bundy. Fisher insists that she did identify the man by the elevator and is left claiming that the state's star witness is "wrong or mistaken in her recollection". Should we believe Harter or Fisher? Hard to say, but Fisher is known to have put something else in his sworn affidavit that wasn't true (from the previous Grand Junction Daily Sentinel article):
Another witness, who according to a prosecution affidavit had spoken to Miss Campbell as she got off the elevator, was called to testify. Ida Yoder, wife of a Littleton physician, promptly said that she did not speak to Miss Campbell and could not remember at what floor Miss Campbell got off the elevator.
If Meyers can't be brushed off so easily, who is he to begin with? Turns out he doesn't have the most credible history, dating back to his time as police chief of Grand Junction CO (kenbotham.com/overview.htm):
The public would like to believe lawmen are on their side, but with a turnover rate far in excess of the state average, sexual involvement of nearly a dozen officers (that can be proven) with some of the victims, when the same officers being assigned to investigate their murders when they admittedly alter and destroy evidence, and when the police chief of that time, partied with the victims before their deaths, a feeling of uneasiness tends to develop.
The police chief Ben Meyers was forced to resign shortly after the Tomlinson murder, and was allegedly extensively involved in drug traffic. Botham's investigators found numerous large deposits in account in two banks, but the D.A. objected to a court order for all Meyers bank records and Judge Ela denied it, saying it was irrelevant. Immediately, the chief resigned, clearing all accounts. This man took an undersherrif position in Aspen, Colorado, resigning after Ted Bundy escaped from the Aspen jail. During the Bundy trial, a witness identified Myers as the man she saw leaving the dead nurse's apartment at the time of her murder . . . the nurse Bundy was accused of killing and leaving frozen in the countryside.
The police chief Ben Meyers was forced to resign shortly after the Tomlinson murder, and was allegedly extensively involved in drug traffic. Botham's investigators found numerous large deposits in account in two banks, but the D.A. objected to a court order for all Meyers bank records and Judge Ela denied it, saying it was irrelevant. Immediately, the chief resigned, clearing all accounts. This man took an undersherrif position in Aspen, Colorado, resigning after Ted Bundy escaped from the Aspen jail. During the Bundy trial, a witness identified Myers as the man she saw leaving the dead nurse's apartment at the time of her murder . . . the nurse Bundy was accused of killing and leaving frozen in the countryside.
During 1975, Grand Junction experienced a string of murders, described in that Ken Botham website overview. Most were young women involved in the drug scene and a number of them knew each other, raising the likelihood that these murders were not random. And as mentioned above, it appears that many of them were also associated with Grand Junction cops, including Meyers, who would be motivated to protect their involvement in sex and drugs-related debauchery.
- April 8: Denise Oliverson disappears and has never been seen since. Bundy apparently confessed to her murder immediately before his execution, which recently (unclear why it took until last year) resulted in her case being closed.
- June 6: Linda Lee Clark supposedly commits a murder-suicide, shooting her two children and then turning the gun on herself. Her mother, however, disputes that finding and believes all were murdered. She happened to know future victims Linda Benson and Linda Miracle.
- June 15: Somebody tries to strangle Linda Miracle, who will become a murder victim 2 months later.
- June 18: A Fort Carson soldier named Jerry Romisch is murdered on his way back to the base, apparently having his vehicle "sprayed" by some kind of automatic weapon (Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, "Palisade soldier shot to death", 1975/06/18). His brother Richard Romisch was also stationed at Fort Carson and was rumored to have been serving on a narcotics squad there.
- June 19: Former Grand Junction resident Daniel VanLone is murdered, a crime later attributed to a gang of civilian and military personnel at Fort Carson. It is infamous detective Lou Smit, later on the Ramsey parents' defense team, who purportedly solved this case. He grew up in Colorado Springs (home to Fort Carson) and served in the US Army, then moved to Grand Junction in 1974 and had been living there up until May 1975 (Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, "Ex-Junction resident killed on East Slope", 1975/06/19). Strangely enough, his former home in Grand Junction burned down within hours of him moving out (Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, "Fire destroys empty house", 1975/05/02), and roughly a week prior to that a bullet had ricocheted over his home (Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, Grocery windows broken by vandals, 1975/04/21).
- July 25: Linda Benson and her 5-year-old daughter Kelly Ketchum are brutally murdered in a grisly scene at her apartment. It was found that "A cross was carved into her sternum, between her breasts" (l.376 of The Killing Season by Alex French), which happens to be one of the alleged markers of Hand of Death cult murders. Rumors swirled that Linda's ex-husband Steve Benson was in the drug and gun trafficking scene (l.710 of French), and at one point Benson's mother Barbara Himmerite offered up a suspicion to police that Steven and Ted Bundy "ran dope together". It is clear that Benson herself was a member of that scene; a member of a local church said to police (l.710 of French): "I'll tell you what, though. Linda was into the drug scene. I believe she had knowledge of the numerous heavy pushers around the Valley and that put her into considerable danger. Once she said to me, "If you only knew who the dealers are . . . big shots."" So Linda Benson was in a position to have known too much, and to top it off, she was friends with future victim Linda Miracle. A bizarre side note (l.913 of French): Steve Goad, who lived in the same apartment complex as Linda, was adamant that he saw Ted Bundy (!) there on the night of her murder. But ultimately, the case was closed through an apparent DNA hit, matching to Colorado serial rapist Jerry Nemnich. That does not, needless to say, rule out others from involvement.
- August 23: Pat Botham, Linda Miracle, and the two Miracle children are killed, with their bodies dumped in the Gunnison River. An aborted podcast on the case (soundcloud.com/junctionpodcast/welcome-to-junction) interviewed a couple who was friends with Botham and Miracle, and they said they were "told by Patricia that her and Linda were going to come forward with some news that was going to shock the whole town". What could they have been in a position to reveal? Both women were romantically involved with local law enforcement officers: Miracle was dating a Mesa County sheriff's deputy named Truman Haley, and Botham was having an affair with Grand Junction PD officer Tom Montgomery. Also bizarrely, Haley stole several of Miracle's diaries, one of which (per SUSPECTS: The Botham / Miracle Murders by Marti Talbott) was said to have recorded sexual liaisons that Miracle had with a large number of Grand Junction cops. Sounds like the town would have been left very shocked indeed if this information came out. The murders were ultimately pinned on Pat's husband Ken Botham, although his sons believe he is innocent and run the aforementioned website on his case: kenbotham.com/overview.htm
- December 27: Deborah Tomlinson is found murdered in a case that has never been solved and has no apparent leads.
This is quite the bizarre string of events to occur under the watch of Ben Meyers, who would later be singled out by a witness as the likely suspect in Caryn Campbell's murder. And it is yet more bizarre that, just as Meyers made an appearance in Bundy's murder case, so too did Bundy make an appearance in two of the Grand Junction murder cases — of Denise Oliverson and of Linda Benson (and his connection to this case, up until now, has barely been publicized as all) — where Meyers is reasonably suspected of sanctioning the underground criminality that forms the backdrop to these crimes.
Indeed, the rumors about Meyers became so serious and troubling that the city council president actually asked one of the cops on Linda Benson's murder to do a secret investigation of their own chief (l.900 of French):
There were rumors Chief Meyers took cash for looking the other way on prostitution and drugs. When it became too much to ignore, the city council president (a former police chief) asked Fromm to investigate in secret. That's the way Fromm tells it, at least. He says he stole the key to the chief's file cabinet. Slipped into the office late one weekend night when he imagined Meyers would be out with his buddies. But then Chief caught him snooping. The next day the brass kept Fromm in interrogation for four hours. Worked him over good.
Making everything quite curious too is the fact that Meyers also ties somewhat indirectly to yet another Bundy murder: that of Julie Cunningham on March 15, 1975 in Vail CO. Ann Rule describes in The Stranger Beside Me how Cunningham was close to the daughter of top Salem OR cop Jim Stovall:
Jim Stovall, Chief of Detectives of the Salem, Oregon, Police Department, takes his winter vacation there, working as a ski instructor. His daughter lives there, also a ski instructor.
Stovall drew a deep breath as he recalled to me that twenty-six-year-old Julie Cunningham was a good friend of his daughter, and Stovall, who has solved so many Oregon homicides, was at a loss to know what had happened to Julie on the night of March 15.
Stovall drew a deep breath as he recalled to me that twenty-six-year-old Julie Cunningham was a good friend of his daughter, and Stovall, who has solved so many Oregon homicides, was at a loss to know what had happened to Julie on the night of March 15.
And Meyers, before becoming the police chief of Grand Junction, was the police chief of...Salem OR! He had even nominated Stovall for an award and accompanied him to the ceremony in Atlantic City NJ (Salem Capital Journal, "National Police Award to Stovall", 1970/10/03):
Sgt. James Stovall of the Salem police department has been selected as one of the most out-outstanding policemen in the nation. His selection has been announced by editors of Parade Magazine. Stovall will receive the honor along with 11 other policemen next week at the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) Conference in Atlantic City, N.J. Stovall will receive the Parade-IACP service award at a session Tuesday. He and Chief of Police Ben Meyers will leave Sunday for the convention. Meyers nominated Stovall last summer. The nomination was primarily based on the sergeant's police work involving the Jerome Henry Brudos case last year. Brudos pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths of three young Oregon women. Stovall also was instrumental, Meyers said, in breaking the case which resulted in the arrest of Bobby Ray Robinson, Salem. Robinson is serving a term in the state penitentiary in connection with the death of a Salem woman. Stovall is a 21-year-veteran with the police department and has been a detective since 1953. He presently is assigned as liaison officer with the Marion County district attorney's office.
At the end of 1973, Meyers resigned as chief of the Salem Police Department to become the chief of the Grand Junction Police Department (The Capital Journal (Salem OR), Salem police chief takes Colorado position, 1973/12/10). This mirrors the move that Bundy would make not too many months later of moving from the Pacific Northwest to further inland, and moving his crimes there as well. And it is little incidents like these, of not just Meyers but also Hugh Joseph Michael Temos (will probably talk about him in a future thread) and reportedly others mirroring Bundy's movements, that make me suspect Bundy was somehow in a larger murderous group.
So to recap: At Bundy's Colorado trial, the star witness instead identified Ben Meyers. Meyers was formerly police chief in Grand Junction, where he appears to have covered for drug trafficking and prostitution operations whose existence was protected through the 1975 murders of several local women and men who knew too much. Meyers is indirectly connected to two other Bundy victims (Cunningham and Oliverson), while Bundy showed up as a possible suspect in a murder case (Benson) very compellingly linked to Meyers. Bundy was accused of involvement in the dope business in Grand Junction, matching a similar accusation made against him in Washington state as I describe on the Donna Gail Manson thread.
It's adding up to a disturbing picture: that Bundy was part of a larger network and that some of these killings may not have been random. Caryn Campbell, for instance, had a brother Robert Campbell who was a Fort Lauderdale police officer. Major drug networks operated in Fort Lauderdale at the time, and one of them, that of Allen Rivenbark, was known to have a mob-connected hideout near Vail CO where Julie Cunningham was killed (Fort Lauderdale News, "Crime figure tied to six drug rings", 1982/11/11: pages 1a, 4a, 5a).
