Looking back is hell, especially when retrospect reveals how close true evil can slither up to your front door. Or in my case, the dorm door.
Back in the late seventies, serial killer Ted Bundy took a spin through South Florida, where I attended college. It was only after this smooth operator trolled up toward the Florida State/Lake City area and murdered several young women and a twelve-year-old, was a deadbolt added to the door of my dormitory to bolster the key lock.
Even after the in-state slaughter by Bundy, girls continued (per usual) to leave the door ajar for their boyfriends by using a block of wood as a lazy-woman's doorstop. Lazy being the operative word here, as God forbid these young ladies should walk down the stairs to open the door.
Fast forward past Bundy's conviction to the night before his execution. Being the narcissist that he was, old Ted managed to manipulate his way onto television, to air his reasons (excuses) for taking out his murderous rages on young women.
As said young woman coming of age during the time of his savagery, I watched Bundy toss the blame on pornography. I'm certain some believed that garbage.
But me?
I didn't sleep that night.
I tossed and turned remembering the social mores of the seventies, how my friends would leave bars with guys known only by what drink they ordered.
I recalled how my beater of a car broke down on I-95 in Ft. Lauderdale and how I jumped into the car of someone I didn't know, just to get to a gas station.
The electrical system went out on the same beater again, this time out on Powerline Road near Pompano. I got out of the car and started walking. Until two deputies stopped and told me to never, ever leave the car. Ever.
When the lights went out for Bundy for the last time--when he was finally executed--I was literally sick to my stomach. I barely made it to the bathroom. Years later, safe in my own home--complete with dead bolts, window locks and an alarm system--the moral of the story hit home hard for me as I flushed away the bile aka Ted Bundy with one single thought.
Us South Florida girls were lucky. Damn lucky. For trusting girls sometimes wind up dead at the hands of psychotic sociopaths.
Florida plans to execute Mark Dean Schwab this evening at six, should the U.S. Supreme Court fail to grant his final appeal.
But regardless of whoever the Sunshine State takes out, home state executions will always be about one good-looking asshole driving a VW bug that had a lethal way with the ladies.
Ted Bundy might have left the building back in 1989 but he shadows my mind for the rest of my days.
What the death penalty gives through ridding society of such people, the death penalty never succeeds in taking away the haunting of evil that this way came way too close.
Ever.
