The Innocents (1964)
by Edward D. Radin

Excerpt on

Dale Bundy
 

Just seventy-two hours before Dale Bundy was to die in the electric chair, his life was saved by the arrival of a special-delivery letter. The writer presented information showing that a vengeful killer was using the state of Ohio as a cat's-paw in his plot to frame an innocent man and have him legally executed; the state was going to commit the murder for him.

Bundy's eighteen months of terror began in the early hours of February 9, 1957. At that time he was thirty-nine years old, married, the father of five children, working and living in Zanesville, Ohio. He had become friendly with Russell McCoy, twenty-two, while both were working in the same plant. The younger man was a heavy drinker unable to keep a job.

McCoy lived with Lloyd and Louise See, an older half-sister, on a farm outside Zanesville; the Sees had reared him since he had been a child of three. Sometime after midnight, during a family dispute over his drinking, McCoy shot to death his sister and her husband, doused the bodies and the interior of the house with gasoline, and applied a match.

While the fire was raging, McCoy sped to the factory where Bundy was working on the night shift and asked him for a loan, telling him he had murdered the Sees. Thinking McCoy was drunk, Bundy refused to believe his story and told him to go home. Before leaving, McCoy pulled a gun out of his pocket and warned the other not to repeat what he had heard.

Bundy still thought McCoy was making up a story, and when he had completed his shift, he went home to bed. It was not until late in the afternoon, after he had awakened and picked up the local paper, that he read that the See house had been destroyed by a fire in which arson was suspected. Two bodies, so badly burned that they could not be identified, had been found in the ruins, along with two spent bullets from two different guns.

Bundy promptly notified the sheriff's office of his early morning conversation with McCoy, and an alarm was broadcast for him. That same day McCoy held up three stores in Columbus, some fifty miles away. He was armed with two revolvers, a .38 and a .22, and boasted to his victims that he had already murdered four people and was not worried about adding another to his list. The shop owners obeyed his commands with alacrity.

With McCoy on an obvious rampage, and in view of his earlier threats, local police posted guards around Bundy's home. When several days passed with no trace of him, the officers were removed. It was eight days after the double murder that McCoy reappeared in Zanesville. Mrs. Bundy saw him approaching the house from the rear, shouted a warning to her husband, who hid, and then spoke to McCoy through a locked window. Her oldest son stood behind her with a loaded shotgun. She told McCoy that her husband was not home. Police were alerted, but McCoy managed to avoid capture until two days later, when he gave himself up.

McCoy readily admitted the See murders and the hold­ups in Columbus. He had fled to Amarillo, Texas, where he spent the money from the robberies, and returned to Ohio when his funds gave out. He said he had hidden the two revolvers in a bus terminal in Amarillo; they later were recovered there.

But McCoy confessed to more than just the murders of his sister and brother-in-law. He added two more killings to his list and on these claimed that Bundy had been his accomplice. He said that four months earlier, a few minutes after 8 o'clock on the night of November 23, 1956, he and Bundy had held up a grocery market in Uniontown, in Stark County, some seventy-five miles north of Zanesville, and had shot and killed Reynoldo Amodio, the owner, and Paul Cain, his clerk. McCoy claimed he had bought the .22 revolver for Bundy just before the robbery.

Bundy denied taking part in the stick-up murders. He said that on that day McCoy had driven him to his home town of Canton, where he spent most of the afternoon visiting relatives. McCoy was restless and wanted to go on to Akron, but he still had many people he wanted to see, and so they had separated, making arrangements to meet again in Canton at 11 P.M. for the return trip to Zanesville. Bundy said they met as scheduled, and when he asked McCoy if he had a good time in Akron, the other replied that it was none of his business since he didn't go with him. Uniontown is between Canton and Akron. Bundy offered an alibi for the time of the holdup murders; he had been in a tavern in Canton. He also pointed out that he would not have turned in McCoy for the See murders if the other man had had something on him. Bundy's protests and his request that he and McCoy be given lie-detector tests to determine who was telling the truth fell on deaf ears. He had a record; seventeen years earlier he had been convicted for robbery. It was after his release from prison that he had settled down, married, and been steadily employed since then. Although he insisted that McCoy was framing him out of revenge for reporting the See murders, Bundy was indicted.

At his trial in June, 1957, McCoy was the chief prosecution witness. He not only claimed that Bundy had shot Amodio three times, but he testified further that Mrs. Bundy had suggested the robbery as a means of raising money for Christmas presents. The prosecutor also placed on the stand a fourteen-year-old girl who testified that she had been in the store shortly before 8 o'clock to return a stapler she had borrowed from the owner and that she had seen a woman customer and two men in the store; she identified Bundy as one of the men and said she had picked him out of a line-up at police headquarters without having seen any previous photographs of him.

Bundy and his wife took the stand and each denied McCoy's story. In addition, both the owner of a Canton tavern and a waitress employed there testified that Bundy had been in their place and they had been talking to him at the time of the murders in Uniontown. They were able to establish the time because they had been discussing with Bundy the band members who were getting ready to play for the evening. The defense also presented the woman owner of an inn in Uniontown, located a mile north of the murder scene, who said McCoy had been in her place alone that night. A newspaper reporter, who had heard the schoolgirl testify, volunteered as a defense witness. He had interviewed the girl after her police-station identification of Bundy and testified she told him that she had seen Bundy's photograph in the newspaper before making her identification.

A jury convicted Bundy of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

The conviction shocked a group of witnesses who had been reluctant to become involved in a murder case but who now came forward. The woman who had been in the store just before the murder said she had viewed Bundy after his arrest and told the detectives that he was not involved, that only McCoy had been in the store. Although the defense knew that a woman had been in the store, they had been unable to learn her identity; her name had not been furnished to the defense. She also said that she had not seen the schoolgirl in the store. Other witnesses discredited the testimony by the schoolgirl. One of her friends and this girl's father both said the schoolgirl had told them only several days after the murder that she had not returned to the store with the borrowed stapler until after the killings. A boarder at the girl's home said that when he questioned her about conflicting reports of her statement she told him, "It's too late to change my story. I'm going to stick to it." Other witnesses also placed Bundy in Canton at the time of the murders. The judge who had presided at the trial heard some of the new witnesses testify at a hearing for a new trial. He denied the motion, ruling that Bundy had received "substantial justice." All other appeals also were denied, and after the Ohio Supreme Court had affirmed the conviction, the execution was set for November 8, 1957.

It was at this point, with Bundy having only three days to live, that Mrs. Norma Brajnovic, the owner of a liquor store directly opposite the bus terminal in Amarillo where McCoy had cached the murder weapons, picked up a copy of a true crime magazine that had been left in the store and flipped through its pages. That issue contained an account of Bundy's conviction. Mrs. Brajnovic paused when she saw McCoy's photograph and immediately recognized him as the young man whose strange conversation had been bothering her for months. He had entered the store and ordered a bottle of vodka. He seemed despondent and, recognizing that his attempt at a Texas drawl was a fake, Mrs. Brajnovic asked him if he had any friends in Amarillo.

"No, I don't have a friend anywhere," he told her. "I did have one friend, but he turned against me."

When she suggested that he could make new friends, she was startled by his reply: "It's too late for that. I already killed four people and I'm going to kill another one, but this one will be legal."

The woman pointed out that there was no such thing as legal murder. McCoy grinned and replied, "There will be. I'm going to have the law do it for me."

It was Mrs. Brajnovic's letter that caused the Ohio Court of Appeals to hurriedly stay the execution, and after a hearing the conviction was set aside and a new trial ordered. At this trial the additional witnesses testified that Bundy had been in Canton at the time of the stick-up murders and Mrs. Brajnovic told her story of her conversation with McCoy; it was not challenged by the prosecution. This second jury, on June 18, 1952, took one ballot and acquitted Bundy.

It was sheer luck that saved Bundy from execution; Mrs. Brajnovic had glanced through the magazine only because it happened to be in the store. McCoy's scheme had contained none of the elements of an elaborate story­book plot; it was quite simple. He merely lied and said Bundy had been his accomplice, and police, the prosecutor, a jury, and various courts all believed him in preference to reputable witnesses. Unfortunately this is not at all unusual. It is this blind and ready acceptance of stories told by persons who normally should be viewed with the greatest suspicion that results in a surprisingly large number of miscarriages of justice by frame-up.