Visions of Ted Bundy by Susan Waller Lehmann

Author:Susan Waller Lehmann [Lehmann, Susan Waller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 2017905291
Publisher: White Rhino Press
Published: 2017-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17: Watching the Detectives

The Democrat published several articles about violent crimes that were unsolved and similar to the Chi Omega murders. Just months earlier, a young coed, Linda Sue Thompson, had been abducted from FSU’s Dorman Hall. She had been savagely raped, beaten, and left for dead in a remote forested area. The Democrat writers speculated that the Thompson incident was related to the Chi Omega attacks.

At the same time, the editors of both the Democrat and the Flambeau had a “new-found awareness” of the escalating problems of violence against women. The front-page articles brought with them a flood of letters to the editors.

Every day, for weeks, the Flambeau printed several letters to the editor which debated women and their “provocative ways.” The papers were now a political and emotional battlefield involving frightened people and swelling ranks of feminists. The media was in a frenzy over violence against women.

Then, on January 21st, two different but related articles ran in the Democrat. One article was about a gruesome murder movie scheduled to be aired on Saturday, January 28th, from 9 until 11 p.m.

The other story mentioned that three of the victims visited a Big Daddy’s nightclub, a popular disco on Appalachee Parkway, the night of the murders. The investigators had worked to establish a timeline to trace every movement the victims had made the days before the attack, hoping the information released to the press would help bring someone forward with a real clue to the killer’s identity. Had the girls met the killer at the disco?

The Big Daddy’s corporation was nervous and displeased with the publicity surrounding this news and quickly issued a statement to the effect that it was just a coincidence that three of the Chi Omega victims had been at the bar on that fateful night.

Curiously, the next day, Big Daddy’s launched a new radio and newspaper advertising campaign which promised, “You never know who you’ll bump into at Big Daddy’s.”[7]

The inappropriate humor of this commercial enraged many Tallahassee residents and students. Newspaper articles appeared and letters to the editor agreed: people felt this new campaign was in poor taste. It was soon discontinued.

The article about the sorority murder movie announced that NBC programming was not going to pull the movie from national broadcast, regardless of the coincidental happenings in Tallahassee. In the movie, the killer is a psychopathic college student who kills three women in a sorority house. The film had two names. One was Stranger in the House and the other was Silent Night, Evil Night.

The movie was scheduled to run on two different Georgia channels, Cable 10 from Albany, and Cable 5 from Atlanta, the two NBC-affiliated TV stations available on the cable system in Tallahassee. A third NBC station also on the cable system, based in Panama City, was airing the March of Dimes telethon that night or it would have broadcast the movie, too.

A brouhaha over the upcoming broadcast soon erupted in the papers and lunch counters throughout Tallahassee. An FCC lawyer in Washington, D.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.