The muggy Tuesday before Ted Bundy was supposed to die, belted into the 62-year-old, red-oak electric chair known as “Old Sparky,” the marquee outside Sonny’s Real Pit Bar-B-Q on U.S. Highway 301 wasn’t advertising barbecue. “Go All the Way,” the big black letters urged, in the hubba-hubba cadence of a football cheer. “No Stay for Bundy.”
Around town, sentiment for Bundy was commonly reduced to even fewer words: “Fry that sucker.”
Here in what may be the most aptly named prison town in America, Southern hospitality is in short supply for the 246 convicts on Florida State Prison’s death row, the most populated death row in the nation.
Starke had one vocal death penalty opponent for a while. She got so fed up with having eggs thrown at her van that right next to her bumper sticker protesting the death penalty she pasted one that said, “I Don’t Get Mad, I Get Even.” She has left town, or, as one resident phrased it, “She hauled buggy.”
Florida has been called the “Buckle of the Death Belt” of America, and Starke, a town of 5,600 people and 38 churches between Gainesville and Jacksonville, is the crest on the buckle. Around it, in a 20-mile radius of the northeastern backwoods of the Sunshine State, are eight prisons. Together they employ about 5,000 people.
“It’s not a question around here of whether you’re for or against the death penalty,” said Joy Johnson, 22, a clerk at Mitchell’s Rexall Drugstore downtown. “Whenever an execution happens, it’s just, ‘Oh, are they gonna do it this morning?’ ” She shrugged. “Then again, when half your family’s employed out there, it’s hard to be too vocal about being against it.”
Ted Bundy, a dapper law student, and Gerald Stano, a pudgy short-order cook, were to have died at 7 a.m. on July 2 in a dank little room with beige walls, low ceilings, linoleum floors and steel doors. Between the two of them, they are believed, separately, to have murdered about 80 women.
If they hadn’t received last-minute stays, they would have become the 17th and 18th men executed in Florida since 1979, all but one of those in the last three years. Only Texas even comes close to that pace.
For all their tough talk about the death penalty, Starke residents don’t appreciate its being the reason for their renown. Many are quick to point out that Florida State Prison isn’t even in Starke. It’s 11 miles outside the city limits, down a straight, two-lane highway, almost over the Bradford County line.
“Media people come in here and they call us ‘The Electrocution Capital of the World,’ ” grumbled one resident. “How come nobody ever mentions that we’re the world’s strawberry capital too?”
Mayor Charlie Schaefer, a man with the gruff but endearing air of the Wizard of Oz, kneaded his cigar and leaned on the bar. He wore an American Legion bolo tie and an American Legion belt. His white hair was in a military crew cut, and his black patent leather shoes were shiny enough to pass the toughest sergeant’s inspection.
“People ask me, ‘Where’s Starke?’ I just tell ’em, ‘Home of the Electric Chair.’ Then they know.”
A short time earlier, Schaefer, 59, had warned, “I’m not going to talk about Bundy or the electric chair. That’s got nothing to do with the city.”
Like a lot of people in town, Schaefer in one moment disavows association with the prisons and in the next proves that they touch almost everyone here, though in ways so routine as to be invisible.
Even though the prisons are one of the area’s largest employers, the Chamber of Commerce brochures don’t mention them. The weekly Bradford County Telegraph didn’t print a word about the Bundy and Stano executions the week they were to happen. Editor Bob Ferguson said the paper writes about the prisons only when they involve local news. “We’ve written about the wood- burning generator out there,” he said. “We cover the prison flower shows.” The mayor also is wary of talking because he doesn’t want his position on the death penalty garbled. “I’ve got re-election to think about,” he said.
He said a Jacksonville TV station interviewed him and made it sound as if he opposed the death penalty. He has enough trouble without that kind of misinterpretation.
The NAACP is suing him to redistrict the city. The humane society is mad at him because he refuses to run a hotel for dogs instead of just a dog pound. And the atheists are after him to take the cross, a leftover Christmas decoration, off the top of the Starke water tower. To the Wisconsin woman who has been pestering him about the cross, he sent a get-well card and a box of Ex-Lax.
The territory around Starke is an ecological limbo where pines, oaks and palmettos meet, a cultural hybrid forged of the lawless Old West and the Old and New Souths. It is more Georgia than Florida, but, except for the Spanish moss and some rambling white colonnaded houses, it is not the genteel Georgia of Rhett and Scarlett.
To the 20,000 motorists who drive through town along U.S. 301 every day, to and from the natural and unnatural attractions to the south, Starke is simply a town on the road to somewhere else, known, if it’s known at all, as a notorious newspaper dateline.
It is a place with a past of shoot-em-ups and moonshine and a present of fast-food franchises and trailer signs. During World War II, 90,000 soldiers settled into nearby Camp Blanding, turning Starke briefly into a neon-lighted carnival.
Prisons have been here since the early part of the century, an economic blessing to one of the poorest parts of the state. Even though they are such an integral part of the sociological landscape that the residents don’t think they rate discussion, you can find evidence of them at almost every turn.
From Richard Dugger’s office, you can see the green concrete prison buildings surrounded by high fences and coiled razor wire. Just outside the administration building, several sweating inmates in white uniforms were pruning orange and yellow mums next to a small sign that primly requests, “Please don’t pick the flowers.”
Dugger was on the phone.
“Bundy’s not talking to anybody. I’ve got two detectives from Salt Lake City sitting in the Econo Lodge hoping he’ll help them identify the location of some of the bodies. I tried to get him to talk, hoping he’d do it for humanitarian reasons. I sat down face to face with him and asked him point blank. There’s no way in hell.”
Dugger is superintendent of Florida State Prison, the only maximum- security prison in the state, occupied by the worst kind of troublemakers, men who have killed other inmates, assaulted guards, been condemned to three consecutive life sentences.
Dugger, 42, is a thoughtful, well-spoken man whose father also worked at the prison. Dugger was raised on the prison grounds, 18,300 flat, green acres that he likens to a farm.
He has witnessed every Florida execution since 1979, when the state resumed executions after a 15-year hiatus. The reasons behind the high numbers are simple, he said. In 1976, when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of death penalty laws in Florida, Georgia and Texas, Florida had a backlog of prisoners sentenced to death. Since 1979, it has had a governor, Democrat Bob Graham, willing to sign death warrants. He has signed 139.
“We look at it in a detached fashion,” Dugger said between phone calls from reporters and law officials about Bundy. “It’s a duty, it’s a responsibility.”
Yet, he added, “you never completely forget it.” He paused. “I remember every one. But you don’t dwell on it. If you did, I think it would cause you problems.”
Early in the morning of the executions, Dugger used to take a flask of Jack Daniels’ and two plastic cups down to the cell of the man who was about to die. They would have a drink together. Word of the 6 a.m. tea party got out, though, and the suggestion came from on high that the practice stop. It did.
As a child, Dugger didn’t intend to work at the prison. “I sort of fell into it. There’s not a lot of employment in the area if you stay here.” That’s what happens to most of the people who come to work at the prison.
“They end up making the best employees,” he said. “They know the system. They stay. We’ve been criticized for inbreeding, but that’s the strength of this system.”
He said the prison has little direct effect on adjacent communities. “I belong to the Rotary Club in Starke, and we don’t talk about the prison,” he said.
Within the next few hours, Dugger had to make sure that Bundy and Stano were measured for suits and asked what they wanted done with their remains.
Meanwhile, prison life went on as usual that day. One death row inmate slashed another in the yard, and some pranksters hid razor blades in the day’s biscuits and a dead rat in the gravy.
