Ted Bundy and Timothy McVeigh’s defense attorneys recall chilling details from their cases
Lawyers who represented Timothy McVeigh, Ted Bundy, Jodi Arias, and Clive Doyle (a former Branch Davidian who was at the Waco, Texas, siege) star in a new show on Oxygen called In Defense Of. On Megyn Kelly Today, they convened to discuss chilling, intimate details of their cases.
John Henry Browne, who defended serial killer Ted Bundy, recalls how Bundy proudly bragged about the actual body count. “When he was in Tallahassee, one of the detectives said something to him, like, ‘We’ve got you on 37 homicides,’ Browne said. “Ted looked at him and said, ‘You better add a digit to that’ … he told me he’d killed over 100 people.”
And in a morbid twist, Browne went on to recall how years before he represented Bundy, his girlfriend was strangled to death in Berkeley, Calif. The murder was never solved, and Bundy was known to have been in California for a time. That led Megyn Kelly to ask Browne if he thought Bundy may have been involved.
“I have to believe that it wasn’t him because I could never forgive myself,” Browne said. “But I didn’t know that, see, until I was done representing him. I didn’t know that he was in California.”
Chris Tritico defended Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 killed 168 people with a bombing at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Tritico said he was “pleasantly surprised that [McVeigh] was absolutely not crazy” when they first met. They even became friends, as he told Kelly.
“You have to understand every aspect of their life … I understood more about Tim McVeigh than his parents did,” Tritico said. “Look, he was never going to come to my house for Thanksgiving. I don’t mean that kind of friend. But we had a connection that most people would never have.”
As for Jodi Arias, who killed her ex-boyfriend in 2008, her defense attorney, Kirk Nurmi, explained the physical toll her five-year case had on him.
“A lot of people don’t know, but I was diagnosed with stage 3, non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” said Nurmi. “I contribute it to the stress of representing Ms. Arias so long and the social media fervor she created.”
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