On May Day, just after leaving her fiancé, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale wrote a note. ‘He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody,’ … Then she crossed it out.
She went to the observation platform of the Empire State Building.
Through the mist she gazed at the street, 86 floors below.
Then she jumped. In her desperate determination she leaped clear of the setbacks and hit a United Nations limousine parked at the curb.
Across the street photography student Robert Wiles heard an explosive crash.
Just four minutes after Evelyn McHale’s death Wiles got this picture of death’s violence and its composure.
Ted Bundy: I don’t sit around and worry about it, no. If it’s going to happen it’s going to happen. I’ve always had the death penalty. It’s just a matter of knowing when you’re going to die.
Hugh Aynesworth: Well here’s a good sign: Two men were scheduled to be executed in Louisiana last week and both got stays.
Ted Bundy: Well, that may last for a while, but they’re eventually going to get Congress to pass legislation whereby state prisoners have limited access to federal habeas corpus. It’s coming, but it doesn’t worry me that much. Not like being on a plane. Does the thought of, you know, crashing on an airliner worry you? It’s in the back of your mind, but….
Hugh Aynesworth: Yeah, but when you board a plane you haven’t already been told that you are going to die-maybe not this year or this month, but soon.
Ted Bundy: Yeah.
Hugh Aynesworth: But I guess if you knew, it would make you not enjoy your remaining days.
Ted Bundy: Sure. Or to take advantage of them. That’s precisely what I’d like to do. Well, thaks for coming by, Hugh, and…
Hugh Aynesworth: Yeah, I’ve enjoyed visiting with you more today than ever before. I hope to see you again, but I don’t know if I ever will or not.
Ted Bundy: Yeah, uh, the pressure, that element of pressure separated us because you always felt you had to get something from me and I felt that your interests were not my interests, so we floundered a bit all the way.
Hugh Aynesworth: Well, we both learned some things, I believe. I was glad to hear you say that in the rediscussing and reliving…going back over some of these years…you made an important breakthrough for yourself.
Ted Bundy: Yes, and I’m glad, too. I think it was important. That’s why I feel that all this was not a waste. It started to put me on the path to where I am now. Just thinking about this business was so terrible, so horrible. You really jarred me a couple of times, knocked me back from where I thought I was to where you thought I ought to be. I don’t recall exactly when it happened, but while I was facing all this from you-which wasn’t easy for any given session-I slowly began to understand what I had to do next, how I had to restructure my life. I’m in a lot better shape now. Oh well, who’ll remember either of us in a hundred years?
Victorian death room photographs
The invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 made portraiture more affordable and meant that the the middle class could mark the death of a loved one as a permanent reminder. Initially, the dead body was often shown in repose - either on a chair or a bed. As the form developed, the cadaver was pictured with members of its own family or friends and, sometimes, it was placed in a childhood scene with siblings gathered around it.
