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Ted Bundy was stricken with violent mood swings that...

By BILL WOOD

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Ted Bundy was stricken with violent mood swings that left him indifferent during histrial and conviction in 1980 for the murder of a 12-year-old schoolgirl, a New York University clinical psychiatrist said Tuesday.

'I believe he was suffering a bipolar mood disorder stemming from a manic-depressive illness,' Dr. Dorothy Lewis, who studied and interviewed Bundy extensively, testified at a mental competency hearing for the serial sex killer.

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'Given the state that he was in, I believe he was not competent to assist his attorneys,' she said.

The hearing into Bundy's mental condition during his trial and sentence of death for the 1978 killing of Kimberly Leach of Lake City was ordered by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta after it stayed Bundy's third execution date in November 1986.

Orlando U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp will forward his report of the hearing to the Atlanta court, which could order a new trial for the Utah law school dropout and suspect in up to 36 murders in the 1970s.

The examination of Bundy's mental condition was upheld by the Supreme Court despite objections that Bundy should not be allowed to raise the competency issue a decade after an insanity defense.

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During Monday's hearing, those working for the public defender's office during the Leach trial testified Bundy sabotaged his own case by drinking spiked juice smuggled to him by the woman he subsequently married.

Michael Corain, who assisted Bundy in the trial in which he was sentenced to die, said Bundy took control near trial's end and called just one witness on his behalf: Carol Boone, who he then married in open court.

Corain called the stunt a 'pitiful display' that did little to help the case.

An investigator for Bundy's public defenders, Don Kennedy, said Boone smuggled juice spiked with alcohol to Bundy, who was often intoxicated and on one occasion launched a tirade at the man who would become jury foreman.

'Ted jumped up and ran around inside the courtroom making statements of a derogatory nature about that individual in particular,' said Lynn Thompson, a Leon County attorney who helped defend Bundy during his two capital murder trials.

Thompson also said Bundy appeared disinterested in the case and did little to help his lawyers when the trial moved to Orlando to obtain an impartial jury.

Bundy also faces two death sentences for killing Florida State University coeds Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman as they slept in the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee the night of Jan. 15, 1978.

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Leach disappeared the following month. Her body was found two months later under a collapsed hog shed in a state park.

Bundy remains a suspect in the disappearances and deaths of dozens of young women in the 1970s, most of them in Utah, Washington and Colorado.

Bundy sat impassively through most of Monday's hearing, which continued a one-day session held in October when Bundy appeared in court for the first time since 1980.

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