Bundy v. State · 471 So. 2d 9 (Fla. 1985) · No. 59,128 · Decided May 9, 1985
Two months after a twelve-year-old girl went missing from her junior high school, her body was found in the woods along the Suwannee River. It took the state of Florida seven more years, two separate murder trials, and a name that had already become infamous nationwide to close the case for good.
The Facts
On February 9, 1978, twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach was reported missing from her junior high school in Lake City, Florida. Two months later, after a large-scale search, her partially decomposed body was located in a wooded area near the Suwannee River in Suwannee County. On July 21, 1978, Theodore Robert Bundy was indicted for her murder and kidnapping.
By the time of the indictment, Bundy was already a national name. He had escaped custody in Colorado, made his way to Florida, and within weeks of arriving had also been charged in the January 1978 killings of two Florida State University sorority members at the Chi Omega house in Tallahassee — a separate case, tried separately, under a separate appeal. The Leach case was tried on a change of venue after Bundy moved for one, and it produced a first-degree murder conviction and, after the jury recommended death, a death sentence imposed by the trial judge.
What the Court Held
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence, exercising its mandatory jurisdiction over death sentences under Article V, section 3(b)(1) of the Florida Constitution. As in most of Bundy’s Florida appeals, the case moved through the courts on a mix of procedural and constitutional challenges — venue, the conduct of the trial, and the weighing of aggravating and mitigating circumstances at sentencing — without disturbing the underlying result.
The Aftermath
Bundy exhausted his state and federal appeals over the following years. He was executed at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. The case remains one of the most extensively documented capital prosecutions in Florida history, and it helped drive the national visibility of victim-search and child-safety practices that followed in the years after.
| Court | Supreme Court of Florida |
| Citation | 471 So. 2d 9 (Fla. 1985) |
| Case No. | 59,128 |
| Lower Court | Suwannee County Circuit Court (direct capital appeal — no DCA) |
| Decided | May 9, 1985 |
Primary sources: Opinion available. Trial record and briefs — access pending. This archive does not publish secondhand summaries.