Music - Luscious Jackson

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Listeners, we want to let you know this next conversation will mention rape as well as murder. Just wanted to give you a heads-up. The new novel Bright Young Women takes its title from something a real judge actually said in court to the infamous convicted serial killer, Ted Bundy. To the man who maimed, mutilated, and raped women and then was arrogant enough to represent himself in court and lose, the judge said, "You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer. I'd have loved to have you practicing in front of me, but you went another way, partner."

What about the women, or girls as they were often referred to at the time, who suffered and even survived his attacks? In a novel, a survivor of a Bundy-esque attack on her sorority is on a mission to put the killer of her friends behind bars, despite the 1970s-era sexism baked into law enforcement and the media. Equal parts crime thriller and cultural analysis, as the Washington Post says about the novel, Bright Young Women, "Most thrillers sensationalize violence against women. Jessica Knoll's novel turns that tradition on its head."

When we meet Pamela Schumacher, she's a successful attorney, 60-something years old, and as the title of chapter one reads, it says, "Pamela, Montclair, New Jersey, day 15,825. That's about 43 years after a killer walked into her Florida sorority house and murdered two of her friends and maimed two others. Then president of the sorority, Pamela takes her role seriously as the only witness, even if others don't take her seriously. She's not alone. A fellow female Avenger seeks her out, but she may mean more trouble for Pamela."

Bright Young Women has already been optioned for screen. It won't be Knoll's first time at that rodeo. Her novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, was made into a film that dropped on Netflix last year. Jessica Knoll joins me in studio. Welcome to the studio.

Jessica Knoll: Thank you so much, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Before you even started this book or research process, what did you know about Ted Bundy?

Jessica Knoll: I knew that he was good-looking, charismatic, and brilliant. That's what I thought I knew about him. Very quickly, when I started to research that era, his crimes, it was all right there. He was a pretty average guy. He was a notoriously poor student. He had an average IQ. He made a complete embarrassment of himself in the courtroom, even though the judge didn't seem to see it that way. I read the transcripts and it was-- I had secondhand embarrassment for him and his performance in the courtroom.

Alison Stewart: That's something that you take on in the novel about how the media built up this mythology around him. In your acknowledgments, you thank Kathy Kleiner for responding to your email. She's a survivor of the Florida State University attack where Bundy murdered two students, three others were brutally beaten. Kleiner describes her injuries in her own book, which is out now, saying her jaw was broken, her chin was shattered, her cheek was ripped through, and she bit off some of her tongue. It was really brutal. What did that email say that you sent to her?

Jessica Knoll: Gosh, I don't remember off the top of my head, but initially, I had reached out to the writer of a piece about her in Rolling Stone Magazine. Her name is Tori, and I said to Tori, "I'm hoping to speak to Kathy. I know you've been in touch with her." She wrote a really beautiful tribute and profile of Kathy. A tribute to her grit and her refusal to let these attacks define her. There was something about her spirit that I was like, "I really want to speak to her if she's open to speaking to me." Tori was the one who put us in touch, and Kathy was very generous with her time and with her story, and her vulnerability.

Alison Stewart: What is a nuance that she provided you that you would come back to as you were writing this novel?

Jessica Knoll: She was one of the first people to say to me, :If you really looked at him, he wasn't that handsome. He wasn't that great." This was very early on in the research process. I think I was definitely getting there in my own research and my own understanding of who he was. It was so much to knock down that narrative that had been built up over the years that I had accepted as fact and that had been reinforced as fact in many of the documentaries and movies that I had seen about him and to as recent as 2019, which was really what sparked my interest in this story.

There was that feeling of, well, how could all these people and all of these reputable publications and filmmakers and storytellers get this so wrong? When she said that, to me, it really crystallized it. I think it sent me down the path of trying to dismantle his legacy and finding all the evidence that I could that would do that essentially. Turns out there was plenty of it.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you went swimming in the Florida State Archives.

Jessica Knoll: Yes, I did.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What information were you looking for? What's a detail you found that either shaped a character or part of the story arc?

Jessica Knoll: I was really looking for his own words. I wanted to read the transcripts. I wanted to read how he questioned the witnesses because of course, because he was representing himself, it was within his rights to drag these women down to the prison where he was incarcerated and depose them, and make them relive one of the goriest nights of their lives. They had no choice but to answer his questions. You could see that he wanted to relive that night, which I think we all know that is a hallmark of these kinds of criminals where they'll revisit the crime scene, any mechanism that will allow them to revisit what they did. He used the depositions for that.

I just thought I had seen the judge's remarks, which you mentioned in the intro, and that's where the title comes from, Bright Young Women. That was part of the documentary that I watched in 2019, but what I found that blew me away was everything that Ted Bundy had said before the judge made those remarks. He was allowed to speak for, I think, they said it took about 35 minutes. Basically, he disagreed with the verdict that the jury had-- that they had found him guilty. He disagreed with it. He just went on a diatribe against the court, against our system of justice, how everyone had got it wrong, all the ways that he had been victimized in this process, professing his innocence, but it was rambling.

To think that the judge-- Again, when I watched this documentary in 2019 that featured the remarks from the judge, they didn't also include Ted Bundy's remarks that prompted the judge's response to say, "You're a bright young man." That's what blew me away is that the judge said those words to him after this nonsensical--

Alison Stewart: Rumbling?

Jessica Knoll: Yes, and I was like, "What? How did you listen to that and come back with a statement like that?" At that point, I didn't trust anything I'd read or heard about him, and I needed to read everything with my own eyes to make up an opinion about him.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jessica Knoll. The name of the novel is Bright Young Women. What is important to this character, Pamela, January 1978, when we first meet her before the attack happens? What's important to Pamela?

Jessica Knoll: What's important to Pamela is she knows that there is something amiss within her. She actually doesn't even know for sure. She just feels slightly off and slightly different than her friends and the women around her. She's very ambitious. I like to think of her as a 1978 version of Tracy Flick. She was my Tracy Flick character. Initially, that storyline was actually told from the perspective of a different sorority sister, and Pamela was just a side character. After several drafts, my editor and lit agent had like an intervention with me and sat me down and they were like, "We're actually interested in Pamela's point of view. We think Pamela is a very compelling character."

As soon as they said it, I was like, "Yes, I want to get inside of her head." What I love about Pamela or what makes me feel very tender toward her is that she survives this awful attack on her sorority and she's the only eyewitness to the man who broke into her house and committed these atrocious acts and she needs the police to take her seriously and believe what she's saying, but all the while, she still wants to be liked. She just wants to be liked and she wants to be respected.

That to me, is something I can relate to as a woman in 2023. Once I discovered that about her and understood that about her, it allowed me to take ownership of the timeline that I was in the 1970s and feel like I could write from a woman's point of view in that timeline with some sort of authority because I was like, in that aspect, not that much has changed.

Alison Stewart: Even for her strength, she drinks a little bit of the patriarchal Kool-Aid.

Alison Stewart: Of course, yes.

Jessica Knoll: She's going to not go to Columbia Law School to go to a-- Not Columbia Law School, let's put it that way, that her boyfriend could get Into. She's going to go down that road. Was that just because she's a product of the times?

Jessica Knoll: Product of the times, definitely, but I'm like, "What times? All times?" [laughs].

Alison Stewart: Fair.

Jessica Knoll: I don't know that there's that much different in today, and all the justification she does about not going to Columbia, that it's not just because her boyfriend can't go there. This other law school has all these other wonderful attributes, and you see how people normalize and justify these things. The other thing I really liked about her is I wanted my character to be affected by what happened to her, but in a way where she shifts gears in her life in a positive way.

That she takes this terrible thing that happened to her and that she witnessed, that could have defined her, that could have torpedoed her life. Instead, she takes it and charts a much more powerful course in spite of it. That to me, felt really empowering. It also felt like something I could recognize I'd done in my own life, and I wanted to imbue my characters with that as well.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to read a passage. You've picked out a passage early on in the book, and this is right around the time of the attack in the sorority house.

Jessica Knoll: Yes. It's from Chapter 2. Very early on. "The crystal chandelier was undulating, disturbed, but still unerringly bright. When the man came down the stairs and darted across the foyer, he should have been very hard to see. Instead, the chandelier acted as my archivist logging a clear and unabridged shot of him as he paused, crouched down low one hand on the doorknob. In his other hand, he held what looked like a child's wooden baseball bat, the end wrapped in a dark fabric that seemed to arch and writhe. Blood. My brain would not yet permit me to acknowledge.

He wore a nick cap pulled down over his brows. His nose was sharp and straight, his lips thin. He was young and trim and good-looking. I'm not here to dispute facts, even the ones that annoy me. For a brief, blissful moment, I got to be angry. I recognized the man at the door. It was Roger Yul, Denise's on again, off again, boyfriend. I could not believe she'd sneaked him upstairs. That was an orange-level violation of the code of conduct, grounds for expulsion. Then I watched as every muscle in the man's body tensed as though he sensed he was being watched. With a slow swivel of his head, he focused like a raptor on a spot just beyond my shoulder.

I was paralyzed by a hammering dread that still comes from me in my nightmares, locking my spine and vaporizing my scream in the sandpapered walls of my throat. We both stood there, alert and immobile, and I realized with a wrecking ball of relief, he could not actually find me in the shadow of the stairwell, that while he was visible to me, I remained unwitnessed. He was not Roger. The man opened the door and went.

The next time I saw him, he would be wearing a jacket and tie. He would have groupies and The New York Times on his side, and when he asked me where I was currently living, legally, I would have no choice but to give my home address to a man who murdered 35 women, and escaped prison twice."

Alison Stewart: That is from a Bright Young Women. My guest is Jessica Knoll. She's very clear about what she saw. She talks to law enforcement and she mentions Roger, but she's clear that it wasn't Roger yet, that sends the investigation down the wrong track, even though she's very clear about what she saw. Why don't the police listen to her?

Jessica Knoll: The police don't listen to her because, and this is true in the real case of what happened, the eyewitness did initially mistake Ted Bundy for their houseboy, which is-- I didn't go to a college that had sororities, so a lot of this-- This was all part of the research of understanding the vocabulary. The houseboy tended to be someone from the sweetheart fraternity who would come over and if there was a leaky pipe, or the hot water wasn't working, he would fix those things.

Initially, the eyewitness thought that that was who she saw. Again, I understood from a survivor's perspective of how your brain very quickly jumps in to make sense of something very senseless that you're seeing. I don't think that law enforcement had an appreciation for that in the 1970s. I think we have more awareness around how the brain works to step in and protect you from something that is dangerous and sinister, something that you can't yet bring yourself to process or accept.

I think we have more of a appreciation for how that survival instinct kicks in, but it's still not perfect. We're still relying on first impressions, false reports, all of these things we hear about all the time. I think it just made it easier for law enforcement to believe that this crime was committed by someone who knew the women. Particularly because the attack on her best friend, Denise, was especially brutal, it felt like whoever had done it must have been personal.

Alison Stewart: In the novel, I had insomnia and I read this novel from, what, 1:30 in the morning to 4:30, and I did go downstairs and check the front door. In my world, that's the perfect time to read it. I like to scare myself. [laughs].

Jessica Knoll: Oh, it was really scary.

Alison Stewart: I scared myself, but I couldn't stop reading it, and some of the scenes, and I'll be honest, are real, are graphic- [crosstalk]

Jessica Knoll: Yes.

Alison Stewart: -because you want to get to the brutality of this person. How did you know how far to go with the descriptions?

Jessica Knoll: It's a great question. It's something that I thought about constantly over the three or four years that I was working on this book. It also goes back a little bit to my conversation with Kathy Kleiner, who was the person who said to me, "Don't shy away from it." She felt that it was the world's responsibility to bear witness to what was done, especially because she felt very forgotten by history.

She gave me a permission that also intuitively felt right to me that when a scene or a moment in the book called for violence that I looked at it head-on and I didn't turn away from it. That's always been my instinct with these kind of more graphic, just more difficult moments in stories. As a survivor myself, I agree with that. I agree it's important to bear witness, especially in situations where victims and survivors are often not really central to the story.

Alison Stewart: If you don't mind sharing for people who don't know your story.

Jessica Knoll: Yes. My debut novel, Luckiest Girl Alive, which came out in 2015 features a character who's a survivor of a multiple assailant rape, and a year after the book came out, I wrote an essay saying that was actually inspired by my real-life story. When I was in high school, I was also assaulted by three boys I went to high school with. In the movie, the movie adaptation, which I wrote, the scene is very graphic and it's very hard to watch, but I had many conversations with our wonderful director and we both agreed, in order to understand the character in her present day and understand where her blinding anger comes from, you have to see what she endured.

Alison Stewart: More than one headline at that time, I went looking at the headlines of the local papers when these attacks actually happened always referred to these young women as girls, Florida girls--

Jessica Knoll: Or coeds.

Alison Stewart: Yes. What are some things a 20-year-old woman today might be shocked to know that a 20-year-old in the mid-'70s had to deal with?

Jessica Knoll: The fact that they use this term sex killer which is wild to me. What's a sex killer? [laughs] I believe that's a rapist and a murderer. So many headlines that called him-- There was one in The New York Times that called him Kennedyesque.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I know. I know.

Jessica Knoll: [laughs] Lots of descriptions of him as being quietly intelligent and a lot of what he was wearing. A lot of what he was wearing and he really prided himself on his suits and his sweaters and all of these things. There was a very breathless, fawning language about him, which honestly, I think we still saw even in recent years. I think pre-Me Too, we were still seeing things like that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Jessica Knoll, the name of the novel is Bright Young Woman. I don't have a lot of time for this answer, but it's important. How did you think about your responsibility balancing your job as a writer and responsibility to the people that this happened to?

Jessica Knoll: It's a big one.

Alison Stewart: Sorry, [inaudible 00:20:21]

Jessica Knoll: It's okay. Part of that was speaking to Kathy. Part of it was thinking about how I wanted to tell this story and how I wanted the women to ultimately be triumphant. What I really wanted to highlight was ultimately their grit and their determination to continue to live their lives in a way that honored their friends who didn't survive. I just thought if I could really focus on that, that I could tow that line.

Alison Stewart: The name of the novel is Bright Young Woman. It is by Jessica Knoll. Jessica, thank you so much for being with us.

Jessica Knoll: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: That is All Of It. All Of It is produced by Andrea Duncan-Mao, Kate Hinds, Jordan Lauf, Simon Close, Zach Gottehrer-Cohen, L. Malik Anderson, and Luke Green, Meg Ryan is the head of live radio. Our engineer this week was Matt Mirando. Our intern is Kim [unintelligible 00:21:20] Peterson, I think I got that right. Luscious Jackson does our music. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you and I will meet you back here next time.

[music]

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