He was a criminal justice professor at Wallace State Community College in Hanceville, teaching a course on mass murderers and serial killers.  But the textbooks were inadequate.  Blackwelder wanted to give his students a more visceral experience.  So he and a female intern named Janice drove 400 miles to death row at Florida State Prison in Starke.

“When visiting a jail,” Blackwelder said, “you never know for sure that you’re going to get in until that metal door slams behind you.”

They were ushered through a series of gates and metal doors before being greeted by a correctional officer.

“Mr. Bundy has been waiting for you,” the officer said.

Down the hallway and around a corner was a small cage in the middle of a large room. Inside the cage sat Theodore Robert Bundy.

“Just call me Ted,” Bundy said, smiling. “You must be Professor Blackwelder.”

Instinctively, Blackwelder reached through the bars and shook hands with one of the most notorious serial killers in history, hands that had strangled and bludgeoned to death upwards of 30 women, including 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, whom Bundy was convicted of kidnapping, raping and murdering before dumping her body in an abandoned hog pen.

With his hands and feet shackled, Bundy was led into a small room . Though a guard stood outside, the only thing separating student and teacher from this cold-blooded killer was a wooden table. From the moment they were alone, Blackwelder wasted no time in getting to the point.

“I’m here to use you,” he said, “because you’re an exquisite specimen.”

Today, from their home in Piedmont, Blackwelder and his wife, Shirley, run the nonprofit Criminology Research Project, an academic Web site dedicated to the study of serial, spree and mass murder.  Blackwelder, 63, retired from teaching in 1992, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  Through encounters with notorious killers like Bundy, Charles Manson and Jeffery Dahmer, Blackwelder built a career not only of science, but of faith.

On that summer day in 1984, Blackwelder was impressed by Bundy’s cool demeanor.

“Bundy was an average guy,” he remembers. “If I had a daughter, he’d be the kind of guy I’d want her to date, because he seems so normal. But that’s just a mask. Underneath, he’s a diabolical killing machine.”

For more than three hours, they interviewed Bundy, discussing everything from football and abortion to the death penalty.

“Society needs to be protected from people like me,” Bundy said. “And there are others out there just like me.”

That was the first of four interviews that Blackwelder had with Bundy before he was executed in Florida’s electric chair on Jan. 24, 1989.  Bundy told Blackwelder that, from his cell in the hours before an execution, he could smell the diesel fuel and hear the generator warming up.  Through a nearby window, he could see the hearse waiting outside.

Yet when Blackwelder asked if Bundy was “right with the Lord,” Bundy’s answer was as enigmatic as the killer himself — a once bright and charming law student who savagely preyed on young women.

“I’m not worried about what happened yesterday, and I’m not concerned about what may happen tomorrow,” he said. “I’m cosmic and you’d be better off if you were cosmic too.”

Looking back, Blackwelder still isn’t sure what Bundy meant.

“But I’ve got to believe when that jolt of electricity hit him, he found out what being cosmic is all about.”

‘Among the evil’

He’s befriended the Atlanta Child Murderer and accepted collect calls from The Hillside Strangler. In 1970, he used Christmas money to fly to California to watch the trial of Charles Manson.

He has FBI files and letters from Manson, Ted Bundy and The Unabomber. He’s interviewed Jeffrey Dahmer, calling the serial killer/cannibal “a doll … just as sweet as can be.”

Blackwelder performed the wedding of Heath Stocks, who murdered his entire family with a .45 handgun, and stood less than six feet away when child-killer Ernest Dobbert was executed in Florida’s electric chair.

During every interview, Blackwelder, who’s been an ordained minister since 1990, talks of salvation, serving as a witness — a flawed man of faith — to those whom society would rather throw away.

“That’s where the preacher is supposed to be — among the evil, the wretched, the unforgiven,” he says. “You can’t do any good in church. There comes a time when you’ve gotta say ‘Amen,’ then get up, get out and go do something useful. …

“If we got what we deserved, we’d all go straight to hell,” he says. “It’s only through the saving grace of Jesus Christ that we’re given the choice.”

Growing up in Piedmont, Blackwelder, like most kids in the rural South, regularly attended church. He did and said all the right things — joining Piedmont First Baptist Church when he was 12 — but the cavalier attitude and transgressions of a hard-headed young man ultimately won out.

“Sin was fun,” he says, grinning at memories better left untold. “I tried to be good. I wanted to be good, but I was just too busy living Eddie’s way.”

Then his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. In the years to follow, she wouldn’t recognize her husband, waking up frightened by the stranger sharing her bed. Blackwelder, who was working full time, would have to lock his mother in the house so she wouldn’t wander the streets.

“That was probably the first time I ever really thought about God,” he says. “I started praying because I needed help. But even though I’d moved closer to God, I was still living the way I wanted to live.”

Blackwelder’s journey wouldn’t be complete until New Year’s Eve 1985. He was celebrating at the Officer’s Club at Fort McClellan, when around 9:30 he received an emergency phone call. His father had suffered a stroke. The night was so thick with fog, Blackwelder could barely see over the hood of his car driving to the hospital. Not knowing if his father would live or die, he made a promise.

“I said, ‘God, let him live. But if he’s gonna die, let me be there when he does. And if you do that, I’ll live the rest of my life for you.’ “

Blackwelder’s father survived the stroke, but was severely weakened. His mother died in 1989, followed by his father in 1990.

“God will get your attention one way or another,” Blackwelder says. “And he never forgets.”

                                                                                         Hooked on Crime
The first time Blackwelder visited a prison was with his father in 1959, when they toured the old Holman Prison near Wetumpka. He even got a chance to see and touch the electric chair, nicknamed “Yellow Mama” — though he declined to take a seat.