Ted Bundy

Warning: This article contains violent and graphic details which readers may find disturbing.

Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer and rapist who between 1974 and 1978 raped, tortured and murdered numerous young women across the country. His total number of victims is unknown. After vigorously denying it, Bundy eventually confessed to 30 murders but estimates run above 100. Bundy is often considered the prototypical serial killer because of the number of victims and his well-publicized escapes from jail — indeed, the term serial killer was devised in part to describe his crimes.

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The many faces of Ted Bundy (right)

Bundy is believed to have been a sociopath. He is often described as an educated, handsome and charming young man despite the brutality of his crimes. Typically, he murdered women and girls with a blunt instrument and sometimes by strangulation. He would also often rape, bite and sexually torture his victims before, during, and after their deaths.

Biography

Youth

Bundy was born on November 24th, 1946, in Burlington, Vermont. His mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell, was a young department store clerk. His father's identity has never been authoritatively established. For the first nine years of his life, Bundy and his mother lived with his mentally unstable grandfather in Philadelphia. At age four, he appeared at his aunt's bed one morning, smiling as he brandished several knives and put them beside her in bed.

Bundy and his mother soon thereafter moved to Tacoma, Washington, where her uncle Jack taught music at the College of Puget Sound (Now the University of Puget Sound). Not long thereafter, she married John Culpepper Bundy, a hospital cook from North Carolina, whom she had met at church.

He initially thought his mother was his sister because she hid the fact that she was his mother from him, and when he found out otherwise, he experienced emotional trauma that could explain his murderous rage towards young women. He was a good, if not spectacular, student at Woodrow Wilson High School, and was active in the Methodist Church and the Boy Scouts. However, as he told Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, authors of Bundy's definitive biography The Only Living Witness, he had no natural sense of how to get along with other people. "I didn't know what made people want to be friends," he told the authors. "I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interactions." Some of his classmates recognized him as being of a deviant nature.

Ted Bundy started his criminal activities at a very young age, before he was out of high school, with voyeurism and window-peeping. While some people would later claim Ted Bundy was a "happy, normal child" others noticed his disturbed mentality when he was still in high school. The same can be said for another sadistic sex killer, Jeffrey Dahmer.

This other self, "the entity," as he described it to Michaud and Ayneswroth, was kept very well hidden. It must be noted, however, that at the point where Ted Bundy was talking about "other selves" he was desperate to save himself from the death penalty. Only when it became certain he was to be executed, did Ted Bundy offer any concrete information and it is generally accepted that he did so to spare his own life, so that he might participate in "studying" why he became a misogynistic, sadistic killer of young women. Later, some friends and acquaintances would remember a handsome, articulate young man. The manipulative Bundy worked and campaigned for the Republican Party as an adult. He also worked as a volunteer at a Seattle suicide crisis center, alongside fledgling crime reporter Ann Rule — who, ironically, wrote articles on the "Ted" murders that, unbeknownst to her, her young friend was committing. Years later, Rule would write a biography on Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me.

In one interview, Bundy described how he was "relieved of his virginity" as a college student by a much older woman one night when he crashed, drunk and barely conscious, at a friend's house. In other interviews, Ted Bundy describes how he relieves young women of their lives, by torturing, raping and murdering them.

Bundy had one serious relationship with a college freshman whom Rule referred to by the pseudonym "Stephanie Brooks." At one point she ended the relationship, fed up with what she described as Bundy's immaturity and lack of ambition, and they separated for a period of roughly two years. He eventually came back into her life, courted her once more, and then proposed. She agreed to marry him. Two days later, he unceremoniously dumped her by ceasing to return her phone calls. It was shortly after this final breakup that Bundy began a homicidal rampage lasting three years.

Rule theorized that "Stephanie" formed the archetype for Bundy's preferred victim: young, white, female, with long dark hair parted in the middle.

Murders

While some Bundy experts, including former King County detective Robert D. Keppel, believe Bundy may have started killing in his early to mid-teens — a twelve-year-old neighbor vanished from her house when Bundy was fourteen — the earliest verified murders began in 1974, when he was 27.

Shortly after midnight on 4 January 1974, Bundy entered the house of Joni Lenz, an 18-year-old student at the University of Washington, and bludgeoned her with a crowbar while she slept. Bundy also removed a bed rod from Lenz's bed and used it to torture and sexually assault her. She was found the next morning, in a coma, lying in a pool of blood. Lenz survived the attack, but suffered permanent brain damage.

Bundy's next victim was Lynda Ann Healy, a senior at the University of Washington. On 31 January 1974, Bundy broke into her room, knocked her unconscious, meticulously removed her clothes and dressed her in jeans and a shirt, folded her nightclothes, wrapped her in the bed sheet, and carried her outside. A single hair would be found at the crime scene which did not belong to the victim. A year would pass before her decapitated, dismembered remains were found.

From that January to June he stalked and killed more than one young woman a month, a spree that culminated in July with the double daytime abduction and murder of two females at Lake Sammamish State Park near Seattle. He tortured and murdered approximately ten victims in Oregon, Utah and Washington. Bundy had a remarkable advantage as his facial features were charming, yet not especially memorable. He would be later described as a chameleon, able to look totally different by making only minor adjustments to his appearance, e.g., changing his hairstyle.

That autumn, Bundy moved on to Utah, where he resumed torturing and killing in October with the murder in Midvale of Melissa Smith, the 17-year-old daughter of police chief Louis Smith. Bundy tortured, raped, sodomized and strangled her. Her body was found nine days later.

Next was Laura Aime, also 17, who disappeared on Halloween. Her remains were found nearly a month later, on Thanksgiving Day, on the banks of a river.

First trial and Bundy's escapes

In Murray, Utah, on November 8, 1974, Carol DaRonch narrowly escaped with her life. Posing as a police officer, Bundy lured DaRonch into his car where he then attempted to slap a pair of handcuffs on her. Fortunately for DaRonch, he only got one wrist. She wrenched her door open with the other hand, rolled out of the car onto the highway and escaped. Bundy was later captured and convicted of DaRonch's kidnapping on June 30, 1976. He was sentenced to one to 15 years in Utah State Prison. Colorado authorities, however, were pursuing their murder cases.

On June 7, 1977, in preparation for a hearing in his murder trial, Bundy was transported to the Pitkin County, Colorado, courthouse. During a court recess, he was allowed to visit the courthouse's law library. Bundy then jumped out of the building from a second-story window and escaped. The two-story fall injured Bundy's ankle, which caused him to remain in the area, and he was recaptured a week later. Back in jail awaiting the start of his trial, Bundy escaped again. He somehow acquired a hacksaw and, over time, sawed a square hole in the ceiling of his cell in the Glenwood Springs, Colorado, lockup. On the night of December 30, 1977, Bundy climbed out of the hole, managed to reach the main hallway and was able to walk right out the jail's front door (the jailer was out for the evening.) Bundy stole a car in the parking lot and drove off into the night.

Bundy goes to Florida

He flew TWA from Denver to Chicago, caught an Amtrak train to Ann Arbor, Michigan, then stole a car which he ditched in Atlanta before boarding a bus for Tallahassee. There, in the early hours of Super Bowl Sunday 1978, he bludgeoned two sleeping women to death and seriously wounded two others inside their Chi Omega sorority house.

On February 9, 1978, Bundy traveled to Lake City, Florida. While there, he abducted and murdered 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, throwing her body under a small shed. She would be his final victim. Shortly after 1 AM on February 15, Bundy was stopped by a police officer in Pensacola, Florida. When the officer called in a check of Bundy's license plate, the orange VW he was driving came up as stolen. Before long, Bundy was identified and taken to Miami to stand trial for the Chi Omega murders.

Conviction and execution

After being convicted, Bundy was sentenced to death by judge Edward Cowart. While under sentence of death, he was tried in Orlando for the murder of Kimberly Leach and was handed another death sentence by Judge Wallace Jopling. During this second trial, while Ted Bundy was acting as his own attorney, he married Carole Ann Boone in the courtroom as the trial was being conducted. Boone was a former coworker and admirer. During his incarceration, Bundy received hundreds of fan letters from female admirers, as is often the case with such high-profile criminals.

Judge Edward Cowart said, when sentencing Bundy to death:

"It is ordered that you be put to death by a current of electricity, that that current be passed through your body until you are dead. Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself. It's a tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity as I've experienced in this courtroom. You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer, and I'd have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went the wrong way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don't have any animosity to you. I want you to know that. Take care of yourself."

In October 1982, Boone gave birth to a girl. Eventually, however, Boone moved away, divorced Ted Bundy, and changed her and her daughter's last name.

In the years Bundy was on death row (at Florida State Prison), he was often visited by Special Agent William Hagmaier of the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit. Bundy would come to confide in Hagmaier, going so far as to call him his best friend. Eventually, Bundy confessed to Hagmaier many details of the murders that had until then been unknown or unconfirmed.

In 1984, Bundy contacted King County homicide detective Robert Keppel and offered to assist in the ongoing search for the Green River Killer by providing his own insights and analysis. Keppel and Green River Task Force detective Dave Reichert traveled to Florida's death row to interview Bundy. Both detectives later stated that these interviews were of little actual help in the Green River investigation; they provided far greater insight into Bundy's own mind, and were primarily pursued in the hope of learning the details of unsolved murders that Bundy was suspected of committing but had never been charged with, let alone tried or convicted.

Bundy contacted Keppel again in 1988. With his appeals exhausted and execution imminent, Bundy confessed to eight officially unsolved murders in Washington State, for which he was the prime suspect. Bundy also hoped to manipulate the confessions into another stay of execution, as Keppel reported that he frequently gave scant detail and promised to reveal more and other body dump sites if he were given "more time," but the ploy failed and Bundy was executed on schedule.

The night before Bundy was executed, he gave a television interview to Dr. James Dobson, head of the Christian organization Focus on the Family. Bundy claimed that consumption of violent pornography helped "shape and mold" his violence into "behavior too terrible to describe." Bundy said that he felt that violence in the media, "particularly sexualized violence," sent boys "down the road to being Ted Bundys." It is noteworthy that Bundy had never blamed pornography until this interview and no pornographic materials were found at his home when it was searched. Many people speculated that at this point Ted Bundy was desperate for any means to buy time in order to save his life.

According to Hagmaier, Bundy also contemplated suicide in the days leading up to his execution, but eventually decided against it. Sociopaths will sometimes kill themselves to deny society the opportunity to execute them; it is evidence of their extreme need to manipulate and control their surroundings at all times. More often, though, sociopaths kill others.

Some accounts from prison guards later claimed that, in the minutes leading up to Bundy's execution, he had to be forcibly dragged from his cell for execution preparation. This involved the shaving of his head, lubrication of his anus with vaseline and cotton, and putting on an "execution diaper" to collect body fluids after he was dead.^{[citation needed]} Bundy's last minutes were dramatically portrayed in the 2002 film Ted Bundy.

At 7:06 AM on January 24, 1989, 42-year-old Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair by the State of Florida for the murder of Kimberly Leach. His last words were, "I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends." Then, an electric potential of over 2,000 volts was applied across his body for less than two minutes. He was pronounced dead at 7:16 AM.

Dramatic portrayals

Four TV movies have been based on Bundy's life.

The Deliberate Stranger, aired in 1986. Mark Harmon played the lead role as Bundy.
Directed by Matthew Bright, The Story of Ted Bundy or just Bundy, was released in 2002. It starred Michael Reilly Burke as Bundy.
The Stranger Beside Me, based on Ann Rule's biography, aired in 2003, starring Billy Campbell as Bundy and Barbara Hershey as Rule.
In 2004 the A&E television network aired a movie adaptation of Keppel's 1995 book The Riverman, starring Cary Elwes as Bundy and Bruce Greenwood as Keppel.

In his novel The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris based the character of Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb in part upon Bundy. (His other inspirations were Gary M. Heidnik, Edmund Kemper, and Ed Gein.) Like Bundy, Bill would put his arm in a sling, approach the women he intended to murder by asking for their help carrying something, and then incapacitate them. Also, the relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling was in part based on Bundy's interviews with Keppel.

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