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Ted Bundy
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Theodore Robert Bundy, born Theodore Robert Cowell (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989), known as Ted Bundy, was an American serial killer who murdered numerous young women across the United States between 1974 and 1978. He twice escaped from prison before his final apprehension in February 1978. After more than a decade of vigorous denials, he eventually confessed to 30 murders, although the actual total of victims remains unknown.
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Encyclopedia
Theodore Robert Bundy, born Theodore Robert Cowell (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989), known as Ted Bundy, was an American serial killer who murdered numerous young women across the United States between 1974 and 1978. He twice escaped from prison before his final apprehension in February 1978. After more than a decade of vigorous denials, he eventually confessed to 30 murders, although the actual total of victims remains unknown. Estimates range from 29 to over 100, the general estimate being 35. Typically, Bundy would bludgeon his victims, then strangle them to death. He also engaged in rape and necrophilia.
Early life
Childhood
Ted Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home For Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont, to Eleanor Louise Cowell. While the identity of his father remains a mystery, Bundy's birth certificate lists a "Lloyd Marshall" (b. 1916), although Bundy's mother would later tell of being seduced by a war veteran named "Jack Worthington". Bundy's family did not believe this story, however, and expressed suspicion about Louise's violent, abusive father, Samuel Cowell. Whatever the truth of Bundy's parentage, to avoid social stigma, Bundy's maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, claimed him as their son. He grew up believing that his mother was his older sister. Bundy biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth wrote that he learned Louise was actually his mother while he was in high school. True crime writer Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally, states that it was around 1969, shortly following a traumatic breakup with his college girlfriend.
For the first few years of his life, Bundy and his mother lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1950, Bundy and his mother, whom he still believed was his sister, moved to live with relatives in Tacoma, Washington. Here, Louise Cowell had her son's surname changed from Cowell to Nelson. In 1951, one year after their move, Louise Cowell met Johnny Culpepper Bundy at an adult singles night held at Tacoma's First Methodist Church. In May of that year, the couple were married, and soon after Johnny Bundy adopted Ted, legally changing his last name to "Bundy".
Johnny and Louise Bundy had more children, whom the young Bundy spent much of his time babysitting. Johnny Bundy tried to include his stepson in camping trips and other father-son activities, but the boy remained emotionally detached from his stepfather. Bundy was a good student at Woodrow Wilson High School, in Tacoma, and was active in a local Methodist church, serving as vice-president of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. He was involved with a local troop of the Boy Scouts of America.
Socially, Bundy remained shy and introverted throughout his high school and early college years. He would say later that he "hit a wall" in high school and that he was unable to understand social behavior, stunting his social development. He maintained a facade of social activity, but he had no natural sense of how to get along with other people, saying: "I didn't know what made things tick. I didn't know what made people want to be friends. I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interactions."
Years later, while on Florida's death row, Bundy would describe a part of himself that, from a young age, was fascinated by images of sex and violence. In early prison interviews, Bundy called this part of himself "the entity". While still in his teens, Bundy would look through libraries for detective magazines and books on crime, focusing on sources that described sexual violence and featured pictures of dead bodies and violent sexuality. Before he was even out of high school, Bundy was a compulsive thief, a shoplifter, and on his way to becoming an amateur criminal. To support his love of skiing, Bundy stole skis and equipment and forged ski-lift tickets. He was arrested twice as a juvenile, although these records were later expunged.
University years
In 1965, Bundy graduated from Woodrow Wilson High. Awarded a scholarship by the University of Puget Sound (UPS), he began that fall, taking courses in psychology and Oriental studies. After two semesters at UPS, he decided to transfer to Seattle's University of Washington (UW).
While he was a university student, Bundy worked as a grocery bagger and shelf-stocker at a Seattle Safeway store on Queen Anne Hill, as well as other odd jobs. As part of his course of studies in psychology, he would later work as a night-shift volunteer at Seattle's Suicide Hot Line, a suicide crisis center that served the greater Seattle metropolitan and suburban areas. There, he met and worked alongside former Seattle policewoman and fledgling crime writer Ann Rule, who would later write a biography of Bundy and his crimes, The Stranger Beside Me.
He began a relationship with fellow university student "Stephanie Brooks" (a pseudonym), whom he met while enrolled at UW in 1967. Following her 1968 graduation and return to her family home in California, she ended the relationship, fed up with what she described as Bundy's immaturity and lack of ambition. Rule states that, around this time, Bundy decided to pay a visit to his birthplace, Burlington, Vermont. There, according to Rule, he visited the local records clerk and finally uncovered the truth of his parentage.
After his discovery, Bundy became a more focused and dominant person. In 1968, he managed the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller's Presidential campaign and attended the 1968 Republican convention in Miami, Florida as a Rockefeller supporter. He re-enrolled at UW, this time with a major in psychology. Bundy became an honors student and was well liked by his professors. In 1969, he started dating Elizabeth Kloepfer, a divorced secretary with a daughter, who fell deeply in love with him. They would continue dating for more than six years, until he went to prison for kidnapping in 1976.
Bundy graduated in 1972 from UW with a degree in psychology. Soon afterward, he again went to work for the state Republican Party, which included a close relationship with Gov. Daniel J. Evans. During the campaign, Bundy followed Evans' Democratic opponent around the state, tape recording his speeches and reporting back to Evans personally. A minor scandal later followed when the Democrats found out about Bundy, who had been posing as a college student. In the fall of 1973, Bundy enrolled in the law school at the University of Puget Sound, but he did poorly. He began skipping classes, finally dropping out in the spring of 1974, as young women began to disappear in the Pacific northwest.
While on a business trip to California in the summer of 1973, Bundy came back into his ex-girlfriend "Stephanie Brooks"' life with a new look and attitude; this time as a serious, dedicated professional who had been accepted to law school. Bundy continued to date Kloepfer as well, and neither woman was aware the other existed. Bundy courted Brooks throughout the rest of the year, and she accepted his marriage proposal. Two weeks later, however, shortly after New Year's 1974, he unceremoniously dumped her, refusing to return her phone calls. A few weeks after this breakup, Bundy began a murderous rampage in Washington state.
Murders
Washington state
No one knows exactly where and when Bundy began killing. Many Bundy experts, including Rule and former King County detective Robert D. Keppel, believe Bundy may have started killing as far back as his early teens. Ann Marie Burr, an eight-year-old girl from Tacoma, vanished from her home in 1961, when Bundy was 14 years old, though Bundy always denied killing her. The day before his execution, Bundy told his lawyer that he made his first attempt to kidnap a woman in 1969, and implied that he committed his first actual murder sometime in 1972. At one point in his death-row confessions with Keppel, Bundy said he committed his first murder in 1972. In 1973, one of Bundy's Republican Party friends saw a pair of handcuffs in the back of Bundy's Volkswagen. He was for many years a suspect in the December 1973 murder of Kathy Devine in Washington state, but DNA analysis led to another man's arrest and conviction for that crime in 2002. Bundy's earliest known, identified murders were committed in 1974, when he was 27.
Shortly after midnight on January 4, 1974, Bundy entered the basement bedroom of 18-year-old "Joni Lenz" (pseudonym), a dancer and student at UW. Bundy bludgeoned her with a metal rod from her bed frame while she slept and sexually assaulted her with a speculum. Lenz was found the next morning by her roommates in a coma and lying in a pool of her own blood. She survived the attack but suffered permanent brain damage. Bundy's next victim was Lynda Ann Healy, another UW student (and his cousin's roommate). In the early morning hours of February 1, 1974, Bundy broke into Healy's room, knocked her unconscious, dressed her in jeans and a shirt, wrapped her in a bed sheet, and carried her away.
Co-eds began disappearing at a rate of roughly one a month. On March 12, 1974, in Olympia, Bundy kidnapped and murdered Donna Gail Manson, a 19-year-old student at The Evergreen State College. On April 17, 1974, Susan Rancourt disappeared from the campus of Central Washington State College (CWSC) in Ellensburg. Later, two different CWSC co-eds would recount meeting a man with his arm in a cast—one that night, one three nights earlier—who asked for their help to carry a load of books to his Volkswagen Beetle. Next was Kathy Parks, last seen on the campus of Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, on May 6, 1974. Brenda Ball was never seen again after leaving The Flame Tavern in Burien on June 1, 1974. Bundy then murdered Georgeann Hawkins, a student at UW and a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, an on-campus sorority. In the early morning hours of June 11, 1974, she walked through an alley from her boyfriend's dormitory residence to her sorority house. She was never seen again. Witnesses later reported seeing a man with a leg cast struggling to carry a briefcase in the area that night. One co-ed reported that the man had asked for her help in carrying the briefcase to his car, a Beetle.
Bundy's Washington killing spree culminated on July 14, 1974, with the daytime abduction of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah. That day, eight different people told the police about the handsome young man with his left arm in a sling who called himself "Ted". Five of them were women whom "Ted" asked for help unloading a sailboat from his Beetle. One of them went with "Ted" as far as his car, where there was no sailboat, before declining to accompany him any farther. Three more witnesses testified to seeing him approach Ott with the story about the sailboat and to seeing her walk away from the beach in his company. She was never seen alive again. Naslund disappeared without a trace four hours later.
King County detectives now had a description both of the suspect and his car. Some witnesses told investigators that the "Ted" they encountered spoke with a clipped, British-like accent. Soon, fliers were up all over the Seattle area. After seeing the police sketch and description of the Lake Sammamish suspect in both of the local newspapers and on television news reports, Bundy's girlfriend, one of his psychology professors at UW, and former co-worker Ann Rule all reported him as a possible suspect. The police, receiving up to 200 tips per day, did not pay any special attention to a tip about a clean-cut law student.
The fragmented remains of Ott and Naslund were discovered on September 7, 1974, off Interstate 90 near Issaquah, one mile from the park. Found along with the women's remains was an extra femur bone and vertebrae, which Bundy would identify as that of Georgeann Hawkins shortly before his execution. Between March 1 and March 3, 1975, the skulls and jawbones of Healy, Rancourt, Parks and Ball were found on Taylor Mountain just east of Issaquah. Years later, Bundy claimed that he had also dumped Donna Manson's body there, but no trace of her was ever found.
Utah and Colorado
That autumn, Bundy began attending the University of Utah law school in Salt Lake City, where he resumed killing in October. Nancy Wilcox disappeared from Holladay, Utah, on October 2, 1974. Wilcox was last seen riding in a Volkswagen Beetle. On October 18, 1974, Bundy murdered Melissa Smith, the 17-year-old daughter of Midvale police chief Louis Smith; Bundy raped, sodomized and strangled her. Her body was found nine days later. Next was Laura Aime, also 17, who disappeared when she left a Halloween party in Lehi, Utah, on October 31, 1974; her naked, beaten and strangled corpse was found nearly a month later by hikers on Thanksgiving Day, on the banks of a river in American Fork Canyon.
In Murray, Utah, on November 8, 1974, Carol DaRonch narrowly escaped with her life. Claiming to be Officer Roseland of the Murray Police Department, Bundy approached her at the Fashion Place Mall, told her someone had tried to break into her car, and asked her to accompany him to the police station. She got into his car but refused his instruction to buckle her seat belt. They drove for a short period before Bundy suddenly pulled to the shoulder and attempted to slap a pair of handcuffs on her. In the struggle, he fastened both loops to the same wrist. Bundy whipped out his crowbar, but DaRonch caught it in the air just before it would have cracked her skull. She then got the door open and tumbled out onto the highway, thus escaping from her would-be killer.
About an hour later, a strange man showed up at Viewmont High School in Bountiful, Utah, nineteen miles away from Murray. The Viewmont High drama club was putting on a play in the auditorium. The strange man approached the drama teacher and then a student, asking both to come out to the parking lot to identify a car. Both declined. The drama teacher saw him again shortly before the end of the play, this time breathing hard, with his hair mussed and his shirt untucked. Another student saw the man lurking in the rear of the auditorium. Debby Kent, a 17-year-old Viewmont High student, left the play at intermission to go and pick up her brother, and was never seen again. Later, investigators found a small key in the parking lot outside Viewmont High. It unlocked the handcuffs taken off Carol DaRonch.
In 1975, while still attending law school at the University of Utah, Bundy shifted his crimes to Colorado. On January 12, 1975, Caryn Campbell disappeared from the Wildwood Inn at Snowmass, Colorado, where she had been vacationing with her fiancé and his children. She vanished somewhere in a span of 50 feet between the elevator doors and her room. Her body was found on February 17, 1975. Next, Vail ski instructor Julie Cunningham disappeared on March 15, 1975, and Denise Oliverson in Grand Junction on April 6, 1975. While in prison, Bundy confessed to Colorado investigators that he used crutches to approach Cunningham, after asking her to help him carry some ski boots to his car. At the car, Bundy clubbed her with his crowbar and immobilized her with handcuffs, later strangling her in a crime highly similar to the Hawkins murder.
Lynette Culver went missing in Pocatello, Idaho, on May 6, 1975, from the grounds of her junior high school. After his return to Utah, Susan Curtis vanished on June 28, 1975. (Bundy confessed to the Curtis murder minutes before his execution.) The bodies of Cunningham, Culver, Curtis and Oliverson have never been recovered.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, investigators were attempting to prioritize their enormous list of suspects. They used computers to cross-check different likely lists of suspects (classmates of Lynda Healy, owners of Volkswagens, etc) against each other, and then identify suspects who turned up on more than one list. "Theodore Robert Bundy" was one of 25 people who turned up on four separate lists, and his case file was second on the "To Be Investigated" pile when the call came from Utah of an arrest.
Arrest, first trial, and escapes
Bundy was arrested on August 16, 1975, in Salt Lake City, for failure to stop for a police officer. A search of his car revealed a ski mask, another mask made out of panythose, a crowbar, handcuffs, trash bags, an icepick, and other items that were thought by the police to be burglary tools. Bundy remained calm during questioning, explaining that he needed the mask for skiing and had found the handcuffs in a dumpster. Utah detective Jerry Thompson connected Bundy and his Volkswagen to the DaRonch kidnapping and the missing girls, and searched his apartment. The search uncovered a brochure of Colorado ski resorts, with a check mark by the Wildwood Inn where Caryn Campbell had disappeared. After searching his apartment, the police brought Bundy in for a lineup before DaRonch and the Bountiful witnesses. They identified him as "Officer Roseland" and as the man lurking about the night Debby Kent disappeared. Following a week-long trial, Bundy was convicted of DaRonch's kidnapping on March 1, 1976, and was sentenced to 15 years in Utah State Prison. Colorado authorities were pursuing murder charges, however, and Bundy was extradited there to stand trial.
On June 7, 1977, in preparation for a hearing in the Caryn Campbell murder trial, Bundy was taken to the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen. During a court recess, he was allowed to visit the courthouse's law library, where he jumped out of the building from a second-story window and escaped, but sprained his right ankle during the jump. In the minutes following his escape, Bundy at first ran and then strolled casually through the small town toward Aspen Mountain. He made it all the way to the top of Aspen Mountain without being detected, where he rested for two days in an abandoned hunting cabin. But afterwards, he lost his sense of direction and wandered around the mountain, missing two trails that led down off the mountain to his intended destination, the town of Crested Butte. At one point he talked his way out of danger after coming face-to-face with a gun-toting citizen who was one of the searchers scouring Aspen Mountain for Ted Bundy. On June 13, 1977, Bundy stole a car he found on the mountain. He drove back into Aspen and could have gotten away, but two police deputies noticed the Cadillac with dimmed headlights weaving in and out of its lane and pulled Bundy over. They recognized him and took him back to jail. Bundy had been on the lam for six days.
He was back in custody, but Bundy worked on a new escape plan. He was being held in the Glenwood Springs, Colorado, jail while he awaited trial. He had acquired a hacksaw blade and $500 in cash; he later claimed the blade came from another prison inmate. Over two weeks, he sawed through the welds fixing a small metal plate in the ceiling and, after dieting down still further, was able to fit through the hole and access the crawl space above. An informant in the prison told guards that he had heard Bundy moving around the ceiling during the nights before his escape, but the matter was not investigated. When Bundy's Aspen trial judge ruled on December 23, 1977, that the Caryn Campbell murder trial would start on January 9, 1978, and changed the venue to Colorado Springs, Bundy realized that he had to make his escape before he was transferred out of the Glenwood Springs jail. On the night of December 30, 1977, Bundy dressed warmly and packed books and files under his blanket to make it look like he was sleeping. He wriggled through the hole and up into the crawlspace. Bundy crawled over to a spot directly above the jailer's linen closet — the jailer and his wife were out for the evening — dropped down into the jailer's apartment, and walked out the door.
Bundy was free, but he was on foot in the middle of a bitterly cold, snowy Colorado night. He stole a broken-down MG, but it stalled out in the mountains. Bundy was stuck on the side of Interstate 70 in the middle of the night in a blizzard, but another driver gave him a ride into Vail. From there he caught a bus to Denver and boarded the TWA 8:55 a.m. flight to Chicago. The Glenwood Springs jail guards did not notice Bundy was gone until noon on December 31, 1977, 17 hours after his escape, by which time Bundy was already in Chicago.
Florida
Following his arrival in Chicago, Bundy then caught an Amtrak train to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he got a room at the YMCA. On January 2, 1978, he went to an Ann Arbor bar and watched the University of Washington Huskies, the team of his alma mater, beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl. He later stole a car in Ann Arbor, which he abandoned in Atlanta, Georgia before boarding a bus for Tallahassee, Florida, where he arrived on January 8, 1978. There, he rented a room at a boarding house under the alias of "Chris Hagen" and committed numerous petty crimes including shoplifting, purse snatching, and auto theft. He stole a student ID card that belonged to a Kenneth Misner and sent away for copies of Misner's Social Security card and birth certificate. He grew a mustache and drew a fake mole on his right cheek when he went out, but aside from that, he made no real attempt at a disguise. Bundy tried to find work at a construction site, but when the personnel officer asked Bundy for his driver's license for identification, Bundy walked away. This was his only attempt at job hunting.
One week after Bundy's arrival in Tallahassee, in the early hours of Super Bowl Sunday on January 15, 1978, two and a half years of repressed homicidal violence erupted. Bundy entered the Florida State University Chi Omega sorority at approximately 3 a.m. and killed two sleeping women, Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. Bundy bludgeoned and strangled Levy and Bowman; he also sexually assaulted Levy. He also bludgeoned two other Chi Omegas, Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner. The entire episode took no more than half an hour. After leaving the Chi Omega house, Bundy broke into another home a few blocks away, clubbing and severely injuring Florida State University student Cheryl Thomas.
On February 9, 1978, Bundy traveled to Lake City, Florida. While there, he abducted, raped, and murdered 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, throwing her body under a small pig shed. On the 12th he stole yet another Volkswagen Beetle and left Tallahassee for good, heading west across the Florida panhandle. On February 15, 1978, shortly after 1 a.m., Bundy was stopped by Pensacola police officer David Lee. When the officer called in a check of the license plate, the vehicle came up as stolen. Bundy then scuffled with the officer before he was finally subdued. As Lee took the unknown suspect to jail, Bundy said "I wish you had killed me." At his booking Bundy gave the police the name Ken Misner (and presented stolen identification for Misner), but the Florida Department of Law Enforcement made a positive fingerprint identification early the next day. He was immediately transported to Tallahassee, where he was later charged with the Chi Omega murders.
Conviction and execution
After a change of venue to Miami, Bundy went to trial for the Chi Omega murders in June 1979, with Dade County Circuit Court Judge Edward D. Cowart presiding. Despite having five court-appointed lawyers, he insisted on acting as his own attorney and even cross-examined witnesses, including the police officer who had discovered Margaret Bowman's body. He was prosecuted by Assistant State Attorney Larry Simpson.
Two pieces of evidence proved crucial. First, Chi Omega member Nita Neary, getting back to the house very late after a date, saw Bundy as he left, and identified him in court. Second, during his homicidal frenzy, Bundy bit Lisa Levy in her left buttock, leaving obvious bite marks. Police took plaster casts of Bundy's teeth and a forensics expert matched them to the photographs of Levy's wound. Bundy was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death. After confirming the sentence, Cowart gave him the verdict:
Bundy was tried for the Kimberly Leach murder in 1980. He was again convicted on all counts, principally due to fibers found in his van that matched Leach's clothing and an eyewitness that saw him leading Leach away from the school, and sentenced to death. During the Kimberly Leach trial, Bundy married former coworker Carole Ann Boone in the courtroom while questioning her on the stand. Following numerous conjugal visits between Bundy and his new wife, Boone gave birth to a daughter in October 1982. However, in 1986 Boone moved back to Washington and never returned to Florida. Her whereabouts and those of Bundy's daughter are unknown.
While awaiting execution in Starke Prison, Bundy was housed in the cell next to fellow serial killer Ottis Toole, the murderer of Adam Walsh. FBI profiler Robert K. Ressler met with him there as part of his work interviewing serial killers, but found Bundy uncooperative and manipulative, willing to speak only in the third person, and only in hypothetical terms. Writing in 1992, Ressler spoke of his impression of Bundy in comparison to his reviews of other serial killers: "This guy was an animal, and it amazed me that the media seemed unable to understand that."
However, during the same period, Bundy was often visited by Special Agent William Hagmaier of the Federal Bureau of Investigation'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 October 1984, Bundy contacted former King County homicide detective Bob 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 investigation; they provided far greater insight into Bundy's own mind, however, and were primarily pursued in the hope of learning the details of unsolved murders which Bundy was suspected of committing.
Bundy contacted Keppel again in 1988. At that point, his appeals were exhausted. Bundy had beaten previous death warrants for March 4, 1986, July 2, 1986, and November 18, 1986. With execution imminent, Bundy confessed to eight official unsolved murders in Washington State for which he was the prime suspect. Bundy told Keppel that there were actually five bodies left on Taylor Mountain, not four as they had originally thought. Bundy confessed in detail to the murder of Georgeann Hawkins, describing how he lured her to his car, clubbed her with a tire iron that he had stashed on the ground under his car, drove away with her in the car with him, and later raped and strangled her.
After the interview, Keppel reported that he had been shocked in speaking with Bundy, and that he was the kind of man who was "born to kill." Keppel stated:
Bundy had hoped that he could use the revelations and partial confessions to get another stay of execution or possibly commute his sentence to life imprisonment. At one point, a legal advocate working for Bundy asked many of the families of the victims to fax letters to Florida Governor Robert Martinez and ask for mercy for Bundy in order to find out where the remains of their loved ones were. All of the families refused. Keppel and others reported that Bundy gave scant detail about his crimes during his confessions, and promised to reveal more and other body dump sites if he were given "more time." The ploy failed and Bundy was executed on schedule.
The night before Bundy was executed, he gave a television interview to James Dobson, head of the evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family. During the interview, Bundy made repeated claims as to the pornographic "roots" of his crimes. He stated that, while pornography did not cause him to commit murder, the consumption of violent pornography helped "shape and mold" his violence into "behavior too terrible to describe." He alleged that he felt that violence in the media, "particularly sexualized violence," sent boys "down the road to being Ted Bundys." In the same interview, Bundy stated:
- "You are going to kill me, and that will protect society from me. But out there are many, many more people who are addicted to pornography, and you are doing nothing about that."
According to Hagmaier, Bundy contemplated suicide in the days leading up to his execution, but eventually decided against it.
At 7:06 a.m. local time on January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke, Florida. His last words were, "I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends." Then, more than 2,000 volts were applied across his body for less than two minutes. He was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. Several hundred people were gathered outside the prison and cheered when they saw the signal that Bundy had been declared dead.
Modus operandi and victim profiles
Bundy had a fairly consistent modus operandi. He would approach a potential victim in a public place, even in daylight or in a crowd, as when he abducted Ott and Naslund at Lake Sammamish or when he kidnapped Leach from her school. Bundy had various ways of gaining a victim's trust. Sometimes, he would feign injury, wearing his arm in a sling or wearing a fake cast, as in the murders of Hawkins, Rancourt, Ott, Naslund, and Cunningham. At other times Bundy would impersonate an authority figure; he pretended to be a policeman when approaching Carol DaRonch. The day before he killed Kimberly Leach, Bundy approached another young Florida girl pretending to be "Richard Burton, Fire Department", but left hurriedly after her older brother arrived.
Bundy had a remarkable advantage in that his facial features were attractive, yet not especially memorable. In later years, he would often be described as chameleon-like, able to look totally different by making only minor adjustments to his appearance, e.g., growing a beard or changing his hairstyle.
All of Bundy's victims were white females and most were of middle class background. Almost all were between the ages of 15 and 25. Many were college students. In her book, Rule notes that most of Bundy's victims had long straight hair parted in the middle—just like Stephanie Brooks, the woman to whom Bundy was engaged in 1973. Rule speculates that Bundy's resentment towards his first girlfriend was a motivating factor in his string of murders. However, in a 1980 interview, Bundy dismissed this hypothesis: "[t]hey...just fit the general criteria of being young and attractive...Too many people have bought this crap that all the girls were similar — hair about the same color, parted in the middle...but if you look at it, almost everything was dissimilar...physically, they were almost all different."
After luring a victim to his car, Bundy would hit her in the head with a crowbar he had placed underneath his Volkswagen or hidden inside it. Every recovered skull, except for that of Kimberly Leach, showed signs of blunt force trauma. Every recovered body, except for that of Leach, showed signs of strangulation. Many of Bundy's victims were transported a considerable distance from where they disappeared, as in the case of Kathy Parks, whom he drove more than 260 miles from Oregon to Washington. Bundy often would drink alcohol prior to finding a victim; Carol DaRonch testified to smelling alcohol on his breath.
Hagmaier stated that Bundy considered himself to be an amateur and impulsive killer in his early years, and then moved into what he considered to be his "prime" or "predator" phase. Bundy stated that this phase began around the time of the Lynda Healy murder, when he began seeking victims he considered to be equal to his skill as a murderer.
On death row, Bundy admitted to decapitating at least a dozen of his victims with a hacksaw. He kept the severed heads later found on Taylor Mountain (Rancourt, Parks, Ball, Healy) in his room or apartment for some time before finally disposing of them. He confessed to cremating Donna Manson's head in his girlfriend's fireplace. Some of the skulls of Bundy's victims were found with the front teeth broken out. Bundy also confessed to visiting his victims' bodies over and over again at the Taylor Mountain body dump site. He stated that he would lie with them for hours, applying makeup to their corpses and having sex with their decomposing bodies until putrefaction forced him to abandon the remains. Not long before his death, Bundy admitted to returning to the corpse of Georgeann Hawkins for purposes of necrophilia.
Bundy confessed to keeping other souvenirs of his crimes. The Utah police who searched Bundy's apartment in 1975 missed a collection of photographs that Bundy had hidden in the utility room, photos that Bundy destroyed when he returned home after being released on bail. His girlfriend Elizabeth once found a bag in his room filled with women's clothing.
When Bundy was confronted by law enforcement officers who stated that they believed the number of individuals he had murdered was 36, Bundy told them that they should "add one digit to that, and you'll have it." Rule speculated that this meant Bundy might have killed over 100 women. Speaking to his lawyer Polly Nelson in 1988, however, Bundy dismissed the 100+ victims speculation and said that the more common estimate of approximately 35 victims was accurate.
Pathology
In December 1987, Bundy was examined for seven hours by Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a professor from New York University Medical Center. Lewis diagnosed Bundy as a manic depressive whose crimes usually occurred during his depressive episodes. To Lewis, Bundy described his childhood, especially his relationship with his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell. According to Bundy, grandfather Samuel Cowell was a deacon in his church. Along with the already established description of his grandfather as a tyrannical bully, Bundy described him as a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews. He further stated that his grandfather tortured animals, beating the family dog and swinging neighborhood cats by their tails. He also told Lewis how his grandfather kept a large collection of pornography in his greenhouse where, according to relatives, Bundy and a cousin would sneak to look at it for hours. Family members expressed skepticism over Louise's "Jack Worthington" story of Bundy's parentage and noted that Samuel Cowell once flew into a violent rage when the subject of the boy's father came up. Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient wife, who was sporadically taken to hospitals to undergo shock treatment for depression. Toward the end of her life, Bundy said, she became agoraphobic.
Louise Bundy's younger sister Julia recalled a disturbing incident with her young nephew. After lying down in the Cowells' home for a nap, Julia woke to find herself surrounded by knives from the Cowell kitchen. Three-year-old Ted was standing by the bed, smiling at her.
Bundy used stolen credit cards to purchase more than 30 pairs of socks while on the run in Florida; he was a self-described foot fetishist.
In the Dobson interview before his execution, Bundy said that violent pornography played a major role in his sex crimes. According to Bundy, as a young boy he found "outside the home again, in the local grocery store, in a local drug store, the soft core pornography that people called soft core...And from time to time we would come across pornographic books of a harder nature...." Bundy said, "It happened in stages, gradually. My experience with pornography generally, but with pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality, is once you become addicted to it — and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction — I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far, you reach that jumping off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give that which is beyond just reading it or looking at it."
In a letter written shortly before his escape from the Glenwood Springs jail, Bundy said "I have known people who...radiate vulnerability. Their facial expressions say 'I am afraid of you.' These people invite abuse... By expecting to be hurt, do they subtly encourage it?" In a 1980 interview, speaking of a serial killer's justification of his actions, Bundy said "So what's one less? What's one less person on the face of the planet?" When Florida detectives asked Bundy to tell them where he had left Kimberly Leach's body for her family's solace, Bundy allegedly said, "But I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet."
Victims
Below is a chronological list of Ted Bundy's known victims. Bundy never made a comprehensive confession of his crimes and his true total is not known, but before his execution, he confessed to Hagmaier to having committed 30 murders. Many of his victims remain unknown. All the women listed were killed, unless otherwise noted.
1973
- May 1973: Unknown hitchhiker, Tumwater, Washington area. Confessed to Bob Keppel before Bundy's execution. No remains found.
1974
- January 4: Joni Lenz (pseudonym) (18, survived). University of Washington first-year student who was bludgeoned in her bed and impaled with a speculum as she slept.
- February 1: Lynda Ann Healy (21). Bludgeoned while asleep and abducted from the house she shared with other University of Washington co-eds.
- March 12: Donna Gail Manson (19). Abducted while walking to a jazz concert on the Evergreen State College campus, Olympia, Washington. Bundy confessed to her murder, but her body was never found.
- April 17: Susan Elaine Rancourt (18). Disappeared as she walked across Ellensburg's Central Washington State College campus at night.
- May 6: Roberta Kathleen "Kathy" Parks (22). Vanished from Oregon State University in Corvallis while walking to another dorm hall to have coffee with friends.
- June 1: Brenda Carol Ball (22). Disappeared from the Flame Tavern in Burien, Washington.
- June 11: Georgeann Hawkins (18). Disappeared from behind her sorority house, Kappa Alpha Theta, at the University of Washington.
- July 14: Janice Ann Ott (23) and Denise Marie Naslund (19). Abducted several hours apart from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah, Washington.
- September 2: Unknown teenage hitchhiker. Idaho. Confessed before his execution. No remains found.
- October 2: Nancy Wilcox (16). Disappeared in Holladay, Utah. Her body was never found.
- October 18: Melissa Smith (17). Vanished from Midvale, Utah, after leaving a pizza parlor.
- October 31: Laura Aime (17). Disappeared from a Halloween party at Lehi, Utah.
- November 8: Carol DaRonch (survived). Escaped from Bundy by jumping out from his car in Murray, Utah.
- November 8: Debra "Debi" Kent (17). Vanished from the parking lot of a school in Bountiful, Utah, hours after DaRonch escaped from Bundy. Shortly before his execution, Bundy confessed to investigators that he dumped Kent at a site near Fairview, Utah. An intense search of the site produced one human bone — a knee cap — which matched the profile for someone of Kent's age and size. DNA testing has not been attempted.
Bundy is a suspect in the murder of Carol Valenzuela, who disappeared from Vancouver, Washington, on August 2, 1974. Her remains were discovered two months later south of Olympia, Washington, along with those of an unidentified female.
1975
- January 12: Caryn Campbell (23). Campbell, a Michigan nurse, vanished between her hotel lounge and room while on a ski trip with her fiancé in Snowmass, Colorado.
- March 15: Julie Cunningham (26). Disappeared while on her way to a nearby tavern in Vail, Colorado. Bundy confessed to investigators that he buried Cunningham's body near Rifle, Garfield County, Colorado, but a search did not produce remains.
- April 6: Denise Oliverson (25). Abducted while bicycling to visit her parents in Grand Junction, Colorado. Bundy provided details of her murder, but her body was never found.
- May 6: Lynette Culver (13). Snatched from a school playground at Alameda Junior High School in Pocatello, Idaho. Her body was never found.
- June 28: Susan Curtis (15). Disappeared while walking alone to the dormitories during a youth conference at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Her body was never found.
Bundy is a suspect in the murder of Melanie Suzanne "Suzy" Cooley, who disappeared April 15, 1975, after leaving Nederland High School in Nederland, Colorado. Her bludgeoned and strangled corpse was discovered by road maintenance workers on May 2, 1975, in nearby Coal Creek Canyon. Gas receipts place Bundy in nearby Golden, the day of the Cooley abduction. The Jefferson County, Colorado, Sheriff's Office has classified the Melanie Cooley murder as a cold case.
1978
- January 15: Lisa Levy (20), Margaret Bowman (21), Karen Chandler (survived), Kathy Kleiner Deshields (survived). The Chi Omega killings, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.
- January 15: Cheryl Thomas (survived). Bludgeoned in her bed, eight blocks away from the Chi Omega Sorority house.
- February 9: Kimberly Leach (12), kidnapped from her junior high school in Lake City, Florida. She was raped, murdered and discarded in Suwannee River State Park in Florida.
In film
Three TV movies and one feature film have been produced about Bundy and his crimes.
Bibliography
- Keppel, Robert. The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer. Pocket Books, 2005, paperback, 597 pages, ISBN 0743463951. Updated after the arrest and confession of the Green River killer, Gary Ridgway.
- Larsen, Richard W. Bundy: The Deliberate Stranger. 1980, hardcover, ISBN 0-13-089185-1.
- Michaud, Stephen, and Hugh Aynesworth. The Only Living Witness. Authorlink 1999, paperback. ISBN 1-928704-11-5.
- Nelson, Polly. Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy's Last Lawyer. William Morrow, 1994, 329 pages. ISBN 0-688-10823-7.
- Rule, Ann. The Stranger Beside Me. Signet, 2000, paperback. 548 pages. ISBN 0-451-20326-7. Updated 20th anniversary edition.
External links
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- at CrimeLibrary.com, and Crime Library with Bob Keppel
- Ted Bundy's with Dr. James Dobson
- 1982 of the Leach conviction, 1982 Chi Omega , 1984 Florida Supreme Court Chi Omega , 1985 Florida Supreme Court Leach , 1986 by the United States Supreme Court, 1989 to the Florida Supreme Court
- July 16, 1979 TIME magazine about the Chi Omega trial
- on Ted Bundy (257 pages, in two parts)
- of Bundy's 1989 confessions
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