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Ted Bundy

From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.

Warning: This article contains graphic and possibly disturbing details about Ted Bundy's murders.

Ted Bundy

Theodore Robert Bundy (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer who between 1974 and 1979 killed numerous young women in Washington, Utah, Colorado and Florida. His total number of victims is unknown. Bundy confessed to 30 murders; estimates run above 100.

Bundy is believed to have been a sociopath. He was intelligent, educated, personable, handsome, and charming, but nevertheless regularly brutally murdered women and girls, usually with a blunt instrument, sometimes by strangulation. He would also often sexually assault his victims before and after death.

Contents

1 Biography

2 First trial and Bundy's escapes

3 Bundy goes to Florida

4 Conviction and execution

5 Dramatic portrayals

6 Further reading

7 External links

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Biography

Bundy was born in November, 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 few years of his life, Ted lived with his mother in his psychologically unstable grandfather's house in Philadelphia. At age four, he appeared at her bed one morning with several knives.

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

Friends generally recalled Bundy as a happy, normal child. 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 The Only Living Witness, Bundy's definitive biography, Ted 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."

Underneath everything was a deep anger. As he explained to Michaud and Aynesworth, Bundy progressed from an undifferentiated interest in sexual images—Playboy and similar sorts of soft erotica—to darker thoughts in which sex and violence intertwined. He patronized dirty book stores and became a peeper. Over time, Ted elaborated a fantasy in which he possessed—his term—lifeless females as one might any inanimate object, "like a potted plant or a Porsche," as Ted put it.

This other self, Ted's "entity," as he described it to Michaud and Ayneswroth, was kept very well hidden. Later, friends and acquaintances would all remember a handsome, articulate, extroverted Bundy who did charity work and campaigned for local and statewide Republican Party candidates.

Meanwhile, he began to kill. While some Bundy experts, including former King County detective Bob Keppel, believe Ted may have started in his early to mid teens, the earliest verified murders began in 1974. From January to June he stalked and killed approximately one young woman a month, a spree that culminated in July with the double daytime abduction murders of two females at a lakeside park near Seattle. he murdered approximately 10 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 just by changing his hair style, for example.

That autumn, Bundy moved on to Utah, where the killings began in October with the murder in Midvale of Melissa Smith, the 17-year-old daughter of police chief Louis Smith. Bundy raped, sodomised, and strangled the Smith girl. 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.

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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, Ted 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. He wandered around the area before being 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 Greenwood Springs, Colorado, lockup. On the night of December 30, 1977, Bundy climbed out the hole, managed to reach the main hallway, and (because the jailer was out for the evening) was able to walk right out the jail's front door. Bundy stole a car in the parking lot and drove off into the night.

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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 coeds 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. 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 killings murder.

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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 Leach murder and was handed another death sentence by Judge Wallace Jopling. During this second trial, he married Carole Ann Boone, a former coworker and admirer. During his incarceration, Bundy received hundreds of fan letters from female admirers.

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, his wife gave birth to their only child, a girl, whom Bundy adored. Eventually, however, Boone moved away, divorced him, and changed her and her daughter's last name. Apparently, she somehow discovered that Bundy was guilty—meaning that she had previously believed that Bundy was innocent, yet another testimonial to his unique ability to charm women.

In the years Bundy was on death row, 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 seemed to wish to unburden himself by confessing to his crimes, which included eight officially unsolved murders in Washington State for which Bundy 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 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 explained how his consumption of violent pornography helped "shape and mold" his violence into "behavior too terrible to describe". Ted Bundy explained that he felt that violence in the media, "particularly sexualized violence", sent boys "down the road to being Ted Bundys". It has been noted that Bundy had never blamed pornography until this interview, and that no pornographic materials were found at his home when it was searched.

According to Special Agent Hagmaier, Bundy also contemplated suicide in the days leading up to his execution, but eventually decided against it.

At 7:06 AM on January 24, 1989, Theodore Robert Bundy was put to death by the State of Florida, by electrocution. The death warrant was for the Lake City murder. 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.

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Dramatic portrayals

A TV movie based on his life, The Deliberate Stranger, aired in 1986. Mark Harmon played the lead role as Bundy. Another film about Ted Bundy's life, directed by Matthew Bright, entitled The Story of Ted Bundy, was released in 2002. It starred Michael Reilly Burke as Bundy.</p>

Another TV movie, The Stranger Beside Me, based on 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.</p>

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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