Trivia
NAME: Theodore (ted) bundy
BORN: November 24th, 1946
died: January 24, 1989 (age 42) electric chair.
number of victims: 30+ possibly 100s
span of killing: august 13, 1961-February 9, 1978
sentence: death penalty (electric chair)
modus operandi: lure young women in by feigning injury to ask help. impersonating an authority figure. victims were typically slender, tall, brunettes. used his charisma and good looks to gain trust. strangle. necrophilia.
"Murder is not about lust and it is not about violence. It's about possession. When you feel the last breath coming out of the woman, and you look into her eyes. At the point, it's being God."
- Ted Bundy
Early life
Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell to Eleanor Louise Cowell known for most of her life as Louise at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers (now the Lund Family Center) in Burlington, Vermont. His father's identity has never been determined with certainty. Some family members expressed suspicions that Bundy might have been fathered by Louise's own violent, abusive father, Samuel Cowell,but no material evidence has ever been cited to support or refute this.
For the first three years of his life, Bundy lived in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, who raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that associated with birth outside wedlock at the time.
Family, friends, and even young Ted were told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister. Eventually he discovered the truth, though his recollection of the circumstances varied. Bundy expressed a lifelong resentment toward his mother for never talking to him about his real father, and for leaving him to discover his true parentage for himself.
Despite his resentment for his mother, he spoke warmly of his grandparents who raised him later in interviews.
Bundy was a bit of a recluse as a child. A fellow classmate recalled Bundy telling him that he chooses to be alone because he has such a difficult time developing interpersonal relationships. Bundy apparently didn't understand how interpersonal relationships worked which is accredited to his anti social personality disorder which he was diagnosed with later in life.
University years
After graduating from high school in 1965, Bundy spent a year at the University of Puget Sound (UPS) before transferring to the University of Washington (UW) in 1966 to study Chinese. In 1967 he became romantically involved with a UW classmate who is identified in Bundy biographies by several pseudonyms, most commonly Stephanie Brooks.
In early 1968 he dropped out of college and worked at a series of minimum-wage jobs. He also volunteered at the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaign and in August attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami as a Rockefeller delegate. Shortly thereafter Brooks ended their relationship and returned to her family home in California, frustrated by what she described as Bundy's immaturity and lack of ambition.
Psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis would later pinpoint this crisis as "probably the pivotal time in his development". Devastated by Brooks's rejection, Bundy traveled to Colorado and then farther east, visiting relatives in Arkansas and Philadelphia and enrolling for one semester at Temple University. It was at this time in early 1969, Rule believes, that Bundy visited the office of birth records in Burlington and confirmed his true parentage.
Back in Washington in the fall of 1969, he met Elizabeth Kloepfer (identified in Bundy literature as Meg Anders, Beth Archer, or Liz Kendall), a divorcée from Ogden, Utah, who worked as a secretary at the University of Washington School of Medicine.Their stormy relationship would continue well past his initial incarceration in Utah in 1976.
In mid 1970, now focused and goal oriented, he reenrolled at UW, this time as a psychology major. He became an honor student, well regarded by his professors. In 1971 he took a job at Seattle's Suicide Hotline crisis center. There he met and worked alongside Ann Rule, a former Seattle police officer and aspiring crime writer who would later write one of the definitive Bundy biographies, The Stranger Beside Me. Rule saw nothing disturbing in Bundy's personality at the time, describing him as "kind, solicitous, and empathetic".
After graduating from UW in 1972 Bundy joined Governor Daniel J. Evans' reelection campaign. Posing as a college student, he shadowed Evans's opponent, former governor Albert Rosellini, recording his stump speeches for analysis by Evans's team. After Evans's reelection he was hired as an assistant to Ross Davis, Chairman of the Washington State Republican Party.
Davis thought well of Bundy, describing him as "smart, aggressive ... and a believer in the system".In early 1973, despite mediocre Law School Admission Test scores, Bundy was accepted into the law schools of UPS and the University of Utah on the strength of letters of recommendation from Evans,
Davis, and several UW psychology professors.
During a trip to California on Republican Party business in the summer of 1973, Bundy rekindled his relationship with Brooks, who marveled at his transformation into a serious, dedicated professional seemingly on the cusp of a distinguished legal and political career. He continued to date Kloepfer as well, though neither woman was aware of the other's existence.
In the fall of 1973 Bundy matriculated at UPS Law School and continued courting Brooks, who flew to Seattle several times to stay with him. They discussed marriage; at one point he introduced her to Davis as his fiancée. In January 1974, however, he abruptly broke off all contact; her phone calls and letters went unreturned. Finally reaching him by phone a month later, Brooks demanded to know why Bundy had unilaterally ended their relationship without explanation.
In a flat, calm voice, he replied, "Stephanie, I have no idea what you mean" and hung up. She never heard from him again. He later explained, "I just wanted to prove to myself that I could have married her"; but Brooks concluded in retrospect that he had deliberately planned the entire courtship and rejection in advance as vengeance for the breakup she initiated in 1968.
By then, Bundy had begun skipping classes at law school; by April, he had stopped attending entirely, as young women began to disappear in the Pacific Northwest.The year the murders began he was the assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission and wrote a pamphlet for women on rape prevention.
Arrest
Shortly after the conclusion of the Leach trial and the beginning of the long appeals process that followed, Bundy initiated a series of interviews with Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth. Speaking mostly in third person to avoid "the stigma of confession", he began for the first time to divulge details of his crimes and thought processes.
He recounted his career as a thief, confirming Kloepfer's long-time suspicion that he had shoplifted virtually everything of substance that he owned."The big payoff for me," he said, "was actually possessing whatever it was I had stolen. I really enjoyed having something ... that I had wanted and gone out and taken." Possession proved to be an important motive for rape and murder as well.Sexual assault, he said, fulfilled his need to "totally possess" his victims.
At first, he killed his victims "as a matter of expediency ... to eliminate the possibility of [being] caught"; but later, murder became part of the "adventure". "The ultimate possession was, in fact, the taking of the life", he said. "And then ... the physical possession of the remains."
Bundy also confided in Special Agent William Hagmaier of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. Hagmaier was struck by the "deep, almost mystical satisfaction" that Bundy took in murder. "He said that after a while, murder is not just a crime of lust or violence", Hagmaier related.
"It becomes possession. They are part of you ... [the victim] becomes a part of you, and you [two] are forever one ... and the grounds where you kill them or leave them become sacred to you, and you will always be drawn back to them."
Bundy told Hagmaier that he considered himself to be an "amateur", an "impulsive" killer in his early years, before moving into what he termed his "prime" or "predator" phase at about the time of Lynda Healy's murder in 1974. This implied that he began killing well before 1974—though he never explicitly admitted doing so.
When it became clear that no further stays would be forthcoming from the courts, Bundy supporters began lobbying for the only remaining option, executive clemency. Diana Weiner, a young Florida attorney and Bundy's last purported love interest,asked the families of several Colorado and Utah victims to petition Florida Governor Bob Martinez for a postponement to give Bundy time to reveal more information.
All refused."The families already believed that the victims were dead and that Ted had killed them", wrote Nelson. "They didn't need his confession."Martinez made it clear that he would not agree to further delays in any case. "We are not going to have the system manipulated", he told reporters. "For him to be negotiating for his life over the bodies of victims is despicable."
Boone, who had championed Bundy's innocence throughout all of his trials, felt "deeply betrayed" by his admission that he was, in fact, guilty. She moved back to Washington with her daughter and refused to accept his phone call on execution day. "She was hurt by his relationship with Diana [Weiner]," Nelson wrote, "and devastated by his sudden wholesale confessions in his last days."
Hagmaier was present during Bundy's final interviews with investigators. On the eve of his execution, he talked of suicide. "He did not want to give the state the satisfaction of watching him die", Hagmaier said.Ted Bundy died in the Raiford electric chair at 7:16 a.m. EST on January 24, 1989; he was 42 years old.
Hundreds of revelers—including 20 off-duty police officers, by one account—sang, danced and set off fireworks in a pasture across the street from the prison as the execution was carried out,then cheered loudly as the white hearse containing Bundy's corpse departed the prison.His remains were cremated in Gainesville, and the ashes scattered at an undisclosed location in the Cascade Range of Washington State, in accordance with his will.