By Chris Bartholomew
November 24, 1946, to January 24, 1989
Items found in the car: large, clear plastic drinking cup; Meadow Gold milk carton; fig cookie wrapper; two Camel cigarette wrappers; two Marlboro cigarette wrappers; paper stickers from Christian Book Store; torn check; grocery store receipt; Polaroid negative; Kentucky Fried Chicken box; brown paper grocery bag; Carefree gum wrapper; plastic window scraper; two Colorado license plates; latent fingerprint taken from driver’s side window.
The car contents were, as he was thought to be: normal.
He was born Theodore Robert Cowell and remained so for a few years. After he moved to Tacoma with his mother, she changed his last name to Nelson. Within a year after that, his mother Louise Cowell met Johnnie Culpepper Bundy. They later married and Johnnie Bundy legally adopted Theodore and changed his last name to Bundy.
No one is really sure who his biological father was. His mother gives two different stories for this. The name on his birth certificate was Lloyd Marshall. However, she later spoke of being seduced by a war veteran named Jack Worthington. There is one other option, however. Some members of Bundy’s family think that his grandfather may also be his biological father. He was mentally unstable, violent and abusive. He would also fly into a rage if anyone spoke of Ted’s biological father.
Bundy describes incidents of his grandfather Samuel abusing the family dog. He also claimed that Samuel would swing neighborhood cats around by their tails. Ted himself has been said to torment animals with knives. He would mutilate animals with the knives which seemed to fascinate him.
Young Ted was active in the Methodist Church and even served as Vice President of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. He was also involved in the Boy Scouts of America club. Although later he stated: "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." He was often described as shy and introverted at this age.
His criminal activities began before he finished high school. He was a habitual liar. He compulsively stole and shoplifted. He later claimed that he was also involved in voyeurism at a young age specifically by peeping into windows. He was arrested twice as a juvenile but the records were later expunged.
He started taking classes upon his graduation from high school in 1965 in psychology and Oriental studies. After a serious girlfriend broke up with him for his lack of ambition, he rededicated himself to psychology and earned his degree in 1972. He was well liked by his professors and graduated with honors.
He started dating a woman with a child (relationship lasted six years) while concurrently and covertly re-establishing his relationship with his girlfriend who dumped him. After a year of their born-again relationship, he proposed and she accepted. Two weeks later, he dumped her and began his killing spree. He would not break up his six-year relationship to another woman until he was arrested for kidnapping in 1976. There are many who say that most of his victims looked like the girlfriend who originally dumped him (long dark hair parted in the middle).
He volunteered at a suicide crisis center alongside a now famous crime author, Ann Rule, as a part of his psychology classes. A serial killer trained in talking people out of killing themselves. Ann Rule was researching the crimes Ted committed all the while not knowing it was her friend who committed them. She later published a book called "The Stranger Beside Me" detailing her relationship with Ted and the numerous crimes he was convicted of.
Ted was heavily involved with the Republican Party. In 1968, Ted managed the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign and attended the Republican Convention in Miami. After his graduation in 1972, he went to work for the state Republican Party. He was later involved in a minor scandal when the Democrats found out that Ted had been following one of them around posing as a college student and taping their speeches and reporting the information back to his Republican office.
He caught a purse snatcher and was given a commendation from the police department. He also saved a drowning toddler once by diving into a lake after him. He wrote rape-prevention books and became active in politics gaining the attention of very important, highly known people. Ted worked many low-paying jobs to pay for college. He was a busboy at a hotel, a messenger, and a clerk at various stores. He left most jobs after only a few months. Some employers said he was a good worker while others gave him less than favorable comments.
Editor’s note: Chris Bartholomew’s article ran in Serial Killer Magazine. What appears here is his own writing. The original also printed the full lyrics of a song about Bundy, which cannot be reproduced, and long passages, a fact box and a dated timeline taken from reference websites; all of those have been left out. Three points need correcting. Bundy was first arrested in Utah in August 1975 and was convicted of kidnapping there in 1976. The rape-prevention work he did was a pamphlet written for a county crime commission, not books. And in 1968 he volunteered at the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign; he did not manage it. Small fixes to spelling and punctuation have been made.