Ted Bundy was a law student, a Republican campaign volunteer and a paid employee of a Seattle crisis hotline. He killed at least thirty young women and girls in seven states between 1974 and 1978, escaped custody twice, and was executed in Florida's electric chair in January 1989. Nobody knows the real number. He gave detectives a figure of thirty in his last days and had given other figures before that.
He was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont. His grandparents raised him as their son. He grew up believing his mother was his older sister. In 1951 she married Johnnie Bundy in Tacoma, Washington, and the boy took his stepfather's name.
The first attack the police later tied to him came on January 4, 1974. Joni Lenz was asleep in a basement bedroom in Seattle when someone pried a metal rod from her bed frame and beat her with it. Her roommates found her that afternoon. She lived, with brain damage that never healed. Four weeks later Lynda Ann Healy vanished from a basement room a few blocks from the University of Washington campus, and the pattern that would run through the next four years was set: a young woman, dark hair parted in the middle, gone from a place she should have been safe.
Six more disappeared from Washington and Oregon campuses that spring and summer. Donna Manson. Susan Rancourt. Roberta Parks. Brenda Ball. Georgann Hawkins, taken from an alley behind her sorority house. The police had a description of a man on crutches or with his arm in a cast asking young women for help carrying books.
On July 14, 1974, he took two women in one afternoon from a crowded state park. Janice Ott and Denise Naslund disappeared from Lake Sammamish in daylight, with forty thousand people in the park. Witnesses remembered a good-looking man in a white tennis outfit with his arm in a sling, asking for help loading a sailboat. Ott left with him in front of several people.
That fall he enrolled at the University of Utah law school, and the disappearances moved with him. On November 8, 1974, a man identifying himself as Officer Roseland approached Carol DaRonch at a mall in Murray, Utah, told her someone had tried to break into her car, and showed her a badge. She got into his Volkswagen. When he tried to handcuff her she fought, got the door open and ran. She was the one who got away, and she remembered his face. That same night, seventeen-year-old Debra Kent disappeared from a high school parking lot in Bountiful.
He was caught by a traffic stop. Just after two in the morning on August 16, 1975, a Utah highway patrol sergeant named Bob Hayward saw a tan Volkswagen Beetle cruising a Granger neighborhood with its lights off and followed it. In the car were a crowbar, an ice pick, handcuffs, a ski mask and a second mask made from pantyhose. Bundy said he had been to a movie and gave the wrong title. DaRonch picked him out of a lineup, and in March 1976 he was convicted of her kidnapping and sentenced to one to fifteen years.
Colorado wanted him for the murder of Caryn Campbell, a nurse who had disappeared from a hotel corridor in Snowmass. He acted as his own attorney, which gave him the run of the law library at the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen, and on June 7, 1977, he jumped out of a second-story window and walked away. He was recaptured in the mountains six days later.
The second escape stuck. He starved himself down by thirty-five pounds, cut a hole in the ceiling of his cell in the Glenwood Springs jail, and climbed out on December 30, 1977. Nobody noticed he was gone for seventeen hours. He took a bus and a stolen car to Chicago, then Ann Arbor, then Atlanta, and arrived in Tallahassee, Florida, on January 8.
A week later he walked into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. In fifteen minutes he beat and strangled Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman and badly injured Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner. Cheryl Thomas was attacked in a duplex eight blocks away the same night and survived. On February 9 he took twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach from her junior high school in Lake City. Her body was found in a state park two months later. He was arrested in Pensacola on February 15, driving a stolen Volkswagen, by an officer named David Lee.
The Chi Omega trial in Miami in 1979 was the first murder trial broadcast on national television. Bundy fired his attorneys, took over parts of his own defense and cross-examined the officers who arrested him. The case against him turned on a bite mark left on Lisa Levy's body and matched to the gap and chip in his front teeth. The jury convicted him in seven hours. He was sentenced to death in July 1979, and again in Orlando the following February for Kimberly Leach. During that second trial he used a Florida provision on declarations in open court to marry Carole Ann Boone while she was on the stand as a character witness.
He spent nine years on death row and talked for most of them. He gave interviews to the journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth in which he described his own crimes in the third person, as what "the entity" or a hypothetical killer would have done. He wrote to Bob Keppel, the Washington detective who had worked the 1974 cases, and offered to help profile the Green River Killer. In his final days he traded confessions for time, admitting to thirty killings and hinting there were more, and asked for a stay to keep talking. Florida refused.
He died in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke at 7:16 on the morning of January 24, 1989. Several hundred people stood in a field across the road and cheered when the hearse came out.
What the case changed was police work. The Washington and Utah investigations had no way to compare notes across state lines, and the men working them said afterward that the hardest part was not identifying a suspect but establishing that the cases belonged together at all. Bundy was on a list of twenty-six names in King County months before his arrest in Utah, and on a shorter list after that. The federal violent-crime database that came out of the early 1980s exists in large part because of the four years nobody could see whole.
Ted Bundy’s sanity was never argued at either of his trials. The question was raised only in the collateral appeal, where his attorney Polly Nelson sought to show he had not been competent to stand trial in Florida. Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a forensic psychiatrist who had examined Bundy in May 1979, gave this deposition on December 12, 1987, thirteen months before the execution. It runs here as he gave it.
Saturday, December 12, 1987.
Polly Nelson: What were your impressions of Mr. Bundy when you examined him on May eighteenth, 1979?
Dr. Emanuel Tanay: My impressions were that he was an individual who was indeed rather intelligent - who was well informed about a variety of matters - but, just as I indicated in my preliminary report, based on documents only, namely April twenty-seventh, 1979, he showed a typical picture of someone who suffers from a lifelong personality disorder. Someone who was, what we would call in psychiatry, an impulse-ridden indivdual, prone to acting out and more involved with immediate gratification than any long-term concerns. He was what in the literature has been described in the past as a typical psychopathic type of personality. This is an old term that is no longer used outside of textbooks, but nevertheless I found it quite descriptive of Mr. Bundy.
Nelson: What do you mean by the term "impulse-ridden?"
Tanay: Someone who has no control, or at least impaired control, over his or her impulses. Most people might perceive a certain type of impulse to act in a certain fashion, because it might gratify some kind of need, but they will reflect about it and make choices. Impulse-ridden individuals don't have that ability. They are driven to gratify their impulse without subjecting it to reflection.
Nelson: Turning to page four of Exhibit Fifteen, you state that "in the nearly three hours which I spent with Mr. Bundy I found him to be in a cheerful, even jovial, mood. He was witty but not flippant; he spoke freely; however, meaningful communication was never established. He was asked about his apparent lack of concern so out of keeping with the charges facing him. He acknowledged that he was facing a possible death sentence. However, he said, 'I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.' " Do you recall that impression?
Tanay: Yes, I do.
Nelson: Could you describe more fully what Mr. Bundy's mood and affect was like at that time?
Tanay: Mr. Bundy was more involved with impressing me with his brilliance and his wit than to use the services that had been arranged for him of an expert. He was informed that I was someone of national reputation and that he was to avail himself of these services - Mr. Minerva and other members of the defense team had so informed me - but that did not take place. Mr. Bundy dealt with me as if I was a reporter for Time magazine or some other publication. He certainly didn't deal with me as if I was a psychiatrist retained by the defense to assist in defending him when he was facing a death sentence. He played a similar game with me as he played with the investigators.
Nelson: In what way?
Tanay: You see, I pointed out to him that a person who committed these type of sadistic homicides may be someone who may have available to him the defense of insanity, and I clearly indicated to him that it may be useful for him to discuss that with me; and just like he did with the investigators, he was confessing that he did - and I say "confessing" in quotes, because it wasn't an official confession, but he was leading me to believe that he indeed committed these acts. Just like he told the investigators, to use their own words, that he was telling them that he did it, and yet he wasn't. So he was creating a situation where he was pursuading people that he committed these acts and yet making it impossible for a psychiatrist, like myself, to review this in a manner that could convceivably assist his lawyer in formulating a defense, and he played it, ya know, he talked to me but never really talked to me about the situation directly. He never acknowledged that he committed the acts, therefore we could never discuss them, and yet he was indicating, in a manner that I can't really describe to you, just as he did with the police officers, that he was the one who did it.
Nelson: What was your impression of the reason that Mr. Bundy was acting in that way?
Tanay: My impression was that it was typical behavior of a psychopath who likes to defy authority, who has a need, who is driven to defy authority - and that includes lawyers, psychiatrists, law enforcement, judges - and that was more important to him than saving his own life. He was typically responding to a gratification of the moment.
Nelson: You wrote here on page five of Exhibit Fifteen that "Mr. Bundy rationalized away every piece of evidence which linked him to the crime," and a little further down, "Mr. Bundy has an incapacity to recognize the significance of the evidence held against him. It would be simplistic to characterize this as merely lying, in as much as he acts as if his perception of the evidence was reality - he makes decisions based upon these distorted perceptions of reality." Do those statements accurately reflect your opinions concerning Mr. Bundy?
Tanay: Yes. On the same page I am describing, or making reference to what I knew at the time the evidence was against him, which certainly I was told by his attorneys was persuasive. By confronting him with the interview I tried to find out if he would respond to my pointing out to him the reality that he was facing, which he did. He simply rejected it.
Nelson: At the bottom of the same page you state, "It is my opinion, based on a variety of data, that his dealings with the criminal justice system are dominated by psychopathology." Are you referring there merely to the alleged crimes or to Mr. Bundy's other behaviors?
Tanay: Both. He was doing the same thing, he was being the same psychopath when he dealt with his victims that he tortured and killed as when he was dealing with lawyers who were helping him, or investigators who were trying to solve the crime. He was behaving in the same manner - psychiatrically it was the same, even though the consequences were obviously not as tragic, since he couldn't harm anybody in the manner that he harmed his victims. He was harming other people. He was destructive to himself. He was destructive to his lawyers. My observations were that he was manipulating people around him, including his lawyers, even though it was destructive to him. Ultimately he was the victim of it all, but he was victimizing other people even while he was in jail.
Nelson: In your opinion, was this behavior of Mr Bundy's under his conscious control?
Tanay: No, it was not. This was part and parcel of his maladaptive personality structure. He was doing what was dictated by his personality disorder.
Nelson: This psychopathology that you note, with which he deals with the criminal justice system, was that a temporary phenomena or was it a chronic condition?
Tanay: It was a lifelong pattern. It was not a temporary phenomena. It was an expression of his basic persoanlity structure.
Nelson: Would you describe Exhibit One?
Tanay: The real background of it is the fact that I told Mr. Minerva that I did not believe that Mr. Bundy would do what he was told to do, and my recollection was that Mr. Minerva was writing this to confirm that I was right, because I did - I recall Mr. Minerva expressing to some degree, I would have to say, admiration, for the fact that I had anticipated what would occur - I did not think that Mr. Bundy would cooperate.
Nelson: Cooperate in what manner?
Tanay: With the advice of his lawyers - including even Mr. Farmer, who supposedly Mr. Bundy greatly respected and admired - and that he would take the guilty plea, because it was my view that he would not, because that would terminate the show, his ability to be the celebrity would come to an end, he would be just someone who was spared from the death sentence, and the show would be over. Whereas, his need was to have the proceedings go on and on in order to gratify his pathological needs.
Nelson: If Mr.Bundy made the decision to reject the plea bargain, in your opinion would that have been a rational decision?
Tanay: No. It was, in my opinion, clearly an irrational decision, even though I anticipated it, not because it was rational but because it was consistent with the psychopathology, the mental disorder from which he suffered. In fact, had he done what his lawyers advised him to do, that would have been rational, since it was forseeable that he would be convicted and face the death penalty.
Nelson: Was Mr. Bundy's behavior with his attorney and his actions in terms of self-representation and other defense matters, was that an integral part of his psychopathology?
Tanay: Very definitely so. He behaved like a typical psychopath with his lawyers, and, for that matter, with me.
Nelson: You testified at the competency hearing of June eleventh, 1979. At that hearing, did Mr. Bundy's competency counsel, Mr. Hayes, explore your opinion to develop facts on which to make a decision as to Mr. Bundy's competency?
Tanay: No one did that. To be very simplistic about it, my feeling of that hearing was like someone who dressed up for the party and arrived and they canceled the party. I was asked very few questions, and very little information about my knowledge of Mr. Bundy or the case was placed on the record.
Nelson: In your experience as an expert witness, was this proceeding unique?
Tanay: I have testified - I belive the first time was thrity years ago, and I have testified on many occasions since - but this is the only case like that, where I have been declared an adverse witness to both parties, and where information that I had was really not developed by the means of an adversary proceeding. Normally, one side pulls in one direction, the other side pulls in the other direction, and considerable information is elicited. I always consider cross-examination to be essential to develop a point of view that I am presenting.
Nelson: Did you feel that your opinion was adequately presented in this hearing?
Tanay: Not at all. Not at all. There was no exploration - that was my impression, I made some notes of it - that was my impression of what happened, and when I read it now that just confirms that my considerable work invested in the case was not utilized in that hearing. I mean, I did not develop my opinion and explain my opinion in this case. An expert witness, unlike a lecturer in a classroom, cannot function on his or her own. He or she is completely, say, at the mercy of whoever takes the testimony.
Nelson: Did you have an opinion at the time of the hearing on June eleventh whether or not Mr. Bundy was able to assist his counsel?
Tanay: Considering the nature of the functions that he was to perform as a defendant claiming innocence, it was my opinion that he was not able to stand trial. When you say assist his counsel, he was his own counsel.
Nelson: Was he capable of changin g that behavior and not becoming his own counsel?
Tanay: In my opinion, he was not. He was predictably unpredictable. What I mean by that is that one could anticipate that he would be guided more by showmanship than prudence.
Nelson: Was Mr. Bundy able meaningfully to assit his counsel at that time?
Tanay: He was not.
Nelson: Referring to the first factor in the Florida rules of criminal procedure governing competency to stand trial, do you have an opinion as to whether Mr. Bundy was able to appreciate the charges?
Tanay: Yes, I do have an opinion that he was able to appreciate the charges intellectually.
Nelson: When you say "intellectually," do you mean that there was some way in which he was not able to appreciate the charges?
Tanay: That's true. I'm of the opinion that he did not appreciate the seriousness of the charges. He could intellectually tell you what the charges were, but he just dismissed them as real insignificant - based on his rich imagination of law enforcement - which was not the case. Clearly the charges were based upon solid evidence, but that was not his view.
Nelson: Dr. Tanay, when you say that Mr. Bundy dismissed the weight of the evidence against him, was that merely carelessness on his part or was that due to an emotional or mental factor?
Tanay: It was part of the illness, his attitude was the product, the outcome, of the nature of the illness.
Nelson: Looking to the second factor of the Florida standards, was Mr. Bundy able to appreciate the range and the nature of the possible penalty?
Tanay: Again, intellectually he was. As I pointed out in my report, he said that he would cross that bridge when he came to it, when I was asking him, Do you know that you are facing th death snetence? He could intellectually acknowledge it, but he sure didn't act like a man who was facing a death sentence. He was acting like a man who did not have a care in the world. I think I commented upon it in my report, that he was cheerful and acted more like a man who was not in jail but was onstage.
Nelson: Was that fact psychiatrically significant?
Tanay: Yes. It's consistent with the diagnosis that I have previously described, of someone who is typical psychopath or suffers from a personality disorder.
Nelson: Dr. Tanay, did you ever observe Mr. Bundy with Mr. Minerva?
Tanay: Yes. As I indicated in my report, Mr. Bundy was acting as if Mr. Minerva was his third assistant and not a lawyer representing him.
Nelson: Did you in June of 1979 have an opinion as to Mr. Bundy's ability to assist his attorneys in planning his defense?
Tanay: I did have an opinion.
Nelson: And what was that opinion?
Tanay: That he was unable to assist in planning his defense. To the contrary, he was interfering with whatever meaningful plans the defense made. He sabotaged pretty consitently what the defense lawyers had worked out. His conduct was symptomatic of his illness, and it was outside his control.
Nelson: What was your opinion as to Mr. Bundy's motivation to help himself in the legal process?
Tanay: He was not motivated by a need to help himself. He was motivated by the need to be the star of the show, as I pointed out in my report. He was the producer of a play in which he was playing a big role. The defense and his future were of secondary importance to him. Tanay: Definitely not. I have absolutely no doubt that he was a disaster as cocounsel or chief counsel of his own defense and that was certainly forseeable.
WASHINGTON Lonnie Trumbull; Seattle (6/23/66) Kathy Devine; Seattle (11/25/73) Lynda Ann Healy; University of Washington (2/1/74) Donna Manson; Evergreen St. College, Olympia (3/12/74) Susan Rancourt; Central Washington St. College, Ellensburg (4/17/74) Brenda Baker; Seattle (5/25/74) Brenda Ball; Burien (6/1/74) Georgeann Hawkins; University of Washington (6/11/74) Janice Ott; Lake Sammamish St. Park (7/14/74) Denise Naslund; Lake Sammamish St. Park (7/14/74)
OREGON Kathy Parks; Oregon St. (5/6/74)
UTAH Nancy Wilcox; (10/2/74) Melissa Smith; Midvale (10/18/74) Laura Aimee; Lehi (10/31/74) Debbie Kent; Bountiful (11/8/74) Susan Curtis; Brigham Young University (6/28/75) Nancy Baird; Layton (7/4/75) Debbie Smith; Salt Lake City (2/?/76)
COLORADO Caryn Campbell; Aspen (1/12/75) Julie Cunningham; Vail (3/15/75) Denise Oliverson; Grand Junction (4/6/75) Melanie Cooley; Nederland (4/15/75) Shelley Robertson; Golden (7/1/75)
IDAHO Lynette Culver; Pocatello (5/6/75) Jane Doe; Boise (9/21/74)
FLORIDA Lisa Levy; Tallahassee (1/15/78) Margaret Bowman; Tallahassee (1/15/74) Kimberly Ann Leach; Lake City (2/9/78)
11/24/46 - Is born as Theodore Robert Cowell in a home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont.
05/19/51 - Bundy's mother, Louise, marries Johnnie Bundy and her son takes his step-father's last name.
Spring 1965 - Graduates from Woodrow Wilson High School in Tacoma, Washington.
Fall 1965 - Enrolls at the University of Puget Sound and attends the school until the Spring of 1966.
06/23/65 - Murders Lonnie Trumbull and seriously injuresroommate Lisa Wick in their Seattle apartment.
Fall 1966 to Spring 1969 - Attends the University of Washington.
1967 to 1968 - Courts Stephanie Brooks, who closely resembles his future victims.
Fall 1968 - Brooks breaks off relationship with Bundy.
Early 1969 - Visits his brithtown of Burlington, Vermont, and learns for certain that he is illegitimate.
Fall 1969 - Re-enters Univ of Washington and meets Liz Kendall, his girlfriend throughout most of the murders.
Spring 1973 - Graduates form the University of Washington.
11/25/73 - Abducts Kathy Devine from a Seattle street corner.
12/06/73 - Devine's body is found near Olympia, Washington.
01/05/74 - Attacks Joni Lenz in her Seattle apartment. Lenz survives.
02/01/74 - Abducts Lynda Ann Healy from her basement bedroom in Seattle.
03/12/74 - Abducts Donna Manson from the campus of Evergreen College.
04/17/74 - Abducts Susan Rancourt from the Central Washignton St. campus.
05/06/74 - Abducts Kathy Parks from the campus at Oregon St.
06/01/74 - Abducts Brenda Ball from Burien, Washington.
06/11/74 - Abducts Georgeann Hawkins from an alley near her University of Washington fraternity house.
06/17/74 - Brenda Baker's body is found in Millersylvania St. Park. It is unknown when she was abducted.
07/14/74 - In seperate incidents, Janice Ott and Denise Naslund are abducted from Lake Samm St. Park.
09/02/74 - A Jane Doe is abducted from Boise, Idaho.
Fall 1974 - Enters the University of Utah Law School.
09/07/74 - Body parts of Ott, Naslund, and Hawkins are recovered 2 miles from lake Samm St. Park.
10/02/74 - Abducts Nancy Wilcox.
10/18/74 - Abducts Melissa Smith from Midvale, Utah.
10/27/74 - Smith's body is found in Summitt Park near Salt Lake City, Utah.
10/31/74 - Abducts Laura Aimee from Lehi, Utah.
11/08/74 - Botches abduction of Carol DeRonch but abducts Debby Kent later that day from school in Bountiful.
Thanksgiving 1974 - Aimee's body is found.
01/12/75 - Abducts Caryn Campbell from a hotel in Aspen, Colorado.
02/18/75 - Campbell's body is found near the motel she disappeared from.
03/03/75 - The skulls of Healy, Ball, Parks, and Rancourt are found near Taylor Mountain in Washington.
03/15/75 - Abducts Julie Cunningham from Vail, Colorado.
04/06/75 - Abducts Melanie Cooley from her school in Nederland, Colorado.
04/23/75 - Cooley is found dead twenty miles from Nederland.
05/06/75 - Abducts Lynette Culver from her school playground in Pocatello, Idaho.
06/28/75 - Abducts Susan Curtis from the campus of BYU while attending a youth conference.
07/01/75 - Abducts Shelley Robertson from Golden, Colorado.
07/04/75 - Abducts Nancy Baird from Layton, Utah.
08/16/75 - Arrested for possession of burglary tools during a traffic stop in Salt Lake City.
February 1976 - Abducts Debbie Smith in Utah.
03/01/76 - Is found guilty of aggravated kidnapping in the DeRonch attack.
04/01/76 - Smith's body is found at Salt Lake International Airport.
06/30/76 - Sentenced to 1-15 years in prison.
06/07/77 - Escapes from Pitkin Co. Law Library in Colorado while preparing for trial in the Campbell murder.
06/13/77 - Is apprehended in Aspen, Colorado.
12/30/77 - Escapes from Garfield County Jail in Colorado and flees to Tallahassee, Florida.
01/14/78 - Enters Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, killing Lisa Levy and Magaret Bowman.
01/14/78 - Also attacks Cheryl Thomas in her house nearby, seriously injuring her.
02/09/78 - Abducts Kimberly Ann Leach from her school in Lake City, Florida.
02/15/78 - Arrested while driving a stolen VW in Pensacola, Florida.
04/12/79 - Leach's body is found in Suwanee St. Park in Florida.
07/27/78 - Indicted for the murders of Levy and Bowman.
07/31/78 - Indicted for the Leach murder.
07/07/79 - Leach and Bowman murder trial begins.
07/23/79 - Found guilty of the murders of Levy and Bowman.
07/31/79 - Sentenced to death for the murders of Levy and Bowman.
01/07/80 - Trial begins for the Leach murder.
02/06/80 - Found guilty of Leach murder.
02/09/80 - Sentenced to death for Leach murder.
07/02/86 - Obtains a stay of execution only fifteen minutes before he is scheduled to die.
11/18/86 - Obtains a stay of execution only seven hours before he is scheduled to die.
11/17/89 - Final death warrant is issued.
01/24/89 - Executed in the electric chair at 7:16 AM.
"It is not an easy matter to isolate things. I mean, incidents which themselves could cause pressure or stress, be unpleasant to one degree or another or have a disorienting effect. You have to see it in its unique effect on the unique individual. There are no broad generalizations or predictions you can make. You just can't predict behavior like that. Society wants to believe it can identify evil people ... it's not practical ... If someone does something antisocial and deviant, that is a manifestation of something that is going on inside. Once they do something, then they can be labeled. Predictions can't be made until that point is reached."
"I think that you could say that the influence of the person's family history was positive. But not positive enough -- not enduring, perhaps not strong enough to overcome the urges or compulsions that resulted ... in this instance, the influence of the family and the environment in which this person grew up were positive, but not so positive as to prepare this individual ... " "You take the individual we are talking about ... and then you subject him to stress. Stress happens to come randomly, but its effect on the personality is not random; it's specific. That results in a certain amount of chaos, confusion, and frustration. That person begins to seek out a target for his frustrations. The continued nature of this stress this person was under -- the nature of the flaw or weakness in his personality, together with other elements in the environment that offer him a logical target for his frustrations or escapes from reality -- yields the situation we're discussing ... There is no trigger, it is truly more sophisticated than that."
"I hate to use labels that are psychological or psychiatric because there are no stereotypes, and when you start to use those labels, you stop looking at the facts." "This condition is not immediately seen by the individual or identified as a serious problem. It sort of manifests itself in an interest concerning sexual behavior, as sexual images ... But this interest, for some unknown reason, becomes geared toward matters of a sexual nature that involves violence. I cannot emphasize enough the gradual development of this. It is not short term ... This is on a different level than this individual would deal with women every day, and not in the context of sexual condition, because that is over here someplace, like collecting stamps. He doesn't retain the taste of glue, so to speak, all day long. But in a broader, more abstract way, it begins to preoccupy him."
"He has no hatred for women; there is nothing in his background that happened that would indicate he has been abused by any females ... there is some kind of weakness that gives rise to this individual's interest in the kind of sexual activity involving violence that would gradually begin to absorb some of his fantasy ... he was not imagining himself actually doing these things, but he found gratification from reading about others so engaged. Eventually the interest would become so demanding toward new material that it could only be catered to by what he could find in the dirty book stores."
In the Michaud and Aynesworth interviews Bundy would not describe his own crimes in the first person. He split himself in two instead, calling the part that wanted to kill "the entity", "the disordered self" and "the malignancy", and reserving the name Ted for the part that planned the approaches. What follows is him describing himself in the third person.
"Say he was walking down the street on one occasion, one evening, and just totally, by chance ... looked up into the window of a house and saw a woman undressing ... And he began, with some regularity, with increasing regularity, to, uh, canvass, as it were, the community he lived in. By peeping in windows, as it were, and watching a woman undress, or watching whatever could be seen, you know, during the evening, and approaching it almost like a project, throwing himself into it, literally for years ... These occasions when he when he would, uh, travel about the neighborhoods that adjoined his and search out candidates for ... search out places where ... he could see what he wanted to see ... more or less these occasions were dictated ... still being dictated by this person's normal life. So he wouldn't break a date or postpone an important, uh, event ... wouldn't rearrange his life ... to accommodate this, uh, indulgence in voyeuristic behavior ... He gained ... a great amount of gratification from it. And he became increasingly adept at it -- as anyone becomes adept at anything they do over and over and over again ... What began to happen was that ... important matters were not being rearranged or otherwise interfered with by this voyeuristic behavior, but with increasing regularity, things were postponed or otherwise rescheduled, to, uh, work around, uh, hours and hours spent on the street, at night and during the early morning hours."
" ... what's happening is that we're building up the condition ... and what may have been a predisposition for violence becomes a disposition. And as the condition develops and its purposes or its characteristics become more well defined, it begins to demand more time of the individual ... There's a certain amount of tension, uh, struggle, between the normal personality and this, this, uh, psychopathological, uh, entity ... The tension between normal individual, uh, normal consciousness of this individual and those demands being submitted to him via this competing ... this condition inside him seems to be competing for more attention ... And it's not an independent thing. One doesn't switch on and the other doesn't switch off. They're more or less active at the same time. Sometimes one is more active ... "
" ... a point would be reached where we'd had all of this, this reservoir of tension building. Building and building. Finally, inevitably, this force -- this entity -- would make a breakthrough ... Maybe not a major breakthrough, but a significant breakthrough would be achieved -- where the tension would be too great and the demands and expectations of this entity would reach a point where they just could not be controlled. And where the consequences would really be seen for the first time." " I think you could make a little more sense of it if you take into account the effect of alcohol. It's important ... When this person drank a good deal, his inhibitions were significantly diminished. He would find that his urge to engage in voyeuristic behavior on trips to the book store would become more prevalent, more urgent. On every occasion when he engaged in such behavior, he was intoxicated."
" ... On one particular evening, when he had been drinking a great deal ... and he was passing a bar, he saw a woman leaving the bar and walk up a fairly dark side street. And we'd say that for no ... the urge to do something to that person seized him -- in a way he'd never been affected before ... And it seized him strongly. And to the point where, uh, without giving a great deal of thought, he searched around for some instrumentality to uh, uh, attack this woman with. He found a piece of a two-by-four in a lot somewhere and proceeded to follow and track this girl ... and he reached the point where he was, uh, almost driven to do something -- there was really no control at this point ... the sort of revelation of that experience and the frenzied desire that seized him, uh, really seemed to usher in a new dimension to the, that part of himself that was obsessed with ... violence and women and sexual activity -- a composite kind of thing. Not terribly well defined, but more well defined as time went on."
"On succeeding evenings he began to, uh, scurry around this same neighborhood, obsessed with the image he'd seen on the evening before ... and on one particular occasion, he saw a woman park her car and walk up to her front door and fumble with her keys. He walked up behind her and struck her with a ... piece of wood that he was carrying. And she fell down and began screaming, and he panicked and ran. What he had done had ... purely terrified him ... The sobering effect of that was to ... for some time ... close up the cracks again. And not do anything. For the first time, he sat back and swore to himself that he wouldn't do something like that again ... or anything that would lead to it ... And he did everything he should have done. He stayed away from ... he did not go out at night. And when he was drinking, he stayed around friends. For a period of months, the enormity of what he did stuck with him, and he watched his behavior and reinforced the desire to overcome what he had begun to perceive were some problems that were probably more severe than he would have liked to believe they were ... within a matter of months ... the impact of this event lost its ... deterrent value. And within months he was back ... peeping in windows again and slipping into that old routine ... the repulsion began to recede ... something did stick with him. That was the incredible danger: by allowing himself to fall into spontaneous, unplanned acts of violence ... It took six months or so, until he back thinking of alternative means of engaging in similar activities, but not ... something that would be likely to result in apprehension."
"Then on another night he saw a woman walking home ... he followed her home ... Eventually, he created a plan where he would attack her in, in the house ... early one morning, uh, he sneaked into her house ... he jumped on the woman's bed and attempted to restrain her... all he succeeded in doing was waking her up, and, uh, causing her to panic and scream. He left very rapidly ... And then he was seized with the same kind of disgust, repulsion, and fear and wonder at why he was allowing himself to attempt such extraordinary violence ... But the significance ... was that while he did the same thing he did before -- stayed off the streets, vowed he'd never do it again and recognized the horror of what he'd done, and certainly was frightened by what he saw happening -- it only took him three months to get over it this time ... and then the next incident, he was over it in a month -- until it didn't take him any time at all to recover... "
"We are talking about anonymous, abstracted, living and breathing people ... but they were not known. To a point they were symbols, uh, but once a certain point in the encounter had been crossed, they ceased being individuals and became, uh, well you could say problems ... that's not the word either... that's when the rational self -- the normal self -- would surface and, and, react with fear and horror ... But, recognizing the state of affairs, would sort of conspire with this other part of himself to conceal the act. The survival took precedence over remorse ... the normal individual, began to condition mentally, out guilt out guilt; using a variety of mechanisms. Saying it was justifiable, it was, uh, acceptable, it was necessary, and on and on."
"He received no pleasure from harming or causing pain to the person he attacked. He received absolutely no gratification from causing pain and did everything possible, within reason -- considering the unreasonableness of the situation -- not to torture these individuals, at least not physically."
Lynda Ann Healy, twenty-one, was taken from the basement bedroom of a house she shared with other University of Washington students in the early hours of February 1, 1974. Her remains were not found for more than a year, on a hillside on Taylor Mountain alongside those of three other young women. Bundy discussed the case in the third person.
" ... he checked out the house and found that the front door was open. He thought about it. What kind of opportunity that offered. And returned to the house later and entered the house ... Then he went around the house and found a particular door and opened -- really hit and miss. Not knowing who or what, not looking or anyone in particular ... that would be the opportunity. This was late at night. And presumably everyone would be asleep ... we know that sometime later the remains were found somewhere in the Cascades. So obviously she transported up there ... some place that was quiet and private. His home or some secluded area ... He would have the girl undress and then, with that part of himself gratified, he found himself in a position where he realized then he couldn't let the girl go. And at that point he would kill her and leave her body where he had taken her."
"As far as remorse over the act, that would last for a period of time. But it could all be justified. The person would attempt to justify it by saying, "Well, listen you, you fucked up this time, but you're never going to do it again. So let's just stay together, and it won't ever happen again." Why sacrifice this person's whole life ... But this did not last for very long. A matter of weeks. We go first into a state of semi-dormancy, and then it would sort of regenerate itself, in one form or another ... Once the condition began to reassert its force, it didn't look back. It looked forward. Didn't want to dwell on the preceding event, but begin to plan, anticipate, contemplate the next ... things would be learned. Experience teaches in overt and subtle ways. And over a period of time, there would be less panic, there would be less confusion, there would be less fear and apprehension. There would be a faster regeneration period."
Roberta Kathleen Parks, twenty-two and known as Kathy, was last seen at Oregon State University on May 6, 1974. Her remains were found about a year later on the same Taylor Mountain hillside.
"It was established quite early in the case that her body had been ravished by wildlife ... a whole variety of wild animals ... feed on the carcasses ... This might give us one as clue as to why this person returned to that site on at least several occasions . Perhaps it was discovered that when a body was left there, and later when the individual would return to check out the situation, he would find that it was no longer there!"
The following statements made by Ted are not relative to any one crime in particular.]
"Once he'd made his contact -- and it appeared he was going to be able to carry it through -- he became very calm and analytical about the situation he was in ... a period of relaxation ... until it came time for him to kill the victim ... he would become torn apart as to the correctness of his conduct ... he'd still have the overriding need to dispose of the victim, and, of course, once it was done, he would usually go into a state of panic. Suddenly it would seem as if the dominant, or formerly dominant ... the predominant, normal self came back into control in a horrifying way. Or one that is presented with ... conceived with panic and confusion ... Fear of being captured or discovered ... I would envision a continuation of this kind of collaboration ... between that one part of this person's self. Which demands certain gratification, and the more dominant, law-abiding, more ethical, rational, normal self -- which was sort of forced to become a party to this kind of conduct. Basically you might say there was a shared division of responsibility. This came as much from evolution as from conscious choice."
" ... this activity is just a small, small portion of what was predominantly a normal existence ... which continued to be a normal existence ... This person could still be very much in favor of law and order and the police ... and be very genuinely shocked by crime in the newspaper. And very much moved by people who suffered the death of a loved one. Complete, genuine responding in a normal fashion. Willing and able to help police. He would have a real feeling in those regards. Not out of a desire to protect or hide. These were just normal responses ... The uniqueness of the whole situation is how this condition pertained to such a narrow spectrum of activity. The inhibitions that would normally prevent a person from acting that way were specifically excised, removed, diminished, repressed ... in such a way as to not affect all the other inhibitions -- or to result in the deterioration off the entire personality. But only in that tiny, tiny slice!"
"We would expect that after the passing of a period of time, this psychological condition, or part of that individual's self ... would reach a state of maturity ... its growth would greatly diminish ... the normal self had a pretty good understanding of this condition. Learned, uh, how to tolerate it..And perhaps, as a symptom of this matured state of development of the condition ... we'd expect this individual wouldn't need to drink to over come his inhibitions."
"It's like trying to examine what's in the medical cabinet by, in great detail, examining what's in the mirror ... he wasn't seeing through perhaps, the morass of justifications and obfuscations that he'd created and indulged in -- and what he was closely examining was the reflection in the mirror, not what was behind it. Not what was really going on ... on the one hand he thought he'd looked at the problem and dealt with it."
TB: How does a person . . . how does a soldier deal with war?
HA: Well, he has the justification built in, you see, there.
TB: So does the mass murderer.