Ted Bundy had been a psychology graduate of the University of Washington, a law student in Utah, a volunteer on a suicide crisis line in Seattle and a state employee in Olympia. He was convicted of three murders, all in Florida, and executed for one of them. In the last days of his life he told investigators he had killed about thirty young women and girls in seven states. He never gave an exact number, and the police in the states where he lived spent years afterward trying to fit his words to their files. Some of those files are still open.
The story of how he was caught is mostly a story about ordinary police work done under strain: a rookie detective in King County who memorized the dental charts of missing women, a state trooper in Utah who took a wrong turn on his way to a call, a Pensacola patrolman who ran a license plate at one in the morning. It is also the story of the women and girls whose lives he ended, most of them between the ages of twelve and twenty-six, and of the families who waited for years, some of them for half a century, to learn what had happened. This account follows the case in order, from the first attack in Seattle in January 1974 to the DNA match announced in Utah in April 2026.
He was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont, to Eleanor Louise Cowell. His mother first went home without him and returned for the baby at her own father’s insistence. He spent his first years partly in the care of his grandparents and moved west with his mother to Tacoma, Washington, where she began using her middle name, Louise, and married Johnnie Bundy, who adopted the boy and gave him his surname. The couple had four more children. Ted went to Wilson High School in Tacoma. The Burr family, whose eight-year-old daughter vanished from their home in 1961, lived in the same North Tacoma neighborhood; that case, and his denials about it, are described below.
As a teenager he came to the notice of the Tacoma police as a shoplifter and a window peeper, according to the historian Rebecca Morris, and he had a juvenile record for burglary and car theft that was later expunged. None of that suggested to anyone, then, what was to come. Years later, after tests performed for his appeals in 1986, a specialist concluded that he seemed to lack “any core experience of care and nurturance or early emotional sustenance.”
He studied at the University of Washington and graduated with a degree in psychology in 1972. In the early 1970s he worked on a crisis hotline in Seattle, where one of his fellow volunteers was Ann Rule, who later wrote The Stranger Beside Me. He worked for Republican candidates, wrote a pamphlet on rape for a county crime commission, and researched a report on rape victims for the King County Law and Justice Planning Office, work that gave him an unusual view of how police in Seattle investigated sexual assault. He enrolled in law classes at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma and dropped out in the spring of 1974. Through most of this period he was in a relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer, a single mother who had moved to Seattle from Ogden, Utah, and who later wrote about him under the name Elizabeth Kendall. He later took a job with the state’s emergency services department in Olympia. He left that job on August 30, 1974, and moved to Salt Lake City to enter law school at the University of Utah.
The attacks that police later connected to him began that January. On January 4, 1974, Karen Sparks, eighteen, a University of Washington student, was beaten while she slept in her bed in a house in the University District. She was in a coma for months and survived with permanent brain damage. (Older accounts, written before she chose to be named, call her Joni Lenz.)
During the night of January 31 to February 1, Lynda Ann Healy disappeared from her basement bedroom in a shared house in the University District. She was twenty-one, a psychology senior who broadcast ski condition reports to about twenty radio stations in Washington and Oregon. Her housemates, three young women of about her age, could not explain how she had gone. Her mother, Joyce Healy, set up a reward with the family and anonymous donors and saw it raised from $2,000 to $5,000. At the end of March, at the request of homicide detectives acting on new information, about fifty Explorer Scouts from Seattle’s search and rescue teams spent a day combing the brush of Ravenna and Cowen parks for any trace of her. They found nothing. Her remains were found about a year later on Taylor Mountain, east of Issaquah, about thirty miles southeast of Seattle.
Through the spring, young women vanished from campuses across the Northwest, at a rate of about one a month. Donna Gail Manson, nineteen, a first-year student at Evergreen State College in Olympia who came from Auburn, played the flute and always carried a camera, set out for a jazz concert on campus on March 12 and was never seen again. In his last days Bundy said he had killed her too; no trace of her has ever been recovered.
Susan Elaine Rancourt, eighteen, a straight-A biology student from Anchorage, Alaska, disappeared from the campus of Central Washington State College in Ellensburg on April 17. Her parents, Dale and Vivian Rancourt, refused from the start to believe she had simply wandered off. “We believe Susan was abducted because she always knew what she wanted and always was a very logical person, very predictable,” her father said that month.
Roberta Kathleen Parks, known as Kathy, twenty-two, who came from Lafayette, California, disappeared from Oregon State University in Corvallis on May 6, more than two hundred miles south of Seattle. Her case showed that whoever was taking these women was willing to travel.
Brenda Carol Ball, twenty-two, had graduated from Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines and taken classes at Highline Community College. She shared an apartment in Normandy Park with two other young women. On the night of May 31 she was seen at the Flame Tavern in Burien just before closing time, and she did not come home.
On June 11, Georgann Hawkins, eighteen, a freshman from Lakewood, a graduate of Lakes High School and a former princess of the Puyallup Daffodil Festival, left her boyfriend’s fraternity house on Greek Row at about one in the morning to walk the short, well-lit alley back to the Kappa Alpha Theta house, where she planned to study for a Spanish final. A friend called down to her from a window as she went. She never arrived. Within days the Seattle police had posted a $5,000 reward. Her parents, Warren and Edith Hawkins, wrote to the department to thank detectives for their work. Among the reports Seattle detectives collected that week was a statement from a student who had been walking on 17th Avenue NE late that night. He described a young man of about twenty to twenty-two, with his leg wrapped from the toes to the knee, moving on crutches and dropping a dark briefcase as he crossed the street; a young woman had come over to help him. The witness was later shown a photograph of Georgann and said she was not the woman he had seen. The detail of the crutches went into the file. It would come back, years later, in Colorado.
The remains of Rancourt, Parks and Ball, like Healy’s, were later found on Taylor Mountain.
On Sunday, July 14, 1974, the summer crowds were out at Lake Sammamish State Park east of Seattle. Janice Ann Ott, twenty-three, a caseworker at the King County Youth Services Center who lived in Issaquah, had ridden there on her yellow bicycle. Her husband, James, was away at medical school in California. Denise Marie Naslund, eighteen, who was training to be a computer programmer and worked part-time to pay for night school, had come with her boyfriend and another couple; she walked off to use the restroom and did not come back. The two women did not know each other. Ott vanished first; Naslund disappeared more than three hours later.
The witnesses that day gave the police more than they had ever had. Several women described a friendly young man with his arm in a sling who said his name was Ted and asked for help loading a sailboat onto his car, a light-colored Volkswagen Beetle. Some had refused him. Two people said they saw Janice Ott leave with him. “We were struck by the meticulousness of their recall,” the detective Robert Keppel said later. “They remembered his gait, his manner of speaking and what he was wearing. And of course, his first name.”
The families did what they could. Janice Ott’s parents, Dr. D. E. Blackburn and his wife, came to Seattle to search. James Ott, twenty-seven, put up the first of hundreds of notices asking for anyone who had seen his wife at the park; the King County Juvenile Court gave a citizens’ group, the Janice Ott Committee, office space and the part-time help of a probation officer. Denise’s mother, Eleanor Rose of White Center, told reporters that her daughter had the kind of helpful nature that could put her in danger with a man like “Ted.” For years afterward she kept Denise’s bedroom exactly as it had been in the summer of 1974.
The Lake Sammamish case fell to Robert Keppel, a former college high jumper and Army military police captain who had been in the King County Sheriff’s Office homicide unit for a week. He had just closed his first murder case. Now he was handed what turned into the defining investigation of his life.
The public response overwhelmed the unit. “We were receiving as many as 200 calls a day about men matching the description of the Lake Sam Ted, far too many for one detective to handle,” Keppel wrote. A composite sketch, which turned out to be only partly accurate, ran in newspapers and on television. Among the thousands of tips were five that named Theodore Bundy, a clean-cut law student with no criminal record. One came from Elizabeth Kloepfer, who recognized his car and the sketch and called the police; she later insisted that his name be passed on to Salt Lake City when he moved there. A professor of his called in as well. But the detectives were looking for something other than a polite graduate with political connections, and among hundreds of young men called Ted, he was not singled out.
On September 7, 1974, grouse hunters on a wooded hillside near Issaquah, about a mile from the park, came upon bones. Keppel was called out and, he admitted later, was at first annoyed by what he took to be routine work for the newest man in the unit. He went back at five the next morning to comb the slope. That day his sergeant called: a skull found the day before had been identified as Denise Naslund’s. Over the following week about two hundred Explorer Scouts, volunteers and search dogs worked the hillside inch by inch, and the team collected more than four hundred items of evidence, including the remains of Janice Ott and a thigh bone from a third person who could not then be named. What they did not find mattered as much: there was no clothing, no jewelry, nothing that might have carried the killer’s hair or blood. “Whoever was doing this was being extremely cautious about leaving evidence,” Keppel said.
On the first days of March 1975, forestry students from Green River Community College working on Taylor Mountain found a skull. Keppel recognized it at once; he had memorized the dental work of fifteen of the missing women. It was Brenda Ball’s. The next day, searching the same slope, he tripped over a maple branch and found another skull a few feet away, with bridgework he knew belonged to the student missing from Ellensburg. Over the following days the search team recovered the partial remains of four of the missing women: Lynda Healy, Susan Rancourt, Kathy Parks and Brenda Ball. A University of Washington psychology professor, John Berberich, worked with the detectives on a profile of the killer that later took him onto the FBI’s lecture circuit.
Keppel became convinced that one man was responsible for the Washington and Oregon cases: the same type of victim, the same kind of ruse, the same injuries and almost no physical evidence. The problem was that the files had grown too large to read. “The mounting tip sheets and other police reports had become too clumsy to be useful,” he wrote. There were, as he put it, too many Teds.
So the detectives tried something almost no American police force had tried. They drew up a list of traits the killer might have: the first name Ted, a Volkswagen Beetle, a connection to the Seattle area at the time of the killings, enrollment in classes alongside some of the University of Washington victims, a link to Central Washington in Ellensburg, acquaintance with at least one of the women, and a place among the hundreds of names phoned in by the public. Every name and fact in the files had to be keypunched onto cards. King County police later said some 160,000 pieces of information went into the computer, at a cost of about $30,000. The run took more than a month. It cut the field to about a hundred men and then to twenty-five, “a more workable number,” Keppel wrote, for the year of work ahead. Theodore Robert Bundy was seventh on the list. His file sat in a wire basket on Keppel’s desk, next to be examined, when the telephone rang from Salt Lake City.
He arrived in Salt Lake City at the end of the summer and found an apartment in the Avenues district. To his classmates he was another law student. He was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; the leader of his congregation later said Bundy had come to activities and meetings and seemed to have his life in order. Investigators in Utah also came to suspect that on the drive south from Washington he had picked up and killed a young female hitchhiker in Idaho. In his final days he described such a killing, of a girl of about sixteen to eighteen picked up in Elmore County in September 1974; she has never been identified.
The disappearances followed him. Nancy Wilcox, sixteen, a cheerleader from Holladay, disappeared on October 2, 1974, last seen riding in a Volkswagen Beetle. The police at first treated her as a runaway, an assumption her family never accepted. The day before his execution Bundy admitted killing her and indicated the general area where he had left her body. She has never been found.
On Friday, October 18, Melissa Anne Smith, seventeen, a high school senior, met her father, Louis Smith, the police chief of Midvale, at a restaurant and talked him out of two dollars for pizza and permission to spend the night with a girlfriend. She did not come home. On October 27 a hunter found her body near Toll Canyon in the Summit Park area above Parley’s Canyon. The Summit County Sheriff’s Office still lists her murder as an active, unsolved case and records her as believed to have been killed by Bundy.
On Halloween night, Laura Ann Aime, seventeen, left a party in Lehi in Utah County. Her mother had reminded her of what had happened to Melissa Smith. Laura had grown up on her family’s farm, where she rode a horse named Arab and fed him red licorice nibs as a treat, and where she took her younger brothers and sisters to the store and bought them candy with her own money. Her sister Michelle, five years younger, shared her bedroom and followed her everywhere. Hikers found Laura’s body on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, down an embankment beside American Fork Canyon Road. A medical examiner estimated that she had been killed some three weeks after she disappeared.
The case that broke Utah open was the one he did not finish. On the evening of November 8, 1974, Carol DaRonch, eighteen, was window-shopping at the new Fashion Place Mall in Murray when a young man introduced himself as Officer Roseland of the Murray police. He told her someone had been caught breaking into her car in the parking lot and that she would need to come to the station and file a report. Her car looked untouched, but she went with him to his battered Volkswagen. Inside, she smelled alcohol on his breath and noticed he was not driving toward any police station. When he pulled over, she reached for the door. He snapped a handcuff onto her wrist; in the struggle the second cuff closed on the same wrist. He threatened her with a gun and then swung a crowbar at her head, and she caught it with her hand. Screaming, scratching and kicking, she got the door open and fell out onto the road, ran into the path of an oncoming car, and was taken to safety by its driver while the Volkswagen drove away. “I knew he was going to kill me and nobody was ever going to know what happened to me,” she said years later.
That same evening, Debra Jean Kent, seventeen, was at a play at Viewmont High School in Bountiful with her parents. During the performance, a stranger had approached the drama teacher and a student, asking each to come out and identify a car in the parking lot; both declined. The teacher noticed the same man near the end of the play, disheveled and out of breath. Debra had left at intermission to pick up her eleven-year-old brother from a roller rink. She was never seen again. The next morning, investigators searching the school parking lot found a small key. It opened the handcuffs that had been locked on Carol DaRonch’s wrist.
Debra’s mother, Belva Kent, waited fourteen years for any answer at all. About thirty-six hours before his execution, Bundy told police where he had left Debra. A search of the Fairview Canyon area in the spring of 1989 turned up hundreds of bones, only one of them human, a kneecap, which police gave to her family as the only closure they could offer. In 2015, when Bountiful detectives reviewed the case, they learned that Belva Kent still kept that bone in a box. They persuaded her to let them test it, and a laboratory at the University of North Texas matched it to the family’s DNA. The family received a death certificate. “That was probably one of the biggest moments in my career,” said Sergeant Shane Alexander.
After DaRonch’s escape, young women stopped vanishing in northern Utah and began vanishing in Colorado.
On January 12, 1975, Caryn Campbell, twenty-three, a nurse from Michigan, was staying at the Wildwood Inn in Snowmass Village with her fiancé. That evening she went up to her room to fetch a magazine she meant to read in the lobby with him and their friends. A witness saw her step off the elevator on the second floor. The magazine was later found in the room with all her belongings. She was not seen alive again. On February 17 her body was found in the snow along Owl Creek Road, below Sinclair Divide, where it had lain for five weeks. She had been struck on the back of the head. In his last days, Bundy told a Pitkin County investigator how he had done it: he had gone to the hotel on crutches, waited near the pool and asked for help carrying his ski boots to his car. Another woman ignored him. Caryn Campbell offered to help.
He used the same act again. On March 15, 1975, Julie Cunningham, twenty-six, a ski instructor who also worked in a sporting goods store, disappeared in Vail. According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s account of his confession, he posed as an injured skier on crutches and asked her to help him carry a ski boot, then drove her about eighty miles from Vail. Her body has never been found. On April 6, Denise Lynn Oliverson, twenty-four, disappeared while riding her bicycle in Grand Junction. Her bicycle was found beneath the Fifth Street Bridge. In 1989 he told investigators he had put a body in a river about five miles west of Grand Junction, and an FBI timeline places him in the area that April. Neither case was ever charged.
In Idaho, on May 6, 1975, twelve-year-old Lynette Dawn Culver disappeared at lunch hour from Alameda Junior High School in Pocatello. A few weeks earlier she and her older sister, Nancy, had finished a twenty-mile walk for the March of Dimes; Nancy was worn out, but Lynette still had the energy to ride her bike to McDonald’s to cash in the free Big Mac coupons they had earned. Her sister remembered her as “a lovable pest of a little sister.” Fourteen years later Bundy told Idaho’s attorney general, Jim Jones, that he had taken a girl of about twelve from near the school that day and later put her body in the Snake River. “It was not suspected that Ted Bundy had committed any murders in Idaho,” Jones said. Bundy knew small things about the family, among them that they had moved across town and that a grandmother was coming to live with them, which persuaded Jones and Lynette’s father, Al Culver, who listened to the tape, that the confession was real. Her body has never been found, and the Pocatello Police Department, which still lists her as missing, said in 2018 that it could not rule out another suspect.
Susan Curtis, fifteen, disappeared on June 28, 1975, during a Latter-day Saints youth conference at Brigham Young University in Provo. Bundy described her grave less than an hour before he was executed, placing it near Price. Four days after his death, a Carbon County search and rescue team went out to look. She has never been found.
He was caught by chance. At about three in the morning on August 16, 1975, Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward was finishing his shift log in his cruiser outside his home in Granger, in what is now West Valley City, when a tan Volkswagen drove past. A few minutes later his radio called him to assist on another matter. He took a wrong turn out of his subdivision and found the same car parked outside a neighbor’s house, where the parents were away on vacation and their teenage daughters were home alone. When his headlights hit it, the Volkswagen fled through the neighborhood and onto a main road, then pulled into an abandoned gas station. Hayward followed it in, gun drawn. The driver, a shaggy-haired young man in a black turtleneck, raised his hands and said, “I’m lost.” He said he had been at the drive-in watching The Towering Inferno; Hayward knew it was not showing there.
The Volkswagen’s passenger seat had been taken out. Inside were a crowbar, an ice pick, handcuffs, a ski mask, a pair of pantyhose with holes cut for the eyes and nose, rope, gloves, a flashlight, garbage bags and strips of torn sheet. “I didn’t want to shoot the guy,” Hayward said twenty-five years later. “I wish I had.” He retired in 1986 after thirty-three years with the highway patrol and sometimes wondered why he had taken that wrong turn. “If I didn’t get him that night and stop him, I don’t know how many more he would have got.”
The arrest, for evading an officer, would not have held him; he was released on a $500 bond. But Hayward’s brother, Pete Hayward, was the Salt Lake County sheriff, and when he mentioned the arrest to his detectives, two of them, Jerry Thompson and Ben Forbes, reacted at once. A tan Volkswagen and a pair of handcuffs meant Carol DaRonch. The name meant something too: Kloepfer’s tip had reached Salt Lake City months earlier with a request from King County to be told if police there ever came across Theodore Bundy. On August 19 the call went to Seattle. When the King County detectives pulled up their computer list and saw his name, Keppel wrote, “The entire task force squad froze stone cold.” Forbes followed up with a letter to Keppel the next day. “It was like a whole euphoric situation when that call came in,” Keppel said later.
Detectives searched Bundy’s apartment and found a satchel holding a crowbar, a tire iron, knives and a flashlight, and a 1974 to 1975 guide to Colorado ski country. On the page listing lodgings in Snowmass, someone had made an X in black ink beside the Wildwood Inn. When a Salt Lake detective told his Pitkin County counterpart about it, the Colorado man could hardly believe it. Bundy was put under surveillance in Utah, and in Seattle detectives began quietly interviewing his former neighbors and acquaintances, asking whether anyone had ever seen him with slings, casts or crutches, and passing around photographs from his Utah lineup. On September 17, 1975, he sold the Volkswagen for $800. Investigators traced and seized it, and an inch-by-inch search turned up hairs that, according to the Salt Lake County detective Jerry Thompson, were matched to Carol DaRonch, Melissa Smith and Caryn Campbell. “It tied it all together,” Thompson said, “what was happening here and what happened up Seattle way.”
On October 2, 1975, DaRonch and two other women picked Bundy out of a lineup, and he was charged with attempted kidnapping. Detectives from Washington, Utah and Colorado met in Aspen to pool what they had, a gathering later called the Aspen summit. They agreed that their best chance of keeping him off the street was the case that had a living witness.
He waived a jury. The trial ran from February 23 to March 1, 1976, before Third District Judge Stewart Hanson, with David Yocom prosecuting and John O’Connell defending. Each day about two hundred people, most of them reporters, lined up for fifty seats. Members of his church congregation came to support him, convinced he was innocent. Bundy behaved as if the courtroom were his stage; he called the prosecutor “Dave” until Yocom demanded that he stop. “You always sensed he thought he was smarter than anybody in the courtroom,” Yocom said.
The case came down to Carol DaRonch, a shy teenager whose memory of a few frightening minutes was uneven. On cross-examination O’Connell pointed to inconsistencies, including whether her attacker had worn a mustache, and she acknowledged that police had told her a car she viewed “was supposed to be the car.” Bundy testified that he had not done it, and admitted under questioning that he had at times worn a false mustache. His own lawyer later said his manner on the stand had been “kind of cocky” and had hurt him. In the Netflix series of 2019, DaRonch described his “smirk.” Judge Hanson took a weekend to decide. On March 1 he found Bundy guilty of aggravated kidnapping. “I cannot say that there weren’t any doubts,” he said, but he believed her. After a long psychological evaluation, Bundy was sentenced to one to fifteen years in the Utah State Prison. On camera outside the jail, he joked to Salt Lake reporters that he had been given “two weeks in the spa,” and promised that he would be cleared and become “a damn good lawyer.” He was later excommunicated from the church.
The defense lawyer Bruce Lubeck, who had also worked on the case, said years later that he had first believed it was a case of mistaken identity. “My perceptions have changed over time,” he said. It was the only conviction Bundy ever received outside Florida, and it later counted against him in Florida as an aggravating factor when juries decided whether he should die.
On October 21, 1976, Colorado charged Bundy with Caryn Campbell’s murder on the strength of the ski guide and the hair from the Volkswagen. In early 1977 he was extradited to Aspen. The Pitkin County jail was tiny, with inmates “sleeping like cordwood on the floor,” a former sheriff recalled, so Bundy was held in the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs and driven to Aspen for hearings. Bob Braudis, a six-foot-six deputy who later served six terms as sheriff, escorted him on his first walk up the courthouse stairs and told him, in coarse terms, what would happen if he stepped more than three feet away. Bundy stayed close. In the patrol car he was charming. He asked for topographical maps of the mountains around Aspen and for a biography of the escape artist Harry Houdini. He got neither.
He chose to act as his own lawyer, and a judge allowed him to research in the law library of the Pitkin County Courthouse without handcuffs or leg irons. A deputy guarded the courtroom door, believed to be the only way out. On June 7, 1977, during a recess, Bundy raised a second-floor window and jumped, spraining an ankle, and made for Aspen Mountain. About ten minutes passed before anyone noticed. The reaction was immediate. Roadblocks went up at every major intersection and every car leaving Aspen was searched. Residents were told to lock their doors, and sales of guns and ammunition were halted in Aspen, Glenwood Springs and nearby towns, but not before about forty women lined up at the Crossroads drug store, the only gun dealer in town, to buy pistols. Ranchers in Woody Creek saddled their horses and rode out with their rifles as a volunteer posse. Braudis was flown by helicopter over the passes looking for tracks. Not everyone was frightened; the mayor, Stacy Standley, told the Denver Post the bars were at least as full as normal.
Bundy took a rifle from a cabin above town and, Braudis believed, got close enough to see the lights of Crested Butte before he became disoriented and, remembering his Scout training, headed downhill. One officer who joined the search believes Bundy staged a report of an attempted sexual assault to pull officers off the streets. He stole a Cadillac from Cemetery Lane and tried to drive out over Independence Pass, not knowing that a landslide had closed the road. On the sixth day he was stopped in the stolen car and recaptured. He told reporters later that he had enjoyed reading about “The Great Escape,” and he corrected one reporter’s language: he wanted to be called a man “accused of murder,” not an “accused murderer.” “I’m extremely confident and firmly believe in my own innocence,” he told The Aspen Times that August.
On December 30, 1977, he escaped again. Over the preceding weeks he had lost a great deal of weight. He removed a light fixture from the ceiling of his cell in Glenwood Springs, cut through to the crawlspace, piled books under the blanket on his cot to make it look as if he were asleep, and crawled through the ceiling to the empty living quarters of a jailer, where he changed his clothes and walked out the front door. It was the holiday week, and his absence was not noticed until the next day. The inventory of what he left behind in his cell, kept for decades in boxes at the district attorney’s office, lists law books, protein powder, magazines, Christmas decorations, a radio, and novels and histories by Hunter S. Thompson, James Clavell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Dee Brown, Pearl S. Buck and J.R.R. Tolkien. Among the Christmas cards he had received was one from the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office. By bus and train, by differing accounts, he made his way east and then south. The FBI added him to its Ten Most Wanted list. By January 8, 1978, he was in Tallahassee, Florida, and after a night in a hotel he rented a room at a rooming house called The Oak on West College Avenue, near the Florida State University campus.
The Chi Omega house stood at 661 West Jefferson Street, just off the Florida State campus, in the blocks that were the center of student life. Next door was Sherrod’s, a bar popular with students. On the evening of Saturday, January 14, 1978, several young women there noticed a man who seemed out of place and who watched the women in the crowd with a stare they found unnerving. Two of them later identified him as Bundy. Lisa Levy, a Chi Omega sister, may have been among those he watched.
Margaret Bowman was twenty-one. Kathy Kleiner, who had joined the sorority about a year before and was one of some forty sisters, remembered her as the most elegant of them, “So Cosmo and beautifully dressed,” and as someone she could go to with anything. Lisa Levy was twenty. Kathy Kleiner, twenty, from Miami, shared a room with Karen Chandler, whose family lived in Tallahassee.
The back door of the house had a faulty lock. At about three in the morning on January 15, Nita Neary came home from a date through that door, heard a thump upstairs, and saw a man crouched near the front doors, holding a club wrapped in dark cloth. He went out the front door. She saw him mainly in right profile, for a few seconds. She woke her roommate, Nancy Dowdy, and they locked the doors and went to the house president, Jackie McGill. Then Karen Chandler came staggering into the hall with her head and face badly injured, and McGill found Kathy Kleiner bleeding on her bed, unable to speak.
Kleiner remembered the first blow as a thud that did not hurt at first, then pain she could not describe, her jaw hanging, and then a light: a car pulling into the parking lot lit up the room, and the man ran. “I was yelling in my head, help me, help me, where is everybody?” she said. “And all I was doing was gurgling.” Her jaw was broken in three places. Chandler suffered a fractured skull, broken facial bones, a broken jaw, a broken arm and crushed fingers. Investigators later estimated that the attacks inside the house took about fifteen minutes.
The first officers were sent on what dispatchers described as a domestic disturbance. Ray Crew, a Florida State University police officer patrolling a few blocks away, and Oscar Brannon of the Tallahassee police arrived at about the same time. Crew went upstairs, found the two injured roommates, realized this was no quarrel between a couple, and then heard someone say that Margaret Bowman had not come out of her room. He opened her door. Margaret had been beaten with a length of oak branch and strangled with a stocking as she slept. In the next room he found Lisa Levy, beaten, strangled and sexually assaulted. Paramedics thought they detected a heartbeat and rushed her to Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, where she died. Susan Denton, another sister, was woken by the radios and the footsteps of the emergency crews. “When you realize how close it occurred, you think, ‘Why was it their room and not our room?’” she said twenty years later.
The crime scene work that night decided the case. The limb used as a club had been left behind. Brannon measured the chips of bark scattered on the floor and drew a scale diagram tracing the path by which it had been carried in. Sergeant Howard Winkler, the Tallahassee police crime scene supervisor, photographed a bite mark on Lisa Levy’s body, with a scale beside it so that the image could later be enlarged to actual size. Without that photograph there would have been no bite mark case.
About an hour after the Chi Omega attacks, some six blocks away, Cheryl Thomas, a dance student from Richmond, Virginia, who hoped to become a ballet dancer, was beaten in her bed in a duplex on Dunwoody Street. Neighbors heard the attack through the wall and called for help. She was found in a coma, with five skull fractures, a jaw broken in two places and a dislocated shoulder, and she was left permanently deaf in her left ear. A Leon County Sheriff’s Office crime scene investigator, Maryann Frisby, came from the hospital to her apartment. On the bed lay a knotted pair of pantyhose that did not belong to Thomas, with holes in it that suggested it had been worn as a mask. Hairs caught in it would be compared with Bundy’s.
At about five that morning two acquaintances saw Bundy standing outside The Oak, looking toward the campus; he did not answer when they greeted him. At about noon, as residents talked over the news, he told them the crimes had been “a professional job” and that whoever did it had probably already left town.
Leon County Sheriff Ken Katsaris coordinated the agencies. A local building contractor, Syde Deeb, donated office space for a joint task force across the street from the Tallahassee police headquarters, so that no agency could keep what it learned to itself. Katsaris saw the bite mark as a possible signature. The campus emptied: many students went home and some never came back. Fraternity men volunteered as escorts, and young men slept in dormitory lobbies to guard the women inside. Curiosity seekers drove through the campus, and psychics called in theories.
He stayed in Tallahassee, stealing to live. On January 13, the night before the attacks, a license plate had been stolen from a house near the Chi Omega house. On February 8, in a Jacksonville shopping center parking lot, a man in a white van approached Leslie Parmenter, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a Jacksonville police detective, and drove off when her brother arrived. The teenagers wrote down the van’s tag. It was the plate stolen in Tallahassee. That night a man registered at the Holiday Inn in Lake City under a name that was not his; two employees and a handwriting expert, John McCarthy, later established that it was Bundy. In Tallahassee, a white van belonging to the Florida State University media center was missing.
Kimberly Diane Leach was twelve, a seventh grader at Lake City Junior High School, the daughter of Tom and Freda Leach. Her best friend, Lisa Little, remembered her as the kind of girl who would cheer you up if you were sad; another friend said she was everyone’s best friend. In church the two girls liked to clap off the beat on purpose. Kimberly had already picked out a pink dress for the Valentine’s Day dance. On the morning of February 9, 1978, between about nine and ten o’clock, she went back to her homeroom to fetch a purse she had left there. Lisa waited for her at the stairs. “I stood at the stairs waiting for her and she didn’t show up,” she said forty years later. A school crossing guard, Chuck Edenfield, later said he had seen a man he identified as Bundy driving a white van in front of the school that morning.
Two days later, at about 1:45 in the morning on February 11, an officer named Dawes found a man without identification at a car door in Tallahassee. On the floorboard lay a license plate with the number the Parmenter children had written down. When the officer went to his radio to run the tag, the man ran. On February 12 Bundy stole a pale Volkswagen Beetle and left Tallahassee for good.
At about one in the morning on February 15, 1978, Pensacola police officer David Lee saw a Volkswagen pull out of the empty lot behind Oscar Woerner’s restaurant on Cervantes Street. He ran the tag and found the car was stolen. After a stop, the driver kicked Lee’s legs out from under him and ran. Lee fired a warning shot and then a second shot, caught him, and struggled with him for his gun before subduing him. On the way to the jail the prisoner asked, “If I run at the jail, will you shoot me then?” and told Lee, by one account, “I wish you had killed me.” In the car police found identification cards belonging to female Florida State students and stolen credit cards.
The driver said his name was Kenneth Misner. Norman Chapman, then a detective with three years on the force who worked the overnight shift, was assigned to him. For almost two days the man kept up the pretense. Then he said, “My name is Theodore Robert Bundy.” “I had no idea who he was,” Chapman said. He soon learned that his car thief was a fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, wanted in Colorado for escape and murder, and a suspect in dozens of killings in the West. Chapman spent about forty hours talking with him. Bundy never confessed in so many words, but he said things Chapman never forgot. Bundy told him he had left Pensacola that night heading for Mobile, felt the urge, and turned back at the last exit to look for someone. “You know I couldn’t go to anyone with my problem and tell them what my problem was,” Chapman remembered him saying. “I couldn’t go to a psychiatrist and talk to them about that.” Chapman’s view of him never changed: “He was very personable, very charismatic, very unalarming, and see, that’s the dangerous thing.” Bundy was booked on about sixty-seven counts of auto theft, burglary and theft and held in the Leon County jail.
After a large search, Kimberly Leach’s body was found on April 7, 1978, in a small hog shed near Suwannee River State Park, about forty-five miles from her school. It was the day before Lisa Little’s birthday. The trial court later found that she had died of “homicidal violence to the neck region.” George Dekle, the assistant state attorney who would prosecute the case (he appears as Bob Dekle in some reports), never forgot the scene that April day.
On July 28, 1978, a Leon County grand jury indicted Bundy on two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted murder and two counts of burglary for the Chi Omega and Dunwoody Street attacks. When Sheriff Katsaris read him the indictment in the Leon County jail, in front of television cameras, Bundy stepped forward and waved to the camera; by one account he tore up the document and confronted the officers. Within days he was also charged with Kimberly Leach’s kidnapping and murder; the Florida Supreme Court later dated that indictment to July 21.
He wanted to defend himself, and he wanted a lawyer of his own choosing, Millard Farmer. Four courts refused to let Farmer represent him. In October 1978, representing himself, he won a two-month delay of the Tallahassee trial and joked with reporters. In May 1979 he fired his court-appointed lawyer, Michael Minerva of the public defender’s office in Tallahassee.
Before that, Minerva had nearly ended the cases without a trial. The state agreed to life sentences in both the Chi Omega and the Leach cases if Bundy pleaded guilty; Minerva said the deal would have meant seventy-five years in prison. According to one account Bundy signed a confession under the agreement. At the joint plea hearing, however, he stood up in open court, challenged the competence of his own lawyers and asked for new ones, and the state withdrew the offer, fearing that any guilty plea would later be attacked as the product of bad advice. “It made him realize he was going to have to stand up in front of the whole world and say he was guilty,” Minerva said later. “He just couldn’t do it.” In the Leach case he accepted a new attorney, Victor Africano, on June 21, 1979.
The Chi Omega trial was moved nearly five hundred miles south to Miami because an impartial jury could not be found in Leon County. Jury selection began before Dade County Circuit Judge Edward D. Cowart on June 25, 1979, and the jury of seven men and five women was settled by June 30; the foreman was a Texaco engineer, Rudolph Treml. The defense brought in an Atlanta hypnotist and jury consultant, Emil Spillman, to help choose them. The prosecution was led by Assistant State Attorney Larry Simpson, who gave the opening statement, with Dan McKeever. On the defense side were public defenders Edward Harvey, Margaret Good and Lynn Thompson and, for a while, a volunteer, Robert Haggard; Bundy acted as one of his own lawyers and often overruled them. Television cameras were allowed in the courtroom, and the trial was broadcast across the country. Young women filled the spectators’ seats to watch him, and one teenager told an Associated Press reporter that she found him fascinating. The prosecution called forty-nine witnesses and the defense fifteen.
Judge Cowart, a former police officer with a soft drawl, held Bundy on a short leash with something close to warmth. He warned him that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, and when Bundy pointed at him, told him, “Don’t shake your finger at me, young man.” Bundy cross-examined Officer Crew, the first policeman into the house, at length, an exercise that went poorly for him.
The eyewitness case rested on Nita Neary. A week after the attacks, on January 23, 1978, a police hypnotist had hypnotized her with the sheriff present, and under hypnosis she had added details, brown hair and brown eyebrows, that she did not recall before or after. In April 1978, in Muncie, Indiana, she picked Bundy’s photograph out of an array. In the Miami courtroom she pointed him out as the man she had seen leaving the house with “a club or a log.” The defense argued that the hypnosis had contaminated her memory; the trial court found her description had stayed consistent from her first statement, before hypnosis, onward.
Kathy Kleiner took the stand for the prosecution. Asked the last question, whether this was the man who attacked her, she told the truth: she had never seen his face. “I said, ‘I can’t tell you. I don’t know,’” she recalled. “But I wanted to put that nail in.” She nearly threw up in the back room afterward. Karen Chandler and Cheryl Thomas testified too.
The physical evidence came down to two things. A hair analyst testified that hairs in the pantyhose mask from Cheryl Thomas’s room had the same characteristics as Bundy’s and “could have come from him.” And there was the bite. Under a judge’s warrant, which Sheriff Katsaris believed was the first of its kind in the country, investigators had taken wax impressions of Bundy’s teeth and cast models of both arches. Dr. Richard Souviron, a Coral Gables dentist and forensic odontologist, stood before the jury with a board showing the enlarged photograph of the bite on Lisa Levy, laid a transparent overlay of Bundy’s teeth over it, and said they lined up exactly. Asked whether Bundy’s teeth had made the marks, he answered, “Yes, sir,” to a reasonable degree of dental certainty. On cross-examination Edward Harvey asked whether bite mark analysis was part art and part science; Souviron agreed that was fair and that his conclusion was a matter of opinion. A second forensic dentist, working from computer-enhanced photographs, reached the same conclusion, the Florida Supreme Court later recorded. Dr. Lowell Levine, chief consultant in forensic dentistry to the New York City Medical Examiner, told the jury that dental identification had been accepted in American courts since the late nineteenth century.
Margaret Good, who had never argued a felony case to a jury, gave the closing for the defense. It would be “a sad day for our system of justice,” she said, if a man’s life were put at risk “because he has crooked teeth.” At 9:31 p.m. on July 24, 1979, after less than seven hours of deliberation, the jury returned guilty verdicts on every count: two of first-degree murder, three of attempted first-degree murder and two of burglary. Three days later, in a jail visiting cell, Bundy told the AP’s Dan Sewell that he was not losing any sleep over it and was confident of his appeal.
At the penalty phase the prosecution put Carol DaRonch, now married, before the jury to show the earlier violent crime. On July 31, 1979, which was Karen Chandler’s birthday, Judge Cowart followed the jury’s recommendation and sentenced Bundy to death on both murder counts. He called the killings “extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile” and found the statutory aggravating factors proved, among them that Bundy had committed the murders while under a sentence of imprisonment in Utah. Then he spoke to the man in front of him. He called Bundy “a bright young man” who would have made a good lawyer, one he would “have loved” to see practice before him. “But you went another way, partner,” he said. As deputies prepared to lead Bundy away, the judge added, “Take care of yourself,” and Bundy thanked him.
The Leach case had been set for trial in Suwannee County. On November 9, 1979, it was moved to Orange County, and the trial opened in Orlando on January 7, 1980, before Circuit Judge Wallace Jopling. Dekle prosecuted with Jerry Blair; it was Dekle’s first first-degree murder case. Kimberly reminded him of his own daughter, he said, and setting the feeling aside was the hardest part of the job. Victor Africano defended. The defense argued that Bundy could not get a fair trial anywhere in Florida. A poll of Orange County residents found that ninety-eight percent of those who answered knew the name Bundy, and some prospective jurors remembered the bite mark testimony from Miami. The man who became foreman was the pre-press manager of the local newspaper. The court seated the jury anyway, finding that each juror could set aside what he or she had heard.
There was no witness to the killing and no fingerprint. Doug Barrow, a fingerprint examiner for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, testified that neither Bundy’s prints nor Kimberly’s were found in the white van; what he did find, on windows and armrests, looked like wipe marks. Bundy, at the defense table, turned up his empty palms and grinned. “There’s the man who leaves no fingerprints,” a prosecutor remarked. Nor did the soil from the van match soil from the scene.
So the case was built piece by piece. Leslie Parmenter, now sixteen, testified on January 25 about the man in the van in Jacksonville. “It kind of scared me the way he was acting,” she said. She and her brother had both been hypnotized before they picked Bundy’s photograph, and the stolen Tallahassee tag they had written down tied the van to the city. The Holiday Inn register, with its false name in Bundy’s handwriting, put him in Lake City the night before Kimberly vanished. Chuck Edenfield, the crossing guard, put him in a white van outside her school. Richard Shook, manager of the university media center, described how the van had disappeared and turned up days later. On its carpet was a bloodstain of group B, a type Kimberly had and that about fifteen percent of people share. A state fiber analyst, Mary Hinson, testified that it was “extremely probable” that Bundy’s clothing, Kimberly’s clothing and the van’s carpet had all been in contact with one another.
The only witness to the abduction itself was Clarence “Andy” Anderson, and his testimony became the most argued-over evidence in either Florida case. On the morning of February 9, 1978, he said, he had been stopped in traffic on Duval Street outside the junior high school behind a white van, and saw a man lead a girl by the elbow around the front of it and help her in. He noticed the girl only because she looked like one of his nieces. She looked unhappy, as if she had been in trouble at school. He told a fishing companion during the search for Kimberly that he might have seen the man who took the Leach girl, but he did not go to the police; he was not sure of the date, he did not want to send detectives on “a wild goose chase,” and the one picture of Bundy he had seen did not look much like the man. Only in July 1978, after a television profile of Bundy struck him, did he come forward. The prosecutor then had him hypnotized twice. The first session, conducted by Imogene Keene, produced little; Anderson did not think he had been hypnotized at all, and he remembered his neck bothering him and people walking in and out. Before the second, three days later, he worked out the date himself: it was the day he had come home and eaten a piece of his daughter’s birthday cake, feeling guilty for missing her party. Under hypnosis by a second hypnotist, Johnny Burnette, he added new details, a young, good-looking man in a white jacket and a girl in a blue football jersey with a number on it. Afterward, he said, he still could not definitely identify the man. In court he pointed to Bundy as the person who “closely resembles” him, and from a photograph identified the girl as Kimberly. The jury heard the tapes of both hypnosis sessions, read transcripts of them, and heard a defense expert describe their flaws.
The defense asked the court to let the jury view the street outside the school. The judge refused; the road had since been widened to four lanes, and photographs were admitted instead. The jury also heard about the two times Bundy had run from police, in Tallahassee two days after Kimberly disappeared and in Pensacola six days after, and was told it could treat flight as a sign of guilt.
On February 7, 1980, after seven hours and fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury convicted Bundy of kidnapping and first-degree murder. He had bet his defense team, he said in a tape he recorded two hours after the verdict, that the jury would be back within three hours. The next morning he recorded himself again, already thinking about what he would say to the jury in the penalty phase and to the judge at sentencing.
At the penalty phase on February 9, 1980, he called one witness, Carole Ann Boone, a woman he had known in Washington. While she was on the stand he asked her to marry him. She said she would, and he declared, “I do hereby marry you.” Boone had arranged for a notary to be present, and under a Florida law that recognized a declaration of marriage made in court, officials said the marriage was legal. Boone later gave birth to a daughter she said was his. The jury recommended death. Arguing to Judge Jopling before sentence, Bundy spoke from a legal pad, contending that the jury had been overwhelmed by the quantity of the state’s evidence rather than its quality and poisoned by publicity. Africano argued that because the state had once offered him life, it was unconstitutional to make him risk death for insisting on a trial. On February 12, 1980, Jopling sentenced him to death for the murder and to life in prison for the kidnapping. It was his third death sentence.
For nine years Bundy and a succession of lawyers fought the sentences, and the claims they raised helped shape Florida law. In October 1982 he appealed the Chi Omega convictions, attacking the bite mark evidence and Nita Neary’s hypnotized identification. In January 1983 he appealed the Leach conviction, arguing that a “Bundy mystique” created by saturation coverage had made a fair jury impossible. In July 1984 guards at Florida State Prison foiled what they believed was an escape attempt after finding a loosened bar and hacksaw blades.
On June 21, 1984, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the Chi Omega convictions and death sentences. It ruled that the science of forensic odontology was accepted and the bite mark comparison reliable enough to go to a jury, that Neary’s hypnosis affected the weight of her testimony rather than whether it could be heard, that her photo identification in Indiana had not been unfairly suggestive, that by asking for a change of venue Bundy had given up his right to be tried in Leon County, and that the trial judge had not erred in refusing to close pretrial hearings to the press.
On May 9, 1985, the same court affirmed the Leach conviction and used the case to change the law. From then on, it held, testimony refreshed by hypnosis would be inadmissible in Florida criminal trials, though a hypnotized witness could still testify to what he had remembered before hypnosis. The rule applied only to future cases. In Bundy’s own case the justices found that only three details had come from Anderson’s hypnosis, the blue jersey, its number, 63 or 68, and the pullover and shirt, and held that admitting them was harmless given the rest of the evidence. They threw out the trial judge’s finding that the killing had been especially cruel, because no one could establish exactly how Kimberly died or show that she had struggled or suffered extreme fear, but upheld the death sentence on the remaining aggravating factors: he had been under a Utah sentence at the time and had prior convictions for violent felonies.
Then came the death warrants. A first warrant expired in early March 1986 after the United States Supreme Court granted a stay to consider his claim that the Miami trial had been unfair; on May 5 it turned him down. On May 22 Governor Bob Graham signed a second warrant setting execution for July 2 in the Chi Omega case. Lake City was impatient. That February more than 5,600 of the town’s roughly 10,000 residents had signed petitions asking the governor to sign a warrant in Kimberly’s case as well. Her father, Tom Leach, told a reporter that he wanted to see Bundy executed and would “celebrate that day.” On July 2, about fifteen hours before the scheduled execution, the federal appeals court in Atlanta granted an indefinite stay.
In the Leach case the Supreme Court declined to hear his direct appeal in 1986, and the governor set his execution for November 18, 1986. On November 17, after the Florida courts turned him down, his lawyers filed a federal petition in Orlando. The district judge, who had read the trial record in advance, dismissed it the same day without a hearing. That night, only hours before he was due to die (six, by one contemporary count), the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals granted a stay. It later sent the case back for a hearing on a single question: whether he had been mentally competent to stand trial in 1980.
That hearing took place in Orlando before U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp in 1987. Two psychiatrists testified for Bundy that he had not been competent: Dorothy Otnow Lewis, who had interviewed him at length and diagnosed a bipolar mood disorder, and Emanuel Tanay, whose deposition on Bundy’s mental state is reproduced below in the form in which it was published. Two psychiatrists for the state, Charles Mutter and Umesh Mhatre, disagreed. Judge Jopling and the prosecutors Dekle and Blair described Bundy’s conduct at the trial. The court heard the tapes Bundy had made while the jury deliberated, in which he coolly criticized the judge’s instructions and the state’s closing argument. Sharp credited the state’s experts and found that Bundy had been competent at all times; he called him “a diabolical genius.” On July 7, 1988, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed and rejected every other claim in the petition: that his lawyers had failed him on the fiber evidence and in the plea talks, that Anderson’s hypnosis had denied him a fair trial, that publicity had poisoned the Orlando jury, that the judge should have let the jury view the scene, that the state had punished him for going to trial, that Florida’s death sentences were racially skewed, and that he had been denied a proper clemency hearing.
For almost all of those years he denied everything, and he talked constantly. In 1980 and 1981 the journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth recorded about a hundred hours of interviews with him in prison. He would not admit to anything, but he agreed to speculate, in the third person, about what a hypothetical killer might have done and why. “I don’t care what you say, as long as it sells,” he told Michaud when Michaud said he would publish. “I was so damn sick of his lies and his denials,” Aynesworth said later. “Sometimes we’d come out of that prison and be actually sick.” Their book The Only Living Witness appeared in 1983.
One of the third-person stories on the tapes concerned the killing of a young girl in an orchard. Beverly Burr, whose daughter Ann Marie had vanished from the family home in Tacoma in 1961, read the book. On May 30, 1986, she wrote to him: there was nothing left for him in this world, she said, but there could still be everything good in the next; would he write to her about Ann Marie? He answered within days. He did not know what had happened to her daughter, he wrote; he had been “a normal 14-year-old boy” who did not wander the streets at night or steal cars. “I had nothing to do with her disappearance.” That same year, a criminal justice professor from the University of Louisville, Ronald Holmes, who was studying serial killers, said Bundy had told him he killed an eight-year-old girl in Tacoma when he was a teenager. Bundy denied it.
In 1984 Bundy wrote to a judge in Washington offering himself as a consultant on the Green River murders, the killings of young women around Seattle that police could not solve. The letter reached Robert Keppel, by then chief investigator for the state attorney general’s criminal division. Keppel was stunned, then intrigued: perhaps, he thought, Bundy would not help with the Green River case, “but he could confess to murders we hadn’t nailed him for yet.” He flew to Florida in the autumn of 1984 and sat knee to knee with Bundy in a cramped interview room at Starke. It was the first of three meetings. Bundy advised the detectives to watch the places where bodies had been left, because the killer would come back to them, and to stake them out before announcing any new discovery; he predicted the killer lived near the dump sites and knew the street scene on Pacific Highway South. When Gary Ridgway was arrested in 2001 and later pleaded guilty to forty-eight of the murders, Keppel found that much of Bundy’s analysis had been right, and some of it wrong; Bundy had guessed Pierce County, and Ridgway lived in South King County. “I still believe that much of Ted Bundy’s ‘Riverman’ hypothesis was a projection of himself,” Keppel wrote. At their second meeting, in 1988, he came away convinced that Bundy wanted to confess but was being advised by his lawyers to wait.
Bill Hagmaier, an FBI agent who interviewed Bundy in the late 1980s for the bureau’s research on violent offenders, found him a useful informant on how such men think. Bundy kept newspaper clippings about cases Hagmaier was working and offered his views. “He talked about how a lot of serial killers would return to the crime scene,” Hagmaier said. But he admitted nothing to Hagmaier either, until the end.
On January 17, 1989, Governor Bob Martinez signed the death warrant that would be carried out. Bundy had used legal maneuvers to avoid the chair for ten years, Martinez said; “Justice has been on hold for a decade and it’s about time Ted Bundy paid for his crimes.” With his appeals almost exhausted, Bundy began to talk. His lawyer, Polly Nelson, said he had always seen what he knew as his “ace in the hole,” and believed that by offering to confess he could persuade the governor to delay the execution for years. “I am the only one in possession of this information,” Bundy said. “To do a proper job for everybody I’m going to need some time.” Martinez refused. There were still several days left, he said later, ample time to confess whatever else he had done.
Detectives from the Western states flew to Starke. Keppel came four days before the execution, at the request of Bundy’s lawyer, for what was billed as a final debriefing. Once Bundy began describing where he had left Georgann Hawkins, near the Issaquah hillside where Janice Ott and Denise Naslund were found, Keppel’s doubts about the man’s sincerity vanished. “This was the voice of the killer playing in my brain, the description, firsthand, of a site only the killer had known,” he wrote. Bundy described in detail how he had taken Georgann from near her sorority house. He admitted to eleven murders in Washington, though he could name only eight of the victims, and he described things done to the remains that no detective had suspected. “After 15 years of searching for the missing pieces of the Ted Bundy puzzle,” Keppel wrote, “Ted himself was almost casually confessing to the murders our baling-wire computer program had assigned to him.”
On January 22 he spent about ninety minutes with Dennis Couch of the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office. The meeting almost did not happen, because Bundy was upset that Utah officials had not tried to stop the execution. “The senselessness of it, it appalls me, although I’m sure not as much as those who are so close to it,” he told Couch. He said he had killed more people in Utah than police knew, but he gave little detail. “My mind isn’t as nimble as it used to be right now,” he said when pressed on one case. Describing an area south of Thistle, along U.S. Highway 89, where he said Debra Kent might lie, he said, “you could spend several lifetimes looking for something there,” and added, “What I’m talking about here, in all likelihood, are remains that can’t be found.” About an hour in, he asked for a break. Couch found him “defeated,” “fatigued, exhausted, almost to the point of falling asleep at times,” but believed he was trying to clear the air before he died. Bundy later told Washington investigators he had killed eight people in Utah. That same weekend he told Idaho investigators about Lynette Culver and the hitchhiker from Elmore County. Utah police later concluded that only five of the Utah killings could be tied to him. Ann Rule, speaking at Utah State University later that year, said she believed he had given police false burial sites as “a scheme to send police out slopping through the mud in vain, something Ted would enjoy.”
On the night of January 23, as Hagmaier ran through the numbers with him and arrived at about thirty, Bundy agreed: “It’s late at night like you said, but I think that’s a fairly close figure.” He named states from Washington and Oregon to Florida. “The truth is terrible,” Hagmaier said later. That night, Hagmaier recalled, Bundy talked of suicide; he did not want to give the state the satisfaction of watching him die. They talked about morality and about how he would explain himself to God. Hagmaier helped him draft a will and letters to his mother, his wife and his daughter, and then Bundy asked for one more thing: to rehearse the execution. Hagmaier talked him through the mechanics. “I’m afraid to die,” Bundy told him.
Earlier on January 23 he had given a final videotaped interview to the evangelical broadcaster James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, choosing him over hundreds of other requests. In it he blamed his crimes on an addiction to violent pornography that, he said, began with magazines he came across as a boy. Dobson said he wept several times and expressed remorse for the families. Many who had dealt with him doubted it. Ann Rule called it a “con game.” That evening the United States Supreme Court denied a last request for a stay, five to four, and the Florida courts rejected a final claim that he was mentally incompetent to be executed.
He spent his last night in prayer with a Methodist minister from Gainesville, Fred Lawrence, and refused a final breakfast of steak and eggs. Before dawn his head was shaved. Shortly before seven he was led into the death chamber at Florida State Prison in Starke and strapped into the oak electric chair. Among the witnesses was Bob Dekle, who as he watched kept seeing the hog shed where Kimberly had been found. “I kept thinking that’s where it started. This is where it ends,” he said. Asked by the superintendent for his last words, Bundy said, “I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.” The current was applied, his fists clenched, and he was pronounced dead by Dr. Frank Kilgo at 7:16 a.m. He was forty-two.
Outside, several hundred people had gathered in the dark under a full moon, some of them Florida State students, with signs that said “Burn, Bundy, burn” and “Roast in peace.” Vendors sold “Burn Bundy Burn” T-shirts and lapel pins shaped like electric chairs. When the signal came, fireworks went up from a cow pasture across the road, the crowd cheered and jeered at the death penalty opponents holding candles nearby, and it cheered again when a white hearse carried his body away toward Gainesville. A radio disc jockey played the sound of bacon frying on the air. His body was cremated.
Kathy Kleiner had been told at midnight that there would be no more stays. At about six-thirty in the morning a call told her it was done. “I cried,” she said. “But I wasn’t crying for me.” She cried for Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, and for the others. Then she dried her face and said, “Let’s go to breakfast.” In La Conner, Washington, Susan Rancourt’s mother, Vivian, said the family felt relief and could get on with ordinary life. In White Center, Eleanor Rose, who still kept Denise Naslund’s room as it was, said nothing would ever be the same. “Part of me is gone and I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Four days later, searchers from Carbon County in Utah set out near Price to look for Susan Curtis on the strength of what he had said in his final hour. They did not find her.
Five people are known to have survived him: Karen Sparks, Carol DaRonch, Kathy Kleiner, Karen Chandler and Cheryl Thomas. Kleiner’s jaw had to be re-broken and wired shut for another nine weeks. She left college, married six months after the attack and later divorced; a few months after the attack, realizing she had become afraid of men, she took a job in a Miami lumber yard to face the fear, then worked at a bank, where six months after the attack a robber pushed a bag and a gun across her counter. She went back to work the next day. She had a son in 1981 and met her husband, Scott Rubin, in 1987. When she called her sorority sisters in the months after the attack, she said, no one called back; it was her own sister who finally told her, “I’m your sister.” She now speaks publicly, especially to police, about how a first responder’s patience can help a victim in shock. In 2020 she went back to Tallahassee and thanked Ken Katsaris.
Karen Chandler moved back into the Chi Omega house when she recovered. She married, had two children and three grandchildren, and stayed married for forty years. “I was a victim until I walked out of that hospital,” she said. “I was a survivor until he was executed.” Cheryl Thomas had to be told what had happened to her. In 1986 the wire services reported that the damage to her balance had forced her to give up dancing; she refused to accept it, moved to Texas to study ballet, earned a master’s degree from Gallaudet University, married, had two children and worked with hearing-impaired dancers. The Chi Omega house mother, Mary Crenshaw, said years later that she had tried and failed to forget that night.
In Lake City, Kimberly’s classmates in the class of 1983 still gather and remember her. The school started a buddy system after she disappeared, and her friends went on to teach local children about safety. Several of them named daughters after her. “I have a daughter that’s named Kimberly Dianne after her and I’m not the only one,” one classmate said. “Our lives changed that day,” Lisa Little said. “A lot of us lost our childhood that day and our community lost its childhood.” In Pocatello, on what would have been Lynette Culver’s fifty-seventh birthday in July 2019, her family and neighbors unveiled a stone bench at the Ross Park swimming pool she loved, engraved, “Rest peacefully sweet child. Wherever you are you will be in our minds and hearts forever.” Her sister hoped it would remind people to teach children how to stay safe.
The families had to keep defending the memory of the victims against the market in his. In 1997 a former Salt Lake County sheriff’s deputy, who had bought Bundy’s Volkswagen at a sheriff’s auction for $925, advertised it in The New York Times for $25,000. Belva Kent said she could not imagine what kind of person would do such a thing. Janice Ott’s father, Don Blackburn, heard about the ad twenty-three years to the day after his daughter disappeared. “I looked for that Volkswagen hour-in and hour-out,” he said. “On a personal basis, I think this is quite sadistic.”
The investigation left a legacy in police work. Keppel took two lessons from the hunt for “Ted”: that agencies in different jurisdictions needed a shared system for spotting similar crimes, and that computers could sort information faster than any detective. In Washington he built the Homicide Investigation Tracking System, known as HITS, which has been used in hundreds of murder and sex crime investigations and copied by other states. In 2017 the state attorney general’s criminal justice division was named for him. He died in 2021. At Florida State, the attacks changed how the university thought about student safety. The Chi Omega killings also cast a long shadow over Florida campuses: Danny Rolling, who murdered five students in Gainesville in 1990, said he wanted the kind of attention Bundy had received.
Bundy’s confessions did not close every file, and some of the cases long attributed to him turned out to belong to other men. Katherine Devine, fourteen, who was last seen hitchhiking in Seattle on November 25, 1973, and found dead in Capitol State Forest near Olympia that December, was for years counted among his victims. In 2002 DNA evidence led to the conviction of William Cosden Jr. for her murder. “It doesn’t bring Kathy back, but it sure does help,” her father said.
DNA has also worked in the other direction. Bundy was never convicted in Washington, so for years no full profile of him sat in the national database. In 2011 a Tacoma cold case detective, investigating the 1961 disappearance of Ann Marie Burr, traced an original vial of Bundy’s blood to the Columbia County clerk’s office in Florida, and the state crime lab developed a complete profile. Burr’s case remains unsolved. In 2018 Seattle police said they were re-examining the 1966 Queen Anne attack in which a flight attendant, Lonnie Trumbull, was killed and her roommate badly hurt, because of similarities to the Chi Omega attack; fingerprints at the scene did not match him.
That Florida profile made the next confirmation possible. Detective Sergeant Mike Reynolds and Detective Jacob Hall of the Utah County Sheriff’s Office set out to review every cold case in the county. In the Aime file they found evidence that investigators in 1974 had preserved with great care, including biological traces left on her body, and they took it to the Utah State Forensic Bureau. Equipment the state had acquired in 2023 could draw a profile from samples that were small, mixed or degraded with age. Analysts picked the items most likely to yield DNA, developed a single male profile and entered it into CODIS, the national database. The hit came from Florida. “Bundy’s DNA was a match,” said Beau Mason, Utah’s commissioner of public safety.
On April 1, 2026, at a news conference in Spanish Fork in front of several of Laura’s relatives, the Utah County Sheriff’s Office announced the result, more than fifty-one years after her death. “We can now say, without a doubt, Ted Bundy did kill Laura Ann Aime,” Sheriff Mike Smith said. A confession alone, he explained, had never been enough to close the case or rule out anyone else. Her sister, Michelle Impala, who was twelve when Laura died, said she had not known the case was still open. “I know that (Laura) would be happy to know that it’s been closed,” she said. “It’s really quite amazing that people are even still interested in Laura’s case.” She remembered that after Laura died, the horse would no longer eat the licorice she used to bring him. “Laura Aime is the quintessential daughter of Utah County,” Sergeant Reynolds said. He added that a new, up-to-date profile would make comparisons easier for every agency with an open case that might be Bundy’s, and that, under confidential circumstances, investigators believed one more case outside Utah County was about to be closed with the evidence they had provided. No such announcement had appeared in the reporting reviewed for this article.
Bundy’s crimes have been told and retold, often by people who knew him or hunted him. Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me (1980) was written by a woman who had sat beside him on the crisis line. Elizabeth Kloepfer’s memoir, The Phantom Prince, appeared under the name Elizabeth Kendall. Michaud and Aynesworth published The Only Living Witness in 1983, and their tapes became the four-part Netflix series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes in January 2019. Keppel told his side in The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer (1995, with William J. Birnes), which A&E made into a television film in 2004 with Cary Elwes as Bundy and Bruce Greenwood as Keppel. Mark Harmon played Bundy in the 1986 television miniseries The Deliberate Stranger. In 2019 Zac Efron played him, opposite Lily Collins as Kloepfer, in Joe Berlinger’s feature film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, whose title borrowed Judge Cowart’s words; Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer followed in 2020, and in 2024 the author Ric Conrad published Six Days in Aspen: The 1977 Manhunt for Ted Bundy.
The Efron film drew criticism that it made him too appealing, and Berlinger insisted it did not glorify him. Some of those closest to the case kept their distance. Norman Chapman, the Pensacola detective, said he had never wanted any part in the films. “Hollywood has to make drama where there is no drama,” he said; living it once had been enough. When the 2019 film’s producers asked to use the Pensacola police uniform and patch, the department declined. Kathy Kleiner, by contrast, said she reads and watches the books and films about him because she wanted to understand him as a person, and that seeing them puts the attack behind her. Her answer to those drawn to his looks is blunt: he was attractive, “but he killed people.” “The victims [are] what’s important,” she said. Kimberly Leach’s friends in Lake City put it the same way: they want her remembered and him forgotten.
The total. Bundy’s own count, offered on his last night, was about thirty. UPI reported on the day of the execution that he had confessed to twenty-eight killings. An FBI agent who befriended him put the number at fifty or more, according to the Tacoma historian Rebecca Morris; Keppel said in 2000 that there might be as many as forty more than the thirty he admitted; some investigators and writers have suggested more than a hundred. No evidence has established any figure above his own. He was convicted of three murders.
The states. Accounts of the final confessions differ. One lists Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, California and Florida. UPI and the Deseret News reported in 1989 that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Vermont had been added to the map after his final interviews; Philadelphia’s homicide chief said no unsolved killing there fit his pattern, and Michigan officials knew of no linked case. He was a student at Temple University in Philadelphia from January to May 1969, a fact that has fed speculation without evidence. A 2026 profile reports that at various times he claimed killings in New Jersey. None of these claims has been tied to a named victim.
Before 1974. He told investigators that he had begun killing before 1974; one Florida investigator has written that he described events going back to 1969. The 1961 disappearance of Ann Marie Burr is suspected by some, was denied by him in writing to her mother, and is unsolved. The account Ronald Holmes gave in 1987 of a jailhouse admission was denied by Bundy.
Utah. He described eight Utah killings; police accept five: Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, Debra Kent and Susan Curtis. In 1989 Utah officials also raised the cases of Nancy Baird (Layton, July 4, 1975), Debbie Smith (Salt Lake City, February 1976), Sandra Weaver (last seen in Salt Lake City on July 1, in 1974 or 1975 by differing accounts, and found near Grand Junction the next day), and the earlier disappearances of Kathy Harmen and Johanna Leatherbury. Bundy denied killing Baird, and none of these cases has been confirmed. His account of a burial site near Thistle has never been confirmed.
Idaho. Lynette Culver’s family and Idaho’s former attorney general believe his confession; the Pocatello police, who have never recovered her body, say they cannot exclude another suspect. The Elmore County hitchhiker has never been identified.
Washington. Carol Valenzuela, twenty, disappeared near Vancouver, Washington, on August 2, 1974, and was found near Olympia with the remains of another, unidentified woman. Bundy denied killing her. The Trumbull case in Seattle remains open, with fingerprints that did not match him. Katherine Devine was killed by another man, as DNA proved.
His explanation. His claim to Dobson that pornography made him a killer is his own account and cannot be tested. Investigators, writers and psychologists who dealt with him have treated it with suspicion.
Convicted in court (Florida): • Margaret Bowman, 21, killed January 15, 1978, Chi Omega house, Tallahassee. • Lisa Levy, 20, killed January 15, 1978, Chi Omega house, Tallahassee. • Kimberly Diane Leach, 12, abducted February 9, 1978, Lake City; found April 7, 1978, near the Suwannee River. • Survivors of attempted murder: Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler (Chi Omega house) and Cheryl Thomas (Dunwoody Street), January 15, 1978.
Convicted in court (Utah): • Carol DaRonch, survivor, aggravated kidnapping, November 8, 1974, Murray.
Charged but never tried: • Caryn Campbell, 23, disappeared January 12, 1975, Snowmass Village, Colorado; found February 17, 1975.
Confirmed by DNA after his death: • Laura Ann Aime, 17, disappeared October 31, 1974, Utah County; found November 27, 1974. Bundy’s DNA matched (announced April 1, 2026). • Debra Jean Kent, 17, disappeared November 8, 1974, Bountiful. A kneecap found in 1989 where he said he left her was matched to her family’s DNA (announced 2019). He confessed.
Confessed or attributed by investigators, never tried: • Washington: Lynda Ann Healy, 21 (January 31 to February 1, 1974); Donna Gail Manson, 19 (March 12, 1974); Susan Elaine Rancourt, 18 (April 17, 1974); Brenda Carol Ball, 22 (May 31 to June 1, 1974); Georgann Hawkins, 18 (June 11, 1974); Janice Ann Ott, 23, and Denise Marie Naslund, 18 (July 14, 1974). Survivor: Karen Sparks (January 4, 1974). • Oregon: Roberta Kathleen Parks, 22 (May 6, 1974). • Utah: Nancy Wilcox, 16 (October 2, 1974); Melissa Anne Smith, 17 (October 18, 1974); Susan Curtis, 15 (June 28, 1975). • Colorado: Julie Cunningham, 26 (March 15, 1975); Denise Lynn Oliverson, 24 (April 6, 1975). • Idaho: Lynette Dawn Culver, 12 (May 6, 1975); an unidentified hitchhiker, about 16 to 18 (September 1974, Elmore County).
Suspected, not proven: • Ann Marie Burr, 8, Tacoma, 1961 (he denied it); Lonnie Trumbull, Seattle, 1966 (fingerprints at the scene did not match him); Carol Valenzuela, 20, Vancouver, Washington, 1974 (he denied it). Utah police in 1989 also raised the cases of Nancy Baird (Layton, July 4, 1975), Debbie Smith (Salt Lake City, February 1976) and Sandra Weaver (1975), among others; none has been confirmed.
Ruled out: • Katherine Devine, 14, 1973: William Cosden Jr. convicted in 2002.
• November 24, 1946: born Theodore Robert Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. • Early 1950s: moves to Tacoma with his mother, who marries Johnnie Bundy. • August 31, 1961: Ann Marie Burr, 8, disappears from her home in North Tacoma (unsolved). • January to May 1969: a student at Temple University in Philadelphia. • 1972: graduates from the University of Washington with a degree in psychology. • January 4, 1974: Karen Sparks attacked in Seattle; survives. • January 31 to February 1, 1974: Lynda Ann Healy disappears, Seattle. • March 12 to June 11, 1974: Donna Manson, Susan Rancourt, Kathy Parks, Brenda Ball and Georgann Hawkins disappear. • July 14, 1974: Janice Ott and Denise Naslund disappear from Lake Sammamish State Park. • August 30, 1974: leaves his state job in Olympia and moves to Salt Lake City for law school. • September 7, 1974: remains of Ott and Naslund found near Issaquah. • October 2, 1974: Nancy Wilcox disappears, Holladay, Utah. • October 18, 1974: Melissa Smith disappears, Midvale; found October 27. • October 31, 1974: Laura Aime disappears; found November 27. • November 8, 1974: Carol DaRonch escapes an abduction in Murray; Debra Kent disappears in Bountiful the same evening. • January 12, 1975: Caryn Campbell disappears, Snowmass Village, Colorado; found February 17. • Early March 1975: remains of Healy, Rancourt, Parks and Ball found on Taylor Mountain, Washington. • March 15, 1975: Julie Cunningham disappears, Vail. • April 6, 1975: Denise Oliverson disappears, Grand Junction. • May 6, 1975: Lynette Culver disappears, Pocatello, Idaho. • June 28, 1975: Susan Curtis disappears, Provo. • August 16, 1975: arrested by Sgt. Bob Hayward in Granger, Utah. • August 19, 1975: Salt Lake County detectives call King County; Bundy is seventh on the computer list of twenty-five. • September 17, 1975: sells his Volkswagen; investigators later seize and search it. • October 2, 1975: picked out of a lineup by DaRonch and two other women. • February 23 to March 1, 1976: bench trial in Salt Lake City; convicted of aggravated kidnapping; sentenced to one to fifteen years. • October 21, 1976: charged in Colorado with Caryn Campbell’s murder. • June 7, 1977: escapes from the Pitkin County Courthouse, Aspen; caught six days later. • December 30, 1977: escapes from the Garfield County Jail, Glenwood Springs. • January 8, 1978: arrives in Tallahassee; rents a room at The Oak. • January 15, 1978: Chi Omega attacks; Cheryl Thomas attacked on Dunwoody Street. • February 8, 1978: approaches Leslie Parmenter in Jacksonville; registers at the Holiday Inn in Lake City. • February 9, 1978: Kimberly Leach disappears, Lake City. • February 11, 1978: flees from an officer in Tallahassee. • February 15, 1978: arrested in Pensacola by Officer David Lee; gives his real name almost two days later. • April 7, 1978: Kimberly Leach’s body found. • July 1978: indicted for Kimberly Leach’s murder (July 21, according to the Florida Supreme Court) and for the Chi Omega crimes (July 28). • July 18, 1978: Clarence Anderson goes to police in Lake City (the federal appeals court gives July 28 in one passage). • May 1979: fires his public defender; a plea deal for life sentences collapses. • June 25, 1979: jury selection opens the Chi Omega trial in Miami, televised nationally. • July 24, 1979: convicted of the Chi Omega crimes at 9:31 p.m. • July 31, 1979: sentenced to death by Judge Edward Cowart. • November 9, 1979: Leach trial moved to Orange County. • January 7, 1980: Leach trial opens in Orlando. • February 7, 1980: convicted of kidnapping and murdering Kimberly Leach. • February 9, 1980: marries Carole Ann Boone in court during the penalty phase; jury recommends death. • February 12, 1980: sentenced to death by Judge Wallace Jopling. • 1983: The Only Living Witness published. • June 21, 1984: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Chi Omega convictions. • July 18, 1984: guards foil an apparent escape attempt, finding a loosened bar and hacksaw blades. • Autumn 1984: first death row meeting with Robert Keppel about the Green River case. • May 9, 1985: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Leach conviction and bars hypnotically refreshed testimony in future Florida trials. • March 1986: first death warrant expires after a U.S. Supreme Court stay. • May 30, 1986: Beverly Burr writes to him; he denies any part in her daughter’s disappearance. • July 2, 1986: stay granted about fifteen hours before a scheduled execution. • November 17, 1986: stay granted hours before a scheduled execution. • 1987: federal competency hearing in Orlando; Judge G. Kendall Sharp finds he was competent. • July 7, 1988: Eleventh Circuit affirms in Bundy v. Dugger. • January 17, 1989: Governor Bob Martinez signs the final death warrant. • January 22, 1989: interviewed by Utah detective Dennis Couch. • January 23, 1989: interview with James Dobson; final night with Bill Hagmaier; U.S. Supreme Court denies a stay, 5 to 4. • January 24, 1989: executed at Florida State Prison, Starke, 7:16 a.m. • January 28, 1989: search near Price, Utah, for Susan Curtis. • Spring 1989: search of Fairview Canyon, Utah, recovers a human kneecap. • 1997: Bundy’s Volkswagen offered for sale; victims’ families object. • 2002: William Cosden Jr. convicted of Katherine Devine’s murder. • 2011: Bundy’s full DNA profile developed from a preserved blood sample. • About 2015: the kneecap from Fairview Canyon identified as Debra Kent’s (announced March 2019). • July 31, 2019: memorial bench for Lynette Culver dedicated in Pocatello. • April 1, 2026: Utah County confirms by DNA that Bundy killed Laura Aime.
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.
"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.