THE TWO PERSONALITIES OF TED BUNDY

Ted Bundy is without question the most fascinating and puzzling killer I have ever known. I have conducted lengthy studies on many homicide offenders and each was unique in some way. Keith Jesperson, the Happy Face Killer, was large and imposing in appearance, but he was friendly to the girls he picked up in his truck – until he killed them. Scott Johnson (pseudo name) was very intelligent and was on his way towards making a large amount of money in a publication of a tourist guide but killing his wife changed all of that.

Westley Dodd was a true psychopath who thought he could kidnap young boys and keep them as sex slaves. Arthur Bishop, an eagle scout who had gone on a religious mission for his church, embezzled money from a company he was working for to pay boys to let him take pictures of their genitals. After he killed his first victim he felt driven to kill others.

Each of these five killers confessed their guilt. Three have been executed, one hung himself in prison and one is serving a life sentence. There are many others who have also given me detailed accounts of their life stories and of their crimes. Many of the criminals I have worked with didn’t have an understanding of how it all happened. Arthur Bishop told me when I first met him on death row that he wanted to be executed for killing five boys. The only thing he asked was that I help him understand how he had become a killer.

Ted Bundy was different from most others I have known. He seemingly had everything going for him. He had a girlfriend who wanted to marry him and settle down to a job and family; she demonstrated her commitment to him by supporting him through college. He had another girlfriend who came from a wealthy and influential family. She wanted to marry him. They officially got engaged and she returned home and announced to her family that they would be getting married. He was a rising star in the political arena. He was going to law school and many believed that he was destined for a prosperous career in the future. With all of this going for him, it’s difficult to understand why he began killing only a few of days after the fiancée he was engaged to flew back to California.

At first those who knew Ted couldn’t believe that he could have killed anyone in the northwest. They believed he could not be guilty of the attempted abduction of Carol DaRonch. They thought that the detectives in Salt Lake had made a gross mistake. After all, he was a student in the prestigious University of Utah Law School.

However, there were others who had seen the darker side of Ted Bundy. He had chocked his girlfriend while having sex. He pushed another woman under water to the point that she thought he was trying to drown her and then he had aggressive sex with her which to her seemed like he was raping her.

Ted had violent sexual fantasies which he had been feeding for years. This was the hidden side of him, the part of him he wouldn’t allow others to see.

The part he wouldn’t allow himself to see.

Over time, the fantasies which he had indulged in for emotional relief for so many years begin to control him.

An inmate of my acquaintance who is in prison for homicide recently wrote about this process:

“Whereas my ‘alternate personality’ may well have acted without conscience while I allowed it to brutalize others in my imagination, I still had a functioning conscience that dissuaded and kept me from considering the acting out of any real life violence. Unfortunately, neither Bundy nor I could continue yielding our minds over to such an ‘alternate personality’ without eventually becoming one with its violent persona.”

When Ted Bundy was in prison in Florida, he spoke to Dr. Dorothy Lewis about the struggle going on within him when he was committing his homicides. He said this Entity became more and more powerful until he couldn’t fight it any longer. It finally took over control of his life and he couldn’t stop it.

Ted was not a Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly called a Multiple Personality Disorder). However, he did create an alternate part of himself which he fed through his fantasies until his fantasies became reality.

In my book, I’M NOT GUILTY. The Development of the Violent Mind: The Case of Ted Bundy I explain the process by which a normal child can become an iconic serial killer. If we can understand how this process occurred with Ted Bundy, can we use this knowledge to prevent others from following the same path?