Ted Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vermont, to Louise Cowell. He was raised in Philadelphia and then Tacoma, Washington, and for years believed his mother was his sister and his grandparents his parents. He took the name Bundy after Louise married Johnnie Culpepper Bundy in 1951. He held his grades, studied psychology at the University of Washington, worked Republican campaigns, and volunteered on a Seattle crisis line beside the writer Ann Rule, who would later publish The Stranger Beside Me about the colleague she had not recognised.
His first known attack came on January 4, 1974, in the University District of Seattle. He entered the basement bedroom of eighteen-year-old Karen Sparks, beat her with a rod torn from her bed frame and assaulted her with it. She survived with permanent brain injury and lived for decades under the pseudonym Joni Lenz, given to her in Ann Rule's book. Four weeks later, on the night of January 31, twenty-one-year-old Lynda Ann Healy was taken from her own basement room and never seen alive again.
Through 1974 young women disappeared across Washington and Oregon in a pattern that grew unmistakable. Most were white, slim, and wore long hair parted in the middle. Witnesses described a man with his arm in a sling or a leg in a cast, asking for help loading a sailboat onto a tan Volkswagen Beetle, who introduced himself as Ted. On July 14, Janice Ott and Denise Naslund vanished hours apart from Lake Sammamish State Park in front of a summer crowd. Bundy's own girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer, gave his name to police that autumn. The tip sat in a file of thousands.
He moved to Utah for law school and the disappearances moved with him. Melissa Smith was taken in Midvale in October and Laura Aime on Halloween. On November 8, 1974, he approached Carol DaRonch in a Murray shopping centre posing as a police officer, failed to secure the handcuffs he put on her, and lost her when she fought free onto the road. Debby Kent disappeared from a school car park in Bountiful the same evening. Colorado followed in 1975. He was stopped in Granger, Utah, on August 16, 1975, for failing to pull over; the Volkswagen held handcuffs, a crowbar, an ice pick and a ski mask. DaRonch picked him out of a line-up, and in March 1976 he was convicted of aggravated kidnapping.
Extradited to Colorado on a murder charge, he escaped twice. On June 7, 1977, he jumped from a second-storey window of the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen and spent six days on the mountain before being recaptured. On December 30 he cut his way through the ceiling of the Garfield County jail in Glenwood Springs and was gone for more than a day before anyone noticed. He reached Tallahassee, Florida, in January 1978 under the name Chris Hagen.
In the early hours of January 15, 1978, he entered the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University through a door with a broken lock. He killed Margaret Bowman, twenty-one, and Lisa Levy, twenty, beating them with a length of oak and biting Levy. He then attacked Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler in the room they shared. Both women survived, saved when headlights swept the window as a housemate returned. Bundy left and broke into a flat on Dunwoody Street eight blocks away, where he beat Cheryl Thomas, who also survived. On February 9 he abducted twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach from her school in Lake City. He was arrested in Pensacola on February 15, driving a stolen Volkswagen.
He was tried in Miami in the summer of 1979 for the Chi Omega murders, dismissed his court-appointed lawyers and conducted much of his own defence. The evidence that convicted him was the bite mark on Lisa Levy's body, matched to his teeth by forensic odontologist Dr Richard Souviron, and the eyewitness who had seen him leaving the house. He was found guilty in late July and sentenced to death. Judge Edward Cowart told him from the bench that he was a bright young man who would have made a good lawyer, and that the court took no pleasure in the waste of him. A second trial in January 1980, for Kimberly Leach, turned on fibre evidence. During its penalty phase Bundy proposed to defence witness Carole Ann Boone in open court and the exchange of vows made the marriage legal under Florida law. Their daughter was born in 1982.
On death row he talked. FBI profiler Robert Ressler found him manipulative and evasive, but Special Agent William Hagmaier and Washington detective Bob Keppel drew out confessions and locations, and Bundy offered his reading of the then-unidentified Green River Killer. In the days before his execution he admitted thirty murders across six states, described keeping heads as trophies and returning to bodies, and blamed pornography for the beginning of it. Keppel and Ann Rule both concluded the true count was higher and unknowable. He was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke at 7:06 a.m. on January 24, 1989.