Ted Bundy was convicted of three murders. On the evening before he died he went through his count with an FBI agent state by state and arrived at thirty. Investigators who spent years on him put the real figure higher and said it could not be established, and that is not an accident: in his last week he traded locations for time, and he ran out of time with the trading unfinished.
The three he was convicted of are Margaret Bowman, Lisa Levy and Kimberly Leach, all killed in Florida in the first six weeks of 1978, at the very end of it. For the four years before that, across five states, the evidence came from survivors, from skeletons found on hillsides, and in the end from his own account.
He was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vermont, to Louise Cowell, and grew up believing his mother was his sister and his grandparents his parents. He took the name Bundy when Louise married Johnnie Culpepper Bundy in 1951. He studied psychology at the University of Washington, worked on Republican campaigns, and took shifts on a Seattle crisis line beside Ann Rule, a former police officer who was writing true crime and who did not recognize what she was sitting next to. She published her book about him in 1980.
The first known attack was on January 4, 1974, in the University District of Seattle. Karen Sparks was eighteen. He got into her basement room while she slept, tore a rod from the bed frame, beat her with it and sexually assaulted her with it. She survived with permanent brain damage and lived for decades under the name Rule gave her in print, Joni Lenz. On February 1, Lynda Ann Healy, twenty-one, was beaten in her sleep and carried out of her own basement room a few streets away. Her jawbone was found more than a year later on Taylor Mountain, east of Seattle.
Through the spring the disappearances came almost monthly. Donna Gail Manson, nineteen, set out on March 12 to walk to a concert at Evergreen State College in Olympia and was never found; Bundy later said he had left her body on Taylor Mountain. Susan Rancourt, eighteen, vanished on April 17 after an evening advisers' meeting at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg. Roberta Kathleen Parks, twenty-two, disappeared from Oregon State University in Corvallis on May 6. Brenda Ball, twenty-two, was last seen on June 1 in the parking lot of the Flame Tavern in Burien, talking to a man with his arm in a sling. On June 11 Georgann Hawkins, eighteen, was taken from the alley behind her sorority house at the University of Washington. The skulls of Rancourt, Parks and Ball were found on Taylor Mountain in 1975, all fractured. Most of the women were white and slim, and wore their hair long and parted in the middle. Witnesses kept describing the same man: an arm in a sling or a leg in a cast, asking for help, introducing himself as Ted.
On July 14 he took Janice Ott, twenty-three, and Denise Naslund, nineteen, from Lake Sammamish State Park about four hours apart, in daylight, from a park holding a summer crowd. Ott was last seen leaving with a man who had asked her to help him put a sailboat on his car. Naslund walked toward the restrooms and did not come back. Witnesses that day gave police the name, a tan Volkswagen Beetle and the sling. Their remains were found that September on a hillside near Issaquah, along with bones Bundy later said were Georgann Hawkins's. That autumn his own girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer, called the police and gave them his name. It went into a file with thousands of others.
He moved to Salt Lake City for law school and the disappearances moved with him. Nancy Wilcox, sixteen, left her home in Holladay after an argument with her father on October 1 and was never found; Bundy said he buried her near Capitol Reef National Park. Melissa Smith, seventeen, the daughter of the Midvale police chief, vanished on October 18 walking home from a pizza parlor and was found nine days later in Summit Park, beaten with a crowbar. Laura Aime, seventeen, disappeared in Lehi on her way home from a Halloween party and was found by hikers in American Fork Canyon, beaten, strangled and sexually assaulted. On November 8 he approached Carol DaRonch, eighteen, at the Fashion Place mall in Murray, told her he was a police officer investigating a break-in of her car, and got her into the Volkswagen. He snapped both handcuffs onto the same wrist, and she fought free and out onto the road. That mistake is why there was ever a prosecution. The same evening Debra Kent, seventeen, walked out of a school play in Bountiful and was gone. A kneecap found in 1989 near Fairview, where Bundy said he had left her, was identified by DNA as hers in 2015.
In 1975 he killed in Colorado and Idaho. Caryn Campbell, twenty-three, a nurse on a ski holiday with her fiancé, disappeared from a hotel corridor in Snowmass Village on January 12 and was found on February 17 beside a dirt road, her skull fractured. Julie Cunningham, twenty-six, left her apartment in Vail for a tavern on March 15, and Denise Oliverson, twenty-four, was taken while cycling to her parents' house in Grand Junction on April 6. Lynette Culver, twelve, was abducted from Pocatello, Idaho, on May 6 as she left her junior high school for lunch. Susan Curtis, fifteen, disappeared from a youth conference at Brigham Young University on June 28 walking back to her dormitory to brush her teeth. None of those four has ever been found. Bundy said he had buried Cunningham near Rifle and Curtis near Price, and thrown Oliverson into the Colorado River and Culver into what investigators believe was the Snake.
On August 16, 1975, a Utah highway patrolman stopped him in Granger for failing to pull over and found handcuffs, a crowbar, an ice pick and a ski mask in the Volkswagen. DaRonch picked him out of a lineup. In March 1976 he was convicted of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to one to fifteen years. He was extradited to Colorado to face a murder charge over Caryn Campbell, and he escaped twice. On June 7, 1977, he jumped from a second-floor window of the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen during a recess in his own hearing and spent six days in the mountains before he was caught. On December 30 he cut through the ceiling of his cell in the Garfield County jail at Glenwood Springs, climbed out through a jailer's apartment and was gone for more than fifteen hours before anyone noticed. He reached Tallahassee in January 1978 and took a room under the name Chris Hagen.
In the early hours of January 15, 1978, he went into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University through a door with a broken lock. In about fifteen minutes he attacked four women as they slept. Margaret Bowman, twenty-one, and Lisa Levy, twenty, were beaten with a length of oak and strangled; Levy was bitten and sexually assaulted. Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler, both twenty-one, in the room they shared, were beaten and survived, Kleiner with a shattered jaw and her cheek torn open, Chandler with a fractured skull, a broken jaw and a crushed arm and fingers, because a housemate came home and her headlights swept the window. He left and broke into an apartment on Dunwoody Street eight blocks away and beat Cheryl Thomas, twenty-one, who survived with a fractured skull and jaw and was left permanently deaf in one ear.
On February 9 he took Kimberly Leach, twelve, from Lake City Junior High School; a witness saw a man lead her to a white van. Her body was found on April 7 in an abandoned hog shed near Suwannee River State Park, about forty miles away. He was stopped in Pensacola on February 15 in a stolen Volkswagen and gave the officer a false name.
The Chi Omega trial opened in Miami in June 1979 and was the first murder trial televised nationally in the United States. Bundy dismissed his court-appointed lawyers and ran much of his own defense, which is the part everyone remembers and was not the reason he lost. He lost on the bite mark on Lisa Levy's body, matched to his teeth by the forensic odontologist Richard Souviron, and on an eyewitness who had seen him leaving the house. The jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted first-degree murder and two counts of burglary. He was sentenced to death twice. Judge Edward Cowart told him he was a bright young man who would have made a good lawyer, that he would have liked to have had him practice in front of him, and that the court bore him no animosity but took no pleasure in the waste.
The Leach trial ran in Orlando in January and February 1980 and turned on fiber evidence connecting the van to the girl. He was convicted on all counts and given a third death sentence on February 10. During the penalty phase he proposed to Carole Ann Boone while she was on the witness stand, and because he was acting as his own counsel and the declaration was made before a court officer, it constituted a legal marriage under Florida law. Their daughter was born in 1982.
Then he spent nine years on death row talking, and the talking is the reason the number is what it is. Robert Ressler of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit found him evasive and manipulative and got little. Special Agent William Hagmaier did better, and so did Bob Keppel, the King County detective who had worked the Washington cases and who came back to hear him. Bundy also offered Keppel his reading of the then-unidentified Green River Killer, which Keppel used. In 1980 he told the journalist Hugh Aynesworth that for every murder that was publicized there could be one that was not. When FBI agents put a total of thirty-six to him, he told them to add one digit. In 1987 he told Keppel there were some murders he would never talk about.
In the final week he confessed to about thirty murders, gave locations, described returning to bodies and keeping heads, and asked for delays in order to give more. Florida refused. On the evening before the execution he went through the tally with Hagmaier: eleven in Washington, counting Roberta Parks, who was taken in Oregon, and three women he never identified; eight in Utah, three of them unidentified; three in Colorado; three in Florida; two unidentified in Oregon; two in Idaho, one unidentified; and one unidentified in California. He told the evangelical broadcaster James Dobson on the day before he died that pornography had started it, an explanation nobody who had worked the case accepted.
He was electrocuted at Florida State Prison at Starke at 7:06 on the morning of January 24, 1989. He was forty-two. A crowd outside the prison cheered. The Methodist minister who gave him last rites, Fred Lawrence, said afterward that he did not think even Bundy knew how many he had killed, or why.
The counting has never stopped. Twenty murders are treated as confirmed: the three in Florida and seventeen women from Lynda Healy in 1974 to Susan Curtis in 1975, eight of whom have never been found. Thirty is his own figure. Keppel, who had heard more of it from him than anyone, wrote that they both knew the total was much higher and later put it at at least fifty and perhaps seventy-five. One of his lawyers, John Henry Browne, has said Bundy told him he killed more than a hundred people and that the first was a boy he killed in his early teens. Neither claim has ever been matched to a case.
Five people are known to have survived him: Karen Sparks, Carol DaRonch, Kathy Kleiner, Karen Chandler and Cheryl Thomas. DaRonch got out of a car because a pair of handcuffs was not properly closed, and it is the only reason he was ever convicted of anything before Florida.