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| "I plead not guilty, right now!" (Bundy ridicules police officers in front of the press) |
* 1946-11-24
+ 1989-01-24 (executed)
Ted Bundy is considered one of the most dangerous and well-known serial killers of all time. He killed at least 30 women in several states in the USA. He committed his first known murders in 1973 and his first series of murders in 1974. However, it is suspected that he started killing several years earlier. Estimates often vary between 1969 and 1972. However, some investigators believe that he murdered an eight-year-old girl in 1961 when he was 14. There is also a theory that he visited the home where he was born immediately after finishing school in 1965 and killed women in the neighborhood.
Ted Bundy was born on November 24, 1946 as Theodore Robert Cowell. He grew up in middle-class but problematic circumstances in the post-war period. Bundy's mother Louise Cowell became pregnant out of wedlock in 1946, which was a problem at the time. The father is unknown. She then gave birth to her son in a home for "unwed mothers". Louise Bundy comes from a conservative Christian and violent home.
Ted Bundy's father is unknown. There are several theories, from a former soldier to her own father.
Louise Cowell later married army cook John Culpepper Bundy. He was considered to be moderately educated and moody, but was also described by some as a buddy type.
Ted Bundy was raised to believe that his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his older sister. Her mother tried to move out of the house as quickly as possible. Ted Bundy came to Tacoma as a small child. He initially settled in well academically and socially, but was considered impulsive from an early age. As a child, Ted Bundy felt very small (which later changed) and unathletic. This was also because his mother placed more value on academic achievements than on athletic achievements. She herself had not been able to go to college despite having top grades.
His school life only became really problematic when he reached puberty and moved on to senior high school. Bundy increasingly withdrew into himself and became shy. To counterbalance this, however, he tried to act like an intellectual and shine in the classroom.
Ted Bundy was linguistically intelligent, but not necessarily scientifically intelligent. He was also unstable. At the same time, he had social problems, but to counteract them he studied the behavior of his peers. This is how he developed into a show-off. He dressed elegantly and used politics, among other things, to distinguish himself.
After finishing school, he initially wanted to study politics with a focus on East Asia, but soon lost his way. A failed relationship with a student from a high family was also responsible for this. Ted Bundy sought revenge, but at the same time wanted to research his own past and looked for the birth certificate. This revealed the whole truth about his past.
Ted Bundy now enrolled in psychology and became increasingly ambitious. During an internship at a telephone counseling service, he met the aspiring true crime writer Ann Rule, who did not yet know - and could not imagine - that Bundy would one day become her most important reporting case. The two got along well. Ted Bundy did his job well and prevented several suicidal people from committing suicide.
Critics, however, see this as just his negative character trait of wanting to be the ruler over life and death.
While studying psychology, Bundy was also interested in sexual crimes and at the same time in the work of the police. It is assumed that this was where he practiced the game with his victims and with the security authorities. We are talking about a phase in the early 1970s.
After successfully completing his psychology degree, Bundy realized that psychology alone would not advance his career and wanted to study law, but had problems finding a place. Bundy was gifted in language, but had difficulty with rigorous analysis, was too unstable, and spent more and more time on his series of murders. Eventually, he dropped out of law school.
The series of murders, the beginnings of which remain a mystery to this day, escalated in 1974 into real killing sprees, in which he killed at least one or two women per month. Ted Bundy targeted women in their early 20s from the white middle class, but sometimes also chose girls as victims. From then on, over the next few years, he is known to have killed over 30 women. The exact number is still unknown. Hints from Bundy himself and a lawyer point to over 100 female victims, possibly also one male. Universities were a frequent place of residence and crime scene. He was later nicknamed the "Campus Killer". But Bundy also killed in many other places.
Ted Bundy kept changing states. The police were in the dark for a long time. At that time, investigators were only just beginning to network with the help of computers and forensic science was not yet so advanced (for example, genetic fingerprinting was only invented in the 1980s). The media was also not as omnipresent as it is today.
Bundy's modus operandi was different, but there were some similarities in the way he carried out the crime. He either attacked the women directly or lured them with tricks. Sometimes he also tried to gain access to their apartment under a pretext. Then he locked the door and could operate undisturbed.
When luring his victims, he often wore one arm in a sling. When he didn't attack or abduct his victims directly, he lured them into his VW Beetle. The passenger seat was removed and Bundy had attached a sling to the fender.
Over time, however, Bundy made some mistakes in carrying out his crimes. He often kidnapped the victims in his VW Beetle, which was seen several times, and his facial camouflage was often only weak. For example, he changed his hairstyle or wore a beard. Sometimes he even gave his first name on purpose. Investigators later interpreted this as overestimating himself, possibly manic euphoria. It is possible that slipping into different roles (conformist, nonconformist, intellectual, rich, southerner with a gold chain) was not just a camouflage for him, but part of his search for identity.
His then partner Liz Kloepfer also became suspicious about a few things and informed the police. For example, he resembled phantom images of the perpetrator and his sexual desire decreased during the series of murders. However, she did not really believe that Ted was involved in the crime and stayed with him for a relatively long time. Bundy also made the mistake of playing cat and mouse with the investigators too much. He once (presumably) even called the police himself and gave clues about the perpetrator.
One of Ted Bundy's major mistakes was the failed kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. Bundy posed as an undercover police detective and lured him into his VW Beetle. When he tried to handcuff her, she resisted and he accidentally grabbed the same arm twice. After an argument in the car, she managed to escape and was picked up by another car. At first she even had difficulty identifying Bundy, but when confronted later, she identified him by his face, his cold eyes and his gait.
At the same time, Bundy was once caught by a police officer in a VW Beetle with the headlights dimmed. The police officer ordered him to open his trunk and discovered burglary/murder tools. Legally, Bundy may not have had to open his trunk at all.
Nevertheless, it took the police a long time to piece together the clues across state borders. This wasted precious time and allowed Bundy to carry on killing. In the end, however, chance conversations between police officers who were dealing with seemingly different cases brought about a turning point.
After Ted Bundy first came under suspicion in Utah in 1975, he was arrested there in 1976 and taken to the state prison there. His trial began in Colorado in January 1977. Bundy wanted to defend himself, although his knowledge of the law was still rudimentary. The authorities initially linked some of the murders to him. However, there were indications that the court might impose the death penalty. During a visit to the law library on July 7, 1977, he managed to escape by jumping out of a library window. Bundy hit the ground hard after several meters. However, Bundy had not planned his escape route well and got lost in the confusing and, despite the summer, cold area. He also ran out of food supplies and became depressed again shortly after jumping to freedom (according to a later interview with Michaud/Aynesworth). Bundy was arrested again.
The trial then continued and Bundy was sent to the Glenwood Springs prison. But Bundy was once again thinking about escaping and this time he was better prepared: he lost weight for a while and then called in sick. In his bed he made a replica of his body out of fabric so that his absence would not be noticed so quickly. He then escaped through an opening in the roof that he had cleared beforehand, through the apartment of one of his guards. Many prison guards were at a party at the time. Bundy's disappearance was not noticed until very late.
In the meantime, Ted Bundy - as far as his escape could be reconstructed - had fled to Chicago airport and from there took a plane to Florida. This time he didn't want to freeze on the run. What he overlooked, however, was the fact that Florida had the death penalty. But that didn't play a role until later. Ted Bundy rented an apartment in Florida. He was helped by stolen money and money donated by supporters of the Republican Party, who definitely believed him to be innocent.
Ted Bundy seemed to be interested in university courses again and to approach female students in bars. Then he broke into the dormitory of the female student fraternity Chi-Omega at night. It is assumed that he chose his victims specifically. He may have been turned down when he tried to approach them in a bar. Ted Bundy took a wrapped oak club with him and acted with incredible brutality. He killed two sisters of the fraternity and seriously injured others. He went through several dormitories. Bundy made the mistake of performing sexual acts on his female victims and biting one student on the buttocks. In addition, he was recognized by a student while fleeing. Investigators later stated that when he entered the dormitories it looked as if sharks had been rampaging there.
Bundy was initially able to escape in several stolen cars and wandered around Florida. But his urge to kill soon returned: near Lake City, he kidnapped a 12-year-old schoolgirl from school under false pretenses, abducted her, raped her and murdered her in the wilderness. These are the three known murders from Florida. Others have not been proven, but are conceivable.
However, the police did notice Ted Bundy because he was driving too fast in his minivan. He tried to escape, but was eventually caught by the police and arrested. At first, the police didn't know what fish they had on the hook, because Bundy liked to give false identities. In the end, however, the truth came out and Ted Bundy found himself in court again.
This time the charges were more serious, the trial was held in Florida, a state with the death penalty, and the trial became a huge media event. The narcissistic Bundy seemed to see the whole thing as a big ego show and liked to interfere in his defense strategy. But this made his situation more difficult.
Incriminating factors included Bundy's habit of having the crime described to him in great detail, the bite wound on the buttocks of one of the victims and a witness who recognized him. This caused Bundy's long-time girlfriend Liz Kloepfer to finally break up with him. However, a new companion, Carol Ann Boone, was to stick with him for many years. In a second trial, in which he was sentenced to death again for the murder of the 12-year-old girl, he even married Carol Ann Boone in court.
The first books about the case were written during the trial. Feature films and TV documentaries were to follow later. Famous books include "The Phantom Prince" by his long-time friend Liz Kloepfer, but also "The Stranger Beside Me" by crime reporter Ann Rule, with whom Bundy worked in the telephone counseling service in the early 1970s. Particularly famous were also "The Only Living Witness" and "Ted Bundy. Conversations with a Killer" by the author duo Stephen Michaud/Hugh Aynesworth. Bundy had conducted several telephone interviews with them during the trials against him. In them he speaks in the third person about a possible perpetrator, although it is actually clear who he is referring to. Bundy provides some deep insights into the psyche of a serial killer, but also verifiably lies in some places, sometimes digresses into the vague and reveals interesting details about the horrors of his childhood in a relatively short but revealing passage.
In the following period, Ted Bundy's legal team was primarily concerned with getting their client off death row and converting his sentence into a long prison sentence. The delaying tactic worked for a while, but it didn't work in the long run. In 1984, files were found in Ted Bundy's cell and confiscated. In 1986, an execution was only postponed twice with great difficulty, and once the postponement came almost at the last minute.The new execution date was to be January 24, 1989. Bundy's lawyers again tried with all their might to get a postponement, but this time the governor of Florida was well prepared for the defense with legal advisors and psychologists. The lawyers' appeal failed by a narrow margin. Bundy himself had probably hoped to get out of trouble until the very end and now thought that by confessing to his crimes step by step he could still get a postponement of his execution. The lawyers, for their part, were more skeptical. The governor, however, refused to accept this offer, which he perceived as blackmail. In the last few days before the execution, Bundy confessed to many more murders and investigators from many states lined up outside the prison to get more information. Bundy has been proven to have committed around 30 murders. However, there are many indications that the number is much higher. It also remained unclear until the end whether he had committed murders in California and the northeastern states. He is said to have made at least one trip in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There are indications that murders were also likely here.
However, Bundy was tired and time was running out. Despite this, he confessed to several murders until shortly before the execution date. In a famous interview on the eve of the execution with the conservative James C. Dobson, he blamed his extensive consumption of pornography for his disposition. Critics are skeptical about this. They believe that Bundy either wanted to accommodate Dobson with his account or simply wanted to make himself important one last time with a provocative thesis.
On January 24, Ted Bundy was executed. During this highly publicized event, there was a festival atmosphere. There was great cheering, especially when Bundy's coffin was loaded into a white prison van. His ashes were scattered over Taylor Mountain, where he had previously hidden many of his victims.
Nevertheless, the literature about Ted Bundy did not let up: "Defending the Devil" by his late lawyer Polly Nelson is one example. Attacks were carried out against some of the places where Bundy stayed. At the same time, unexplained deaths were investigated and examined for possible connections to Ted Bundy. A blood sample with Bundy's DNA was also found many years after his death. In the 1970s, DNA samples did not play a role. There were only general hair analyses or blood group analyses, for example.
In May 2012, Ted Bundy's former lawyer, John Henry Browne, announced a new and supposedly groundbreaking book about Ted Bundy, which was published in 2016. Browne, who was also heavily involved in defending a US Afghanistan veteran, claimed in a preliminary interview that Ted Bundy killed far more than 30 people, namely over 100 women and one man (his first victim). He also stated that Ted Bundy had done very detailed research on him and knew that one of his girlfriends had been murdered. But it is not clear whether Bundy had anything to do with it.
Browne later clarified his statements in various interviews. Ted Bundy's first victim was supposedly a boy with whom he was playing in the woods. Ted Bundy was a Boy Scout as a schoolboy and was considered to be close to nature.
SOURCES/LITERATURE:
Wikipedia
Michaud, Stephen G./Hugh Aynesworth: Ted Bundy. Conversations with a Killer; New York 2000
Nelson, Polly: Defending the devil; My story as Ted Bundy's last lawyer; New York 1994
Rule, Ann: The Stranger Beside Me; 2008
John Henry Browne: The Devil’s Defender: My Odyssey Through American Criminal Justice from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar Massacre; Chicago Review Press City, 2016
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