Biography

Youth

Bundy was born on November 24, 1946, at the Elizabeth Lund Home For Unwed Mothers, where his mother lived, in Burlington, Vermont. His mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell, was a young department store clerk. His father's identity has never been authoritatively established. For the first nine years of his life, Bundy and his mother lived in Philadelphia with his maternal grandfather who, according to some family members, was mentally unstable and prone to violence. To avoid the stigma of an illegitimate pregnancy, many neighbors and friends were told that Eleanor's parents had adopted Bundy, and that he was actually Eleanor's younger brother. According to sources, Bundy was led to believe that his mother was actually his older sister throughout most of his childhood and adolescence.

Much speculation has been placed on Bundy's early formative years, though little is definitively known. However, in a 1987 court competency hearing, a psychologist who had interviewed Bundy related an incident involving his Aunt Julia in which she woke from a nap to find that her body was surrounded by knives, which someone had placed around her while she slept. When Julia looked up, she noticed her nephew, Ted Bundy, standing at the foot of her bed and smiling. Bundy was three years old at the time.

Bundy and his mother eventually moved to Tacoma, Washington, where Eleanor's uncle Jack taught music at the University of Puget Sound. Not long thereafter, she married Johnny Culpepper Bundy, a hospital cook from Pasquotank County, North Carolina, whom she met at a church social function.

Bundy was a good student at Woodrow Wilson High School, and was active in the local Methodist Church and the Boy Scouts. However, as he told Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, authors of The Only Living Witness, he had no natural sense of how to get along with other people. "I didn't know what made people want to be friends. I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interactions." Bundy remained shy and introverted throughout most of his high school and early college years.

Bundy's criminal activities began at an early age, before he was even out of high school. He was a compulsive thief, a shoplifter, and on his way to becoming an amateur con artist. He was arrested twice as a juvenile, though these records were later expunged.

Bundy described the part of himself that, from a very young age, was fascinated by images of sex and violence as "the entity," and kept it very well hidden. However, by the time Bundy was talking about "other selves" he was trying to appeal his death sentence. Later, friends and acquaintances would remember a handsome, articulate young man. Bundy worked and campaigned for the Washington State Republican Party as an adult. He also worked as a volunteer at a Seattle suicide crisis center, alongside fledgling crime reporter Ann Rule. Ironically, at the time Rule wrote articles on the "Ted" murders that, unbeknownst to her, her young friend was committing. (Rule would go on to write a biography of Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me.)

Bundy had one serious relationship with a college freshman whom Rule referred to by the pseudonym "Stephanie Brooks." She ended the relationship, fed up with what she described as Bundy's immaturity and lack of ambition, and they separated for a period of roughly two years. He eventually came back into her life with a new look and attitude as a serious, dedicated professional man who had been accepted to law school; he courted her once more and then proposed, an offer she accepted. Two days later, Bundy unceremoniously dumped her by ceasing to return her phone calls. He would later dismiss the proposal and break-up as part of a challenge he undertook, saying "I just wanted to prove to myself that I could have her." It was shortly after this final breakup that Bundy began a homicidal rampage lasting three years. In her book, Rule notes that most of Bundy's victims had long straight hair parted in the middle just like Brooks, and speculates that Bundy's teeming resentment towards his first girlfriend was a motivating factor in his string of murders.

First murders

Among the still unanswered questions regarding Ted Bundy is when he began to kill. Many Bundy experts, including Rule and former King County detective Robert D. Keppel, believe Bundy may have started killing as far back as his early teens: an eight-year-old girl from Tacoma, Ann Marie Burr, vanished from her home in Bundy's neighborhood in 1961, when Bundy was 14. However, Bundy denied killing Burr, even after confessing to many other murders. His earliest confirmed murders were committed in 1974, when he was 27.

Shortly after midnight on January 4, 1974, Bundy entered the basement bedroom of an 18-year-old student at the University of Washington, Joni Lenz, and bludgeoned her with a metal rod from her bedframe while she slept. Bundy also sexually assaulted Lenz with a speculum (a gynecological tool). Lenz was found the next morning in a coma, with the speculum rammed deep into her vagina, and lying in a pool of her own blood. She survived the attack and had no memory of it, but suffered permanent brain damage.

Bundy's next victim was Lynda Ann Healy, a senior at the University of Washington and roommate of a friend of Bundy's. On January 31, 1974, Bundy broke into Healy's basement room, knocked her unconscious, dressed her in jeans and a shirt, wrapped her in a bed sheet, and carried her away. A year would pass before her decapitated remains were found in the mountains east of Seattle.

On March 12, 1974, Bundy kidnapped and murdered nineteen-year old Evergreen State University student Donna Gail Manson on her way to a jazz concert on campus.

Bundy's next victim was Georgeann Hawkins, a student at the University of Washington and a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, an on-campus sorority. In the early morning hours of June 11, 1974, she walked from her boyfriend's dormitory residence to her sorority house, a distance of approximately 90 feet. She was last seen by one of her boyfriend's fraternity members approximately halfway down the alley that separated the two buildings. A campus housemother reported hearing a scream around the time Hawkins left her boyfriend's room, though she initially believed it was due to students playing a joke and went back to sleep. Hawkins was never seen again.

Bundy confessed to Hawkins's murder shortly before his 1989 execution, stating that he was waiting in a parking lot behind Hawkins's sorority house, using crutches and pretending to have trouble carrying his briefcase to his car. Hawkins agreed to assist him, and he walked her to his waiting Volkswagen Beetle where he had laid a crowbar by the tire. When they approached the vehicle, Bundy hit Hawkins over her head, knocking her unconscious. He then handcuffed her, pulled her into his vehicle, and sped away. Bundy said that Hawkins awoke during a drive through the mountains and began talking to Bundy. During his confession to King County Detective Robert Keppel, Bundy stated that he thought it was strange some of the things his victims said to him prior to him murdering them. Bundy stated that Hawkins awoke and told him that she thought Bundy had come to help tutor her for a Spanish test she had to take the next day. He then knocked her unconscious again before strangling her to death with a piece of cord just as the sun was coming up. After the murder, Bundy said he panicked and began throwing out evidence from his car as he was driving away, including the briefcase, handcuffs, crowbar, and crutches. Regarding his decision to throw these items away, Bundy said, "I'd get mad at myself a few weeks later because I'd have to go out and buy another pair. I mean, it's not comical, but that's what would happen." Bundy claimed that one of Hawkins's bones had been discovered on September 6, 1974, approximately two miles from Lake Sammamish State Park in Washington, though her remains have never been identified.

In the first half of 1974, Bundy stalked and killed at least eight young women in Washington State. Bundy's killing spree culminated on July 14 with the abduction, in broad daylight, of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish State Park near Seattle. Five different women would testify about that day and about a man wearing a white tennis outfit and with his arm in a sling who called himself "Ted." The witnesses said the man had approached each of them asking for help unloading a sailboat from his car. One went with Bundy as far as his Volkswagen, where there was no sailboat, before refusing to accompany him further. Two more witnesses testified to seeing the man approach Janice Ott with the story about the sailboat, and to seeing Ott walk away from the beach in his company—the last time she was ever seen alive.

From the description of the individual described by witnesses at Lake Sammamish, King County detectives were able to get a description both of the suspect and his brown Volkswagen Beetle. Both Ted's girlfriend, Liz Kendall (a pseudonym) and Ann Rule reported him as a possible suspect, but the King County police, deluged with hundreds of tips, did not have any reason to pick out the unassuming Bundy from the long list of leads to be investigated.

The remains of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund were discovered months later at a site near the park. Additionally, an extra thigh femur bone and vertebra were found at the site, but police did not know to whom they belonged, though evidence would later suggest they belonged to Georgeann Hawkins.

That autumn, Bundy moved to Utah to attend law school in Salt Lake City, where he resumed killing in October. Nancy Wilcox disappeared on October 2. On October 18, Bundy murdered Melissa Smith, the 17-year-old daughter of Midvale police chief Louis Smith. Bundy raped, sodomized, and strangled Smith. Her body was found nine days later.

Next was Laura Aime, also 17, who disappeared when she left a Halloween party in Lehi, Utah on October 31, 1974. Her remains were found nearly a month later, by hikers on Thanksgiving Day, on the banks of a river in the American Fork Canyon. She was found naked, beaten beyond recognition, sodomized, and strangled with her own sock.

Further murders, first trial, and Bundy's escape





In Murray, Utah, on November 8, 1974, Carol DaRonch narrowly escaped with her life. Claiming to be Officer Roseland of the Murray Police Department, Bundy lured DaRonch into his car where he then attempted to slap a pair of handcuffs on her. Fortunately for DaRonch, he only got one wrist. She wrenched her door open with the other hand, rolled out of the car onto the highway and escaped with contusions to the head given to her via a blunt instrument that Bundy had taped underneath the car seat.

Frustrated in his attempt to kill DaRonch, Bundy snatched Debbie Kent, who was attending a school play in Bountiful, Utah, mere hours later. Kent, 17, disappeared after leaving the school play. She had left early and alone to pick her brother up, but her car never left the parking lot. Residents nearby reported hearing screams from the area of the lot, and a handcuff key that fit the cuffs left on DaRonch's wrist was later found on the ground nearby. Bundy had been clearly seen lurking in the back of the auditorium where the play was held and had boldly appeared backstage, confronting a drama teacher, Raelynn Shepard, with the demand that she accompany him to the parking lot with him to allegedly identify a vehicle—the same ruse Bundy had tried earlier in the day with DaRonch. Kent's body has never been found.

In 1975, while still attending law school at the University of Utah, Bundy shifted his crimes to Colorado. Caryn Campbell disappeared from the Wildwood Inn at Snowmass, Colorado, on January 12 where she had been vacationing with her husband. Her body was found on February 17. Julie Cunningham disappeared on March 15, and Denise Oliverson on April 6. Lynette Culver went missing in Pocatello, Idaho on May 6. Back in Utah, Susan Curtis vanished on June 28. The bodies of Cunningham and Oliverson have never been recovered.

Bundy was arrested on August 16, 1975, in Salt Lake City, for failure to stop for a police officer. A search of his car revealed a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs, trash bags, and other items that were thought by the police to be burglary tools. Bundy was arrested for this charge on 21 August. Utah police connected Bundy and his Volkswagen with the DaRonch kidnapping and with the murdered and missing women in Utah and Colorado. Following a week-long trial, Bundy was convicted of DaRonch's kidnapping on March 1, 1976. He was sentenced to 15 years in Utah State Prison. Colorado authorities, however, were pursuing their murder cases.

On June 7, 1977, in preparation for a hearing in the Caryn Campbell murder trial, Bundy was transported to the Pitkin County courthouse. During a court recess, he was allowed to visit the courthouse's law library. Bundy then jumped out of the building from a second-story window and escaped. The two-story fall injured Bundy's ankle, which caused him to remain in the area, and he was recaptured a week later. Back in jail awaiting the start of his trial, Bundy escaped again. He somehow acquired a hacksaw and, over time, sawed a square hole in the ceiling of his cell in the Glenwood Springs, Colorado, lockup. On the night of December 30, 1977, Bundy climbed out of the hole, managed to walk right out of the jail's front door (the jailer was out for the evening) and reach the main hallway. Bundy stole a car in the parking lot and drove off.

Bundy's final rampage — Florida

With around $510 in cash given to him by his friends during jail visits, Bundy bought a one-way plane ticket and flew TWA from Denver to Chicago the night he escaped. He then caught an Amtrak train to Ann Arbor, Michigan and stole a car that he abandoned in Atlanta before boarding a bus for Tallahassee, Florida. There, he rented a room at a boarding house under the alias of "Chris Hagen" and FSU graduate "Ken Misner", and committed numerous petty crimes including shoplifting, purse snatching, and auto theft, though he later professed that he had been determined to not so much as jaywalk while on the lam from prison. Despite his attempts to stop himself, Bundy was only in Tallahassee for six days when in the early hours of Super Bowl Sunday on January 15, 1978, he bludgeoned to death two sleeping women, Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, and seriously wounded Karen Chandler and Kathry Kleiner inside their Florida State University Chi Omega sorority house. He then clubbed and severely injured another young woman, Cheryl Thomas, in her home a few blocks away.

Levy and Bowman had been bludgeoned and strangled. Levy's right collarbone had been broken by a tremendous blow. There was a double bite mark on her left buttock where her killer had torn at her with his teeth, leaving four distinct sets of marks where his teeth had sunk in. (This bite mark would be pivotal evidence against Bundy during his 1979 trial.) Bowman had been struck repeatedly on the right side of her head so viciously that broken pieces of her skull were driven into her brain. The force dealt to Bowman's skull was so tremendous that her brain had been slammed against the left side of her skull when she was struck with the oak club on the right. A Hanes "Alive" pantyhose ligature cut from Bowman's neck had been buried so deep that it could be hardly seen in the flesh. Neither girl had any damage to their hands or nails, indicating that they had not been able to defend themselves in any way.

On February 9, 1978, Bundy traveled to Lake City, Florida. While there, he abducted, raped and murdered 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, throwing her body under a small shed. She would be his final victim. Shortly after 1 a.m. on February 15, Bundy was stopped by Pensacola police officer David Lee. When the officer called in a check of Bundy's license plate, the orange VW he was driving came up as stolen. Bundy then scuffled with the officer before he was finally subdued. On the way to the jail, Officer Lee said that Bundy had told him that he wished that Lee had just killed him. Lee said he did not know why Bundy, who was using a stolen identity, was so upset because he was only being charged with possession of a stolen vehicle. Before long, Bundy was identified and taken to Miami to stand trial for the FSU murders.

Conviction and execution





Bundy's trial for the Chi Omega murders was held from June 25 to July 31, 1979. Despite his five court-appointed defense lawyers, Bundy represented himself as his own legal counsel, even cross-examining witnesses. He was convicted on all counts. Judge Edward Cowart said, when sentencing Bundy to death:

"It is ordered that you be put to death by a current of electricity, that current be passed through your body until you are dead. Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself, please. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity as I've experienced in this courtroom. You're an intelligent young man. You'd have made a good lawyer, and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Once again, take care of yourself."

After the Chi Omega trial, Bundy was tried for the Kimberly Leach murder in 1980. He was again convicted on all counts and sentenced to death. During his trial for the Kimberly Leach murder, while Bundy was acting as his own attorney, he married former coworker Carole Ann Boone in the courtroom as the trial was being conducted. During his incarceration, Bundy received about two hundred fan letters each day from female admirers.

In October 1982, Boone gave birth to a girl. Eventually, however, Boone moved away, divorced Bundy, and changed her and her daughter's last name. Both of their whereabouts are today unknown.

In the years Bundy was on death row (at Florida State Prison), he was often visited by Special Agent William Hagmaier of the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit. Bundy would come to confide in Hagmaier, going so far as to call him his best friend. Eventually, Bundy confessed to Hagmaier many details of the murders that had until then been unknown or unconfirmed.

In 1984, the very manipulative Bundy, likely hoping for some leverage in delaying his death sentence, contacted former King County homicide detective Robert D. Keppel and offered to assist in the ongoing search for the Green River Killer by providing his own insights and analysis. Keppel and Green River Task Force detective Dave Reichert traveled to Florida's death row to interview Bundy. Both detectives later stated that these interviews were of little actual help in the Green River investigation; they provided far greater insight into Bundy's own mind, and were primarily pursued in the hope of learning the details of unsolved murders that Bundy was suspected of committing but had never been charged with, let alone tried or convicted.

Bundy contacted Keppel again in 1988. With his appeals exhausted and execution imminent, Bundy confessed to eight official unsolved murders in Washington State, for which he was the prime suspect. Bundy told Keppel that there were actually five bodies left on Taylor Mountain, and not four as they had originally thought. Bundy said that the fifth body was that of Donna Manson, the Evergreen State University student missing since 1974. Bundy also admitted that the extra femur bone and vertabrae discovered beside the road two miles from Lake Sammamish State Park was all that was left of Georgeann Hawkins. After the interview, Keppel reported that he had been shocked in speaking with Bundy, and that he was the kind of man who was "born to kill". Keppel stated:

"He described the Issaquah crime scene (where Janice Ott, Denise Naslund, and Georgeann Hawkins had been left) and it was almost like he was just there. Like he was seeing everything. He was infatuated with the idea because he spent so much time there. He is just totally consumed with murder all the time."

Bundy had hoped that he could manipulate the revelations and partial confessions into another stay of execution or possibly commutation to life imprisonment. At one point, a legal advocate working for Bundy, Linda Barker, had asked many of the families of the victims to fax letters to the Florida governor and ask mercy for Bundy in order to find out where the remains of their loved ones were. To a person, all the families refused. Keppel and others reported that Bundy gave scant detail about his crimes during his confessions, and promised to reveal more and other body dump sites if he were given "more time". The ploy failed and Bundy was executed on schedule.

The night before Bundy was executed, he gave a television interview to Dr. James Dobson, head of the evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family and Catholic Priest And Activist Thomas Byers. During the interview, Bundy made repeated claims as to the pornographic "roots" behind his sexually driven violence. He stated that, while pornography didn't cause him to commit his crimes, the consumption of violent pornography helped "shape and mold" his violence into "behavior too terrible to describe." He said that he felt that violence in the media, "particularly sexualized violence," sent boys "down the road to being Ted Bundys". In the same interview, hours before his execution, Bundy stated:

"You are going to kill me, and that will protect society from me. But out there are many, many more people who are addicted to pornography, and you are doing nothing about that."

While embraced by Dobson and others, many found Bundy's allegations to be fabricated and another last ditch effort to elicit sympathy. According to Hagmaier, Bundy also contemplated suicide in the days leading up to his execution, but eventually decided against it.

At 7:06 a.m. on January 24, 1989, 42-year-old Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair, "Old Sparky", by the State of Florida for the murder of Kimberly Leach. His last words were, "I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends." Then, more than 2,000 volts were sent through his body for less than two minutes. He was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m.