May 30, 2017 ▸ People, True Crime

Episode 201: Ted Bundy: The Ultimate Serial Killer

On this episode of the Sofa King Podcast, we fulfill a long-standing listener request and explore the twisted life and killings of Ted Bundy. Bundy is one of the most notorious serial killers in US history, having killed somewhere between 30 and 100 women, known for rape and necrophilia. Still with us? Okay, then, this one gets pretty brutal… It is also confusing since so many biographers rely on interviews and testimonies given by Bundy, a man who was notorious for constantly changing his story and revising his past.

Ted Bundy was born to an unwed mother in the 1940s in a religious family who did not condone such things. The mother, Louise Cowell, hid out at an unwed mother’s shelter and gave birth there. Once Ted was born, she moved back in with her parents. This gets weird because they claimed that Ted’s grandparents were his real parents, and his mother was his sister. Ted was born under this lie, and only found out as a teenager. In the meantime, his grandfather was an abusive, racist, bigot of a man; his grandmother underwent electroshock therapy, and Ted showed an affinity for knives, pornography, and being a peeping Tom at a young age.

Bundy went off to college, and he eventually fell madly in love with a woman called Stephanie Brooks. She broke up with him, sending him into a spiral of depression. Years later, he dated her again, just so he could break up with her and cause her harm. From that point on, he started murders, and all of them were women with similar looks to Brooks—white girls with dark hair parted down the middle.

Bundy started his killing spree from state to state. He would lure women to come to his aid by wearing slings and fake casts and hobbling around on crutches. He would bludgeon them, rape them, and then hide their bodies in the woods where he was said to have continued having sex with their bodies until they were too badly decomposed to continue

Eventually, he got pulled over with a whole list of creepy murder gear in his VW Bug, and that combined with confessions of an ex-girlfriend got him on surveillance and eventually arrested for kidnapping. So how many murders did he actually commit? How many times did he escape from prison, and how long did he escape for? What happened at the Florida sorority house that finally did Ted Bundy in? How did he get a judge to accidentally marry him and his wife during his legal defense? Listen, laugh, learn.

Bundy’s final interview: https://vimeo.com/49018764