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Journalist Stephen Michaud shocked the world with his chilling taped conversations with America's most notorious serial killer .

He infamously tricked Ted Bundy into revealing key details of his gruesome murders during the six months he spent talking with him inside his prison cell.

The tapes, which formed the basis of a book, have now been released for the Netflix documentary, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.

But before anyone else had read or heard the killer’s blood-curdling ramblings, the journalist first played the tapes to Bundy’s mother and father-in-law at their home in Tacoma, Washington state.

(Image: Netflix)

(Image: Rex)

Louise Bundy always claimed her son was innocent, and stood by him right up until the moment he was executed.

In an exclusive interview with Mirror Online, Stephen, who worked with colleague Hugh Aynesworth, recalled the moment he broke the news to Bundy’s family that he was in fact “as guilty as hell”.

He said: “I got to know Ted’s mother Louise. I was a kind of liaison to her, occasionally phoning her and passing on messages.

"She a tea-totaller and a devout methodist, and was sure that I was going to get her son off by proving that he was innocent.

“When we finished our work we felt duty bound to sit down with her and her husband and say that, unfortunately, the sum total of our work and the conversations with your son led inexorably to the conclusion that he is in fact guilty.

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“So I sat down with them in their house and played for her and her husband the audio tapes with the more telling confessions, the descriptions he had shared with us.

“I remember how she listened intently, and as she was listening she started making these little sounds, like someone was squeezing a mouse, it was very bizarre.

“But even more bizarre was when the recording was over and we turned off the tape recorder, and everybody sat there quietly.

“Then Louise suddenly stood up and clapped her hands and announced: ‘Whose for apple pie and ice-cream?’ It was just bizarre.

“She didn’t say any more about it and continued insisting, right up to his execution, that her boy could never have done those things.

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“She clearly had the capacity to compartmentalise. I wondered if there was a genetic component in her son’s ability to do the same thing.”

Unable to believe Bundy was guilty even after hearing from his own mouth, Louise, who died aged 88 in 2012, later told a local newspaper: "Ted Bundy does not go around killing women and little children!

"Our never-ending faith in Ted - our faith that his is innocent - has never wavered. And it never will. Ted has been the best son the world.”

In fact Bundy himself eventually confessed to 36 murders just days before his execution in January 1989, telling agents who asked how many women he had really killed: “Add one digit to that, and you’ll have it.”

After bludgeoning his female victims to death, and sometimes spending the night with their dead bodies, the psychopath would often remove their heads with a hacksaw and keep them in his apartment as mementos.

(Image: Youtube)

With the severed heads at home, sick Bundy would wash their hair, apply make-up to them, and engage in sexual acts with them.

Americans were so sickened by his horrific crimes that his electrocution was celebrated by the largest crowd ever seen outside an exeuction.

Stephen was a 31-year-old journalist working for Business Week in New York when, in 1979, he was approached by Carole Anne Boone, who would later marry Bundy in jail and have his baby, asking if he wanted to write a book about his case.

Bundy had just been arrested in Florida and was awaiting trial, and believed that having a journalist speak to him and reexamine the murders he had been charged with would end up exonerating him.

Stephen, who turned down a move to start a new bureau in Tokyo to write the book, said he hoped to find Bundy innocent.

He said: “I though, if he is innocent it will be a hell of the story. And if he did them and he tells me everything, that will be a great story too.

“So I called my old colleague, Hugh, who I worked with at Newsweek earlier in the 70s.

"We decided that I would interview Bundy in prison and he would go to the West Coast where the murders have been committed and see if he’s telling the truth.

“I went there in the hope that he was innocent, as he said he was. It would have been a better story.

“So many of the murders he had been charged with were based on coincidence and inference, and none of them on particularly hard evidence.

"If Hugh could have disattached Ted to a couple of them, the whole thing would have come down.

“It took about two weeks, however, for me to realise that Ted was as guilty as hell.”

The first challenge was to get into the Florida State Prison and spend the time they needed with the man who was by now America’s most notorious serial killer.

He said: “They were not going to let some reporters waltz into the prison any time they felt like to talk the most infamous serial killer.

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"Hugh had a private investigator’s licence, and through his connections I got one too.

“So I asked one of his attorneys if he would walk me into the prison and introduce me as an investigator for his appeals attorneys, and believe it or not I made that story stand up for six months.

“I thought, let’s try to get away with it as long as we can, then we’ll figure out what they are going to charge me with for breaking in to a prison.”

Over the next six months, Stephen filled 75 to 90 tapes with Bundy’s talking, with over 100 hours worth of audio recording.

But at the beginning Bundy thought he could outsmart him and stuck to the line that he had’t killed anyone.

He said: “He wanted to use us to escape the electric chair. Like, I’ve got these two reporters and they’ve gone out and they can’t find anything either.

“I think Ted thought he was smarter than us, and that he could get a celebrity bio out of this which would in his view perpetuate this ‘did he do it or did he not do it’ kind of game he was playing.

“He was clearly a narcissist, and he was also paranoid. So while he didn’t trust anybody he also really enjoyed being in the limelight, and thought it was a wonderful game that he was playing.

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"He wanted to go down in history as a serial killer but at the same time he wanted to get let off so he could go murder again.

“So while he wanted us to go away telling others that he was a hell of a nice guy and couldn’t have done those things, he also wanted to talk about these crimes for which he was really proud. He considered his murders his life’s masterwork.

“And Ted really, really, really, liked killing, and he wanted to get out and disappear so he could kill again, that was his raison d’etre.

"But on the other hand he enjoyed calling attention to himself, and thought it was a clever game he would win by somehow being exonerated or on a technicality.

“That was how his brain worked - I wish I was anonymous again so I could kill, and it’s so great to be famous.”

It was when he understood Bundy’s warped mind - and this weakness - that Stephen was able to dupe him into confessing.

He remembered: “After one particularly frustrating day with him I was driving back to a crummy hotel and it was sort of an epiphany.

"I thought, maybe I’m dealing with a 12-year-old inside the body of a 25-year-old.

“So I went back to the prison and said, ‘you know, Ted, I’m not happy with the way this conversation is going.

"I’ve been thinking about this unique position here, as a suspect in these cases, you know more about these killings than anybody, you’ve seen all the evidence, you’ve been taken to the crime scenes, and you are a trained psychologist.

"So why don’t you tell me what kind of person you think could have done this?

“He grabbed the tape recorder out of my hand and off he went.”

Bundy started talking about himself in the third person, and with each conversation he opened up more about why and how he had killed.

Stephen said: “He started explaining how as a young man this person felt uncomfortable, how he got an interest in sex and violence and pretty soon was following women home at night.

"And eventually and inevitably he started attacking them.

“He talked of this voice in his head which he called the ‘entity’ which directed him. And I listened to that for 6 months!”

Bundy told Stephen that it wasn’t the killing itself which motivated him, but that “what he was really after, the real key to it, was to possess the woman’s dead body as he memorably said ‘as you would a potted plant or a Porsche’.

The journalist said: “But I think he was just cleaning up his act for my sake. I think he really, really enjoyed cracking them over the head and then playing with their dead bodies.”

(Image: Netflix)

What shocked him the most, though, wasn’t Bundy's retelling of the murders but “the overall dispassion with which he discussed them".

I mean, talk about lack of guilt or remorse. He really was a cold blooded killer.

Stephen said: “At one point Hugh asked him if he didn’t feel anything, the pain he had caused.

"And Ted replied, ‘you know, Hugh, I think I have an advantage over other people in that " can’t feel guilt, I feel no guilt over anything that’s every happened.

“‘Anyway, it’s in the past and the past is not real. Show me the past, can you touch the past, Hugh?’”

Bundy’s belief that opening up to a journalist would help him escape prison backfired spectacularly as Stephen’s recordings ensured he was condemned to die for his crimes.

(Image: Netflix)

And Stephen never found out how the killer reacted when he discovered he had been tricked into confessing, saying they had a “complete and utter divorce” once the recordings were over.

Bu he did hear how Bundy once insisted that he had “never met them” when asked by prison staff if he had been interviewed by Stephen and Hugh.

Stephen, however, admits that his six months with one of the world’s most infamous serial killers affected him emotionally over the next 30 years, claiming that “Ted used to visit me every now and again in my sleep”.

He said: “Nobody came away from an association with Ted Bundy without being tainted, and that was whether you were a cop, attorney, family or friend, Ted stained everything.

"He would do anything and say anything to manipulate you.

“To be in the presence of that for any extended period of time leaves a mark on you.

“I’m proud of the fact that I tricked him into talking, but I sort of wished Ted had come along towards the end of my career, not when I was still young.

“It made me a more cynical person. When he was executed I didn’t shed a tear. For me he was a virus, someone for whom there was no redemption.

“It really helped me to write a book about it, it was sort of therapeutic. I had to confront it and examine what had happened to me.”

And he is sure that Ted Bundy would be revelling in his infamy and the continued publicity, 30 years after his death.

He said: “To be the object of so much fascination and scorn and misplaced love and to be so infamous is what he always wanted. It just interfered with his first love of going out and murdering girls.

“But from whatever vantage point Ted may or may not have out in there in the cosmos today, I think on balance he probably says, i did a really good job, they still haven’t forgotten me.”