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Theodore Robert Bundy was a serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, burglar, and necrophile from Vermont.

Over a four-year period in the 1970s, he assaulted and murdered 30 young women and girls, often faking a limp with a crutch, asking for assistance to his car.

He escaped from prison twice during his trial (during one prison break he went on a killing spree at a college dormitory) and was eventually sentenced to death after one of his victims escaped and testified against him.

I spent six intense months with Bundy after I was approached to write a book about him.

(Image: Bettmann Archive)

Ted had let it be known he was willing to co-operate on a book, if it meant a re-investigation into the cases against him.

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Hugh Aynseworth, one of the leading investigators in America, was to look into his case and I was to do the interviews.

Why? Bundy wasn’t going to say no to the best in the business making his story hot news again.

Plus, he was so narcissistic, he felt I’d consider myself lucky to be in the same room as him.

By the time it came to meeting him, I’d spoken to him on the phone a few times and read endless news stories about him.

What emerged from reports was a confused, enigmatic, good-looking, articulate, law student who came from a loving Methodist family.

He’d been accused of attacking and murdering girls, tearing them apart, burying them only to dig them up and abuse them again.

He was a wild animal.

So it was hard to connect those two Teds in my head.

But both of those characters lived inside him.

I entered the prison and sat in a room with two chairs, a table and a single ashtray.

When Bundy was brought in he was wearing a belly chain, handcuffed and dressed in a peach sweatshirt.

He had a breezy exterior.

He smiled and said, ‘Hi, good to meet you, I’m Ted Bundy.’

He was determined to ingratiate himself immediately.

The thing that initially shocked me the most was how at the beginning he didn’t want to speak about his crimes at all.

What cements just how crazy Bundy was is he thought I was there to write a celebrity biography about him.

He spent weeks telling me long, funny stories about his upbringing.

Worried I wouldn’t get anything from him on his crimes, I changed my tactics.

Since Bundy had studied psychology and had done a few years of law school, I asked him to speak about the crimes he was accused of in the third person, to act as an expert.



I explained that, because he’d been taken to the crime scenes and interrogated, he knew more than anyone else.

I also praised him, calling him reflective and articulate.

He stared at me for a minute before saying, ‘Well, all I could do is speculate.’

I said, ‘Speculate away.’

He grabbed the recorder and curled up with it on the table.

He started talking and he spoke for six months.

In fact, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

Because he wasn’t ‘confessing’ per se, I was the first person he spoke with about these things, because none of it could be used in court.

Still, he realised he couldn’t make a mistake and say something only the killer would have known.

He’d say things like, ‘And then he killed her.’

I’d ask how and he’d reply, ‘I believe the police report said strangulation.’

I’d ask how long it took her to die and he’d say, ‘How would I know?’ He was eerily calm and matter-of-fact when relaying gory details.

(Image: Youtube)



The only giveaway was how excited he became in his eyes.

His eyes were piercing blue, but when he got excited or agitated his pupils enlarged so they looked jet black.

He would sweat a lot too.

It was so obvious he was talking about himself and on rare occasions he’d slip into the first person because he was so into it.

When he spoke about ‘this person’, he discussed an inner voice they had, which he referred to as ‘the entity.’

The voice would goad him into getting angry and he’d retaliate by hunting young women.

I think he knew I thought he was guilty.

I’d seen the autopsy reports, so it was unusual hearing the person who’d committed the crime talk about what it felt like doing it.

I’d ask what the killer was feeling as the victim took her last breath.

He’d say, ‘We speculate that there was a great feeling of power and sexual tension.’

(Image: Internet Unknown)

The main personality trait reported about Bundy was he was capable of great charm.

And he was.

But it was practised to death.

It was all about power… a con to getting his own way.

Ted did not do genuine things.

But he was also witty and comical.

One time when we took a break from the murder chat, I said, ‘Ted, you ought to do product endorsements, you used a lot of crowbars, for instance.’

He looked at me and smiled and went into this salesman comedy sketch for crowbars.

Then he did another for his socks.

He said, ‘So the camera pans out to me in the cell. I say, “Hi, I’m, wearing my Burlington socks to my execution. It just burns me up that I’ll never be able to wear them again”.’

He was doubled-up laughing.

Despite light-hearted moments, when I started writing the book I made a point in never saying anything that would glorify his behaviour.

Instead, I wrote about how, because he had zero reason to kill these women, he was hard to trace.

The only people who saw the real Ted were his victims.

In that moment before the hammer came down on their heads.

Ted liked to play mind games with me.

Once he looked me in the eye and said, ‘I think you’d make a really good serial killer. You’ve got it in you.’

The things he’d say to me would bother me.

I did often find it hard going home at the end of the day because I didn’t want to switch it off for fear I wouldn’t be able to turn it on again.

I had to be fully immersed in the horror of it.

But he was opening up to me so I started to see it as a game – one I was winning.

Ted got a lot of fan mail from groupies.

Crowds of college girls would sit outside the court room during his trial trying to get his attention.

Which he loved.

I never understood why they’d want to go near him.

And I didn’t want to waste my time talking to them to ask.

I also interviewed Carole Ann Boone, who became Ted’s wife.

She’d met him at law school and when she saw he’d been arrested on the news she raced over to support him.

She always protested his innocence.

She used to call him her ‘bunny’ and he proposed to her in court on the day he was convicted.

It was me who actually helped to arrange their wedding, and they used to bribe guards to turn a blind eye so Carole was able to fall pregnant while he was in jail.

She adored Ted and when she found out he was wanting to officially confess as his execution date loomed, she was horrified and filed for divorce.

She had genuinely believed he was innocent.

That woman was under the Bundy spell.

It’s been 30 years since his execution and I didn’t go.

I don’t believe in the death penalty, but I didn’t lose a moment’s sleep over whether Ted should be executed.

If they’d kept him alive he could have been talking to people like him and influencing them.

He was a very dangerous man.

He never showed any remorse.

He’d always just say, ‘But it’s all in the past. Long gone. Who can touch the past?’

The months spent talking to Ted were claustrophobic.

When Netflix approached me to use my interview tapes for a documentary, it brought back difficult feelings to hear it all again.

We might not be able to deal with the story, but we’ll never be as damaged as any of the women unfortunate enough to get close to him.

Ted Bundy- Conversations With A Killer, £8.99, Mirror Books