Jess's Case Studies: Ted Bundy
Disclaimer: Some topics discussed in the following post may be graphic or difficult for some to read. Discretion is advised. Information provided in this post is based on personal research and some of it is my personal opinion about events that have transpired in relation to the topic at hand.
Most people in the modern world have, in some way or another, heard of Ted Bundy. Either they've watched a crime TV show where he was mentioned, heard someone compared to him, or were alive during his reign of terror in at least five states, you've heard the name. Bundy was a serial killer, one of the most famous serial killers in American history, who was surprisingly only convicted of three murders in Florida in the 1970's and 80's. However, he claimed to have killed many other young women, most of whom fit a very specific profile, and most people who knew him suspected that he could have killed upwards of 100 people.
He was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946. His mother, Elizabeth "Louise" Cowell, was young and unmarried, so her embarrassed parents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, took Bundy in and raised him as their own child, pretending that Louise was actually his sister. Samuel Cowell was reportedly abusive toward his wife, daughter, and grandson (though in later interviews, Bundy would never admit to suffering from child abuse). In 1951, Louise took her son and fled their home and moved to Tacoma, Washington, changing their name to Nelson. There, Louise met, fell in love with, and married Johnnie Culpepper Bundy, who became Ted's adoptive father after the marriage. Johnnie and Louise had four other children who were less well-behaved than Ted, so he grew up relatively ignored because of his docile nature. However, in his teens, he was arrested under suspicion of burglary and auto theft. These charges were expunged when he turned eighteen.
Bundy excelled in high school academically and even did well in college, though he was fairly socially inept. He did not have many friends due to being socially awkward and, in college, blamed this on his being less wealthy than his peers. He originally went to the University of Puget Sound but transferred to the University of Washington in his sophomore year. This is where he met Stephanie Brooks, the woman of his dreams. She was beautiful, intelligent, and wealthy, three things that were incredibly important to Bundy. They dated for quite a while, but Bundy was overwhelmed by having a job, a girlfriend, and being a full time student, and dropped out of UW in 1969. Due to this lack of ambition, Brooks broke up with Bundy soon thereafter. This would unintentionally set off the chain of events that led to Bundy being one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.
Bundy suffered from a deep depressive phase after losing his relationship with Brooks and spent several months recovering from this. However, he took a turn for the supposed better after the break up and seemed to turn his life around. He took a semester at another university and transferred back to UW fairly quickly, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology from UW in 1972. Friends and family described him as much more confident in himself following the disappointing end to his relationship. He became the assistant to the Chairman of the Washington State Republican Party due to his charm and charisma. After he became successful in his life, he managed to win back Brooks with his new ambition and confidence. They dated for quite a while and he hinted that he was going to propose and that they should get married. Then, all of a sudden, he ignored her calls and left her, essentially to make her feel the same pain he felt when she left him.
Officially, this is when his crime spree began. In 1974, young women began to go missing in Washington state. Bundy's victims were typically young female college students with long hair styled in a center part. Nine identified and three unidentified victims were later attributed to Bundy just within the state of Washington, most of deceased disposed of at the Taylor Mountain site where little more than their skulls were found after Bundy's confession. These include one of Bundy's most famous victims, Karen Sparks, also called Joni Lenz, who is one of Bundy's few survivors. She was assaulted in her basement dorm room by Bundy and ended up in a coma for ten days due to the bludgeoning, sodomizing, and rape she endured.
The fall of 1974, Bundy moved to Utah for law school, and where he went, Bundy's crimes followed. In Utah, supposedly five more women that Bundy claimed as his victims went missing. Women in the area began to identify a man who identified himself as "Ted" who sometimes portrayed himself as a police officer or a firefighter, sometimes as an injured man, who was charming and required their assistance in some way as a tactic to get them alone with him. Bodies that turned up or women that escaped had been bludgeoned, raped, and sodomized. Most prominent of these victims was Carol DaRonch, whose testimony led to the initial capture of Bundy in 1975. He attempted to kidnap her, however she got away from him after escaping from his car (a now iconic yellow VW beetle). Later in the year, Bundy was pulled over for a traffic violation and his car was searched. Inside, the police found a mask made of pantyhose, handcuffs, a crowbar, an icepick, and several other suspicious items. He was arrested on suspicion of burglary but, thanks to DaRonch's statement and her picking Bundy out of a lineup, he was charged with attempted kidnapping. At the time, they believed that he was responsible for the other missing and murdered women in the area, but they had no evidence to link them together yet. The Utah authorities charged him with attempted kidnapping and they managed to sentence him to 15 years in prison. While the trial process went on, Colorado authorities were investigating him for the murders of several Colorado women that had occurred in the time period Bundy was there. They managed to trace his credit card statements to the corresponding areas in Colorado. He was then extradited from the Utah prison to Colorado to stand trial. Bundy decided to represent himself in the trial, which gave him more freedom than an average prisoner. He managed to escape out of a second floor window in the law library while preparing for the trial, though he was captured again a week later.
On December 30, 1977 however, he escaped again, this time getting as far away as he could. Bundy went to Tallahassee, Florida and took up residence near Florida State University. Two weeks after his arrival, he attacked the Chi Omega sorority house and attacked four women, strangling and bludgeoning two of them to death, one of whom he brutally raped, biting her buttocks and one of her nipples, leaving teeth marks on her body. One of the sorority girls came home and interrupted Bundy's attack, making him flee. Later that night, another woman was attacked and Bundy's mask was found in her car.
Bundy struck again, this time for the last time, on February 9, 1978. He kidnapped, mutilated, and killed twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach from her junior high. Within a week of her disappearance, Bundy was captured in Pensacola because he was driving a vehicle with stolen plates. The bite marks on the girl from the sorority linked him to the murders in Florida.
Bundy refused a plea bargain for the murders, which would have given him 75 years total instead of the death penalty. For the murders of the women from the sorority, he defended himself once again, playing to the media attention he was receiving and trying to make himself seem as innocent as possible to everyone watching. The jury, however, was not falling for his charade and found him guilty for both murders and he was given two death penalty sentences. In January of 1980, he was tried for the kidnapping and murder of Kimberly Leach. This time, instead of defending himself, he hired attorneys and went for the only defense he had left that may work in his favor - insanity. He acted completely different in the courtroom than before; he slouched, acted angry, and frequently stared off into the distance. In the end, his attempt at insanity did not work and he was found guilty, once again. At the sentencing for this last trial, a woman named Carol Boone he had called before to testify to his character was called to give testimony and he married her right there. She later gave birth to his child whom he appeared to have cared for. Several years later, she must have been convinced of his guilt because she divorced him and refused to visit again.
Bundy spent years filing appeals in an attempt to have his execution stayed. His last stay was on January 17, 1989. In his final interviews, Bundy gave the details on where to find more than fifty women he claimed to have killed. He confessed to other things, including necrophilia and keeping the heads of his victims as trophies, though neither were proven. In his final interview, he blamed early exposure to pornography for his violent behaviors and murderous tendencies. In the end, Bundy claimed to have killed many more women than the authorities found, citing that if they "add one digit" to the number of murders they suspected him of, they would be closer. People who knew Bundy stated that they would not have been surprised if he'd killed over 100 women in his time as an active serial killer.
The execution took place the morning of January 24, 1989 by means of the electric chair, commonly referred to as Ol' Sparky. Bundy's last words were directed at one of his attorneys and the minister who had sat with Bundy praying all night when he said, "Jim and Fred, I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends." Ted Bundy was declared dead at 7:16 am while crowds outside the prison chanted, "Burn, Bundy, burn!"
This may have seemed long-winded but honestly I cut out a lot of fluff from the main story. This is nowhere NEAR everything about Bundy and his crimes, but this is a majority of it. I could have spent thousands of words going into explicit detail on each victim and each instance of Bundy attacking someone (at least, each account that was attributed to him), but I figured it best to narrow things down as best I could. This didn't even go into detail of his friends and family that knew him and that thought him to be a completely normal guy until he was first convicted (a good source for this is Ann Rule's book, The Stranger Beside Me, which recounts Bundy's life from her perspective as his friend).
I personally believe that the most horrifying part about Bundy is that he seems so normal. Watching interviews, listening to his confession, seeing photos of him - you wouldn't look at him twice if you walked past him on the street. He looks and sounds like a normal person; but beneath his cool, charismatic mask lies a vicious rapist and murderer who had absolutely no remorse for what he did to dozens of young women. Even if you watch the interview that took place the day before his execution, you will see that he is calm and collected, talking about what he had done and why he believes he became a serial killer, he is almost robotic in the way he talks, and especially how he takes a moment to process every single sentence that comes out of his mouth. He was very manipulating of a situation - he wanted the interviewer and everyone who would watch the interview later, to hear specific things and he essentially refused to let his stoic exterior slip.
Bundy was the first case study on a serial killer I ever did. It was back in high school for my AP psychology class when we were doing a section on abnormal psychology. Part of the assignment we were given was to determine whether or not Bundy was a psychopath or a sociopath or if he was neither. It is my opinion, based on the research that I've done into Bundy's case, that he suffered from antisocial personality disorder, which is essentially sociopathy. Symptoms of the disorder include a failure to comply with social norms, violation of the rights of others, impulsivity, deceitfulness, lack of conscience, and lack of remorse for wrongdoings, to name a few. Some people think that people suffering from ASPD are chemically under-aroused and seek stimuli from activities that may be frightful or aversive to most "normal" people (called the arousal theory). Of course, there are many other things that would go into a personality disorder diagnosis, but that will take an entire blog post in itself. Though he received no formal diagnosis while alive, it is clear there was something going on in his mind that was outside the boundaries of social norms.
Fun Fact: The grandmother of a girl I went to high school with was almost one of Bundy's victims. She didn't give specifics on time or place, but she said that when her grandmother was younger, she went to the beach with her husband. Her husband went to get drinks for them and while she was alone, a handsome man with his arm in a cast approached her and asked her if she would like to come back to his apartment and model for some photography project he was doing. Of course, because this was a very creepy thing to ask of anyone you just met, she said no, but at that time she did not know how close she came to being the victim of one of America's most notorious serial killers.
I wanted to do Bundy's case as my first blog post just because I feel like it's how I really became interested in serial killers and criminal profiling in the first place. Now, I've studied people who were, if you can believe this, more horrifying to study than Bundy and it just feeds my curiosity. This blog is going to give me the chance to study things that fascinate me and expand my knowledge of various topics related to crime while still in school and, hopefully, without seeming as creepy as just writing this stuff down in a notebook.
Check out Ted Bundy's final interview before his execution here and his full confession here.
Thanks for reading, everyone! If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please leave a comment - and I will see all of you next week!
-Jess
Most people in the modern world have, in some way or another, heard of Ted Bundy. Either they've watched a crime TV show where he was mentioned, heard someone compared to him, or were alive during his reign of terror in at least five states, you've heard the name. Bundy was a serial killer, one of the most famous serial killers in American history, who was surprisingly only convicted of three murders in Florida in the 1970's and 80's. However, he claimed to have killed many other young women, most of whom fit a very specific profile, and most people who knew him suspected that he could have killed upwards of 100 people.
He was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946. His mother, Elizabeth "Louise" Cowell, was young and unmarried, so her embarrassed parents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, took Bundy in and raised him as their own child, pretending that Louise was actually his sister. Samuel Cowell was reportedly abusive toward his wife, daughter, and grandson (though in later interviews, Bundy would never admit to suffering from child abuse). In 1951, Louise took her son and fled their home and moved to Tacoma, Washington, changing their name to Nelson. There, Louise met, fell in love with, and married Johnnie Culpepper Bundy, who became Ted's adoptive father after the marriage. Johnnie and Louise had four other children who were less well-behaved than Ted, so he grew up relatively ignored because of his docile nature. However, in his teens, he was arrested under suspicion of burglary and auto theft. These charges were expunged when he turned eighteen.
Bundy excelled in high school academically and even did well in college, though he was fairly socially inept. He did not have many friends due to being socially awkward and, in college, blamed this on his being less wealthy than his peers. He originally went to the University of Puget Sound but transferred to the University of Washington in his sophomore year. This is where he met Stephanie Brooks, the woman of his dreams. She was beautiful, intelligent, and wealthy, three things that were incredibly important to Bundy. They dated for quite a while, but Bundy was overwhelmed by having a job, a girlfriend, and being a full time student, and dropped out of UW in 1969. Due to this lack of ambition, Brooks broke up with Bundy soon thereafter. This would unintentionally set off the chain of events that led to Bundy being one of the most prolific serial killers in American history.
Bundy suffered from a deep depressive phase after losing his relationship with Brooks and spent several months recovering from this. However, he took a turn for the supposed better after the break up and seemed to turn his life around. He took a semester at another university and transferred back to UW fairly quickly, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in psychology from UW in 1972. Friends and family described him as much more confident in himself following the disappointing end to his relationship. He became the assistant to the Chairman of the Washington State Republican Party due to his charm and charisma. After he became successful in his life, he managed to win back Brooks with his new ambition and confidence. They dated for quite a while and he hinted that he was going to propose and that they should get married. Then, all of a sudden, he ignored her calls and left her, essentially to make her feel the same pain he felt when she left him.
Officially, this is when his crime spree began. In 1974, young women began to go missing in Washington state. Bundy's victims were typically young female college students with long hair styled in a center part. Nine identified and three unidentified victims were later attributed to Bundy just within the state of Washington, most of deceased disposed of at the Taylor Mountain site where little more than their skulls were found after Bundy's confession. These include one of Bundy's most famous victims, Karen Sparks, also called Joni Lenz, who is one of Bundy's few survivors. She was assaulted in her basement dorm room by Bundy and ended up in a coma for ten days due to the bludgeoning, sodomizing, and rape she endured.
The fall of 1974, Bundy moved to Utah for law school, and where he went, Bundy's crimes followed. In Utah, supposedly five more women that Bundy claimed as his victims went missing. Women in the area began to identify a man who identified himself as "Ted" who sometimes portrayed himself as a police officer or a firefighter, sometimes as an injured man, who was charming and required their assistance in some way as a tactic to get them alone with him. Bodies that turned up or women that escaped had been bludgeoned, raped, and sodomized. Most prominent of these victims was Carol DaRonch, whose testimony led to the initial capture of Bundy in 1975. He attempted to kidnap her, however she got away from him after escaping from his car (a now iconic yellow VW beetle). Later in the year, Bundy was pulled over for a traffic violation and his car was searched. Inside, the police found a mask made of pantyhose, handcuffs, a crowbar, an icepick, and several other suspicious items. He was arrested on suspicion of burglary but, thanks to DaRonch's statement and her picking Bundy out of a lineup, he was charged with attempted kidnapping. At the time, they believed that he was responsible for the other missing and murdered women in the area, but they had no evidence to link them together yet. The Utah authorities charged him with attempted kidnapping and they managed to sentence him to 15 years in prison. While the trial process went on, Colorado authorities were investigating him for the murders of several Colorado women that had occurred in the time period Bundy was there. They managed to trace his credit card statements to the corresponding areas in Colorado. He was then extradited from the Utah prison to Colorado to stand trial. Bundy decided to represent himself in the trial, which gave him more freedom than an average prisoner. He managed to escape out of a second floor window in the law library while preparing for the trial, though he was captured again a week later.
On December 30, 1977 however, he escaped again, this time getting as far away as he could. Bundy went to Tallahassee, Florida and took up residence near Florida State University. Two weeks after his arrival, he attacked the Chi Omega sorority house and attacked four women, strangling and bludgeoning two of them to death, one of whom he brutally raped, biting her buttocks and one of her nipples, leaving teeth marks on her body. One of the sorority girls came home and interrupted Bundy's attack, making him flee. Later that night, another woman was attacked and Bundy's mask was found in her car.
Bundy struck again, this time for the last time, on February 9, 1978. He kidnapped, mutilated, and killed twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach from her junior high. Within a week of her disappearance, Bundy was captured in Pensacola because he was driving a vehicle with stolen plates. The bite marks on the girl from the sorority linked him to the murders in Florida.
Bundy refused a plea bargain for the murders, which would have given him 75 years total instead of the death penalty. For the murders of the women from the sorority, he defended himself once again, playing to the media attention he was receiving and trying to make himself seem as innocent as possible to everyone watching. The jury, however, was not falling for his charade and found him guilty for both murders and he was given two death penalty sentences. In January of 1980, he was tried for the kidnapping and murder of Kimberly Leach. This time, instead of defending himself, he hired attorneys and went for the only defense he had left that may work in his favor - insanity. He acted completely different in the courtroom than before; he slouched, acted angry, and frequently stared off into the distance. In the end, his attempt at insanity did not work and he was found guilty, once again. At the sentencing for this last trial, a woman named Carol Boone he had called before to testify to his character was called to give testimony and he married her right there. She later gave birth to his child whom he appeared to have cared for. Several years later, she must have been convinced of his guilt because she divorced him and refused to visit again.
Bundy spent years filing appeals in an attempt to have his execution stayed. His last stay was on January 17, 1989. In his final interviews, Bundy gave the details on where to find more than fifty women he claimed to have killed. He confessed to other things, including necrophilia and keeping the heads of his victims as trophies, though neither were proven. In his final interview, he blamed early exposure to pornography for his violent behaviors and murderous tendencies. In the end, Bundy claimed to have killed many more women than the authorities found, citing that if they "add one digit" to the number of murders they suspected him of, they would be closer. People who knew Bundy stated that they would not have been surprised if he'd killed over 100 women in his time as an active serial killer.
The execution took place the morning of January 24, 1989 by means of the electric chair, commonly referred to as Ol' Sparky. Bundy's last words were directed at one of his attorneys and the minister who had sat with Bundy praying all night when he said, "Jim and Fred, I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends." Ted Bundy was declared dead at 7:16 am while crowds outside the prison chanted, "Burn, Bundy, burn!"
This may have seemed long-winded but honestly I cut out a lot of fluff from the main story. This is nowhere NEAR everything about Bundy and his crimes, but this is a majority of it. I could have spent thousands of words going into explicit detail on each victim and each instance of Bundy attacking someone (at least, each account that was attributed to him), but I figured it best to narrow things down as best I could. This didn't even go into detail of his friends and family that knew him and that thought him to be a completely normal guy until he was first convicted (a good source for this is Ann Rule's book, The Stranger Beside Me, which recounts Bundy's life from her perspective as his friend).
I personally believe that the most horrifying part about Bundy is that he seems so normal. Watching interviews, listening to his confession, seeing photos of him - you wouldn't look at him twice if you walked past him on the street. He looks and sounds like a normal person; but beneath his cool, charismatic mask lies a vicious rapist and murderer who had absolutely no remorse for what he did to dozens of young women. Even if you watch the interview that took place the day before his execution, you will see that he is calm and collected, talking about what he had done and why he believes he became a serial killer, he is almost robotic in the way he talks, and especially how he takes a moment to process every single sentence that comes out of his mouth. He was very manipulating of a situation - he wanted the interviewer and everyone who would watch the interview later, to hear specific things and he essentially refused to let his stoic exterior slip.
Bundy was the first case study on a serial killer I ever did. It was back in high school for my AP psychology class when we were doing a section on abnormal psychology. Part of the assignment we were given was to determine whether or not Bundy was a psychopath or a sociopath or if he was neither. It is my opinion, based on the research that I've done into Bundy's case, that he suffered from antisocial personality disorder, which is essentially sociopathy. Symptoms of the disorder include a failure to comply with social norms, violation of the rights of others, impulsivity, deceitfulness, lack of conscience, and lack of remorse for wrongdoings, to name a few. Some people think that people suffering from ASPD are chemically under-aroused and seek stimuli from activities that may be frightful or aversive to most "normal" people (called the arousal theory). Of course, there are many other things that would go into a personality disorder diagnosis, but that will take an entire blog post in itself. Though he received no formal diagnosis while alive, it is clear there was something going on in his mind that was outside the boundaries of social norms.
Fun Fact: The grandmother of a girl I went to high school with was almost one of Bundy's victims. She didn't give specifics on time or place, but she said that when her grandmother was younger, she went to the beach with her husband. Her husband went to get drinks for them and while she was alone, a handsome man with his arm in a cast approached her and asked her if she would like to come back to his apartment and model for some photography project he was doing. Of course, because this was a very creepy thing to ask of anyone you just met, she said no, but at that time she did not know how close she came to being the victim of one of America's most notorious serial killers.
I wanted to do Bundy's case as my first blog post just because I feel like it's how I really became interested in serial killers and criminal profiling in the first place. Now, I've studied people who were, if you can believe this, more horrifying to study than Bundy and it just feeds my curiosity. This blog is going to give me the chance to study things that fascinate me and expand my knowledge of various topics related to crime while still in school and, hopefully, without seeming as creepy as just writing this stuff down in a notebook.
Check out Ted Bundy's final interview before his execution here and his full confession here.
Thanks for reading, everyone! If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please leave a comment - and I will see all of you next week!
-Jess
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