Ted Bundy

Theodore Robert Bundy (né Cowell; November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls between 1974 and 1978. His modus operandi typically consisted of convincing his target that he was in need of assistance or duping them into believing he was an authority figure. He would then lure his victim to his vehicle, at which point he would bludgeon them unconscious, then restrain them with handcuffs before driving them to a remote location to be sexually assaulted and killed.

Bundy killed his first definitively-known victim in February 1974 in Washington, and his later crimes stretched to Oregon, Colorado, Utah and Idaho. He frequently revisited the bodies of his victims, grooming and performing sex acts on the corpses until decomposition and destruction by wild animals made further interactions impossible. Along with the murders, Bundy was also a prolific burglar, and on a few occasions he broke into homes at night and bludgeoned, maimed, strangled and sexually assaulted his victims in their sleep.

In 1975, Bundy was arrested and jailed in Utah for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault. He then became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in several states. Facing murder charges in Colorado, Bundy engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults in Florida, including three murders, before being recaptured in 1978. For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two trials and was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989.

Biographer Ann Rule characterized Bundy as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death and even after." He once described himself as "the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet," a statement with which attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, agreed. She wrote that "Ted was the very definition of heartless evil."

Early life

Childhood

Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, to Eleanor Louise Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. His biological father's identity has never been confirmed; his original birth certificate apparently assigns paternity to a salesman and United States Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, though a copy of it listed his father as unknown. Louise claimed she met a war veteran named Jack Worthington, who abandoned her soon after she became pregnant. Louise's younger sister Audrey described him as a "nice reputable person" who nevertheless refused to pay child support. Census records reveal that several men by the name of John Worthington and Lloyd Marshall lived near Louise when Bundy was conceived. Some family members expressed suspicions that Bundy was sired by Louise's own father, Samuel Cowell. However, in the 2020 documentary film Crazy, Not Insane, psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis claimed she received a sample of Bundy's blood and that a DNA test had confirmed that he was not the product of incest.

For the first three years of his life, Bundy lived in the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia with his maternal grandparents, Samuel Knecht Cowell (1898–1983) and Eleanor Miriam Longstreet (1895–1971). The couple raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied childbirth outside of wedlock at that time. Family, friends and even young Bundy were told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister. Bundy eventually discovered the truth, although his recollections of the circumstances varied; he told a girlfriend that a cousin showed him a copy of his birth certificate after calling him a "bastard", but he told biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth that he had found the certificate himself. Biographer and true crime writer Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally, wrote that he did not find out about his true parentage until 1969, when he located his original birth record in Vermont. Bundy expressed a lifelong resentment toward his mother for never telling him about his real father, and for leaving him to discover the truth about his paternity for himself.

In some interviews, Bundy spoke warmly of his grandparents and told Rule that he "identified with", "respected" and "clung to" his grandfather Samuel. In 1987, however, he and other family members told attorneys that Samuel was a tyrannical bully who beat his wife and dog, swung neighborhood cats by their tails and expressed racist and xenophobic attitudes. In one instance, Samuel reportedly threw his daughter Julia down a flight of stairs for oversleeping. He would sometimes speak aloud to unseen presences, and at least once flew into a violent rage when the question of Bundy's paternity was raised. Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient woman who periodically underwent electroconvulsive therapy for depression and was afraid to leave their house toward the end of her life.

These descriptions of Bundy's grandparents have been questioned in more recent investigations. Some locals in Roxborough remembered Samuel as a "fine man" and expressed bewilderment at the reports of him being violent. "The characterization that [Sam] was a raging alcoholic and animal abuser was a convenient characterization used to make people justify why Ted was the way he was", said one of Bundy's cousins. "From my limited exposure to him, nothing could be farther from the truth. His daughters loved him dearly and had nothing but fond memories of him." In addition, Louise's younger sister Audrey Cowell stated that their mother could not leave her home because she suffered a stroke due to being overweight and was not mentally ill.

In 1950, Louise changed her surname from Cowell to Nelson and, at the urging of multiple family members, left Philadelphia with her son to live with cousins Alan and Jane Scott in Tacoma, Washington. The following year she met Johnny Culpepper Bundy (1921–2007), a hospital cook, at an adult singles night at Tacoma's First Methodist Church. They married later that year and Johnny formally adopted Bundy. Johnny and Louise conceived four children together, and though Johnny tried to include his adopted son in camping trips and other family activities, Bundy remained distant from him. Bundy would later complain to a girlfriend that Johnny "was not his real father", "wasn't very bright" and "didn't make much money".

Bundy exhibited disturbing behavior at an early age. Louise's youngest sister, Julia Cowell, recalled awakening from a nap to find herself surrounded by knives from the kitchen, and three-year-old Bundy standing by the bed, smiling. Sandi Holt, a childhood neighbor in Tacoma, recalled Bundy as a "mean-spirited kid" who "liked to inflict pain and suffering and fear". According to Holt, Bundy once engaged in animal cruelty by hanging a stray cat from his backyard clothesline and setting it on fire with lighter fluid. She also claimed that Bundy would take younger children from the neighborhood into the woods, force them to strip and proceeded to terrorize them: "You'd hear them screaming for blocks, I mean no matter where we were here, we could hear them screaming." Bundy reportedly built makeshift punji traps around his Tacoma neighborhood, injuring at least one girl.

Bundy varied his recollections of Tacoma in later years. To Michaud and Aynesworth, he described picking through trash barrels in search of pictures of naked women. To attorney and author Polly Nelson, he said that he perused detective magazines and crime novels for stories that involved sexual violence, particularly when the stories were illustrated with pictures of dead or maimed women. In a letter to Rule, however, he asserted that he "never, ever read fact-detective magazines, and shuddered at the thought that anyone would". He once told Michaud that he would consume large quantities of alcohol and "canvass the community" late at night in search of undraped windows where he could observe women undressing, or "whatever [else] could be seen". Psychologist Al Carlisle claimed that Bundy "started fantasizing about women he saw while window peeping or elsewhere [and] mimicking the accents of some politicians he listened to on the radio. In essence, he was fantasizing about being someone else, someone important."