Psychopath

One cold and dark night, people are screaming behind the bars. But one is still calm and thinking as normal people. But he isn't the normal person. He's Ted Bundy. Theodore Robert Bundy ( Cowell; November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped, and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. After more than a decade of denials, before his execution in 1989 he confessed to 30 homicides that he committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. The true number of victims is believed to be higher.

Bundy was regarded as handsome and charismatic, traits that he exploited to win the trust of victims and society. He would typically approach his victims in public places, feigning injury or disability, or impersonating an authority figure, before knocking them unconscious and taking them to secluded locations to rape and strangle them. He sometimes revisited his victims, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses until putrefaction and destruction by wild animals made any further interactions impossible. He decapitated at least 12 victims and kept some of the severed heads as mementos in his apartment. On a few occasions, he broke into dwellings at night and bludgeoned his victims as they slept.

In 1975, Bundy was jailed for the first time when he was incarcerated 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, he engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults in Florida, including three murders, before his ultimate recapture in 1978. For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two trials. Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Raiford, Florida on January 24, 1989.

Biographer Ann Rule, who had previously worked with Bundy, described him 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."^[3] Bundy once called himself "the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet."^[4][5] Attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, wrote that Bundy was "the very definition of heartless evil."^[6]

There is no consensus on when or where Bundy began killing women. He told different stories to different people and refused to divulge the specifics of his earliest crimes, even as he confessed in graphic detail to dozens of later murders in the days preceding his execution.^[58] He told Nelson that he attempted his first kidnapping in 1969 in Ocean City, New Jersey, but did not kill anyone until sometime in 1971 in Seattle.^[59] He told psychologist Art Norman that he killed two women in Atlantic City in 1969 while visiting family in Philadelphia.^[60][61]

He hinted but refused to elaborate to homicide detective Robert D. Keppel that he committed a murder in Seattle in 1972,^[62] and another murder in 1973 that involved a hitchhiker near Tumwater.^[63] Rule and Keppel both believed that he might have started killing as a teenager.^[64][65] Circumstantial evidence suggested that he may have abducted and killed eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr of Tacoma when he was 14 years old in 1961, an allegation that he repeatedly denied.^[62] His earliest documented homicides were committed in 1974 when he was 27 years old. By then, by his own admission, he had mastered the necessary skills—in the era before DNA profiling—to leave minimal incriminating forensic evidence at crime scenes.^[66]

Shortly after midnight on January 4, 1974 (around the time that he terminated his relationship with Brooks), Bundy entered the basement apartment of 18-year-old Karen Sparks^[67] (identified as Joni Lenz,^[68][69] Mary Adams,^[70] and Terri Caldwell^[71] by various sources), a dancer and student at UW. After bludgeoning Sparks senseless with a metal rod from her bed frame, he sexually assaulted her with either the same rod,^[55][72] or a metal speculum,^[69] causing extensive internal injuries. She remained unconscious for 10 days,^[71] but survived with permanent physical and mental disabilities.^[73] In the early morning hours of February 1, Bundy broke into the basement room of Lynda Ann Healy, a UW undergraduate who broadcast morning radio weather reports for skiers. He beat her unconscious, dressed her in blue jeans, a white blouse, and boots, and carried her away.^[74]

During the first half of 1974, female college students disappeared at the rate of about one per month. On March 12, Donna Gail Manson, a 19-year-old student at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, 60 miles (95 km) southwest of Seattle, left her dormitory to attend a jazz concert on campus, but never arrived. On April 17, Susan Elaine Rancourt disappeared while on her way to her dorm room after an evening advisors' meeting at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, 110 miles (175 km) east-southeast of Seattle.^[75][76] Two female Central Washington students later came forward to report encounters—one on the night of Rancourt's disappearance, the other three nights earlier—with a man wearing an arm sling, asking for help carrying a load of books to his brown or tan Volkswagen Beetle.^[77][78] On May 6, Roberta Kathleen Parks left her dormitory at Oregon State University in Corvallis, 85 miles (135 km) south of Portland, to have coffee with friends at the Memorial Union, but never arrived.^[79]

Detectives from the King County and Seattle police departments grew increasingly concerned. There was no significant physical evidence, and the missing women had little in common, apart from being young, attractive, white college students with long hair parted in the middle.^[80] On June 1, Brenda Carol Ball, 22, disappeared after leaving the Flame Tavern in Burien, near Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. She was last seen in the parking lot, talking to a brown-haired man with his arm in a sling.^[81]

In the early hours of June 11, UW student Georgann Hawkins vanished while walking down a brightly lit alley between her boyfriend's dormitory residence and her sorority house.^[82] The next morning, three Seattle homicide detectives and a criminalist combed the entire alleyway on their hands and knees, finding nothing.^[83] After Hawkins' disappearance was publicized, witnesses came forward to report seeing a man that night who was in an alley behind a nearby dormitory. He was on crutches with a leg cast and was struggling to carry a briefcase.^[84] One woman recalled that the man asked her to help him carry the case to his car, a light brown Volkswagen Beetle.^[85] Bundy later told Keppel that he lured Hawkins to his car before rendering her unconscious with a crowbar he had earlier placed beside the vehicle. He then handcuffed Hawkins and drove her to Issaquah, where he had strangled her,^[86] before spending the entire night with her body. Prior to her murder, Hawkins had regained consciousness inside his car, and had begun talking with Bundy, who recollected she had informed him she had a Spanish test the following day and she "thought that I had taken her to help tutor her for the Spanish test", adding "it's not funny, but it's odd the kinds of things people will say under those circumstances".^[87] He admitted to revisiting Hawkins' corpse on three occasions.^[88] He stated that he returned to the UW alley the morning after Hawkins' abduction and murder. There, in the very midst of a major crime scene investigation, he located and gathered Hawkins' earrings and one of her shoes, where he had left them in the adjoining parking lot, and departed, unobserved.^[89]

During this period, Bundy was working in Olympia as the Assistant Director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission (where he wrote a pamphlet for women on rape prevention).^[90] Later, he worked at the Department of Emergency Services (DES), a state government agency involved in the search for the missing women. At DES he met and dated Carole Ann Boone, a twice-divorced mother of two who, six years later, would play an important role in the final phase of his life.

Ted Bundy's 1968 Volkswagen Beetle, in which he committed many of his crimes. Vehicle on display at the now-defunct National Museum of Crime and Punishment

Reports of the six missing women and Sparks' brutal beating appeared prominently in newspapers and on television throughout Washington and Oregon.^[94] Fear spread among the population; hitchhiking by young women dropped sharply.^[95] Pressure mounted on law enforcement agencies,^[96] but the paucity of physical evidence severely hampered them. Police could not provide reporters with the little information that was available for fear of compromising the investigation.^[97] Further similarities between the victims were noted: The disappearances all took place at night, usually near ongoing construction work, within a week of midterm or final exams; all of the victims were wearing slacks or blue jeans; and at most crime scenes, there were sightings of a man wearing a cast or a sling, and driving a brown or tan Volkswagen Beetle.^[98]

The Pacific Northwest murders culminated on July 14, with the broad daylight abductions of two women from a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah, a suburb 20 miles (30 km) east of Seattle.^[99] Five female witnesses described an attractive young man wearing a white tennis outfit with his left arm in a sling, speaking with a light accent, perhaps Canadian or British. Introducing himself as "Ted," he asked their help in unloading a sailboat from his tan or bronze-colored Volkswagen Beetle. Four refused; one accompanied him as far as his car, saw that there was no sailboat, and fled. Three additional witnesses saw him approach Janice Anne Ott, 23, a probation case worker at the King County Juvenile Court, with the sailboat story, and watched her leave the beach in his company.^[100] About four hours later, Denise Marie Naslund, a 19-year-old woman who was studying to become a computer programmer, left a picnic to go to the restroom and never returned.^[101] Bundy told both Stephen Michaud and William Hagmaier that Ott was still alive when he returned with Naslund—and that he forced one to watch as he murdered the other^{[102][103][104]}—but he later denied it in an interview with Lewis on the eve of his execution.^[105]

King County police, finally armed with a detailed description of their suspect and his car, posted fliers throughout the Seattle area. A composite sketch was printed in regional newspapers and broadcast on local television stations. Elizabeth Kloepfer, Ann Rule, a DES employee, and a UW psychology professor all recognized the profile, the sketch, and the car, and reported Bundy as a possible suspect;^[106] but detectives—who were receiving up to 200 tips per day^[107]—thought it unlikely that a clean-cut law student with no adult criminal record could be the perpetrator.^[108]

On September 6, two grouse hunters stumbled across the skeletal remains of Ott and Naslund near a service road in Issaquah, 2 miles (3 km) east of Lake Sammamish State Park.^[99][109] An extra femur and several vertebrae found at the site were later identified by Bundy as Georgann Hawkins'.^[110] Six months later, forestry students from Green River Community College discovered the skulls and mandibles of Healy, Rancourt, Parks, and Ball on Taylor Mountain, where Bundy frequently hiked, just east of Issaquah.^[111] Manson's remains were never recovered.