Ted Bundy

• 1. Introduction

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  In June 1974, Ted Bundy walked into the middle of an active Seattle police investigation to collect evidence he had left behind. Bundy would murder dozens of young women and girls in 1974-1975 and 1978. On the night of the 11th of June 1974-18-year-old University of Washington student Georgann Hawkins vanished from a brightly lit alley. The alley ran between her boyfriend's dormitory and her sorority house. The next morning, three Seattle homicide detectives and a criminalist searched every foot of it on their hands and knees and found nothing. That afternoon, Bundy returned, picked up her earrings and one of her shoes from the adjoining parking lot, and left unobserved. Detective Robert Keppel, who later spent years studying Bundy, wrote that it was "a feat so brazen that it astonishes police even today." Who was the man capable of that? Why did people who knew him struggle to believe it, even after they reported his name to police? How did he twice walk out of custody in Colorado? And what did he finally say once his appeals were running out?

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• 2. A Hidden Parentage

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  Theodore Robert Cowell was born on the 24th of November 1946 at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. His mother was Eleanor Louise Cowell, known as Louise, and his father's identity was never confirmed. An original birth certificate apparently named a salesman and Air Force veteran called Lloyd Marshall, yet a copy listed the father as unknown. Louise said she had met a war veteran named Jack Worthington, who abandoned her soon after she became pregnant. Census records showed several men with those names living near her at the time. Some relatives suspected that Louise's own father, Samuel Cowell, was the father. In the 2020 documentary Crazy, Not Insane, psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis said a DNA test on a blood sample had ruled that out.

  For his first three years, the boy lived in the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia with his maternal grandparents, Samuel Knecht Cowell and Eleanor Miriam Longstreet. To avoid the stigma that then surrounded unmarried mothers, the couple raised him as their own son. Everyone, including the child, was told that Louise was his older sister. The story of how he learned the truth changes with each telling. He told one girlfriend that a cousin showed him his birth certificate after calling him a bastard. He told biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth that he found it himself. Ann Rule, who knew him personally, wrote that he did not discover the truth until 1969, when he located his original birth record in Vermont. He resented his mother for the rest of his life for never telling him.

  The grandfather at the center of that household has two incompatible portraits. Bundy sometimes spoke warmly of Samuel, telling Rule that he respected him and clung to him. In 1987, however, Bundy and other relatives told attorneys that Samuel was a tyrannical bully who beat his wife and his dog and held racist views. More recent investigators found Roxborough neighbors who remembered a fine man. One of Bundy's cousins called the raging-alcoholic story a convenient characterization that helped people explain why Ted turned out as he did. Louise's sister Audrey Cowell likewise said their mother stayed home because of a stroke, not mental illness, contradicting Bundy's account of a frightened grandmother.

  In 1950, Louise changed her surname from Cowell to Nelson and, urged by relatives, took her son to Tacoma, Washington, to live with cousins Alan and Jane Scott. The following year she met Johnny Culpepper Bundy, a hospital cook, at an adult singles night at Tacoma's First Methodist Church. They married that year, and Johnny formally adopted the boy. The couple went on to have four children, and Johnny tried to include his adopted son on camping trips. Bundy stayed distant and later complained to a girlfriend that Johnny was not very bright and did not earn much money.

  Relatives and neighbors in Tacoma recalled troubling behavior from early on. Louise's youngest sister, Julia Cowell, once woke from a nap to find kitchen knives arranged around her bed and three-year-old Bundy standing nearby, smiling. A childhood neighbor, Sandi Holt, called him a mean-spirited kid and claimed he took younger children into the woods to frighten them. Bundy himself gave shifting accounts of these years. He told Michaud and Aynesworth that he chose to be alone because he could not grasp what made people want to be friends. Classmates at Woodrow Wilson High School told Rule he was well known and well liked, a medium-sized fish in a large pond. Twice at least he was arrested on suspicion of burglary and car theft, and the records were expunged when he turned 18. His one real passion was downhill skiing, which he pursued with stolen equipment and forged lift tickets.

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• 3. The Respectable Resume

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  After finishing high school in 1965, Bundy spent a year at the University of Puget Sound and then transferred to the University of Washington to study Chinese. In 1967 he became involved with a classmate named Diane Edwards, whom biographies disguise under several pseudonyms, most often Stephanie Brooks. He later called her the only woman he ever really loved. In early 1968 he dropped out of college and drifted through minimum-wage jobs. He also volunteered at the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaign and worked as driver and bodyguard for Arthur Fletcher, a candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Washington State. That summer he won a scholarship to study Chinese at Stanford, and in August he attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami. Soon afterward, Edwards ended the relationship, frustrated by what she saw as his immaturity and lack of ambition. Psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis would later call that breakup "probably the pivotal time in his development."

  Heartbroken, Bundy traveled east, visited relatives in Arkansas and Philadelphia, and enrolled for one semester at Temple University. Back in Washington in the fall of 1969, he met Elizabeth Kloepfer, a single mother from Ogden, Utah, who worked as a secretary at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Bundy became a father figure to her three-year-old daughter, Molly, and stayed in the girl's life until she was ten. As an adult, Molly wrote that from the age of seven she had suffered abuse at his hands.

  In mid-1970, Bundy re-enrolled at the University of Washington as a psychology major and became an honor student. In 1971 he took a job at Seattle's Suicide Hotline Crisis Center. There he worked beside Ann Rule, a former Seattle police officer and aspiring crime writer who would later write one of the definitive Bundy biographies, The Stranger Beside Me. At the time, Rule saw nothing disturbing in him and described him as "kind, solicitous, and empathetic."

  After graduating in 1972, Bundy joined Governor Daniel J. Evans's re-election campaign. Posing as a college student, he followed Evans's opponent, former governor Albert Rosellini, and recorded his speeches for the campaign to analyze. Evans afterward appointed him to the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Committee. Ross Davis, chairman of the Washington State Republican Party, then hired him as an assistant and described him as "smart, aggressive... and a believer in the system." In early 1973, despite mediocre LSAT scores, Bundy was accepted by the law schools at Puget Sound and the University of Utah. Letters from Evans, Davis and several psychology professors made the difference.

  That summer, on Republican Party business in California, Bundy rekindled his romance with Edwards, who marveled at the serious professional he had become. He kept dating Kloepfer too, and neither woman knew about the other. In the fall of 1973 he began at the University of Puget Sound law school. Edwards flew to Seattle several times, they discussed marriage, and he introduced her to Davis as his fiancee. Then in January 1974 he cut off all contact. When she finally reached him by phone a month later, he answered in a flat, calm voice, "Diane, I have no idea what you mean," and hung up. Bundy later said he only wanted to prove to himself that he could have married her. Edwards concluded that the courtship had been planned so that he could reject her as she had once rejected him. By April he had stopped attending law classes entirely, just as young women began to disappear in the Pacific Northwest.

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• 4. Slings, Crutches, and Badges

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  On the 14th of July 1974, four women on a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah described the same attractive young man. He wore a white tennis outfit, had his left arm in a sling, and spoke with a light accent that might have been Canadian or British. Introducing himself as "Ted," he asked each for help unloading a sailboat from his tan or bronze Volkswagen Beetle. Three refused. One walked with him as far as the car, saw that there was no sailboat, and fled. Other witnesses watched 23-year-old Janice Ann Ott, a probation caseworker at the King County Juvenile Court, leave the beach with him. About four hours later, 19-year-old Denise Marie Naslund left a picnic to find a restroom and never came back.

  That day was the culmination of a pattern that had been building for months. In April, two students at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg reported a man in a sling asking for help carrying books to a brown or tan Volkswagen Beetle. One encounter came on the night 18-year-old Susan Elaine Rancourt disappeared, and the other three nights earlier. On the 1st of June, Brenda Carol Ball was last seen in the parking lot of the Flame Tavern in Burien, talking to a brown-haired man with his arm in a sling. Investigators noticed that the missing women were young college students with long hair parted in the middle. The disappearances happened at night, often near construction work and within a week of exams. Many of the women wore slacks or blue jeans.

  After Bundy moved to Salt Lake City in August 1974 to attend the University of Utah law school, the ruse changed. On the 8th of November 1974, he approached 18-year-old telephone operator Carol DaRonch at Fashion Place Mall in Murray, Utah. He called himself "Officer Roseland" of the Murray Police Department and told her someone had tried to break into her car. When she noticed he was driving away from the police station, he pulled over and tried to handcuff her. In the struggle he fastened both cuffs to the same wrist, and she escaped through the car door. That same evening, 17-year-old Debra Jean Kent disappeared from Viewmont High School in Bountiful after a theater production. The drama teacher and a student told police that a stranger had asked each of them to step outside and identify a car. Investigators later found a key in the school's parking area that opened the handcuffs taken off DaRonch.

  In 1975, Bundy shifted much of his activity to Colorado. On the 12th of January, 23-year-old nurse Caryn Eileen Campbell vanished from a well-lit hallway at the Wildwood Inn in Snowmass Village. On the 15th of March, 26-year-old Vail ski instructor Julie Lyle Cunningham disappeared while walking to a dinner date. Bundy later told Colorado investigators that he approached her on crutches and asked her to help carry his ski boots to his car. On the 6th of April, 25-year-old Denise Lynn Oliverson vanished while cycling to her parents' house in Grand Junction. Gas receipts later placed Bundy in the city that day. On the 6th of May, he lured 12-year-old Lynnette Dawn Culver away from the Alameda Junior High School in Pocatello, Idaho. Her body was never recovered.

  The disguises followed him to Florida. In Jacksonville in February 1978, he approached 14-year-old Leslie Parmenter in a parking lot, introducing himself as "Richard Burton, Fire Department." He retreated when her older brother arrived and confronted him. Police later found a pair of dark-rimmed non-prescription glasses and plaid slacks in a stolen car, and tied them to that fake fireman.

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• 5. The Net Tightens

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  After King County police posted fliers and printed a composite sketch in regional newspapers, detectives were receiving up to 200 tips per day. Kloepfer, Ann Rule, an employee of the Department of Emergency Services and a University of Washington psychology professor all recognized the sketch and the car, and each named Bundy. Detectives found it unlikely that a clean-cut law student with no adult criminal record was their man. On the 6th of September 1974, two grouse hunters found the skeletal remains of Ott and Naslund near a service road in Issaquah. Six months later, forestry students from Green River Community College found four skulls on nearby Taylor Mountain, where Bundy often hiked. Donna Gail Manson's remains were never recovered. Fear had already spread through Washington and Oregon, and hitchhiking by young women had dropped sharply.

  Faced with an overwhelming mass of names, King County detectives tried something innovative at the time. They fed lists into the county payroll computer, a huge and primitive machine, and asked it to find coincidences. The lists included acquaintances of each victim, Volkswagen owners named Ted and known sex offenders. Out of thousands of names, 26 appeared on four lists, and one of them was Bundy. He was also on the detectives' hand-compiled list of their 100 best suspects. Kloepfer had called King County police a second time in November 1974 after reading about missing women near Salt Lake City, and she called the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office in December. When Bundy visited her in January 1975, she did not tell him she had reported him three times.

  The break came from a routine moment on the 16th of August 1975, in Granger, a suburb of Salt Lake City. Utah Highway Patrol officer Bob Hayward spotted Bundy cruising a residential street before dawn in his Volkswagen Beetle and watched him flee at high speed. Hayward noticed that the front passenger seat had been removed. Inside the car he found a ski mask, a second mask made from pantyhose, a crowbar, handcuffs, trash bags, a coil of rope and an ice pick. Bundy said the ski mask was for skiing, he had found the handcuffs in a dumpster, and the rest were household items. Detective Jerry Thompson remembered a similar suspect and car from the DaRonch case. In Bundy's apartment, police found a guide to Colorado ski resorts with a check mark by the Wildwood Inn. They also found a brochure for the Viewmont High School play. There was not enough evidence to hold him, so he went free on his own recognizance.

  Thompson flew to Seattle and learned from Kloepfer about the objects she had never understood. They included crutches, a bag of plaster of Paris, a meat cleaver never used for cooking, surgical gloves and a sack of women's clothing. Bundy kept a lug wrench, taped halfway up its handle, in the trunk of her own Volkswagen. In September, Bundy sold his Beetle to a Midvale teenager, and Utah police impounded it. FBI technicians dismantled it and found hairs matching those from Campbell's body, and later hairs "microscopically indistinguishable" from those of Melissa Smith and DaRonch. FBI lab specialist Robert Neill called the presence of hairs from three victims who had never met a "coincidence of mind-boggling rarity."

  On the 2nd of October, DaRonch picked Bundy out of a lineup as "Officer Roseland." His parents paid $15,000 bail, and he lived in Kloepfer's house in Seattle under police watch. Kloepfer remembered so many unmarked police cars starting up when they stepped onto the porch that it sounded like the beginning of the Indy 500. In November, Thompson, Keppel and Colorado investigator Michael Fisher met in Aspen with thirty detectives and prosecutors from five states. They left that Aspen Summit convinced of Bundy's guilt but agreed they needed harder evidence before charging him with any killing. In February 1976, Bundy waived his right to a jury on the advice of attorney John O'Connell. After a four-day bench trial, Judge Stewart Hanson Jr. found him guilty of kidnapping and assault, and in June sentenced him to one to 15 years in the Utah State Prison. In October, guards found him hiding in prison-yard bushes with an escape kit of road maps, airline schedules and a Social Security card. Later that month, Colorado charged him with Campbell's murder, and he was transferred to Aspen in January 1977.

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• 6. Two Escapes

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  On the 7th of June 1977, Bundy was driven 40 mi from the Garfield County jail in Glenwood Springs to the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen for a preliminary hearing. He had chosen to act as his own attorney, so the judge excused him from handcuffs and leg shackles. During a recess he asked to use the courthouse law library. Hidden from his guards by a bookcase, he opened a window and jumped from the second story, injuring his right ankle. He limped through Aspen as roadblocks went up and climbed Aspen Mountain. Near the summit he broke into a hunting cabin and took food, clothing and a rifle. For two days he wandered the mountain without finding either of the trails that led down.

  On the 10th of June, Bundy broke into a camping trailer at Maroon Lake and stole food and a ski parka. Instead of heading away from town, he walked back toward Aspen, evading roadblocks and search parties. Three days later he stole a car at the edge of a golf course. Cold, exhausted and in constant pain from his sprained ankle, he drove into Aspen, where two officers noticed his car weaving between lanes and pulled him over. He had been a fugitive for six days. Maps found in the car showed the mountain area where prosecutors said Campbell's body was found, which suggested the escape had been planned.

  Back in jail, Bundy ignored the advice of friends and legal advisers to stay put. The Colorado case was already weak, and pretrial rulings kept going his way as key evidence was thrown out. He had as little as a year and a half left on the Utah sentence. An acquittal would probably have discouraged other prosecutors. Instead, he obtained a floor plan of the Garfield County jail and a hacksaw blade from other inmates. Over six months, visitors, especially Carole Ann Boone, smuggled in $500 in cash for him. In the evenings, while other prisoners showered, Bundy sawed a hole about one square foot in the steel-reinforced ceiling of his cell. He lost 35 lb so he could squeeze through, and he explored the crawl space above for weeks. Reports from an informant about nighttime movement in the ceiling were never investigated.

  On the 23rd of December 1977, the Aspen trial judge granted Bundy's request to move his trial, but to Colorado Springs, where juries had a history of hostility toward murder suspects. One week later, on the night of the 30th, most of the jail staff were on Christmas break and nonviolent prisoners were home on furlough. Bundy piled books and files in his bed under a blanket to look like a sleeping man and climbed into the crawl space. He broke through into the apartment of the chief jailer, who was out for the evening with his wife. There he changed into the jailer's street clothes and walked out the front door. After his stolen car broke down on Interstate 70, a passing motorist gave him a ride to Vail. He took a bus to Denver and a morning flight to Chicago. The skeleton crew at the jail did not discover the escape until noon on the 31st of December, more than seventeen hours later. From Chicago, Bundy went by train to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was seen in a local tavern on the 2nd of January.

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• 7. Florida on Trial

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  Bundy reached Tallahassee, Florida, on the morning of the 8th of January 1978 and soon rented a room under the alias "Chris Hagen" at a boarding house near the Florida State University campus. He later said he first meant to find honest work and stay out of trouble. His one job application, at a construction site, ended when he was asked for identification. He went back to shoplifting and to stealing money and credit cards from women's wallets left in shopping carts.

  In the early hours of the 15th of January 1978, Bundy slipped into the university's Chi Omega sorority house through a rear door with a faulty lock. Beginning around 2:45 a.m., he attacked four women in their bedrooms. Margaret Elizabeth Bowman, 21, and Lisa Janet Levy, 20, were killed. Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler, both 21, survived with severe injuries. Kleiner believed automobile headlights shining into their room frightened the attacker away. Detectives determined that all four attacks took place in under 15 minutes, within earshot of more than 30 people who heard nothing. Bundy then broke into a basement apartment eight blocks away and attacked 21-year-old Cheryl Thomas. She survived with permanent deafness in her left ear and balance damage that ended her dance career.

  On the 8th of February, Bundy drove a stolen university van to Jacksonville. The morning after, 12-year-old Kimberly Dianne Leach was called out of her homeroom at Lake City Junior High School to retrieve a forgotten purse and never returned to class. Seven weeks later, after an intensive search, her remains were found in a pig farrowing shed near Suwannee River State Park. On the 12th of February, Bundy stole a car and fled Tallahassee, driving west. Three days later, Pensacola police officer David Lee stopped him near the Alabama line after a check showed the Volkswagen was stolen. When told he was under arrest, Bundy kicked Lee's legs out from under him and ran. Lee fired two warning shots, chased him down and subdued him after a struggle over his gun. The car held three sets of IDs belonging to female Florida State students, 21 stolen credit cards and a stolen television. Unaware that he had arrested one of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, Lee heard his prisoner say, "I wish you had killed me."

  A Florida grand jury indicted Bundy in May 1978 for the Chi Omega crimes. His trial opened in June 1979 in Dade County before Judge Edward Cowart. About 250 reporters from five continents covered it, and it was the first trial televised nationally in the United States. Bundy had five court-appointed attorneys but again handled much of his own defense. Public defender Mike Minerva said a deal had been negotiated in which Bundy would plead guilty to the Levy, Bowman and Leach killings in exchange for a firm 75-year sentence. Bundy saw it as a way to escape the death penalty and then challenge the plea once the evidence had weakened. At the last minute he refused. As Minerva remembered it, he could not stand in front of the whole world and say he was guilty.

  At trial, sorority member Nita Neary testified that she saw Bundy leaving the house clutching the murder weapon. Connie Hastings placed him near the house that night. Forensic odontologists Richard Souviron and Lowell Levine matched the bite wounds on Levy's body to castings of Bundy's teeth. The jury heard details of the DaRonch kidnapping and deliberated for less than seven hours before convicting him on the 24th of July 1979. Judge Cowart imposed death sentences for the murders. Six months later, a second trial in Orlando for the Leach murder ended in another conviction after less than eight hours of deliberation. An eyewitness had seen him leading Leach from her school, and clothing fibers with an unusual manufacturing flaw tied him to the van.

  During the sentencing phase of the Leach trial, Bundy used an obscure Florida law under which declaring a marriage before a judge made it legal. Boone, who had moved to Florida to be near him and was testifying as his character witness, said yes when he asked her to marry him on the spot. On the 10th of February 1980, he received his third death sentence and reportedly shouted, "Tell the jury they were wrong!" That third sentence would be the one carried out nearly nine years later. On the 24th of October 1981, Boone gave birth to a daughter, Rose Bundy.

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• 8. Possession and Confession

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  Shortly after the Leach trial, Bundy began a series of interviews with Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth. Speaking mostly in the third person to avoid what he called the stigma of confession, he described how his mind worked. He confirmed Kloepfer's old suspicion that he had stolen almost everything he owned. "The big payoff for me," he said, "was actually possessing whatever it was I had stolen." Possession, he said, was also the motive behind his sexual assaults, which fulfilled his need to totally possess his victims. At first, he claimed, he killed to avoid being caught. Later, murder became part of the adventure. "The ultimate possession was, in fact, the taking of the life," he said.

  He confided in FBI Special Agent William Hagmaier of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, who was struck by the deep, almost mystical satisfaction Bundy took in murder. Bundy told Hagmaier that he saw himself as an impulsive amateur in his early years. He said he entered what he called his prime or predator phase around the time Lynda Ann Healy was killed in 1974. That statement implied he had killed well before then, though he never openly admitted it.

  In July 1984, guards found two hacksaw blades in Bundy's cell and a window bar that had been sawed through and glued back into place with a homemade soap adhesive. He was later disciplined for writing to another notorious prisoner, John Hinckley Jr. In October 1984, he offered his supposed expertise to Keppel in the hunt for the Green River Killer. Keppel and Detective Dave Reichert interviewed Bundy, but Gary Ridgway, the man eventually identified, stayed free for another seventeen years.

  Execution dates came and went. A March 4 date in 1986 was stayed by the United States Supreme Court. When a new date of July 2 was set, Bundy finally confessed to Hagmaier and attorney Polly Nelson what they believed was the full range of his crimes. Less than 15 hours before the execution, the Eleventh Circuit stayed it indefinitely. A second date in November was stayed the day before. In mid-1988 the Eleventh Circuit ruled against him, and in December the Supreme Court declined to review the ruling. Within hours, a firm date was announced for the 24th of January 1989. His appeals moved unusually fast for a capital case, and even prosecutors acknowledged that his lawyers never used delaying tactics.

  With every appeal exhausted, Bundy spoke more openly to investigators. He told Keppel that he had committed all eight of the Washington and Oregon homicides for which he was the prime suspect. He described five more victims in those two states, whom he declined to identify. Keppel said Bundy described the Issaquah site as if he were seeing everything again, consumed by murder. Nelson said what stunned her was the absolute misogyny of the crimes and his total absence of compassion. She wrote that for him the murders were his life's accomplishments.

  Bundy soon tried to turn his confessions into a bargaining chip. He offered detectives piecemeal details of some killings and hinted at "other buried remains in Colorado" without saying where. The press labeled this "Ted's bones-for-time scheme." Diana Weiner, a young Florida attorney, asked the families of several Colorado and Utah victims to petition Governor Bob Martinez for a postponement. All refused. Colorado Detective Matt Lindvall saw a conflict between Bundy's wish to delay his death and his need to remain the only person who knew where his victims lay. Ann Rule 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." Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on the 24th of January 1989. His last confession, to the 1975 disappearance of 15-year-old Susan Curtis at Brigham Young University, was tape-recorded moments before he entered the execution chamber. Laura Ann Aime, 17, vanished in Lehi, Utah, on the 31st of October 1974, and her body was found on Thanksgiving Day. Although Bundy confessed to killing her, forensic DNA testing did not confirm her as his victim until 2026.

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