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Ted Bundy - The charming lady killer

Ted Bundy was handsome, suave – and deadly to women
By David Cocksedge

THE DISAPPEARANCES began on 31 January 1974 . Lynda Ann Healy, a 21-year-old law student at the University of Washington State in Seattle , set her alarm for 7am . It went off on time. But two hours later it was still ringing. Just after 9am her room-mate walked in to find Lynda gone; with a bloodstain on the pillow as the only evidence that she had been there the previous night.

Six weeks later, on 12 March, student Donna Manson (20) walked from her dormitory and headed across the Evergreen State College Campus to a student faculty music recital. She was never seen again.

On 17 April Susan Rancourt (18) left a meeting at the university campus to walk to a movie theatre just 400 yards away. She too vanished off the face of the earth. And so did 22-year-old Roberta Parks on 6 May, Brenda Ball (22) on 6 June and Georgina Hawkins (18) on 16 June. It soon became clear to Seattle police that a serial killer was at work in the area. Someone who came and went at will, and left no clues.

On 14 July a crowd of around 40,000 people were swimming and sunbathing at Lake Sammamish State Park near Seattle . One of the sunbathers was pretty 23-year-old Janice Orr. She was approached by a handsome young man with his left arm in a sling. He politely asked her if she would help him place his sailing boat on top of his car. Janice smiled, stood up and wheeled her bicycle over to the parked car, engaged in gently flirtatious conversation with the stranger. She was never seen alive again.

Later that day, Denise Naslund (22) was with a group of friends swimming in a stream that ran into the lake. She left to walk to the public restrooms and became victim number eight. Two months later a team of grouse beaters founds the remains of both Denise and Janice under a copse of trees. Both had been sexually assaulted and killed, and wild animals had eaten part of their naked bodies.

When Seattle detectives began a murder hunt, they heard from several women in the area that they had been approached by a polite handsome young man with one arm in a sling. He had said to several of them, “Hi! I'm Ted.”

Amazingly, the killer had used his real name. The perpetrator was Theodore Robert Bundy, known to everyone as Ted. He was born to unmarried 19-year-old Louise Cowell on 24 November 1946 in Burlington , Vermont . Ted was brought up by his grandparents and for 22 years thought that his mother was his elder sister. Louise took her son across country to Seattle in 1958 where she met and married hospital cook Joseph Bundy. Joe adopted Ted as his own son and had four other children with his wife. Once intensely shy as a young boy, Ted's confidence grew as he entered his teens and discovered his talents as an athlete and student. He was good looking, intelligent and polite and charmed women wherever he went. He represented his high school and then university in track Athletics and Football, and was rarely short of a date. But many of his girlfriends, whilst praising his charm and good looks, recall him as a sadistic bedfellow who liked to act out bondage and sado-masochistic fantasies.

Bundy the psychology graduate was a dedicated campaigner for the Republican Party in Washington and in 1971, in a supreme twist of irony; he became a counselor at a Seattle rape crisis centre after being screened for ‘maturity and balance'. It was here that he met and befriended the famous crime writer Ann Rule who later wrote a definitive book on Bundy: ‘The Stranger beside Me.'

When his long term girlfriend, Meg Anders, rejected his proposal of marriage, Bundy was devastated, though few knew it. He later said that Meg had been his one true love and he never really got over her. This rejection may have triggered his murderous urges which he was unable to control. And what he craved was total control over an anonymous victim, whom he often strangled during sex. Ms Rule contends however that like all sociopaths, Bundy felt no real remorse or guilt for his actions.

With his first name and identi-kit picture widely circulated Bundy felt the police investigation closing in, so on 30 August 1974 he quit his job as a paralegal in Seattle and moved to Salt Lake City where he enrolled at the University of Utah Law School as a post-graduate student. On 2 October he abducted Nancy Wolcox (19) after a party. On 18 October he raped and strangled Melissa Smith (18), the daughter of the local police chief. Thirteen days later he abducted Laura Aimee (17) from a Halloween party in Orem . Her naked body was discovered at the bottom of a canyon. Next to die was Debbie Kent (17) on 8 November from a school playground in which the key to a pair of handcuffs was found.

A week later he approached 18-year-old Carol DaRonch in Salt Lake City . Bundy said he was a plains clothes detective and asked her for the license number of her car, explaining that someone had been trying to break into it. He then invited her to accompany him to the police station in order to identify the suspect and she innocently got into his Volkswagen Beetle. Once they were in a quiet street, he handcuffed her and held a gun to her head when she screamed. Despite being cuffed, Carol managed to escape from the car with Bundy chasing her with a crowbar. She ducked as he swung at her head, then ran away and flagged down a passing vehicle, which whisked her away to safety.

Carol gave a good description of her attacker to Utah Police, but the wily Bundy quickly moved away to Colorado . In January 1975 Dr Raymond Gadowsky reported that his fiancée, Carolyn Campbell (23), was missing from her hotel room in Snowmass Village , a ski resort. A month later her naked body was found in melting snow: she had been raped and her skull smashed in. Then Julie Cunningham (21) disappeared from nearby Vail, and the remains of Susan Runcourt (22) and Brenda Bell (19) were found on Taylor Mountain .

The attacks in Colorado continued: the body of teenager Melanie Cooley was discovered near Aspen ; Nancy Baird (21) vanished from a petrol station, and Shelley Robertson's naked body was found down a mine shaft. But Bundy's luck ran out when he returned to Utah to trawl for more victims. A patrolman saw his VW cruising through Granger, Utah without lights on. When called on to pull over, Bundy sped off and the policeman gave chase. Bundy's slower vehicle was soon overtaken and forced to stop. When the policeman asked him what he had in the trunk of his car, Bundy replied, “Just some junk.”

The junk turned out to be a ski mask, handcuffs, some nylon stockings and a crowbar. Bundy was detained for committing a traffic offence and then arrested the next day at his apartment and charged with possessing tools with which to commit burglary. He was released on bail, but the police impounded his car in which they found maps and brochures of resorts in Colorado , some of which coincided with places from which women had disappeared. Forensic experts matched a hair in the VW to Melissa Smith. A witness recognized Bundy from Snowmass Village , and Carol DaRonch immediately picked him out of a line-up.

Bundy was charged with kidnapping and was subsequently tried, found guilty and sentenced to a period in jail of from one to 15 years. Then he was extradited to Colorado to stand trial for the murder of Carolyn Campbell. In court Bundy came across as such an intelligent and personable young man that jurors felt it unlikely that he could be responsible for such horrific sex attacks.

During trial hearings in Aspen Bundy was given permission to conduct his own defense and allowed to use the law library. It was from there that he managed to give his guard the slip, jump from a window and escape. He was recaptured eight days later. Bundy continued to protest his innocence and was able to spin out the pre-trial hearings by using skilful legal stalling tactics. In his cell, Bundy managed to cut a hole under the light fitting with a stolen hacksaw blade as he stood on a stack of legal books. On 30 December, he squeezed through the narrow hole, stole a police car and got clean away. He headed first to Chicago , then south to Florida . And wherever he stopped, he assumed a different identity by stealing driving licenses and credit cards.

Ted Bundy was on top of the list of the USA 's most wanted felons. Yet when he rented a room near the University of Florida in the state capital of Tallahassee no one suspected that he was anything but a polite, intelligent, courteous man, keen to continue his law studies.

On the night of 15 January 1977 , he gripped a baseball bat in gloved hands as he crept into the Chi Omega sorority house, a female dormitory at the university, where the sleeping students had just returned from Christmas vacation. His first victim was Margaret Bowman (21). He clubbed her and strangled her with her own tights before savagely biting her buttocks. He killed Lisa Levy (20) the same way, and viciously attacked two others, Karen Chandler and Kathy Keiner, scarring both of them for life. Then he dropped the baseball bat and fled.

Whilst responding in his car to the 911 call from Chi Omega, patrolman Cord Millen passed a man running quickly in the opposite direction almost a mile from the crime scene. But it could not be the killer, he decided; no one could have moved that far so quickly. But he thought about it later, and decided that an athlete could have done it - a track star with excellent speed endurance like Ted Bundy, a man who in college could run half a mile in a minute and 48 seconds.

Bundy's most monstrous attack was in Lake City , Florida on 8 February. There he killed his youngest known victim, ten-year-old Kimberley Leach. He raped her, strangled her and then left her body in a pig shed.

Thankfully, Kimberley was Bundy's last victim. On 15 February, a Pensacola police officer checked the license plate of a car parked in a restaurant car park and found it to be reported stolen. The driver identified himself as Ken Misner; just one of 21 identities that Bundy had assumed, complete with credit cards, passport and forged ID. When questioned further, Bundy suddenly attacked patrolman David Lee and tried to escape. The burly officer swiftly tackled Bundy and knocked him out cold with his nightstick. When Ted came round, he told Lee, “I wish you had killed me.” He was to be in custody for the rest of his life.

Bundy faced three trials within a space of three years. His first was for the Chi Omega murders on 22 February 1978 in Miami , Florida . Three months later, he was tried for the attacks on the surviving sorority sisters and on 7 January 1980 , he stood trial for the murder of Kimberley Leach. It would be the first trial that sealed his fate, however.

Though he never sat his bar exams, Bundy was a good student, and by now was an expert on Florida State Criminal Law. He defended himself well, but the forensic evidence was overwhelming. The testimony of odontologist Dr Richard Souviron convinced the jury as he described the bite marks on Lisa Levy's body; which exactly matched a cast of Bundy's teeth. On 23 July, Bundy showed no emotion in the dock as he was found guilty. Later he was also found guilty of the attacks on Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler. Ted defended himself with great charm and bravado in his final televised trial, and was often applauded by his ‘fan club' of women supporters. In prison, he often received sacks of mail from loyal fans – almost all of them female. Many proposed marriage to the handsome charmer, and all fanatically supported his claim that he had been framed by the state. But that was just wishful thinking. On 31 July 1980 , he was sentenced to die in the state's electric chair.

Bundy lived in the shadow of ‘Old Sparky' for almost ten years, using all his prison lawyer's skills to use every appeal and avenue to delay his sentence. Then, when there was no way out, he finally broke down and confessed to close to forty killings. “I deserve to die for them” he declared to religious broadcaster James Dobson who heard his last confession. Ted said that he had also killed women in Idaho , California , Michigan , Pennsylvania and Vermont . He had felt great anguish and fear after the first murder, he stated, but the ‘buzz' of stalking and then killing and defiling his victims had been too great. He knew that he would never stop until he was either imprisoned for life or executed, and took more and more risks as his manic compulsion spiraled out of control. The clubbing attack on the female dormitory in Tallahassee had been especially reckless.

Bundy's repeated appeals cost the US taxpayer over seven million dollars during the nine years he spent on death row. But time finally ran out for him on 24 January 1989 when he walked to the chair in Starke Prison , Florida . Only his female fans wept for him.

The local radio DJ, a fanatical believer in Capital Punishment, told listeners near the prison, “Turn down your coffee makers, folks, because they're gonna need all the juice they can get there in Starke today. Ted Bundy is gonna burn! You're going up in flames, Bundy! Fry, you maggot!”

The last thing that Theodore Robert Bundy felt was the cold metal of the chair's electrodes on his skull and legs in the death chamber. At the appointed time, three thousand volts of electricity coursed through his body, abruptly ending his life on this earth after 42 years and 60 days.

When actor Mark Harmon brilliantly played the handsome and manipulative Bundy in an award-winning TV movie in 1992, he also received sacks of fan mail from female viewers. Even in death, Ted Bundy had not lost his charm.

(Research: crimelibrary.com._ted bundy, ‘Serial Killers' by Nigel Blundell, Sunburst Books 1994).

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