1989: Ted Bundy, psycho killer
January 24th, 2009 Headsman
Qu’est-ce que c’est?
It was 20 years today that Ted Bundy, the signature sexual psychopath in a golden age of serial killers,* rode the lightning in Florida’s Starke Prison.
Executed Today is pleased to mark the occasion with a conversation with Louisville crime writer Kevin M. Sullivan, author of a forthcoming2009 book on Ted Bundy … and a man who knows how the world looks from inside Bundy’s ski mask.
Ted Bundy is obviously one of the most iconic, written-about serial killers in history. Why a book about Ted Bundy? What’s the untold story that you set out to uncover?
The desire, or drive, if you will, to write an article about Ted Bundy and then create a 120,000 plus word book about the murders, was born out of my crossing paths with his infamous murder kit. Had Jerry Thompson [a key detective on the Bundy case -ed.] left Bundy’s stuff in Utah that May of 2005, well, it would have been an enjoyable meeting with the former detective, but I’m certain it would have all ended quietly there. Indeed, I doubt if I’d even considered writing an article for Snitch [a now-defunct crime magazine -ed.], much less a book about the killings. But it was having all that stuff in my hands, and in my home, and then being given one of the Glad bags from Ted’s VW that made it very real (or surreal) to me, and from this, a hunger to find out more about the crimes led me forward.
Ted Bundy’s gear, right where you want it — image courtesy of Kevin M. Sullivan. (Check the 1975 police photo for confirmation.)
Believe me, in a thousand years, I never would have expected such a thing to ever come my way. I can’t think of anything more odd or surreal.
ET: You mentioned that you think you’ve been able to answer some longstanding questions about Bundy’s career. Can you give us some hints? What don’t people know about Ted Bundy that they ought to know?
I must admit, when I first decided to write a book about the crimes, I wasn’t sure what I’d find, so the first thing I had to do was read every book ever written about Bundy, which took the better portion of three or four months.
From this I took a trip to Utah to again meet with Thompson and check out the sites pertaining to Bundy and the murders in that state. Next came the acquisition of case files from the various states and the tracking down of those detectives who participated in the hunt for the elusive killer.
Now, no one could have been more surprised than me to begin discovering what I was discovering about some of these murders. But as I kept hunting down the right people and the right documents, I was able to confirm these “finds” at every turn. And while I cannot reveal everything here, It’s all in the book in great detail. Indeed, you could say that my book is not a biography in the truest sense, but rather an in-depth look at Bundy and the murders from a vantage point that is quite unique. I wish I could delve further into these things now , but I must wait until it’s published.
The Bundy story has a magnetic villain and a host of victims … was there a hero? Was there a lesson?
The real heroes in this story are the detectives who worked day and night for years to bring Ted Bundy to justice. And if there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this, it is this: It doesn’t matter how handsome or articulate a person might be, or how nicely they smile at you, for behind it all, there could reside the most diabolical person you’ll ever meet! We need to remember this.
But how can you act on that lesson without living in a continual state of terror? Bundy strikes me as so far outside our normal experience, even the normal experience of criminality, that I’m inclined to wonder how much can be generalized from him.
Actually, (and I might say, thank God here!) people as “successful” as Ted Bundy don’t come our way very often. I mean, the guy was a rising star in the Republican Party in Washington, had influential friends, a law student, and certainly appeared to be going places in life. Some were even quite envious of his ascension in life. However, it was all a well-placed mask that he wore to cover his true feelings and intentions. On the outside he was perfect, but on the inside a monster. He just didn’t fit the mold we’re used to when we think of a terrible killer, does he?
Now, there are those among us — sociopaths — who can kill or do all manner of terrible things in life and maintain the nicest smile upon their faces, but again, just beneath the surface ticks the heart of a monster, or predator, or what ever you might want to call them. Having said that, I’m not a suspicious person by nature, and so I personally judge people by their outward appearance until shown otherwise. Still, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to see the “real” individual behind the person they present to us on a daily basis.
You worked with case detectives in researching your book. How did the Ted Bundy case affect the way law enforcement has subsequently investigated serial killers? If they had it to do over again, what’s the thing you think they’d have done differently?
They all agree that today, DNA would play a part of the investigation that wasn’t available then. However, in the early portion of the murders, Bundy made few if any mistakes, as he had done his homework so as to avoid detection. As such, even this wouldn’t be a panacea when it came to a very mobile killer like Bundy who understood the very real limitations sometimes surrounding homicide investigations.
I can’t help but ask about these detectives as human beings, too. Clearly they’re in a position to deal with the heart of darkness in the human soul day in and day out and still lead normal lives … is a Ted Bundy the kind of killer that haunts or scars investigators years later, or is this something most can set aside as all in a day’s work?
They are, first of all, very nice people. And you can’t be around them (either in person, or through numerous phone calls or emails) for very long before you understand how dedicated they are (or were) in their careers as police officers. They are honorable people, with a clear sense of duty, and without such people, we, as a society, would be in dire circumstances indeed.
Even before Bundy came along, these men were veteran investigators who had seen many bad things in life, so they carried a toughness which allowed them to deal with the situations they came up against in a professional manner. That said, I remember Jerry Thompson telling me how he looked at Ted one day and thought how much he reminded him of a monster, or a vampire of sorts. And my book contains a number of exchanges between the two men (including a chilling telephone call) which demonstrate why he felt this way
How about for you, as a writer — was there a frightening, creepy, traumatic moment in your research that really shook you? Was there an emotional toll for you?
Absolutely. But the degree of “shock”, if you will, depends (at least for me) on what I know as I first delve into each murder. In the Bundy cases I had a general knowledge of how Bundy killed, so there wasn’t a great deal that caught me by surprise, as it were. Even so, as a writer, you tend to get to know the victims very well through the case files, their family members or friends, and so on. Hence, I’ll continue to carry with me many of the details of their lives and deaths for the remainder of my life. And so, lasting changes are a part of what we do.
However, I did a story a few years back about a 16 year old girl who was horribly murdered here in Kentucky, and this case did cause me to wake up in the night in a cold sweat. Perhaps it was because I have a daughter that was, at the time, only a few years younger than this girl, and that some of what transpired did catch me off guard, so to speak, as I began uncovering just what had happened to this very nice kid.
Watch for Kevin M. Sullivan’s forthcoming The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History from McFarland in summer or fall of 2009.
* In fact, the term “serial killer” was coined in the 1970′s by FBI profiler Robert Ressler, as an improvement on the sometimes inaccurate category of “stranger killer”.
Additional Bundy resources from the enormous comment thread:
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Video of Wildwood Inn, where Bundy abducted Caryn Campbell in 1975. (From Timmy)
Thread commenter Richard A. Duffus wrote a 2012 book about Ted Bundy, Ted Bundy: The Felon’s Hook (Excerpt | Image from the book)
Video interview of Kevin M. Sullivan (From Richard A. Duffus)
Also on this date
- 1846: Elizabeth Van Valkenburgh, in her rocking chair
- 1936: Allen Foster, who fought Joe Louis
- 1911: Shusui Kotoku and ten other anarchists
- Daily Double: The High Treason Incident
- 1938: Han Fuqu, Koumintang general
- 1992: Ricky Ray Rector, "a date which ought to live in infamy for the Democratic Party"
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Electrocuted,Execution,Florida,History,Infamous,Murder,Popular Culture,Serial Killers,Sex,USA
Tags: 1980s, 1989, detectives, january 24, jerry thompson, kevin m. sullivan, psycho killer, sociopaths, starke prison, talking heads, ted bundy
6,267 Responses to “1989: Ted Bundy, psycho killer”
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Pages: « 1 … 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 [126] Show All
May 8th, 2013 at 3:45 pm
Kevin,
I thought you were letting your country roots show with the “tole,” LoL.
And – I hadn’t heard that about Holmes. It’s hearsay, of course (and Keppel is actually one of the sources I tend to be more leary of, as I think he has mythologized Bundy, as well as his relationship with him, to a large extent in his own mind, referring to him as his “personal nemesis” and so forth). It’s interesting though.
I do need to read your book one of these days. Believe it or not, I really am just burnt out on Bundy to some extent (having read six books about the guy already). I also searched for yours on Amazon once, and they were selling secondhand copies for like $50, which was a bit of a discouragement. :S
I’ll get to it, I promise.
May 8th, 2013 at 4:54 pm
JB: That was funny! LOL!
Yes, Keppel can be quite protective of his relationship with Bundy (folks need to remember other investigators were involved and receiving confessions from Ted too!), but he does shoot straight with researchers like me, and I’ll always be grateful for that.
If you live near a library that has a copy of my book, check it out. Or, if you have an E Reader, and a library acct. somewhere, perhaps you can get it that way.
Take care!
Kevin
May 9th, 2013 at 8:43 am
JB,
I think we long ago abandoned the idea of “making sense” of Bundy’s crimes. They make no sense at all.
As for his MO becoming remarkably consistent after Lynda Healy’s murder, how do you know? For this statement to have any veracity, you would have to have information on all the murders Bundy committed, including the numerous ones we don’t know about that most investigators think he committed.
Kevin uncovered some information that indicated Bundy killed at least one hitchhiker, and Bundy himself hinted to Hugh Aynesworth that for every known murder, there might be one that was never discovered. So we have huge gaps in our knowledge about Bundy’s murderous activities, thereby making it well nigh impossible to make accurate statements about the patterns of Bundy’s murders.
Trolling schoolyards and hallways, approaching women on a ruse, breaking into apartments and houses, picking up hitchhikers…Bundy was an equal opportunity abductor and murderer. To try to trace his murdering career in a linear fashion is an exercise in futility.
May 9th, 2013 at 11:08 am
Ted has just thrown the entire practice of profiling out the window, LoL.
I would still consider the abduction of a hitchhiker to be a “public” abduction, for what it’s worth (but simply with the need for the ruse eliminated). And, while it’s true that I certainly don’t have knowledge of every single crime Ted committed – based on *what we know,* his MO seems to have been pretty consistent.
And sure, you can assume he committed all sorts of murders we don’t know about – if someone accused Bundy of, I don’t know, committing a sniper murder or something, you could say, “Well, we don’t KNOW FOR A FACT that Ted never sniped his victims.” But there’s no evidence that he did so. Just as there’s no real evidence that he killed extensively before ’74 (other than writers’ suppositions, Keppel and Ann Rule’s often torrid imaginings, and admittedly, the occasional cryptic comment by Ted himself).
Bottom line: Ted Bundy could not have killed every pretty white girl who disappeared (or was found bludgeoned in her home, or naked in a ditch, or what have you) in Colorado or the Pacific Northwest between 1960 and 1975. You can speculate about crimes that closely match his MO at the time (home invasions during ’73 and early ’74, ruse approaches during ’74 and ’75, and so on), but we’ll most likely never know for sure about those. It seems like, many times though, people are willing to pin Ted with virtually ANY murder of a woman, regardless of whether it even remotely matches his MO.
Cases in point: Ann Marie Burr. A young, young girl. Ted didn’t generally prey on young, young girls. AND he was a kid himself at the time. Or the woman stabbed at the library in Burlington or wherever it was – Ted’s not known to have stabbed any of his victims either, let alone attacked them in a public place and left them there to die. Yet people say it was Ted, because he liked to kill people, he MIGHT have been there, and wouldn’t you know it, here we have a person who’s been killed.
But in terms of Ted’s pattern, we’re getting farther and farther from the mothership. If someone robbed a bank in Seattle in ’74, and the robber wore a pantyhose mask, would you assume it was Ted because he liked to commit crimes, and a pantyhose mask was found in his “rape kit” in the trunk of the VW? If an old lady got killed, would you say, ‘well, we don’t KNOW that Ted never killed old ladies?’ I think the Ted-o-phile community (and I would certainly include Keppel and Ann Rule in this) really needs to come up with better criteria for what they’ll even consider, in that respect.
May 9th, 2013 at 11:34 am
JB,
Talk about wandering far from the mothership…we’ve got Bundy robbing banks and sniping now! It can’t be long before we can all agree that Bundy was responsible for Amelia Earhart’s disappearance.
I’m paging back through all my posts on this forum to find where I wrote that Bundy was responsible for the disappearance of every pretty white girl, but I just can’t find it.
Bundy’s very well-documented and deliberate desire to change his MO over time was precisely to oppose any sort of profiling the law enforcement agencies were attempting to do regarding the unknown killer they knew was responsible for several of these murders. And it worked for a long time. He got away with lots of murders and what is known about almost all of them is mostly conjecture.
But, based on comments by Bundy (which admittedly can’t be trusted implicitly), several authors who talked to him, and just about every policeman and FBI agent that dogged his trail for years and years, the consensus leans heavily toward Bundy being a skilled killer before the murder of Lynda Healy. To quote Steven Michaud from TOLW: “It would take deliberate opacity of mind to infer otherwise.” I always liked that line.
I’m going with their expertise over the musings of Bundy hobbyists on this forum (in which group I include myself, of course).
May 9th, 2013 at 11:52 am
Yep, I was totally making the case that Bundy actually sniped and robbed banks up there. Read those paragraphs again, dude.
My whole point was that many people are so all-inclusive of the sorts of crimes they’ll consider Bundy a “suspect” for (if that’s even a proper term, considering the suspect in question is long dead and the crimes are no longer being actively investigated). And my criticism was of that school of thought in general, not any particular poster.
The problem with giving the researchers, authors of books, etc. so much credit, is that you’re affording them an almost magical ability to discern the truth. Both Keppel and Ann Rule, for instance, make statements about Bundy in their books that are ridiculous and totally unsubstantiated.
Keppel refers to Bundy as his “nemesis,” acts like the two of them worked hand in hand like Batman and Robin to catch the Green River killer (when in fact they had like two meetings on the subject, and neither one had anything to do with catching the guy – which didn’t happen until 15 years later, by the way), and just generally portrays himself as Holmes to Bundy’s Moriarty. Ann Rule believes every chick who writes her a letter saying a strange man tried to grab her off the road thirty years ago, “…and I looked at his picture in your book and I JUST KNEW IT WAS HIM.”
Where’s the meticulous, objective research there? They both have preconceptions about Bundy, and they both allow their imaginations to run wild when it comes to what they’re willing to attribute to him. And it just bugs me, like I said, the same way it bugs me when people recite made-up claims about President Obama that they picked up in an email forward as fact, or or when they talk about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and say, “But the most scariest thing of all is… IT’S TRUE.” It just astounds me that people seem able to accept these things so uncritically.
No, I’m not a cop, and no, I’ve never written a book on the subject. But I’ve read like six books about the guy, and spent countless hours discussing him on this forum. I’d argue that I know as much about the guy as Keppel does (excepting things revealed in interviews that haven’t been made public). Too many people are willing to make outlandish claims about all this, and when you challenge them, they say something like, “Well, I heard from a reliable source that Keppel once made an offhand comment at a law enforcement conference, and he totally confirmed Bundy shot JFK.” Come on, guys.
May 9th, 2013 at 12:14 pm
Sorry if I sound argumentative, by the way. Hopefully it goes without saying that nothing I say is intended as a personal attack.
May 9th, 2013 at 1:17 pm
JB,
You were making some good points until you wrote:
“I’d argue that I know as much about the guy as Keppel does.”
That might be the single most astounding sentence written in the 6,256 posts on this forum.
You lost me with that one.
May 9th, 2013 at 2:49 pm
Hey, I respect Keppel. I’d love to take that class he teaches at UW some day. I’m not saying he’s not a good cop, or a good investigator. I’m not even saying I know as much about CRIME as he does. I’m simply saying that there’s a finite amount of information out there about Bundy, and I’m pretty sure I’ve absorbed most of it. Just as you and probably Kevin have.
Now, as far as minute details of the police files he may be privy to, or stuff Ted might have told him in interviews that he hasn’t made public – of course I have no way of knowing that. But therein lies the rub: no one can possibly have access to that information, or even know for sure that HE has it, unless and until he decides to make it public. If there’s anything he knows that’s terribly relevant, why hasn’t he publicly cited it, chapter and verse? Why isn’t it in his book?
As long as he’s just sitting there being inscrutable, making the occasional “revelatory” comment here and there without specifically backing it up, and we all just ASSUME that he has access to some enormous pool of knowledge that he for some reason has chosen not to include in any of the voluminous number of books published on the subject – I’m sorry, that sort of implied “expertise” just doesn’t mean anything to me.
(It’s worth noting that it’s possible I’m not being fair to Keppel here. I have no idea if he actually does this, but the way people TALK about Keppel, and how he supposedly made this or that comment over the years, he almost comes across as the kinda guy who likes to wow people at dinner parties by occasionally dropping scandalous little tidbits into conversation: “You know, Ted told me HE thought about planting a bomb at the Boston Marathon once…”)
Keppel’s a good guy, but he’s not infallible. He makes unsupported leaps in logic (such as his certainty that Ted killed Ann Marie Burr, or Kathy Devine for that matter – he goes on and on about Ted’s reaction to seeing her photo in the book. Years later, of course, her real killer was brought to justice). I think he’s very credulous where suppositions about Ted are concerned, and I think he’s mythologized Ted, Ted’s murders, and his relationship with Ted in his own mind. And I think this comes through loud and clear in his book.
May 11th, 2013 at 5:27 pm
Hi everyone
The Ted Bundy Death Row Tapes film will be released on dvd??
May 11th, 2013 at 5:31 pm
And what about CHASING THE DARKNESS??
I cant wait!
May 11th, 2013 at 8:26 pm
Hi Sasha!
I’m certain the Death Row Tapes will be released on DVD at some point, but I don’t know when that will be.
As far as “Chasing the darkness”, I’ve heard nothing about it in a long time.
Take care,
Kevin
May 11th, 2013 at 9:44 pm
What are these things again?
May 11th, 2013 at 11:32 pm
The documentary Ted Bundy: The Death Row Tapes, aired on MSNBC last November. It was a very good program that contained Bundy’s confessions to Keppel. Now, these tapes can be found on the net, but not in the clarity found in this program. On a personal note, I gave them permission to use a particular photograph, and I must say, I was pleasantly surprised when I learned my name would be appearing in the credits. That was nice!
“Chasing the Darkness” has to do with other murders with which Bundy may have been involved. I did a filmed interview for this one but I don’t know if it will ever be completed or hit the small screen.
May 12th, 2013 at 12:43 am
Interesting. Is it all the same content from the stuff online? The ones I’ve heard only add up to 20-25 minutes, and tend to skip around a lot. It’s obvious stuff has been cut out. And you barely ever make out anything Keppel is saying, of course.
I remember there was a super garbled version that was out for a long time, then a radio station or something in Seattle (KIRO?) came out with a clearer version.
May 12th, 2013 at 9:55 am
These are the same tapes that are out there. But what makes this different is the clarity. What is available online is exceedingly poor. These tapes come from Bob Keppel and are crystal clear. Plus, the show itself is done exceedingly well. Plenty of good visuals. I too will buy the DVD when it’s out.
May 21st, 2013 at 1:28 pm
Hello All!
I have decided to sell my copy of THE PHANTOM PRINCE.
Now, the least expensive copy I’ve encountered on the web is $175. My plan was (and may still be) to put the book up for sale on Amazon for $125. At this price, it should go rather quickly. And then I began to think of all those over the years here at ET that have expressed a desire to own a copy, so I have decided to do the following:
I will sell my copy, which includes a good dust jacket, for $100 plus $6 Priority Mail shipping for US destinations; and a higher shipping fee for overseas destinations.
If anyone is interested, contact the headsman and he will pass your email address to me. I will them contact you to work out the details. Payment will need to be made by personal check or money order. Old school, I know.
I hope all of you are well…