Ted Bundy -- Serial Killer

Ted Bundy -- Serial Killer

"I'm the most cold-blooded son of a bitch you'll ever meet" (Bundy, quoted in Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer, Michaud, et al., 2000).

How could a young male who was good in high school, who was liked by his classmates, who did well academically at the University of Puget Sound -- and earned a bachelor's degree in psychology -- end up as one of the most notorious serial killers in the history of the United States? That's a question lingering around any research done on Ted Bundy, but the actual focus of this paper is on three aspects related to Bundy's killing, including: a) was he organized or disorganized; b) what was the victimology of his victims; and c) what is the difference between a serial killer (or serial rapist) and a spree killer?

Bundy was indeed in many ways an organized person

In the book Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer, the authors go to great lengths to review Bundy's own confessions and descriptions of his killing; in fact Stephen G. Michaud is credited with having conducted long exclusive interviews with Bundy when the serial killer was safely behind bars and awaiting execution. Bundy was intelligent, arrogant, and yet while he was a "repellent…figure" he also showed "charm," according to Michaud (15). He had an "innate need to manipulate," Michaud continues (15).

It may stretch credulity somewhat to say Bundy was organized, but clearly he couldn't have gotten away with nearly 30 vicious murders for as long as he did without having some sense or organization. Michaud notes that Bundy would plot out his victims, know where certain potential victims would be at specific times and he would know what van owners that had a history of leaving their keys in the car might leave their vans. Bundy may have been "degenerate" and a "savage killer," but he was also a "consummate gamesman," Michaud explains on page 15, and the mind has to be able to organize events and stories to play those sort of mind games with interviewers, as Bundy did.

Whether Bundy was talking about his life while he was in school, or "…detailing the essence of victim 'possession' -- he never seem to stop striving for a fuller, more comprehensible explanation for who he was and why he had become a killer" (Michaud, 15). A disorganized person would not go to these lengths to make his point and entertain his biographers.

In another book Michaud and Aynesworth wrote about Bundy (The Only Living Witness), the killer explained how he organized his attacks; using third person objective, Bundy told his interviewers that he began his darkest period just snooping around neighborhoods looking in windows to see women undressing or in some unclothed condition. "He gained, at times, a great amount of gratification from it," Bundy explained, talking about himself using "he" instead of "I" (Michaud, et al., 1999). "And [he] became increasingly adept at it," Bundy continued, "as anyone becomes adept at anything they do over and over again" (Michaud). So the answer to the question, was he organized, is a definite yes, he was, in the sickest, most vile and violent way, Bundy was indeed organized in his madness. The way in which he escaped from prison in Glenwood Springs was extraordinarily coy, and only a well organized person could have obtained a hacksaw in prison and sawed through welds allowing him to slip through a hole, into a crawl space, and into the snowy Colorado night, free (Clark Prosecutor).

The victimology of Bundy's subjects

The Clark County prosecutor's office in Florida has detailed many of Bundy's victims, and from that data a victimology emerges; clearly all of Bundy's known victims were females and most of those were young, up to college age. He used various ruses to coax a female into his car, and from there she was likely never seen alive again.

On November 7, 1974, he abducted Carol DeRonch, 18, from a shopping center in Utah, and he was able to handcuff her wrists but she managed to get away. On July 14, 1974 he abducted two young women (Janice Ott and Denise Naslund) in Utah, and killed them both. His method was to lure them to his car and take them to a remote place and rape them, sometimes torture them, or sodomize them, then strangle them or kill them by another method. He raped and strangled a hitchhiker in Utah in 1974, and killed Nancy Wilcox in Utah in 1974; he raped, sodomized and murdered 17-year-old Melissa Smith also in 1974 (Clark Prosecutor). The list goes on and on, and the methods he used -- also considered the victimology of the situation -- were very similar.

Sometimes he would ask a woman to help him; for example, he was on crutches (faking an injury) in Colorado and asked a female to help him carry ski boots to his car. When they got to the car, he hit the victim, Julie Cunningham, with a crowbar, handcuffed her, and later strangled her (Clark Prosecutor). In Colorado in 1975, he lured a 12-year-old girl (Lynette Culver) from her junior high school in Pocatello, Idaho, took her to a Holiday Inn where he had rented a room; he raped her then drowned her (Clark Prosecutor).