Ted Bundy was a handsome, elegant, romantic, and tender man who was defined by his friends, but actually, he was the worst serial killer in American history. His girlfriends and those who knew Theodore Robert Cowell were born on November 24, 1946. His mother was Louise Cowell, and his father was an Air Force veteran whose identity remained unknown to Bundy throughout his life.
After the birth of Ted, Louise goes to live with her parents, and over time, the child is made to believe that his grandparents are his parents and that his biological mother is his older sister. This was the aim of protecting the young woman from the critical acid of society against single mothers. This act was negative for Bundy since, at some point in his life, he was going to find out about the deception.
At the age of 4 years, Ted Bundy and his mother move to Tacoma, Washington, to live with other relatives. There, his mother falls in love with a city cook named Johnny Culpepper Bundy. Eventually, their love grows, and in May 1951, the couple finally marries. In this way, Ted assumes the surname Bundy would retain a lifetime.
The marriage bore fruit with four more brothers for Bundy and Johnnie, who tried to form an emotional bond from father to son with Ted, including him in all family activities. But this could never solidify. As time went by, Ted felt more uncomfortable about the situation. Every time, it was becoming lonely for Ted. The experts believe that Bundy’s inability to socialize and build emotional ties with people comes from these early family episodes in adolescence. His character was shy, childish, and prone to loneliness.
He starts to be isolated from his peers and begins to adopt cruel behavior towards everything around him, for example, mutilating animals. He went to classes at the University of Washington and the Puget Sound and applied to his studies and degrees. At the work level, he took low-level jobs but did not last long in them. And their employers remember him as someone unreliable.
In the spring of 1967, a love relationship was established with a girl who would change her entire life. The girl, Californian, was the dream come true that Bundy had imagined all his life: smart, beautiful, sophisticated, and with a good family. In the 1969 year after graduation, the girl decides to end the relationship with Bundy since she sees huge gaps in his personality, mainly the lack of direction and clear objectives in his life.
Ted Bundy never knew she would recover. That girl became an obsession, and he tried to keep in touch with her by writing letters, although she didn’t change her mind for the moment. By the previous break, Bundy had dropped out, but somehow he remade his affairs and re-enrolled at the University of Washington, this time in a psychology career. In that subject, he was brilliant and held in good esteem by his professors.
At this time, a romance with Elizabeth Kendall would last approximately 5 years. She came from a divorce, and he had a little daughter. She saw Ted as an excellent match. Even though I knew he didn’t, he loved so much, and that before the idea of marriage, the external reason for his refusal was because he still had many things to achieve before getting married.
And apart from everything that he suspected, he had relationships with other women. He hoped that he would change for the better and that he would finally sit head-on next to her and her daughter. But none of this was going to happen; Elizabeth Kendall was unaware of Bundy’s past relationship with the Californian, and they still had communication with each other.
From 69 to 72, everything was going in the desired direction. Bundy sent applications for admission to several law schools. He was involved in community activities and even got a Seattle police award for saving a 3-year-old from drowning.
He was involved with important figures of the Republican Party and was on a trip working in California in 1973 when he reunited with his former girlfriend. In fact, it was impressive because of the enormous change experienced by Bundy, and the issue of marriage floated in several of the love encounters that both held in the summer and winter.
By February 1974, it was consummated revenge for not returning any more calls to the girl. In fact, she never knew anything again from Bundy. Although several experts think that Ted Bundy should have started killing in adolescence, It is speculated that the disappearance in Tacoma, Washington, of Ann Marie Burr (8 years) could be related to Bundy, who was 15 years old at the time.
They have considered their first crimes confirmed, those from 1974 and from 27 years onward. On January 4, 1974, Bundy enters Joni Lenz’s 18-year-old university student and hits her with a metal lever. He even removes a piece of the victim’s bed and sexually assaults her with the same. The next day, the woman is found in a puddle of her own blood. survive, but with permanent brain damage.
The next was Lynda Ann Healy, 21, a psychology student at Washington University. On January 31, 1974, Bundy managed to sneak into her bedroom and hit her, leaving her unconscious. He dressed her in jeans and a t-shirt and then wrapped it in a sheet.
His beheaded remains were found a year later in the nearby mountains. On the night of his disappearance, his room neighbors could not be heard, so nobody noticed the girl’s absence until the next day, when the alarm clock and phone Finally, the parents worried about Lynda’s absence, but the police were not able to establish that some serious crime had been committed.
No major samples or studies of the crime scene were taken. During the spring and summer of that year, under similar circumstances, they continued to disappear. University girls are all beautiful women with straight shoulder hair and dark colors. Also, his disappearance was discovered in the morning when they were absent from work.
At least eight victims were counted until Bundy attacked in broad daylight. In the meantime, the police began the investigation, and the testimonies pointed to a man who was identified as ‘Ted’ who requested the help of young girls he saw happen. He was having trouble carrying books because he had an arm in a cast or with a sling.
Other times he was also in trouble to throw to ride his old VW. On other occasions, he was seen hanging around the site where the two disappeared, so the police already had several clues as to who could be responsible for the crimes. In August 1974, in the park of Lake Sammamish, the remains of two girls were found to have disappeared last July.
The fact that victims were identified by the shortage of clues—strands of hair of different colors, a jaw, two skulls, and five bones—legged them were all rescued from the park. It was concluded that these remains belonged to Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, both missing in broad daylight on July 14.
The last to see alive Janice Ott was a couple who saw a man chat with the girl, from which they heard that the subject, by the way good-looking, needed help to load his boat to the car because he had an arm plastered to it, to which the woman agreed without any problem. Denise Naslund spent the day with her boyfriend and friends when he went to the park bathroom and never returned.
The same appeared as a man requesting help from a couple of women to load their boat to the car, but they said they couldn’t help it, a case contrary to Naslund, who couldn’t refuse to help a man with a cast arm. It was this gesture of kindness that cost the girl’s life. Bundy had an advantage over the police, and it was that his appearance could change greatly by just adjusting his hairstyle and leaving or shaving the beard.
His physical traits made him a good-looking man, but they did not attract too much attention, so it was very difficult to keep track of them. A) Yes, it was that he changed residence to continue killing and went to the state of Utah; in that place, it was dispatched to the daughter of the local sheriff. Melissa Smith on October 18, 1974, and days later to Laura Aimee, whose body was in the Wasatch Mountains.
The body showed traces of having been hit in the head, with the classic metal wedge having been raped and sodomized. The police established that the victim had been killed elsewhere since there were no signs of the victim’s blood in lieu of the finding. The state police began a frantic search for the murderer. But the similarity in the modus operandi was that he made them contact Washington officials with whom they jointly accumulated evidence until Post posted a portrait with the likely appearance of the killer.
Thanks to the portrait of the murderer, a close friend of Elizabeth Kendall identifies the probable killer as Ted Bundy. Kendall became convinced that her boyfriend could be the murderer because many keys were pointed directly at him. Ted’s resemblance to the police portrait was the fact that he was driving a VW sedan as the killer, and he had seen crutches in his apartment even though he had never hurt himself.
Given the situation, he anonymously called the police, suggesting that his current boyfriend might have something to do with the deaths. Although he provided recent photos of Bundy to police, witnesses failed to try to make the corresponding identification. The police scrapped that track. And attention to Ted Bundy dissipated until a few years later.
On November 8, 1974, the case took a 180-degree turn when Bundy lets Carol escape alive DaRonch, the facts were like this: hanging around a book store, Bundy chooses the girl as a victim, 18 years old, and deceitfully pretends to be a police officer named Roseland and throws him the roll that someone tried to steal the girl’s car. By the force of insistence, he manages to get her into his car, and shortly after driving—in the opposite direction of the police station—the struggle between the two begins.
Ted Bundy threatens her with a gun and a wedge of metal. In trying to handcuff her, she fails, and she fights for her life. Get out of the car, and even though it continues with the attack, she defends herself by hitting him on the genitals. In this way, you earn precious moments to escape. Fortunately, a couple driving through the place realizes the situation, and the girl manages to enter their car.
They immediately take her to the police station. The girl is in a full nervous breakdown. But that was not the only attempt that Bundy would make that day. In a local school, where the principal of the school constantly bothered her, how good the woman never paid attention to the subject of being extremely busy in his affairs. But it seemed very strange to see him hanging around the place. Anyway, Debby Kent was found dead at the hands of Ted Bundy that night.
The only clue found was a small wrench key that perfectly matched the wife used in the attempted kidnapping of Miss DaRonch. The circle over Bundy was closing more and more. On August 16, 1975, the VW Bundy sedan was identified as the one involved in the kidnapping of DaRonch. After a week of kidnapping trials, Ted Bundy was sentenced to a 15-year sentence on March 1, 1976, in Utah State Prison, Colorado.
He was arrested because the road officers in each county are knowledgeable about everyone’s neighbors and pay close attention to cars they don’t know. As there was a history of a VW sedan involved in a kidnapping, it was a matter of not much time to be stopped. In the first inspections, the metal lever (Bundy’s favorite weapon), wives, tape, and other objects immediately made the suspect.
The evidence found was linked gradually to the disappearance of other women (Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, and Debby Kent). Thanks to the collaboration of the principal of the school that was hanging around Bundy and Carol DaRonch, the identification of Bundy was corroborated by the police. The police knew that he had in his possession the indicated subject, and the large-scale investigation of the man they now knew was Theodore Robert Bundy began.
In the fall of 1975, the police deepen Bundy’s life through Elizabeth’s statements Kendall goes to the affected and nervous interrogations but provides valuable data that go into composing the puzzle of the existence of her peculiar boyfriend. She says that in the days of the murders, I couldn’t determine where her boyfriend had been, not with her at least.
In fact, Bundy had for I usually sleep more during the day and at night I used to go out. Another revealing fact is that a year ago he had made a trip to Sammamish lake to ski, just because of the days they had Miss Ott and Naslund missing. As for the sexual life of the couple, Kendall narrates that Bundy was fond of sadomasochism and when she decided not to participate anymore, she had put sad and lost much interest in her.
In the following sessions, he told the police that He noticed from the first days of his courtship that Bundy kept plaster and bandages in his room and that Even what he remembered had never broken any bones in his body. Bundy also spent time in the mountains of Taylor place where several bodies had been found. Once discovered under the car seat an ax and so on the details became critical evidence.
The next step was to know about Bundy’s previous relationship with the Californian girl who was contacted to find out how Ted had broken relationships in the most abrupt and cold way. To top it off Bundy had loaded fuel using credit cards so tracking sites where it had happened what It framed more and more. On February 23, 1976, the trial against Ted Bundy begins for aggravated kidnapping. The accused arrives at the room, confident and self-confident, thinking that there was not enough evidence against him.
No, He foresaw the impact that Carol DaRonch’s statement had on whom the prosecutor asks to identify the man who attacked her. Without hesitation, a second point directly to Bundy while bursting into tears. The jury turns to see Bundy’s reaction and looks at him staring with an icy and impassive look at the witness. In their defense would say that he didn’t even know the girl, but he didn’t have any alibi on the day of the events.
It took the judge the weekend to thoroughly review the case, and the defendant was sentenced on June 30 to a 15-year sentence with the possibility of parole. In the prison, the tests were carried out psychologically as ordered by the judge, and the doctors determined that Bundy was not even psychotic, sexually deviant, dependent on drugs and alcohol, or suffering from brain damage.
But if he had a strong dependence on women and had a great fear of being humiliated in their relationships with them’ While in prison in Utah, more cases were being prepared against Bundy, and his legal problems were just beginning. The expert tests on the VW sedan of Bundy had taken a little time but the samples of hair taken coincided with those of Melissa Smith and Caryn Campbell and subsequent examinations revealed that cranial injury marks could have been caused by the lever found a year earlier in Bundy’s car.
Then the Colorado police lifted the murder charge on October 22, 1976. In April 1977 Bundy is transferred to the Garfield County Jail to face this new process. During the preparations for the Bundy trial, he decides to defend himself against the alleged incapacity of his lawyers whom he dismisses. With so much work before you, you can visit the Aspen court library. No one imagined that the real strategy was to try to escape.
Taking advantage of the fact that he did not enter the library handcuffed or chained in one of the frequent visits to the place, Bundy manages to escape through a window but when he falls, he hurts an ankle, a situation by which he cannot escape as far as he intended. The police established a fast fence in the city, and a massive search was undertaken, even using sniffing dogs.
In the meantime, the fugitive lived by stealing the food he needed here and there and spent time in the camps sleeping even in abandoned campers. With the greatest of the sigils he moved but could not stay in Aspen so when he finds a VW with the keys on, he steals it, but he is captured again when the police identify him. It was several days that he eluded the police.
On December 30, he climbs to the roof of one of the sections of the prison from there to gain access to another part of the ceiling that led to the closet of an empty apartment in the prison. I wait until I know that nobody was there and went out the front door of one of the departments of custodians No one noticed Bundy’s absence until the next morning, 15 hours after the facts.
By that time, I was already on my way from Chicago to Florida. By January 1978 already It was installed in a department of Tallahassee, near the Florida State University. Enjoying freedom again and knowing how young, intelligent, and powerful, Bundy developed that vein for stealing how well he was doing. He used his time between his daily walks to campus, where he even went to some classes as if were one more student and watched the television, I had stolen from someone else side.
In fact, all his furniture was a product of theft, just like the food he bought using stolen credit cards. On January 14, the Chi Omega fraternity building was half empty because most of the occupants were partying or in ballrooms taking advantage of the fact that there was no curfew that night. At 3:00 a.m. Nita Neary’s boyfriend was leaving her at the door of the fraternity and the girl notices that the door is open.
As soon as he entered the building, he heard activity and footsteps of someone running upstairs, immediately the sound was approaching the stairs. Reach to hide and watch a man wearing a colored knitted cap come down and leave the building blue, and on the arm, what looked like a folder wrapped in a rag. He kept thinking that someone had assaulted the fraternity.
So, he looked for his roommate Nancy and without knowing what to do they were in search of the person in charge of the building. But soon another colleague named Karen came across staggered down the wounded hallway and covered in blood on the head. Soon they discovered another girl more, seriously injured. That night Bundy made one of his most terrible attacks on the vile number of victims: police found the body of Lisa Levy who was hit in the head, raped, and almost a bite detaches a nipple from his chest.
In the end, the attack on Lisa Levy would result in crucial importance in the fate of Bundy. He also inserted a can of hair spray into his vagina. Margaret Bowman died in strangulation, also attacked while sleeping. The analysis of Forensics indicated that she was not sexually assaulted as Lisa Levy.
But the blows to his head were so brutal that part of the brain mass was exposed when the body was found. None of the two women were able to fight for their lives, the attack was swift and forceful. The other victims do not could provide any information about the attacker, only Miss Neary was able to provide the biggest data.
Bundy hadn’t finished his night yet not far from the fraternity would attack a girl more, fortunately, the neighbors heard strange noises and phoned the department of the woman; This heroic action could save the life of the girl who was immediately assisted by the police who found her sitting on her bed, semi-unconscious.
Although the police were able to collect enough evidence of this latest attack such as hair from a mask that Bundy released in the place, semen, and blood samples the reality was that the criminal was unknown to them. The state of Florida didn’t know anything about Ted Bundy. The last victim of Ted Bundy was the teenager Kimberly Leach who was kidnapped on February 9, 1978, in Lake City.
The only witness of the event was a friend of his named Priscilla. He saw a lord’s truck get in but could not provide more information on the color or type of truck. The body was found 8 weeks later in Florida, given the advanced state of decomposition of he himself gave no significant clue about the attacker. Days before the kidnapping of Kimberly Leach a stranger in a van white approached a 14-year-old student, the girl was on the road waiting for his brother who had been to go through it.
The girl was warned by her father, a detective officer, that he shouldn’t talk to strangers and felt uncomfortable at his questions of Bundy Fortunately, the brother arrived. Missed by the subject, the young man points to the plates of the van and shows them to his father. Once the story of the man and the white van has been heard, Detective James Parmenter of the Jacksonville Police Department decides to investigate.
The plates corresponded to a man named Randall Ragen whom Parmenter decided to visit. Mr. Ragen reports that the license plates that had been stolen from his vehicle had already been processed as new ones. Later, the detective finds out that his children were told that they had seen it stolen.
Then he senses suspicion and makes his children see a few photographs at the station To their surprise, the subject they identify is Ted Bundy. Time after discarding the van, Bundy steals a car that suits him Well, another VW sedan. But the same thing happens again: local officials in the region suspect the presence of a vehicle that is not known to them.
Officer David Lee locates him on February 15 at about 10 p.m. Report the license plates to the plant and discover that the car is stolen. As in Utah, Bundy decides to run away until he suddenly stops. To the officer’s surprise, he resists arrest and manages to escape. The officer shoots, and Bundy drops down, pretending to have been wounded, only to attack the officer again when he approaches again.
Finally, after a brief struggle, he is subdued and handcuffed. Once in the hands of the police, the evidence and the clues quickly accumulate against Bundy. He is immediately charged with the murder of the young Leach, and he is linked to the crimes of the Chi Omega fraternity and sentenced to death.
There were two trials that Theodore Robert Bundy would face for murder. The first one began on June 25, 1979, in Miami, Florida. In this case, the court focused on crimes against the Chi fraternity Omega. The second trial was held in Orlando, Florida, in January 1980 and was for the murder of the young woman, Leach But it would be the fraternity judgment that would seal Bundy’s fate.
Despite having the planet whole against him and with all the weight of the evidence on top of him Bundy acted as his own lawyer and he always hoped he could make the trial as fair as possible. The jury was composed of most African Americans. The intention was that the jury was not charged with prejudice, but the evidence was decisive, especially in the case of the brotherhood, Chi Omega.
First, it was Nita Neary’s testimony pointing to Bundy as the subject she managed to see running out the door. The other strong testimony was provided by a dentist. Dr. Souviron showed a series of photographs of the bite on Miss Levy’s buttock and the denture marks, which corresponded perfectly with Bundy’s teeth. That way, some photographs linked Bundy with the murders of the fraternity.
On July 23, after seven hours of deliberation, the jury decided that Ted Bundy was guilty. He heard the verdict without showing any emotion. On July 30, the mother testified and implored for the life of her son de Bundy, and he had the opportunity to give a good reason not to be sentenced to death. Among other things, he said he was the victim of a farce and of an unfair and abusive trial.
And that I didn’t even have because I was asking for mercy for something he had not committed. Judge Cowart at the end of Bundy his statement recommended the death penalty in the electric chair for the death of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. On January 7, 1980, the trial for the death of Kimberly Leach began in Orlando, Florida.
This time Ted Bundy decides not to defend himself, and the lawyers Julius Africano and Lynn Thompson remain as their representatives. The strategy to follow was to appeal because of mental disability. During the trial, he surprised everyone when he announced his marriage to Carole Ann Boone, his former partner of work In 1982, Ted Bundy, hired a new lawyer to make an appeal against the sentence for the homicides of the Chi Omega fraternity, which was dismissed by the court.
Then, in 1985, he hired a new lawyer to appeal the sentence for the murder of Kimberly Leach, but again, the motion was denied. The fight would continue until 1986, when he would fight again against the death penalty that weighed on him without being more successful than previous appeals.
The execution of Ted Bundy was scheduled for March 4, 1986. Hence, thanks to the proceedings of his lawyer, Polly Nelson, the fatal day was postponed until, finally, the supreme court of justice of the United States denied the last extension on January 17, 1989 “We serial killers are their children; we are their husbands; we are everywhere.
And there will be more of his children dead tomorrow. ‘Ted Bundy. “A question from a journalist: do you deserve to die? Ted Bundy replied: Good question, I think society deserves to be protected from me and from people like me ” Hence, history shows, that he was the Worst Serial Killer in American history.
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