The Very Definition of Evil: The Story of Ted Bundy

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vmbo k
• Leerjaar 3

Who is this man?

What do you know
about Ted Bundy?

The Very Definition of Evil: The Ted Bundy Story

Ted Bundy described himself as "the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet." His crimes certainly prove that statement true. 

During the spring and summer of 1974, police in the Pacific Northwest were in a panic. Women at colleges across Washington and Oregon were disappearing at an alarming rate, and law enforcement had few leads as to who was behind it.  

 

In just six months, six women had been abducted. Panic in the area reached fever pitch when Janice Ann Ott and Denise Marie Naslund disappeared in broad daylight from a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park. 

But the boldest of the abductions also yielded the first real break in the case. On the day Ott and Naslund vanished, several other women remembered being approached by a man who had tried and failed to lure them to his car.  

They told the authorities about an attractive young man with his arm in a sling. His vehicle was a brown Volkswagen Beetle, and the name he gave them was Ted.  

   

After releasing this description to the public, the police were contacted by four people who identified the same Seattle resident: Ted Bundy.  

These four people included Bundy’s ex-girlfriend, a close friend of his, one of his co-workers, and a psychology professor who had taught Bundy.  

 

But the police were inundated with tips, and they dismissed Ted Bundy as a suspect, thinking it unlikely that a clean-cut law student with no adult criminal record could be the perpetrator; he didn’t fit the profile. 

These types of judgments benefitted Ted Bundy many times throughout his murderous career as one of history’s most infamous serial killers, which saw him take at least 30 victims across seven states in the 1970s.  

For a time, he fooled everyone — the cops who didn’t suspect him, the prison guards whose facilities he escaped from, the women he manipulated, the wife who married him after he was caught — but he was, as his final lawyer said, “The very definition of heartless evil.”  

As Bundy himself once remarked, “I’m the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.” 

First Attack

In 1973, Bundy was accepted into the University of Puget Sound Law School, but after a few months, he stopped attending classes.  

 

Then, in January of 1974, the disappearances began.  

 

Ted Bundy’s first known attack was not an actual murder, but instead an assault on 18-year-old Karen Sparks, a student and dancer at the University of Washington.  

 

Bundy broke into her apartment and bludgeoned her unconscious with a metal rod from her bed frame before sexually assaulting her with the same object. His assault left her in a 10-day coma and with permanent disabilities.

First Murders

Ted Bundy’s next victim and his first confirmed murder was Lynda Ann Healy, another UW student.  

A month after his assault on Karen Sparks, Bundy broke into Healy’s apartment in the early morning, knocked her unconscious, then clothed her body and carried her out to his car. She was never seen again, but part of her skull was discovered years later at one of the locations where Bundy dumped his bodies. 

Afterward, Bundy continued targeting female students in the area. He developed a technique: approaching women while wearing a cast or appearing otherwise disabled and asking them to help him put something in his car.  

 

He would then bludgeon them unconscious before binding, raping, and killing them, dumping their bodies in a remote location in the woods. Bundy would often revisit these sites to have sex with their decaying corpses. In some cases, Bundy would decapitate his victims and keep their skulls in his apartment, sleeping beside his trophies

Over the next five months, Bundy abducted and murdered five female college students in the Pacific Northwest: Donna Gail Manson, Susan Elaine Rancourt, Roberta Kathleen Parks, Brenda Carol Ball, and Georgann Hawkins.  

 

  

Law School and Arrest

As the manhunt for the abductor continued, more witnesses produced descriptions that matched Ted Bundy and his car. Just as some of his victims’ bodies were being discovered in the woods, Bundy was accepted to law school in Utah and moved to Salt Lake City.  

While living there, he continued to rape and murder young women, including a hitchhiker in Idaho and four teenage girls in Utah

 Finally, in August 1975, Bundy was pulled over while driving through a Salt Lake City suburb, and police discovered masks, handcuffs, and blunt objects in the car. While this was not enough to arrest him, a police officer, realizing that Bundy was also a suspect in the earlier killings, put him under surveillance. 

The officers then found his Beetle, which he had since sold, where they discovered hair matching three of his victims. With this evidence, they put him in a lineup, where he was identified by one of the women whom he had attempted to abduct. He was then put to prison.

Escaping Jail in Aspen

But arrest didn’t stop Bundy from killing.  

 He was soon able to, for the first of two times in his life, escape from custody.  

 

In 1977, he escaped from the law library at the courthouse in Aspen, Colorado.  

 

Because he was serving as his own lawyer, he had been allowed into the library during a break in his preliminary hearing. Nominally, he was researching the laws pertaining to his case. But the fact that he was his own counsel also meant he was unshackled — and when he saw his chance, he took it. 

He jumped from the library’s second-floor window and hit the ground running, disappearing into the trees before the guard returned to check on him.  

 

He planned to make his way toward Aspen Mountain, and he broke into a cabin and later a trailer for supplies.    

Back in Aspen, he stole a car, thinking to put some distance between himself and the jail cell he was fleeing.  

 

But the reckless speed with which he left Aspen made him conspicuous, and police officers spotted him. He was recaptured after six days of being on the run. 

Chi Omega Murders At Florida State

Bundy’s next escape took place just six months later, this time from a jail cell.  

After carefully studying a map of the prison, Bundy realized that his cell was directly beneath the living quarters of the prison’s chief jailer; the two rooms were separated by a crawl space.  

 

Bundy traded with another inmate to get a small hacksaw, and while his cellmates were exercising or showering, he worked away at the ceiling, scraping away layer after layer of plaster.   

The crawl space he made was small — very small. He began deliberately cutting back on meals in an effort to lose weight. 

He also planned ahead. Unlike last time, when his escape had failed because he was without resources in the outside world, he stowed away a small pile of money smuggled to him by Carole Ann Boone, the woman who would later marry him in prison.  

 

When he was ready, Bundy finished the hole and crawled up into the chief jailer’s room. Finding it unoccupied, he swapped his prison jumpsuit for the man’s civilian clothes and strolled out the jail’s front doors.  

 

This time, he didn’t dawdle; he stole a car immediately and got out of town, making his way to Florida. 

On January 15, 1978, two weeks after his escape, Bundy broke into a Chi Omega sorority house on the Florida State University campus.  

 

Within the span of just 15 minutes, he sexually assaulted and killed Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, bludgeoning them with firewood and strangling them with stockings. He then assaulted Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler, who both suffered horrific injuries, including broken jaws and missing teeth.  

 

He then broke into the apartment of Cheryl Thomas, who lived several blocks away, and beat her so badly she lost her hearing permanently. 

Still on the run on February 8, Bundy abducted 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach from her middle school and murdered her, concealing her body on a pig farm.  

 

And then, once again, his reckless driving caught the attention of the police. When they realized that his plates belonged on a stolen car, they pulled him over and found the IDs of three dead women in his vehicle, linking him to the FSU crimes.  

 

“I wish you had killed me,” Bundy told the arresting officer.

Trial and Execution

He would act as his own lawyer when he eventually was found guilty and put on death row where he was later electrocuted to death.

Though he confessed to many murders before his death, the true number of Bundy’s victims remains unknown. Bundy denied certain killings, despite physical evidence tying him to the crimes

 

Ultimately, all of this has led authorities to suspect Bundy killed anywhere from 30 to 40 women, making him one of the most infamous and terrifying serial killers in American history — and perhaps “the very definition of heartless evil.”