Ted Bundy
Ted Bundy was one of a kind serial killer. The murders that he committed were horrendous to the degree that the world had never seen before. Not only did he rape, torture, and kill these women, but he continued to have sex with their corpses. The murders he committed sent shockwaves through American society at the time. And alas, when they finally discovered his identity, people were shocked to see that this serial killer who was killing young women was a young, attractive, charming, and successful gentleman, going ultimately against what the traditional stereotype of a serial killer entails. The gruesome details of what he did to these women can send shivers up your spine. Ted Bundy showed the world the dark side of humanity and what human beings could be capable of.
The movie is based on a true-life story. Ted Bundy was born on 24 November 1944 in Vermont, USA. His 22-year-old mother was unwed, and to avoid the social stigma, she pretended to be her son’s sister, and Ted was raised by his grandparents, who he thought were his adoptive parents (Samuel & Widiger, 2007). He found out the truth about his mother when he studied in college in 1968, and that kicked off his criminal behavior. Until then, he was a young social man, an excellent student, and he was in love with Stephanie Brooks, an upper-class woman, whose family took money and prestige for granted. Ted Bundy came from a working-class family, and he was often self-conscious about the fact that his family struggled financially (Ramsland, 2019). Ted dropped out of college, and he did not care about his future at that point, so Stephanie broke up with him as she could not tolerate his attitude. Bundy was distraught and hurt when Stephanie left him. Of course, that was the ”excuse” for Bundy’s murders, not the real reason.
Bundy rekindled his relationship with Brooks in 1973, and they were about to get married, but in 1974, he disappeared and broke it off with her, which was no doubt an act of revenge on his part, typical behavior of a psychopath. By that point, he was totally out of control. He raped women, and then he either strangled them or bludgeoned them, and after he killed them, he carried their corpses into the woods where he buried them (Paoletti, 2017). Then, he would revisit them and performed sexual acts on them until they were decomposed. He often decapitated his victims and kept their severed heads as trophies.
His target group was 15–25-year-old students of middle-class background, and they all had brown, long, straight hair, parted sideways like Stephanie Brooks, the woman who broke his heart. He would often pretend he had broken his arm or his leg; he pretended he walked on crutches and asked unsuspecting girls to help him carry his books or his bags to his car. Bundy was well mannered, well dressed, and charming; thus, they were eager to help him (Nordheimer, 1978). He killed eight women in Washington from January to July 1974 and 9 girls in Utah and Colorado until June 1975. 18-year-old Carol DaRonch managed to escape from him as she jumped off his car when he tried to abduct her (Pedneault, n.d.). She is one of the very few women who survived Ted Bundy. Because of her, Tedd Bundy was brought to justice. In August 1975, the Police stopped Bundy‘s car and found in his weird trunk objects such as a mask, handcuffs, rope. They also found hairs that belonged to DaRonch in his car, though he used to clean it meticulously, whom he previously tried to abduct by pretending to be a policeman. He was arrested and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment in February 1976.
He defended himself in the trial; thus, he would often get permission to visit the library to study law books. On 7 June 1977, he escaped jumping off the library’s window, and he hid in the woods in Aspen for six days until June 13, when he was arrested again. On 30 December 1977, Bundy escaped again (Yang et al. 2019). This time he moved to Florida, and on 15 January 1978, he broke into a sorority’s house. He raped and strangled two students, 21-year-old Margaret Bowman and 20-year-old Lisa Levy. On 09 February 1978, he raped and killed 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. He was tracked down by the Police 3 days later as he tried to cross the state of Alabama. Ironically, the Police officer who stopped Bundy had no idea who he was. He asked him to pull over because he drove a stolen vehicle. His trial began in June 1979, and Bundy represented himself again.
Though a talented lawyer, he did not have the legal expertise and knowledge to handle such a delicate case. The most damning evidence against him was his tooth prints found in some of his victims’ bodies (Anonymous, 2019). He got the death sentence by electric chair though he proclaimed his innocence. During his trial, he proposed to a woman with whom he had been romantically involved for a while named Carol Anne Boone, and she accepted to marry him (Biographics., 2018). They even had a daughter in 1981. The prosecution called the wedding proposal a charade. According to the law, the marriage was valid.
In conclusion, Ted Bundy committed extremely vicious crimes, which made him infamous. The sad part, besides the women he killed, is that he had all it took to succeed in his life, but like the judge who convicted him said,” you went the other way partner”. Ted Bundy gave in to his urge to kill and destroy. He only exploited his charisma in winning women‘s trust to kill them.
References
Samuel, D. B., & Widiger, T. A. (2007). Describing Ted Bundy’s Personality and Working
towards DSM-V. Independent Practitioner, 27(1), 20-22. Retrieved from
file:///C:/Users/maken/OneDrive/Documents/Psyc 475/Describing Ted Bundy’s Personality and Working Towards DSM-V.pdf.
Paoletti, G. (2017). “The Very Definition Of Heartless Evil”: The Story Of Ted Bundy. ATI.
Retrieved from https://allthatsinteresting.com/ted-bundy.
Nordheimer, J. (1978). ALL AMERICAN BOY ON TRIAL. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/10/archives/allamerican-boy-on-trial-ted-bundy.html.
Yang, A., Gowen, G., Taudte, J., Deutsch, G., & Lopez, E. (2019) Timeline of many of Ted
Bundy’s brutal crimes. ABC News. Retrieved from https://abcnews.go.com/US/timeline-ted-bundys-brutal-crimes/story?id=61077236.
Anonymous. (2019). Ted Bundy. Newspaper. Retrieved from
https://www.newspapers.com/topics/famous-people/ted-bundy/.
Biographics. (2018, January 10). Ted Bundy Biography: Profile of a Serial Killer. Retrieved from https://biographics.org/ted-bundy-biography-profile-serial-killer/
Pedneault, A. (n.d.). Ted Bundy on the “malignant being”: An analysis of the justificatory
discourse of a serial killer. Retrieved from http://www.sfu.ca/~palys/crim862-Pedneault-
TedBundyJustificatoryDiscourse.pdf
Ramsland, K. (2013, Fall). The many sides of Ted Bundy. The Forensic Examiner, 22(3), 18+. Retrieved from http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.liberty.edu/apps/doc/A345172399/AONE?u=vic_libert
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