Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy seemed to be a friendly young law student. But behind his pleasant façade lurked a demonic psychopath who preyed on young girls.

At 7.18 a.m. on the morning of 24 January 1989, an executioner hired by the state of Florida flipped a switch and sent a 2,000-volt surge of electricity coursing through the body of Ted Bundy. For 60 seconds the mass killer arched and twisted against the straps that held him, as if fighting death. Then, as the power was switched off, he sank back, his life extinguished. ‘Old Sparky’, the oldest electric chair in America, had done its duty once again.

It was nice years and 277 days since the death sentence had been passed. Across the USA, in a nation used to outbreaks of bizarre and horrific crime, work stopped as people stood around TV sets, popping champagne corks and cheering at the news. After 15 years, America’s most loathed mass killer had finally been dealt with. On the eve of his death, Bundy, the handsome young lawyer, by now 42, finally broke down and confessed to the murder of 23 young women. Detectives believe the true figure was 36, with several more lives ruined after surviving his appalling attacks.

‘Organised’ serial killer

Ted Bundy was a classic ‘organised’ serial killer. His crimes were not spur-of-the-moment decisions: they were carefully planned and executed. He was intelligent and articulate and had a degree in psychology to his credit. Handsome and clean-cut, his outward appearance gave no clues to as the monster inside. To his friends, to the courts and, above all, to his victims, he came across as a well-spoken and charming man. It was impossible to believe that Ted Bundy was actually a brutal sadist.

Bundy’s first hideous attack is believed to have occurred on 4 January 1974 at the Washington State University in Seattle. An 18-year-old student, Sharon Clarke, had settled down for the night in a modern residential block when Bundy crept in. She was battered with animal ferocity with a heavy blunt object that fractured her skull, then raped and violated with an iron rod.

The poor victim was found the next day in a coma by classmates who had gone to her room thinking she had overslept. For weeks she hovered on the edge of death before pulling through. But it was nearly three months before she could talk to detectives, by which time Bundy had wreaked more horror and havoc.

Four weeks after the first attack, Lynda Ann Healy, a student at the same university, was murdered in her bed. A friend checked her room and made a grisly discovery. Lynda was missing and her bed was soaked with blood. On 12 March on the campus at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, one hour’s drive from Seattle, 19-year old Donna Manson left her room to go to a nearby jazz evening. On 17 April, 18-year old Susan Rancourt, a student at the Central Washington State College at Ellensburg, 90 miles from Seattle, filled up a washing machine at the campus launderette, and left saying she would be back for her laundry later. Neither girl was ever seen again. One university student almost murdered, three missing – police agreed it looked ominous.

It would be six months before the terrible fate of Bundy’s victims became clear. Ted Bundy drove a bronze-coloured VW Beetle car, which had the passenger seat removed when he was ‘hunting’. Wearing a mask and equipped with handcuffs, he beat each girl about the head with a tyre iron or similar weapon. The semi-conscious victim was then dragged into the car and driven to his chosen murder site: Taylor Mountain. Pulling off a lonely mountain road 20 miles from Seattle, he knew he would be undisturbed while he raped and killed.

With the body buried, Bundy drove back to Seattle, and resumed his respectable life. However gruesome his crimes, there was nothing ‘insane’ about Ted Bundy. He knew exactly what he was doing. But he began to believe he could always outwit the police.

Murder in Oregon

The pattern was repeated in May, but this time nearly 230 miles away at a university campus at Corvallis, Oregon. Roberta Parks, aged 20, left her room just before 11 p.m. to walk 100 yards to the student’s union building. She vanished from the face of the earth.

Homicide detectives from five forces were now pooling their information. They were sure the disappearances were linked to the first attack but they had nothing, not even the sighting of a suspect, to work on. While they looked for a lead another girl went missing, this time back in Seattle.

Vivacious Brenda Ball had gone out dancing to a nightclub on the evening of 1 June 1974. It was a Saturday and none of her friends thought it was a matter of concern when she didn’t come back for the rest of the weekend. When the alarm was raised, there was little the police could find out except that she had left the nightclub with a good looking man who had his arm in a sling. Homicide officers didn’t know it then, but they were going to hear more in the years to come about a man with an injured arm.

Within 12 days’, tension brewing around the university at Seattle reached near hysteria when yet another young woman suddenly vanished. At 11 p.m. 18-year old student Georgeanne Hawkins left a party to walk back to her quarters, only 50 feet away. It was as if the ground had opened up and swallowed her: the next day there was no trace of her.

The police were filled with foreboding and frustration. Captain Joseph Mackie was sure he had a serial killer on his hands, but how could he be certain when there were no bodies and virtually no evidence?

On 14, July the pressure on Mackie and his team became almost unbearable. Not one, but two, young women vanished on the same day at the same place.

Two women abducted

Janice Ott, a striking 23-year old blonde, and 18-year old Denise Naslund vanished while on a day out to Lake Sammamish, a national park and popular beauty spot 10 miles outside Seattle. Both had been their independently.

TV and newspaper appeals soon brought forward the first piece if hard information. Janice had definitely been seen leaving the park with a good looking young man. A witness had heard the man ask Janice if she would help him get a boat on to the roof of his car.

Bundy was pleased with himself. It was one thing to bludgeon a sleeping woman unconscious and drive her away in the middle of the night. Now he had abducted two women together, in broad daylight. He had always felt superior to everyone around him. Now he knew he was right.

Bundy had an aura of authority and he carried several items of police gear, including fake ID. But it was not just a trick to lure girls into his car. Bundy craved that feeling of control. It was like a drug and one that he would be increasingly dependent on. The feeling lasted even after he had killed his victims; he kept ‘souvenirs’ to help him relive the moment. 

He hid the bodies in remote locations and revisited several of them to experience again the thrill of total control. He had sex with the corpses.

Bundy’s crimes were so utterly gross that they seemed far removed from the nice looking young law student. The police were looking for a savage beast in human form. But no-one imagined that its disguise could be so convincing.

Detectives Keppel and his partner Roger Dunn, both experienced homicide cops, were sure they now knew Ted’s new modus operandi; his MO.

Helping hand

The attacks at night in halls of residence were probably too risky to continue. Instead, seek out well-educated, well brought-up young women, college students for instance. Ask them politely for help. An arm in a sling would help to convince them that he needed assistance, and what harm could a nice-looking man with only one arm free do?

What happened to them next only remained a secret until 7 September when the bodies of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund were found hidden in a ditch just four miles from Lake Sammamish.

Now, suddenly, the chilling disappearances stopped. But the murder team picked up another vital piece if information. A student at the same university as Susan Rancourt, missing since April, came forward to day she had been approached by a man fitting the description of ‘Ted’, and with his arm in a sling, on the same day Susan had disappeared.

More reports came in from other women who had been approached by a stranger wearing a cast on his arm, sometimes his leg. Help with a boat was sometimes mentioned. A girl told of the night a man “with a broken leg” had asked her to help his carry some books. It was the same place and the same night that Georgeanne Hawkins had disappeared.

The detectives knew the calls were genuine. Now they were sure they were up against a cunning and rapacious serial killer.

Possible suspects

They were sifting through thousands of names of possible suspects. One name that came out was that of Theodore Robert Bundy. An extremely bright graduate in psychology, he had been studying law at the University in Tacoma, 25 miles from Seattle, and he lived close to the campuses where several of the missing girls had been snatched.

Bundy had been prominent in political campaigns in the 1972 presidential elections and spent spare time working with emotionally disturbed youngsters. He was in a permanent relationship with an attractive young woman and had a sparkling career almost guaranteed in law or politics.

What the police did not know was that Theodore ‘Ted’ Bundy had moved from the state of Washington in September 1974 to Salt Lake City in Utah, 3,000 miles away, to study law at university. Coincidentally, girls stopped vanishing in Washington State. But in Utah, police noticed there was something distinctly worrying going on.

On 18 October, Melissa smith, teenage daughter of local police chief Louis Smith, vanished from a restaurant car park. She was found raped, battered and strangled nine days later in woods near the Summit Park mountain resort.

On 31 October, Halloween night, another teenager, Laura Ann Aime, mysteriously vanished from a party at the American Fork park in Salt Lake. Hikers found her body nearly a month later hidden un underbrush on a hillside. Like Melissa, she had been raped, battered and strangled.

Little over a week later two women had terrifying close encounters with Bundy. One lived to tell the tale. The other vanished without trace, presumed murdered.

The woman who survived was 18-year old Carol DaRonch, who was in a Salt Lake City shopping arcade when she was approached by a man claiming to be a police officer. He tricked her into his car, and when she became suspicious he tried to handcuff her, but she fought back, screaming and yelling. Eventually she fell out of the car. Bundy followed her but, illuminated by the headlights of an approaching car, he leapt back into his vehicle and sped away.

High school kidnap

That seemed to end the night’s drama. But even as the lawmen were reassuring lucky Carol that she was safe, another chain of events with more tragic consequences was being played out just 15 miles away at the Viewpoint High School.

A play was in progress in the school theatre when a young teacher was approached by a man claiming to be a police officer and asking her to identify a car in the car park. The teacher’s refusal probably saved her life.

Seventeen-year-old Debbie Kent was not so fortunate. She had gone to the play with her family, leaving a younger brother at a nearby roller rink. At 10 p.m. she volunteered to take the family car and collect him. Witnesses later told police they heard screams from the school car park and saw a bronze-coloured VW Beetle drive away. Debbie was never seen again. Police found one clue: a handcuff key.

As quickly as they started, the killings in Utah stopped. But the killer hadn’t stopped killing. He’d just moved on. By January he was in the ski resort of Aspen, Colorado.

Caryn Campbell, a 23-year old nurse, had gone to Aspen from her home in Michigan with her boyfriend, a doctor, to attend a medical conference. They were booked into the Wildwood Inn on 12 January 1975. The first night they were in the lobby with friends when Caryn said she wanted to go back to her room to find a magazine.

She never returned. Police mounted a huge search, but there was no trace.

A month later, the worst fears of the local police force were realised when Caryn’s naked body was found buried in a snow bank on a mountain road between Aspen and the neighbouring resort of Snowmass.

Things were happening fast. On 1 March 1975 two forestry workers were checking timber growth on Taylor Mountain in the Cascade Range when they saw a white, shiny sphere half buried in moss. It was the skull of Brenda Ball.

Detectives Keppel and Dunn were quickly joined at the site by a full team of police scene-of-crime scientists and searchers.

Within 24 hours they had made three more startling finds. Here lay the remains of Lynda Ann Healy, Susan Rancourt and Roberta Parks, four girls who had been seized from places miles apart. In the case of Roberta, from Corvallis, Oregon, over 200 miles away. Yet all had been brought to this lonely mountain as a final resting place.

A fortnight later, on 15 March, the killer struck again. In Vail, another wealthy ski centre 100 miles from Aspen, 26-year old ski instructor Julie Cunningham was feeling down after a broken romance. To lift her spirits, she agreed to meet a girlfriend in a bar. She left home but never made the rendezvous. Like so many before, she simply vanished.

Only her shoes were found

On Sunday 6 April it happened again. Denise Oliverson lived in Grand Junction, Colorado, a small town on the interstate highway between Salt Lake City and Aspen. After an argument with her husband, Denise mounted her bicycle and rode off to visit her parents who lived in the same area. Her bike and shoes were later found in a ditch under a railway bridge.

On 15 April Melanie Cooley vanished in Nederland, Colorado. Her body was found two weeks later 15 miles away. She had been battered to death and raped.

Ten weeks later on 1 July, Shelley Robertson disappeared from another Colorado town, this time the resort of Golden. Her naked and battered body was found hidden in a disused mineshaft in late August.

On Independence Day, 4 July, a petrol station attendant, 19-year old Nancy Baird, disappeared from the forecourt where she worked at Bountiful, Colorado. The Seattle murder squad, Colorado homicide and FBI specialists on serial killers had no doubt that the ‘Campus Killer’ had struck again.

Eighteen young women dead or missing, but scarcely a clue, just a vague description, a penchant for slings or plaster casts, a commonplace car. For the harassed Colorado police, it didn’t add up too much. Thousands of possible lines of enquiry were followed through and checked.

Again, the name of law student Theodore ‘Ted’ Bundy came up. Some months earlier his steady girlfriend, Megan Roberts, had approached detectives in Seattle, Washington.

Reported by his girlfriend

She was worried about aspects of her boyfriend’s behaviour. She had found a bag of women’s underwear hidden in his flat. He kept medical supplies, bandages, plaster of Paris, surgical gloves, even a crutch, in a cupboard without explanation. He had a knife in the glove compartment of his car.

There was more. She said Bundy liked to tie her up with her stockings. Experiments with bondage and anal sex were followed by mock strangulation that left her frightened for her life. But the detectives were confronted by a list of over 3,000 suspects. While her revelations raised some eyebrows, they did not catapult Ted Bundy to the top of the pack. There were weirder suspects to be dealt with first.

Since his college days Bundy had had little difficulty attracting women. It seemed unbelievable that a man with a steady girlfriend could be vanishing from time to time in order to perpetrate such dreadful crimes. But, although Bundy could start a normal sexual relationship, he could never maintain one. One former girlfriend described him as an unexciting lover. For Ted Bundy normality was not enough. And it made him angry.

He was angry with everyone, his girlfriends, his family and people in general. Whether Ted Bundy was abused as a child remains unclear, but his formative years were certainly unhappy. For whatever reason, his inner rage led him to regard women as disposable items. Kidnap, murder and necrophilia offered him something that ‘mere’ sex could not.

Bundy’s murderous career received its first check on 16 August 1975. In the early hours of the morning he was driving his VW Beetle through Granger, a small town near Salt Lake City. He was looking for a victim, but he attracted the attention of a Highway Patrolman parked at a quiet junction. Sergeant Bob Hayward flashed the VW to stop but Bundy turned off his lights and sped away.

Hayward gave chase and another Highway Patrol car, vectored by radio, joined the pursuit. The VW ran through two stop signs before finally pulling over in a lay-by.

Hayward questioned the driver, a tall, slim man in his 20s, who told the lawman: “I’m lost.” The Highway Patrolman, a seasoned officer with over 20 years’ service, knew the driver was hiding something. He asked to see his driving licence. The name on the Licence was Theodore Bundy.

Hayward, now joined by two colleagues in the back-up car, decided to search the VW. He found a strange collection of property. A crowbar, an ice pick, torn strips of bed sheet, a pair of handcuffs and a peculiar mask with eye holes, made from a pair of ladies’ tights with the legs knotted at the top.

Excuse for everything

Bundy had a plausible explanation for everything: the mask, for example, was a home-made ski hood. But Hayward wasn’t taken in. Bundy was arrested as a suspect burglar. He was taken to jail, then bailed pending further enquiries. The enquiries were taken up by detective Captain Pete Hayward, brother of the patrol officer who had flagged Bundy down.

Hayward had interviewed Megan Roberts personally when she had nervously walked in to police and named her boyfriend, Ted Bundy, as a murder suspect.

Three days after he had been stopped, Bundy was rearrested and charged with going equipped to commit burglary. Hayward and detective Jerry Thompson were quietly excited. Bundy looked like a good suspect for the attempted snatch of Carol DaRonch. The car, crowbar and handcuffs all fitted. Could this be the mass killer sought in four states?

Thompson searched Bundy’s flat and found a map of Colorado. Bundy denied ever having been there. But in Aspen, detectives alerted about the arrest of Bundy requisitioned his credit card records. He had lied about Colorado. Bundy had filled up with petrol in that state three times. The dates coincided with the days Caryn Campbell, Julie Cunningham and Denise Oliverson had vanished.

Bundy was charged with kidnapping Carol DaRonch and was held in custody. Detectives from Seattle, Salt Lake City and Aspen held an emergency summit conference.

On 20 November Bundy was given $100,000 bail. He went to Seattle to stay with friends, shadowed round the clock by undercover police.

In February 1976 he went back to Utah to face trial on the kidnap charge. Bundy put up a strong defence, denying he had been anywhere near the shopping mall where Carol DaRonch had been snatched two years before.

When questioned about why he tried to escape when the Highway Patrol tried to stop his car, Bundy calmly told the jury he had been smoking drugs. He panicked when he saw the police car and sped off throwing several cannabis “joints” out of the window.

But Carol DaRonch proved a resolute witness, positively identifying Bundy as her abductor. He was convicted and sentenced to one to fifteen years in jail.

The police had won a battle, but the war between the law and the young lawyer was by no means over. While detectives renewed their efforts to link Bundy to the murdered girl, the ‘Campus Killer’ was making plans to escape.

Charged with murder

By January 1977 the authorities in Aspen had enough evidence to charge Bundy with the murder of Caryn Campbell. Bundy announced that he would defend himself, and requested access to the prison law library in Glenwood springs close to Aspen. On 7 June he asked to visit the Court House library for some last-minute cramming just before his appearance. He was left alone and promptly escaped by leaping from a second floor window.

Bundy was recaptured a week later, pulled over by a Sheriff’s car while driving a stolen Cadillac. The murder trial was rescheduled for January 1978. But Bundy had no intention of showing.

Feigning illness throughout December, Bundy refused food and slimmed down enough to climb through a loose ceiling panel on the night of the New Year’s Eve celebrations in 1977. He crawled through the ceiling space, smashed into an adjacent room and vanished into the night.

Lawman greeted the news with stunned disbelief. In Aspen Bundy’s latest escape turned him into a ghoulish folk hero, with T-shirts and even a folk song celebrating his unscheduled departure.

Eight days after escaping, Bundy, now calling himself Chris Hagen, got off the bus at the town of Tallahassee, home of the University if Florida and 1,500 miles from Aspen. He booked into a respectable guest house, paying a $100 advance in cash.

Over confident

How long could Bundy have eluded capture is open to question. He was an accomplished thief who wined and dined several girls, paying his bills with stolen credit cards. He had devoted his considerable intelligence to staying free he might still be at liberty. But the months in confinement only served to increase Bundy’s appetite.

And his confidence knew no bounds. He had proved to himself that he could abduct, rape and kill and will. It had only been a bit of bad luck with the Highway Patrol that landed him in prison. Like several other serial killers, Bundy was now convinced he could outwit the police whatever he did. No mortal man could catch Ted Bundy.

Only two weeks after his escape Bundy killed again. But it was not to be a single murder. On the night of 15 January 1978 he launched himself in a frenzied attack on five girls living on the university campus.

Bundy broke all his own rules that night. Having broken into a girls’ residential block, home to 40 students, he moved from room to room attacking at leisure. Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner suffered severe head injuries that disfigured them for life. Bundy used the same oak branch in the rooms of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, but he had gone further, sexually assaulting both girls as they lay dying. At 3.15 a.m. Nita Neary returned to the building from a night out. Perhaps disturbed by the approaching footsteps, Bundy fled down the stairs, actually passing the terrified girls as he raced into the street.

But Bundy was not finished yet. He attacked again only four blocks away.

Three girls rented a house on Dunwoody Street. Nancy Young and Debbie Cicarelli woke to hear a violent struggle inside the house and they called the police. Officers, already on the scene because of the earlier mayhem, arrived within minutes. They found Cheryl Thomas, a ballet student, lying in a pool of blood with massive head injuries. Among the gore lay a stocking mask. Bundy had not even bothered to keep it on.

While Tallahassee reeled with shock at the vile events, the man knows as Chris Hagen maintained a bold front. He kept late hours and seemed to drink more than was good for him, but he paid his way. Once again Bundy was living off stolen credit cards and stealing vehicles to keep mobile.

Attempted abduction

On 8 February Bundy tried to abduct a schoolgirl in Jacksonville. He posed as a fire officer, but fled when the girl’s brother appeared unexpectedly. The children of a detective, they noted down the number of the van Bundy was driving and reported what had happened.

On 9 February Bundy kidnapped a 12-year old schoolgirl from outside the Junior High in Lake City. Kimberley Leach was no runaway and she vanished days before she was to be the school’s Valentines Day Princess. Police feared for the worst.

The van was found on 13 February and forensic analysis had barely begun before police found Bundy himself. He had stolen an orange VW Beetle and was parked in a Pensacola side street at 1.30 a.m. when Patrolman Dave Lee approached. Bundy took fright and once again made the mistake of racing a patrol car in a VW Beetle. Forced on to the kerb, he was arrested at gunpoint.

False identification

At first he blustered, saying his name was Kenneth Minster, but the ID he showed police was stolen. He had a wallet-full of stolen credit cards and some of them turned out to have been used in Lake City the day Kimberly Leach disappeared. Eventually he admitted his true identity, but he would not confess to the killings in Tallahassee or to the abduction of Kimberly Leach. Her body was found two months later, hidden in a derelict pig sty. From examination of the van and her remains, it appeared that she had been raped in the vehicle and then suffocated in the mud while he assaulted her again. He had mutilated her body with a knife.

Appointment with ‘Old Sparky’

Bundy was tried in June 1979 for the murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy. The jury was unanimous in finding him guilty and the legal panel ordered the death penalty, in Florida the electric chair. The following year Bundy received another death sentence for murdering Kimberly Leach. Although Bundy exploited every legal avenue to save his skin, the state of Florida was determined to see justice done. It took nearly 10 years and several million dollars to defeat every challenge, but he was made to keep his appointment with ‘Old Sparky’.

Secret Psycho

What made Ted Bundy a gentle charmer one day and a homicidal sex killer the next remains a mystery. In most ways his personality was the exact opposite of the majority of serial killers or rapists.

Psychiatrists have discovered that most sex murderers are inadequate personalities, who suffer from poor self image. They are frequently of low intelligence, often physically small, and their attacks on women usually stem from a feeling of rejection by the opposite sex at an early age.

Cultured Killer

Bundy showed none of these traits. He was intelligent, cultured, good looking, witty, and a bit hit with women. When he was first arrested in Colorado, friends from the colleges where he studied could not believe the police were holding the right man. They all described his as kind, sensitive and self-assured.

Bundy seemed to have everything. He was tall, slim, and handsome. He had a brilliant future ahead of him as a lawyer, he had campaigned for the Republican Party at election times, studied and spoke Chinese, was friendly and sociable and enjoyed sports.

Jekyll and Hyde character

Police captain Joseph Mackie, one of the Seattle detectives who helped bring Bundy to justice, said: “He was a true Jekyll and Hyde character, He was very attractive to women, good looking, charming, successful, a fun guy to be with most of the time.

“But inside him lurked a terrible twisted power that drove him to commit some of the worst sex crimes ever seen in the USA.”

After his final arrest, Bundy told psychiatrists that he had fantasies about being a vampire which often took over his life. But he said that he always felt bad about these phases after they had passed.

While refusing to admit to any of his crimes until the very eve of his execution, he did admit to being heavily influenced by magazines featuring violent pornography that he often bought from sleazy stores in Seattle.

Psychiatrists and detectives also noted that while denying involvement in any crimes, Bundy would freely speculate about who the killer might be and what his mental situation was.

Detective Mackie said: “We know he was talking to us about himself, but he always acted like he was using his very considerable intelligence to try to help us build up a picture of what the real killer might be like. He enjoyed playing mind games.”

Dr James Dobson, a psychologist who examined Bundy, said: “Only after his first killing did he feel any remorse. But then the sex frenzy overcame him and he killed again and again, becoming more and more desensitised. He no longer experienced normal human feelings and he blamed pornography for feeding his sick obsessions.”

The man they couldn’t hold

Bundy’s bizarre folk-hero image stemmed largely from his ability to escape. Everyone loves an escape artist. As early as September 1976 prison officers found forged ID and social security papers hidden in his cell, plus airline timetables.

In January 1977 he was driven from Utah to Colorado to be tried for the murder of Caryn Campbell. As a former law student, Bundy’s decision to defend himself in court was taken at face value. He was granted access to the prison law library, where he laboured away in peace. No suspicions were aroused when at the courthouse on 7 June Bundy requested a quick last-minute cramming session in the law library there. But when the time came for him to face the judge, he was nowhere to be found. Bundy had jumped from the second-floor window and ran for it.

Leap for freedom

In his leap for freedom he sprained his ankle, but he made it to the thickly wooded mountains before helicopters were overhead. He heard police dogs on his trial but threw them off the scent by swimming the swirling Roaring Fork river. He found a hunter’s cabin and broke in, finding food, warm clothing and a gun.

Bundy pressed on, trying to get as far from Aspen as he could. But, unfamiliar with the area, he actually travelled in a circle. Six days after his dramatic escape he was back on the outskirts of the city. Weak, exhausted and in serious pain from his injured ankle, he thought his prayers were answered when he found a Cadillac with the keys in the ignition.

Bad Driving

Bundy stole the car, but he was so tired that his erratic driving attracted the attention of a Sheriff’s car. He was chased and arrested.

The Caryn Campbell murder trial was set for 6 January 1978. But Bundy had other plans. In the weeks leading up to his court appearance he pretended to be ill, refusing food and sleeping late. But there was nothing wrong with him: he was deliberately losing weight. Bundy had discovered a loose ceiling panel around a light socket in his cell. From there he could wriggle through a tiny crawl space and break into the jailer’s lounge.

On New Year’s Eve Bundy knew all the jailers would be at a big party in their social club.

On New Year’s Day bleary-eyed wardens were not surprised to see what they thought was Bundy still asleep under his blankets. In fact, they had fallen for the oldest trick of all. The lump under the covers was just a pile of Bundy’s law books. He had done it again, and had a 17-hour start on his captors.

Massacre in Florida

Forty female students and a supervisor lived in the Chi Omega residential block. The building was protected by a combination entry lock but it had been malfunctioning for several days. Tragically, no-one had bothered to fix it.

On a Saturday night many of the girls were out on dates or seeing friends. Margaret Bowman, who was 21, had gone out with a new boyfriend. Lisa Levy had been out to a disco. Karen Chandler, a local girl, had been home to have a meal with her parents. Kathy Kleiner, her room mate, had been to a wedding.

It was Nita Neary, coming home at 3.15 a.m. after a hectic night, who first noticed something suspicious. As she entered the building foyer she heard the sound of feet running on the landing above. A man wearing a dark ski cap bounded down the stairs and dashed away towards the rear of the building. He was carrying what looked like a lump of a tree branch.

Intruder inside

Scared, Nita woke her room mate Nancy Dowdie. The two friends ventured back into the corridor looking for the intruder. Finding nothing, they were discussing what to do next when they saw Karen Chandler stagger out of her room with blood streaming from her head.

In Karen’s room her friend Kathy Kleiner was on her bed, her face a mask of blood. Both girls had been the victims of a frenzied attack with a heavy club. They were alive but critically injured.

Within minutes of the alarm, police and ambulance crews were sweeping into the car park. Frightened students in their dressing gowns were wandering the corridors in confusion.

Police ordered a room-by-room search. In Lisa Levy’s room patrolman Ray Crewe was greeted with a sight he would never forget. The young student lay on her blood-soaked bed dead from massive head wounds. She had been subjected to a cruel and violent sex attack.

Now every room had been searched except number nine. Margaret Bowman had been chatting to one of her friends until 2.45 a.m. There was no reply to the knocks on her door.

An officer forced his way in to be greeted by another scene of sheer horror. Margaret lay on her bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. But the room was awash with blood. Her skull had been cracked open by a series of massive blows. A nylon stocking had been used to throttle her. It had been pulled so tight that her neck was broken. She was beyond help.

Work of a madman

A madman had been at work, moving from room to room, bludgeoning his victims with a heavy oak tree branch. There were pieces of bark stuck in pools of coagulating blood.

The attacks must have stretched over nearly 30 minutes yet, amazingly, no-one had heard a scream, a cry for help, or the sounds of violence.

The streets around the dormitory block were clogged with police cars and ambulances. Sirens wailed and blue and red lights lit up the night. Unbelievably, only four blocks away from the Chi Omega house a fresh horror was unfolding.

Three students, Cheryl Thomas, Nancy Young and Debbie Cicarelli, shared a rented house on Dunwoody Street. On this terrible night they had all been out on the town together. When they had got home they were in good spirits, laughing and joking before going to bed in their separate rooms.

Cheryl, a ballet dancer, was later to say that the last thing she remembers as she was dozing off was hearing what she thought was her cat knocking a pot plant off a window sill.

Violent pounding

A few minutes later Debbie and Nancy were terrified to hear the sounds of violent pounding coming from elsewhere in the darkened house. They called the police.

Officers already at the scene of the campus carnage raced to Dunwoody Street. They forced their way into Cheryl’s room to find her semi-conscious in a sea of her own blood. She had been battered to the very edge of death.

As an ambulance rushed her to hospital, where her life was saved, detectives began an immediate examinations of the crime scene. In the blood they made a vital find. It was a mask made from a pair of ladies’ tights with eye holes cut out and the legs knotted on top.

Bite marks that trapped the killer

The breakthrough came after the murder of Lisa Levy at Tallahassee. During the frenzied sex attacks he had bitten her breast and buttocks, leaving deep teeth marks.

Police called in dentist Dr Richard Souviron. He was also a forensic odontologist and had helped police identify hundreds of bodies from dental records. Now detectives wanted to know if the bite marks could help trap the killer.

Wounds photographed

At the mortuary Souviron had the bite wounds carefully photographed. When Bundy was arrested police were able to obtain a copy of his dental records and x-rays from the jail in Utah where he had been held before his escape.

Souviron noted remarkable similarities between Bundy’s teeth and the bite marks on Lisa Levy. For instance, Bundy’s lower incisors were sharply angled out of line with the rest of his teeth. This pattern could clearly be seen in the victim’s flesh.

Court order

 

Later police got a court order to take a wax impression of Bundy’s teeth. Souviron was then able to prove conclusively that the injuries could only have been made by Bundy.

Kidnap vehicles yield vital clues

Forensic science made a great contribution to getting Ted Bundy convicted as a multiple murderer. The first was when Bundy’s Volkswagen was seized after his arrest in Colorado. Detectives hoped that a microscopic check of its interior might yield valuable evidence.

The inside of the car was vacuumed. About 1 lb of dust, gravel and other debris was carefully packaged and sent to the FBI crime labs in Quantico, Virginia.

Special Agent Neill

Special Agent Bob Neill emptied the bag in to a glass-topped table and used an illuminated magnifying glass to search for human hairs. Several were found and picked out with tweezers. Magnified 400 times, human hair displays a patters as individual as a fingerprint.

Agent Neill was supplied with samples of hair from all of the murder victims found up to that point. He then used a special device called a comparison microscope, which can magnify two sides at once merging the image into one.

If two hairs from the same person were laid end to end they would become a continuation of one another. One of the hairs taken from Aspen victim Caryn Campbell was a perfect match. Neill subsequently made more Caryn Campbell hair matches.

Vacuumed samples

He then compared a pubic hair from police chief’s daughter Melissa Smith with a hair recovered from the vacuumed samples. Once more, a perfect match, proof that both women had been carried in Bundy’s car.

A further forensic lead came when the police found the body of Kimberley Leach. Unlike the previous Bundy killings were clothes and jewellery were never found, her clothes were still on her body.

Polyester fibres

Sticking to some of them were blue polyester and wool fibres that proved a prefect match to the carpet in the rear of the stolen van Bundy had been spotted driving in Florida.

Splashes of blood, a perfect match with Kimberley’s, were also found in the van carpet material, and identical fibres to those sticking to her clothes were later discovered in lab tests adhering to one of Bundy’s jackets.

Courtroom Survivor

On 31 July 1979 Ted Bundy was sentenced to death for the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. He became convict 669063 in Railford Penitentiary, Florida. Hundreds of men were there on Death Row. All awaited a one-way trip to ‘Old Sparky’, America’s oldest electric chair.

The US legal system allows for a seemingly endless series of appeals and stays of execution. Ted Bundy was a law student with a degree in psychology and he was determined to make the system work for him. However, he was back in court the following year, once again on trial for his life.

In January 1980 he was tried for the rape and murder of 12-year old Kimberley Leach. He was convicted in February, the jury recommending the death sentence. The judge agreed and duly passed sentence. However, although the state of Florida was determined to execute Bundy, it took more than nine years and legal expenses estimated at between five and ten million dollars to get him to the electric chair.

Playing for time

When every single legal avenue had been closed, Bundy played for time. In the last days of his life he confessed to more murders, hoping to delay his death still further. Closeted with detectives from Utah and Colorado, he admitted to several more murders. The night before his death he confessed to a whole series of them. But his final appeals were rejected, and on 24 January he was led to the ‘Chair’.

How many lives cut short?

How many people did Bundy kill? No one will ever know for sure. As he lingered on Death Row he made various claims to journalists, psychologists and law officials, raging from 40 to 400. 

Confessed to more murders

Although convicted of three murders in Florida, crimes he steadfastly denied, it was only on the eve of his execution that he called together detectives from five different states and confessed to another 22 murders.

Brutal sites

Police search teams later visited a number of woodland sites where Bundy claimed to hidden bodies, but no remains were found.

One FBI detective said: “Many of the areas had been dug up in open cast mining operations or changed completely by timber felling or road building. All we can say is that he certainly killing at least a dozen women, probably three times that number, and possibly a lot more.”

Among the girls he finally confessed to killing where Roberta Parks, Susan Rancourt, Georgeanne Hawkins, Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, Brenda Ball and Donna Manson.

Burn Bundy Burn!

Bundy went to the electric chair at the Florida State Penitentiary in the town of Starke on 24 January 1989, nine years and 277 days after being sentenced to death. He was 42.

He had spent the previous two days making further belated confessions to detectives and praying in the company of a Methodist priest. For the last week of his life he had been confined to a tiny death cell, only nine feet by eleven feet.

Head shaved

On the morning he died Bundy refused a last meal of steak and eggs. His head was then shaved and he was walked the 30 feet to the execution chamber.

He was strapped into the macabrely named “Old Sparky”. Built in 1923, it was the oldest electric chair in America. It had already put to death 215 killers.

At exact noon, a hooded and anonymous executioner, paid $85 for the job, flipped a switch that sent 2,000 volts through Bundy’s shuddering body.

The execution was watched by 43 witnesses, state and prison officials, plus 12 representatives of the media, and a dozen Florida citizens picked from more than a thousand who applied by letter for the “privilege” of seeing Bundy die from behind a glass panel.

Witnesses said that Bundy had to be supported by two prison officers as he entered the death cell. He was described as having a look of controlled anger on his face as the signal to switch the current was given.

Outside the jail, Sheriff’s deputies struggled to keep order as a huge crowd set off fireworks and cheered in a lynch-mob atmosphere.

A local radio DJ even urged listeners to turn off their toasters and coffee makers “to give them more juice down there at the jail”.

After an autopsy, Bundy was buried in a tiny cemetery reserved for execution victims inside the prison grounds. His grave is marked only by a small concrete tablet bearing his name.

END