Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
a dossier that is honestly difficult to look
at. We are staring into the abyss of American
criminal history. We're talking about Ted Bundy.
Yeah. But before you think, oh, I know this story.
He's the handsome law student killer. I really
want to stop you right there. Because the source
material we're digging into today, the comprehensive
timeline, the psych profiles, the court transcripts,
it tells a much, much more complex story. It
really does. The pop culture version of Bundy
is this sort of evil genius, a master criminal.
But the real Bundy, the one you find when you
dig into the source material, he's actually a
study in contradiction. That's a good way to
put it. He's a study in inadequacy. And most
importantly, he's a mirror for the systemic failures
of law enforcement in the 1970s. That's the mission
for today, right? We aren't just here to recount
the timeline of 30 plus murders, although we
have to look at it because the sheer scope is
baffling. It is. We're trying to understand the
mechanics of the deception. I mean, how does
a man. who is so clearly falling apart inside,
convince the entire world he's put together?
How can you be a crisis hotline worker, literally
saving lives one minute? And a necrophile the
next. It doesn't compute. Exactly. It's the study
of the chameleon. That's the word that keeps
coming up again and again in the research. It's
a changeling. That's what some of the psychiatrists
who interviewed him called him. Someone who didn't
just hide in the shadows. He hid in the light.
He hid in plain sight. Completely. I mean, this
is a guy who volunteered for the Republican Party.
He's rubbing elbows with governors. And at the
same time, he has a burglary kit in the passenger
seat of his Volkswagen. So let's orient ourselves
for this deep dive. We are talking about a timeline
that stretches primarily from... 1974 to 1978.
It covers Washington, Utah, Colorado, and finally
Florida. A huge geographic footprint. He confessed
to 30 murders. But, and we'll get into this,
he is suspected of many, many more. But to understand
the how, we have to start with the who. And that
takes us way back. Burlington, Vermont, 1946.
The origins of Theodore Robert Cowell. And right
out of the gate, his life is built on a lie.
The sister lie? I mean, it sounds like something
out of a Gothic novel. It's just so bizarre.
It really is. So he's born to Eleanor Louise
Cowell. She's not married. And he's born at a
home for unwed mothers. Now, you have to put
yourself in that time period, 1946. The stigma
of illegitimacy was massive. It was career ending,
life ending socially. It was social suicide for
the whole family. So his grandparents, Samuel
and Eleanor Cowell, they take him in. They bring
him to their home in Philadelphia and they make
a decision. They are going to raise him as their
son. Which means they have to tell him that his
own mother, Louise, is actually his older sister.
Correct. And he grows up believing this for years.
Just try to imagine the daily reality of that.
The people you trust most in the world, your
entire family, they are performing a play 24
hours a day. And you're the only one who doesn't
have the script. And the source material has
these conflicting accounts on when he actually
found out the truth. It does. There's one story
that a cousin taunted him with it when he was
young, maybe showed him a copy of his birth certificate.
But his biographer, Ann Rule. who knew him personally,
and we will absolutely get to that insane connection
later, she believed he didn't find the actual
birth certificate until 1969 when he was in his
20s. But regardless of when the final reveal
happened, think about the psychological crater
that leaves. I mean, if your own identity, the
very foundation of who you are, is a fabrication
created by the people who are supposed to love
you. What do you learn from that? You learn that
reality is malleable. Exactly. You learn that
if you lie convincingly enough, it just becomes
the truth. It destroys the entire concept of
objective truth for you. It's like his whole
life was a lesson in deception. Psychologists
have a term for it, a defect in object relations.
He learned that people aren't really people.
They're just props. They're characters to be
moved around to maintain whatever narrative you're
trying to sell. So he wasn't just lying to hide
crames later in life. Lying was his native language.
It was his first language. And there's all this
ambiguity about his biological father, too. It's
not just the mother -sister thing. Right. Another
layer of deception and mystery. His birth certificate
lists a salesman named Lloyd Marshall. But his
mother, Louise, later claimed it was a war veteran
named Jack Worthington. But then there were even
darker rumors, right? The ones that implicated
his own grandfather. That was a longstanding
theory, yeah. The idea that his grandfather,
Samuel Cowell, the man who was raising him as
a father, might have actually been his biological
father. Implying incest. Correct. Now, it is
worth noting that much later, Dr. Dorothy Otnell
Lewis, a psychiatrist who studied Bundy extensively,
she claimed that DNA eventually disproved that
specific incest theory. So that may not be true.
However, the grandfather, Samuel Cowell, he's
a character we really need to look at closely.
Because he's central to the story Bundy tells
about himself. Yeah, because for a long time,
the narrative that Bundy himself pushed was that
this guy was an absolute tyrant. Right, a monster.
Bundy and other family members, they told attorneys
and biographers that Samuel was a violent bully,
that he would swing cats by their tails, that
he threw his own daughter, Bundy's mother, down
a flight of stairs, that he would speak to unseen
presences in the house. So he's painting this
picture of a violent, unstable... Frankly terrifying
household. The perfect origin story for a future
serial killer, right? It provides a neat explanation.
But I hear a but coming. But later investigations
really call that into question. People who knew
the family, neighbors in their Philadelphia neighborhood,
they remembered Samuel Cowell as a fine man,
a quiet, respectable person. Another cousin said
the whole raging animal abuser story was a convenient
fabrication. The fabrication to do what? To explain
why Ted turned out the way he did. to garner
sympathy, to create a trauma narrative that might
explain his own deviations. It's possibly one
of the earliest examples of him manipulating
his own history to fit the audience. Wow. So
even his trauma might have been a performance.
It's entirely possible, and it shows you the
manipulator was there from the very beginning.
But speaking of early signs, even if the grandfather
wasn't the monster Bundy claimed he was, young
Ted had some... Some serious red flags. The knife
incident? The knife incident. It's chilling.
Let's paint the scene for you because it's really
disturbing. So his aunt, Julia, is taking a nap
in the house. She wakes up and she feels something
is wrong. You know that feeling. She opens her
eyes and she is surrounded by knives from the
kitchen. Just laid out around her. Tucked into
the covers, laid out on the pillow next to her
head. And there, standing by the bed, is three
-year -old Ted just smiling at her. Three. Years.
Old. That's not normal toddler mischief. That
is something else entirely. No. That suggests
a fascination with power, with fear, with control
at a very, very early age. And it wasn't an isolated
incident. There are other accounts from neighbors
of him, you know, allegedly torturing animals,
burning a cat, building punji traps in the woods,
these pits with sharpened sticks to try and injure
people. So we have this. Really dark undercurrent.
But then his mother moves them away from all
that. She moves them to Tacoma, Washington. She
marries a man named Johnny Bundy. And Ted gets
adopted. He becomes Ted Bundy. And on the surface,
things seem to settle down. Okay. He becomes
what one classmate called a medium -sized fish
in a large pond. He wasn't a total outcast, but
he wasn't popular either. He was awkward. He
felt awkward. He later claimed he just didn't
understand social interactions. He said he didn't
know what made people want to be friends. It's
like he was observing humans rather than being
one. Precisely. He was an anthropologist from
another planet. He talked about window peeping
late at night, going out and looking into windows
to see women undressing, sure, but also just
to see how normal people lived, how families
interacted. He was studying. He was studying.
He was mimicking politicians he heard on the
radio to learn how to... to speak persuasively.
He was consciously building what psychiatrists
call the mask of sanity. He learned that if you
smile at the right time and you say the right
things and you look presentable, people will
accept you. They won't look any deeper. And he
builds that mask well enough to get into the
University of Puget Sound and in the University
of Washington. And this is where we meet the
first pivotal figure in his adult life. The sources
call her Diane Edwards, though she's often known
by the pseudonym Stephanie Brooks in movies and
books. Right, the one that got away. In the narrative
of his life that he constructs, she is the catalyst
for everything. But it wasn't just a bad breakup,
was it? I mean, we've all had bad breakups. We
don't all go on to commit 30 homicides. What
was so unique about this dynamic with her? It
was about class and status. That's the key. Diane
was wealthy, sophisticated, beautiful. She was
from a world that Bundy desperately, desperately
wanted to belong to, but felt he never could.
He felt inadequate. Deeply inadequate. He didn't
have the money or the social pedigree. He called
her the only woman he ever really loved, but
it was an aspirational love. He wanted to possess
what she represented. And she dumps him. 1968.
She ends it because he lacks ambition. He's directionless.
He's not going anywhere. And for Bundy, this
devastation seems to trigger something very specific.
It wasn't just heartbreak. It was what psychologists
call a narcissistic injury. What does that mean
exactly? It means she validated his deepest,
most terrifying insecurity, that he wasn't good
enough, that he was a fraud. It was a rejection
of his very self. And he couldn't handle it.
So he drops out of school. travels a bit, dabbles
in politics, but then he reconstructs himself.
This is the part of the story that just feels
like a movie script. He doesn't just get over
it. He reinvents himself with the specific goal
of getting her back. It's a calculated act of
revenge. He goes back to the University of Washington,
and this time he becomes an honor student in
psychology. He gets glowing recommendations.
He starts working for the Republican Party. Right,
for big campaigns. Yeah. Nelson Rockefeller,
Arthur Fletcher. Yeah, he's creating this perfect
facade of the rising young political and legal
star. He's building the man he thinks she wants.
And in 1973, he contacts her again. He rekindles
the relationship. And she falls for it completely.
She thinks, wow, he's changed. He's become the
man I always wanted him to be. They're talking
about marriage. She's totally invested. And then
in January 1974, he goes completely cold. total
silence ghosts her when she finally gets him
on the phone and asks why he cut her off what
happened he just says diane i have no idea what
you mean and hangs up the phone it was a long
con the whole thing was a performance it was
pure revenge he said later he just wanted to
prove that he could have her and once he possessed
her psychologically once he knew she was his
for the taking she was useless to him he discarded
her and here's the terrifying correlation yeah
The thing that makes your blood run cold. The
very next month, February 1974, the murders begin.
It's like breaking her spirit was the dry run.
It was the psychological warm -up for destroying
women physically. Many criminal psychologists,
and Ann Rule herself, they believe that his simmering
rage toward Diane Edwards directly fueled the
victim profile. Absolutely. So many of his victims
looked just like her. Long, dark hair, parted
in the middle. They were often bright. Confident
college students, the very type of woman who
represented the class that he felt had rejected
him. He was killing her over and over and over
again. So let's move to that year, 1974, the
Pacific Northwest. This is where the nightmare
starts in earnest. It starts with incredible
brutality. January 4th, Karen sparks. He breaks
into her basement apartment while she's sleeping.
He bludgeons her with a metal rod that he takes
from her own bed frame. She survives, miraculously.
She survives, but with terrible permanent brain
damage and other injuries. It's an important
case because it shows the raw rage. This wasn't
a seduction crime. This was a violent, predatory
ambush. But after Karen sparks, the pattern changes,
doesn't it? The women, they start disappearing.
Yes. He gets smarter. He gets cleaner. And they
disappear like clockwork. Almost monthly. It's
a terrifying rhythm. Linda Ann Healy, a student,
disappears from her basement room in February.
Donna Gail Manson, another student, vanishes
in March on her way to a jazz concert. Susan
Elaine Rancourt in April. He's escalating. He's
getting more confident. And he's refining his
method. This is where we see the Ted persona
emerge. The cast. The crutches, the slaying.
This is absolutely crucial to understand. Why
did these smart, capable women go with him? It's
a masterclass in weaponizing sympathy. It's just
diabolical. He realized that our social norms
make it incredibly difficult for a person, especially
a woman in the 1970s, to say no to a handsome,
well -dressed man who appears to be injured and
is asking for help. So you'd wear a fake plaster
cast on his arm or use crutches and then he'd
like drop his books near a woman he'd targeted.
Exactly. And he asks for help. Excuse me, I'm
having trouble with these. Could you possibly
help me carry them to my car? He prayed on their
kindness. He turned their instinct to be a good
person into their death sentence. It's so evil
because it subverts the social contract. We are
taught from childhood to help people who are
injured. He turned a virtue into a vulnerability.
He did, and he was so, so bold. We have to talk
about Lake Sammamish. July 14, 1974. This is
the one that blows my mind every time I read
about it. Broad daylight. A crowded state park
on a hot summer day. Thousands of people around.
He approaches a young woman named Janice Ann
Ott. Multiple witnesses see him. He's wearing
a white tennis outfit. His arm is in a sling.
He asks for her help with a sailboat on his car.
She goes with him. She disappears. And that would
be brazen enough. But he comes back. Four hours
later, he returns to the same beach, and he does
it again. He approaches another young woman,
Denise Marie Naslund, and she too disappears.
He abducted two women from the same crowded beach
in a single afternoon. While people were barbecuing
and swimming just yards away. That is the level
of compulsion and the staggering arrogance we
were dealing with. He felt invisible. He felt
untouchable. And witnesses at the beach, they
heard him introduce himself as Ted. They saw
the bronze Volkswagen Beetle. So the police have
a first name, a car description, and a composite
sketch. How did they not catch him then? This
is the chameleon effect we talked about. The
witnesses couldn't agree on what he looked like.
One said he had an accent. Another said he didn't.
They gave different heights, different weights.
And if you look at photos of Bundy, it's true.
He looks different in almost every single shot.
It's uncanny. He would change his hair, grow
a mustache, shave it off. He was generically
handsome in a way that made him forgettable.
He looked like... everyone and no one at the
same time and he was clean Yeah. Forensically
clean. Incredibly so for that era. Remember,
this is before DNA profiling really exists as
a tool. But he knew enough from, you know, his
own studies to check for fingerprints. He kept
his car tidy. And the source material details
how he would sometimes wash the victim's hair
or apply makeup to them after they were dead.
Which is, it's a part of the necrophilia and
the possession ritual, but it also served a practical
purpose. It destroyed evidence. It was all part
of his process. And during all of this. And I
find this irony absolutely suffocating. He is
working at the Department of Emergency Services
in Olympia on a suicide hotline alongside Ann
Rule. The true crime writer. It's unbelievable.
It's one of those details that if you put it
in a novel, people would say it's too unrealistic.
Ann Rule is literally writing articles for magazines
about the Ted murders, warning women in the Pacific
Northwest to be careful. And the guy sitting
next to her at the crisis hotline, the one she
considered a kind, empathetic friend, the one
who would walk her to her car at night to make
sure she was safe, is Ted. She described him
as kind, solicitous, professional. She had absolutely
no idea. It just hammers home the perfection
of that mask of sanity. He could turn the empathy
on and off like a light switch. But the heat
is starting to turn up in Washington. The sketches
are everywhere. The Ted name is out there. So
what does he do? He runs. But he doesn't just
run. He runs towards respectability. He goes
to law school. He gets accepted to the University
of Utah Law School in Salt Lake City. And he
moves. He's literally studying criminal procedure
and evidence law during the day while kidnapping
and murdering women at night. He is learning
how to beat the system from inside the system.
This move to Utah brings us to a really crucial
turning point, a mistake, and a survivor, Carol
Duranche. November 8th, 1974. This is a huge
moment. He tries a new ruse this time. He's evolving
his methods. He approaches her at a shopping
mall. But this time he's posing as Officer Roseland
of the police department. He's using authority
instead of sympathy. Exactly. He tells her someone
tried to break into her car and she needs to
come with him to the station to file a report.
He's playing on her trust and authority figures.
And she gets in the car. She does. But she's
suspicious. He smells of alcohol. The car, a
VW bug, doesn't look like a police car. And when
he pulls over and tries to slap a handcuff on
her wrist, he bungles it. He gets one cuff on,
but he can't get the other. And she fights. She
fights like hell. She gets the door open. She
bails out of the moving car and flags down a
passing driver. She escapes. She survives. And
now for the first time. There is a living witness
who has seen his face up close, been inside his
car, and seen the actual handcuffs. The ruse
failed. It did. And yet, on that exact same night,
he drives to a nearby town and abducts Debra
Jean Kent from a high school play. He failed
with Carol, so he immediately went hunting again
to satisfy the urge. The compulsion was that
strong. There was no cooling off period. None.
He later described it to the FBI as an entity.
A possession. A dark personality that took over
and had these needs. He needed to possess the
victim totally. First their life, then their
body. The failure with Carol just made the entity
angrier, more determined. Let's fast forward
to the arrest. Because for all his planning,
for all his supposed genius, he gets caught in
a very, very mundane way. August 1975. A simple
traffic stop. He's cruising a residential area
in a suburb of Salt Lake City at dawn. A patrol
officer, Bob Hayward, sees the VW driving slow,
turning off its lights, and thinks it's suspicious.
He pulls him over. And Bundy has the kit in his
car. Oh, yeah. The front passenger seat has been
removed. There's a ski mask on the floor, a crowbar,
a pair of handcuffs, trash bags, and ice pick.
It is, for all intents and purposes, a murder
kit. But he talks his way out of it initially.
He tries. He gives this plausible story. Oh,
I'm a law student. I was just looking for a friend's
address. I used the mask for skiing. I found
the handcuffs in a dumpster. He's smooth. And
because it's 1975 and he's this clean -cut law
student, they let him go. They don't have enough
to hold him on the spot. But the officer is suspicious.
He notes the name. And then the detectives start
connecting the dots. They have the Durant identification.
They have the make of the car. And here is where
the primitive technology of the time actually
worked in their favor. They used a payroll computer
to cross -reference lists. I want to pause on
this because it's such a great little nugget
for any tech history buffs listening. This isn't
a Google search. This is not sophisticated AI.
Paint the picture for us. What does it actually
look like? It was incredibly tedious manual work
feeding into a very basic machine. They had a
witness description of a man named Ted. They
had a description of a Volkswagen Beetle. And
they had lists, huge physical stacks of paper.
What kind of lists? A list of every student at
the University of Utah Law School. A list of
every registered owner of a bronze or tan Volkswagen
in the county. A list of known local sex offenders.
And they had to manually cross -reference all
these huge lists. They fed the data from these
lists into the main county payroll computer,
a massive mainframe machine that took up a whole
room. And they basically asked it to run a program
to print out any names that appeared on all of
those lists. It's like looking for a needle in
a haystack. but using a giant rudimentary magnet.
That's a perfect analogy. And out of thousands
and thousands of potential suspects, the computer
spits out a very short list. And at the top of
that list, Theodore Robert Bundy. It's incredible
to think that a punch card mainframe in 1975
did what human intuition couldn't do for over
a year. It just cut through all the chameleon
camouflage and looked at the cold, hard data
points. The net finally tightens. They get a
warrant to search his car more thoroughly this
time. And in the carpeting, they find hairs.
Hairs that, through microscopic comparison, are
matched to three different victims from two different
states. Three victims. The FBI forensic expert
who testified at the trial called it a coincidence
of mind -boggling rarity. So he's caught. He's
convicted of the Carol Durange kidnapping. He's
in extradited Colorado to face murder charges
for Karen Campbell. He's in a jail in Aspen.
And this is where the story goes from a straightforward
true crime narrative into something from an action
movie. The Aspen Jump. June 1977. This is his
first escape. He decides he's going to act as
his own attorney. The legal term is pro se. And
that's a key decision because it gives him certain
privileges, right? It does. It means he doesn't
have to wear handcuffs or leg irons when he's
in the courthouse because he needs to be able
to move around and access his legal materials.
He's using the law to escape the law. Precisely.
And he has access to the law library in the courthouse.
So during a recess in a pretrial hearing, he
asks to go to the library to do research. The
guard is outside the door. Bundy goes to a window
on the second story, opens it, and just... Jumps
out a second story window. He lands, hurts his
ankle pretty badly, but the adrenaline is pumping.
He gets up and takes off into the mountains surrounding
Aspen. He's gone for six days, wandering the
wilderness, breaking into empty cabins for food
and supplies. But he's not a survivalist. He
gets lost. He gets weak. He eventually steals
a car and in a moment of just terrible judgment,
he drives back into Aspen. exhausted, sleep deprived,
maybe even hallucinating. And a cop pulls him
over for weaving in traffic. You would think
after an escape like that, they would lock him
down in a fortress. You'd think they would never
take their eyes off him again. You would think.
But he's sent to the Garfield County Jail in
Glenwood Springs, Colorado. And the security
there, well, let's just say it was lacking. This
is where he plots his second and much more spectacular
escape. This is the ceiling crawl. This one really
just exposes the systemic negligence and on his
part, the sheer force of will he had. He gets
a hacksaw blade, probably smuggled in by another
inmate. And over the course of weeks, he starts
sawing a hole in the ceiling of his cell. It's
in the corner above his bunk. And the hole is
tiny. It's about one square foot. He's a grown
man. I mean, he's over six feet tall. How does
he fit through a one square foot hole? He starves
himself. He would hoard his food to make it look
like he was eating, and then he would flush it
down the toilet late at night. He dropped 35
pounds. He became skeletal. He was literally
reshaping his own body to fit through a hole
in the architecture of his prison. The dedication
is just, it's horrifying. And he plans the timing
perfectly. December 30, 1977. Why that date?
Because it was the middle of the Christmas holidays.
The main staff is off. It's a skeleton crew at
the jail. Most of the other prisoners have been
transferred. The building is quiet and empty.
So he makes his move. That night, he piles books
and files under his blanket to make it look like
he's sleeping. He climbs up, squeezes through
that tiny hole into the dusty crawlspace above
the cells. He navigates through the pipes and
wiring and drops down into the chief jailer's
apartment, which was connected to the jail. The
jailer who is conveniently out for the night
with his wife. Exactly. Bundy raids his closet,
changes into the jailer's street clothes, and
just walks out the front door of the building.
A free man. And it takes them how long to notice
he's gone? An unbelievable 17 hours. By the time
they do a head count the next afternoon and realize
Ted Bundy is gone, he's already on a bus to Chicago.
This is the part of the story that just makes
you want to scream at the history books. He was
in custody. He was identified. They had him.
And he just walked out the front door. And that
failure, that systemic catastrophic failure,
it leads directly to the final and perhaps most
brutal. chapter of his crimes, the rampage in
Florida. Because he doesn't go into hiding to
live a quiet life. Yeah. He goes hunting again.
He makes his way down to Tallahassee. It's January
1978. He rents a room near the Florida State
University campus under the name Chris Hagan.
He claims he tried to get a legitimate job, right?
Yeah, there's a story that he tried to get a
job as a security guard or something. But he
couldn't produce any ID, so he couldn't get hired,
so he reverts to what he knows. Petty crime.
Shoplifting food, stealing credit cards. But
the entity, as he called it, was hungry, and
he was unraveling fast. That leads directly to
the Chi Omega sorority house, January 15, 1978.
This attack is different from all the others.
This wasn't a calculated one -on -one abduction
with a ruse. This was a frenzy, a blitz attack.
It was a berserker rage. Describe the timeline
here, because the speed is what's so terrifying.
He breaks in around 2 .45 a .m. In the space
of just 15 minutes, that's it, 15 minutes, he
moves through the darkened house and attacks
four women in their sleep. Margaret Bowman and
Lisa Levy are bludgeoned and strangled to death.
Two others, Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler,
are brutally beaten but survive. 15 minutes.
See? The silence and the efficiency of that violence
is just... unimaginable. And he wasn't done.
He leaves the Channel Mega house, walks a few
blocks away, breaks into a basement apartment,
and attacks a fifth woman, Cheryl Thomas. He
leaves her for dead too. She also survives, but
with devastating injuries. This is the de -evolution
you mentioned earlier. He's not the careful Ted
with the cast anymore. This is a wild animal.
He's completely unraveling. He's drunk, he's
desperate, and the violence is just exploding
out of him. But in his haste, he leaves something
behind this time. A crucial piece of physical
evidence, a bite mark. On Lisa Levy's body. Yes.
A very distinct double bite mark. And that physical
evidence, that human signature, becomes the forensic
nail in his coffin later on. But he's still loose.
He steals a university van. He drives east to
Lake City. And this is where he commits the crime
that, for many people, is the most heartbreaking
of all. Kimberly Leach. She was 12. 12 years
old. He abducted her from outside her junior
high school in broad daylight. This completely
broke his established pattern of college -aged
women. It showed he had no boundaries left. He
had no victim type anymore. He was just taking
whatever opportunity he could find. And finally,
the law catches up to him. But again, it's not
some big FBI dragnet that gets him. It's a patrolman
on a routine stop. Pensacola, Florida. An officer
named David Lee is on patrol, and he runs the
license plates on an orange Volkswagen Beetle
he sees parked suspiciously. It comes back stolen.
When he approaches... Bundy tries to run. There's
a struggle. A life or death struggle. Bundy kicks
the officer. They fight for the officer's gun.
It's a real brawl. And when he's finally subdued
and in the back of the patrol car, Officer Lee
has no idea who he's just arrested, right? No
idea at all. He just thinks he has a particularly
tough car thief. It's only later they identify
him as one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives.
And in that car, Bundy says to him, I wish you
had killed me. He knew it was over. For good
this time. He knew. So now we enter the final
phase of his life. The media circus. The Florida
trials. This was the first nationally televised
trial in American history, wasn't it? It was.
And Bundy loved the camera. He was a performer.
He fired his defense attorneys and once again
insisted on representing himself for large parts
of the trial. He wore nice suits. He was articulate.
He cross -examined witnesses. Can you just imagine
being one of the survivors, like the women from
the Chi Omega house, and having to get on the
stand and have the man who tried to kill you
be the one asking you questions? It was a form
of psychological torture that the court system
allowed. He was grandiose. He was delusional.
He completely sabotaged his own legal team because
he was convinced he was smarter than all of them.
He even refused a plea deal that would have saved
his life. Why? Why would he do that? Because
the deal required him to stand up in court and
plead guilty. And his narcissism, his ego, simply
would not allow him to say the words, I am guilty.
Even to save his own life? Even then. But the
evidence this time was just overwhelming. The
eyewitnesses who saw him near the sorority house,
the fibers from his van that matched Kimberly
Leach's clothing, and the odontologist, the forensic
dental expert who came in and perfectly matched
a cast of Bundy's teeth to the bite mark on Lisa
Levy's body. And in the middle of this death
penalty trial, he pulls a stunt that is just,
it's beyond bizarre. He gets married. To Carol
Ann Boone. a woman he had worked with back in
Washington years earlier. She had remained loyal
to him, convinced he was innocent. She moved
to Florida to support him during the trial. And
he uses some obscure legal loophole to do it.
Yeah. A strange old Florida law stated that a
declaration of marriage made in open court in
front of a judge constituted a legal marriage
ceremony. So while he has her on the stand as
a character witness during the penalty phase
of his trial, he asks her, will you marry me?
She says, yes. He says, I do declare in front
of this court that we are married. And boom.
They were legally married. While he is on trial
for multiple brutal murders. And she later has
his child while he's on death row. It just speaks
to his incredible, almost hypnotic, manipulative
power that he could convince someone so thoroughly
of his innocence in the face of all that evidence.
So he has the death penalty. Three times over.
And he spends the next decade on death row. And
this is where we finally get into the confessions.
For years and years, he denied everything. Total
innocence. Then, as the electric chair got closer
and closer, he started talking to the journalists
Stephen Michaud and Hugh Ainsworth. But he played
the strange game with them. He wouldn't say,
I did this. He would speculate. He'd say, let's
hypothesize what a killer might have done in
this situation. Talking in the third person.
The killer. The individual. It was a way to disassociate.
To talk about the crimes without taking on the
personal guilt or responsibility. In those tapes,
he described the motive not as lust or anger,
but as possession. He said the ultimate possession
was taking the life and then possessing the physical
remains. He admitted to revisiting the bodies,
to necrophilia. He viewed the victims not as
people, but as objects, as cargo. It's stomach
turning. And then right at the very end, 1989,
time is running out. And he tries one last scam,
the bones for time scheme. With his execution
just days away, he starts confessing to unsolved
murders all over the country. Washington, Oregon,
Idaho, Utah. But he dribbles the information
out. He says, I can tell you where the bodies
are. I can help you close these cold cases, but
I need more time. You have to delay the execution.
He's using the grief of the victim's families
as his final bargaining chip. It was absolutely
despicable, his final act of manipulation. He
officially confessed to 30 murders. But detectives
like Bob Keppel, who spent years on the case,
believe the true number was at least 50, maybe
75, maybe even triple digits. We'll never know.
But the governor of Florida at the time, Bob
Martinez, held the line. He said, we are not
going to have the system manipulated by this
man any longer. And then the day before he dies,
he does that famous interview with James Dobson,
the conservative religious leader. Right. And
suddenly, after all these years of denial and
third person speculation, Ted Bundy has a new,
simple explanation for everything. It wasn't
him. It was pornography. He blamed violent pornography
for fueling his fantasies and warping his mind.
And a lot of people, especially at the time,
really latched onto that. It was a simple answer
to an impossible question. But the expert consensus
from virtually every biographer and psychologist
who studied him is that it was one last desperate
manipulation. He knew James Dobson was a fierce
opponent of pornography, so Bundy gave him exactly
what he wanted to hear. Hoping for what? A last
-minute stay of execution? Maybe. Or at the very
least, it would allow him to die reframing himself
as a victim of society rather than the predator
he was. It was a final attempt to shift the blame.
Dr. Dorothy Otnell -Lewis, the psychiatrist we
mentioned earlier, she said she had searched
for a true psychopath her entire career. And
when she interviewed Bundy, she said she finally
found one. Zero empathy. Zero remorse. A complete
void where a conscience should be. She described
him as a changeling. She said when he would talk
about the crimes, when the entity, as he called
it, took over, his face physically seemed to
change. His whole demeanor would transform. January
24th, 1989. The execution of the electric chair.
Old Sparky. The crowds outside the prison were
shearing. They were setting off fireworks. It
was a public celebration. Which feels dark in
its own way, but you can absolutely understand
the collective relief. It was the end of an era
of terror that had stretched across the entire
country. So let's try to wrap this up. We've
walked through the horror. We've seen the manipulation,
the escapes, the failures. Why does Ted Bundy
still haunt the American imagination? What is
his legacy? I think it's because he shattered
the safety of the known. Before Bundy, the cultural
idea of a monster was someone who looked like
a monster, a creepy stranger in a dark alley.
Bundy taught America and the world that the monster
could be the handsome guy in the white tennis
outfit, the guy with the cast on his arm asking
for help, the charming, educated law student.
He weaponized our trust, our decency. He did.
And he had this quote. He claimed that everyone
is invisible to everyone else, that we don't
really see each other. And that's why he could
get away with it for so long. That's a profoundly
terrifying thought. It is. And here's the question
I kind of want to leave you with, the thing to
really mull over. We live in a world now that
is hyper -surveilled. There are cameras everywhere.
We have DNA databases, digital footprints. A
Ted Bundy operating today using the methods of
1974 would likely be caught much, much faster.
Probably. Almost certainly. If Bundy was a chameleon
who evolved his camouflage to perfectly fit his
environment, Would a modern predator look like
the Ted Bundy of 1974? Or would he have evolved
a new kind of camouflage for our time? Is the
modern monster hiding in plain sight on social
media, on dating apps, in a way we haven't even
learned to recognize yet? That is a thought that
is going to keep me up tonight. Me too. Thank
you for joining us on this deep dive. I know
it wasn't easy, but sometimes it's necessary
to look into the abyss. Knowledge is the only
real defense we have. We'll see you next time.