by Ian Brady
Again, like our student Raskolnikov, Bundy had badly overestimated his own ruthlessness. Whatever the truth, he was soon to overcome such weakness as he progressed and routinely transgressed every obstructive icon of decency.
By instinctive design or lack of control, Bundy eventually discovered a successful method of attack which also satisfied his psychological needs.
He gained access to the bedroom of a sleeping eighteen-year-old girl, Sharon Clarke, and, without hesitation or compunction, battered her unconscious with an iron bar. Not much finesse or panache, but it worked.
Bundy must have then realised that this was what he had sought all along, a totally inert, compliant victim completely under his control. No more need for the infuriating frustration of social niceties, courting rituals and such, he could now just get straight down to the main course.
Apart from the obvious overtones of necrophilia involved, this drastic method also reveals aspects of sexual inadequacy. Only absolute power over the victim could surmount this, acting on him as a potent aphrodisiac. This in addition indicates that, at this stage in his career, he still retained some remnant of conscience and could only function by first depersonalising the victim, turning her into an inert object of his passions, a mistress bereft of any form of reproach.
Understandably dazed by the novelty of his first success, he remained sexually inhibited and simply introduced objects (penis substitutes) into the vagina of the first victim. He then departed, leaving her alive. Her life probably was saved by the lucky fact that she had not seen his face.
His next victim, Lynda Healy, a twenty-one-year-old student, was not so fortunate. Bundy again used what was to become his modus operandi, entering the bedroom of the sleeping victim and hammering her senseless. But this time he carried the unconscious body out to his car.
This additional act is significant. It shows that Bundy not only still felt sexually repressed and possibly morally uncomfortable in the victim’s bedroom, but that he was also seeking a higher degree of power by taking her from her familiar surroundings to a place of alien isolation dictated by him. This isolating technique — control by environment rather than a weapon — psychologically empowered him to extend depersonalisation and power over the victim even further. In which case, if psychologically satisfying, he would repeat the technique. Which he did.
His choice of location was Taylor Mountain, twenty miles away, where he stripped and raped her and, as she had resumed consciousness in the course of the ordeal long enough to see his face, he then killed her.
In the next few months, using the same hit-and-rape tactics, Bundy murdered five more female victims, three of whom were taken to Taylor Mountain. The other two were driven to a house near Lake Sammanish — a more elaborate, time-consuming and risk-taking method.
After he conveyed the first girl, Janice Ott, to the house and raped her, he tied her up and drove back to kidnap a second girl, Denise Naslund. Returning with her to the house, he raped her in front of the first girl, then killed both of them. He then drove both bodies to a deserted location several miles away and simply discarded them, making no attempt to conceal the bodies — the classic hallmark of the psychotic, disorganised killer, but not entirely valid in Bundy’s case, as I will eventually explain.
Although Bundy had found a system of raping and killing which satisfied psychological needs, the sudden escalation in his rate of victims betrays an equally rapid deceleration of sexual satisfaction, a progressive stimulus sdeficiency.
With Bundy, novelty obviously soon paled. He was, in effect, chasing a psychosexual will-o’-the-wisp, a higher degree of stimulation and satisfaction which would always be just beyond his grasp. The concomitant, ever increasing sexual frustration was predictably goading him on to greater outrages. The ‘hunchback’ side of him had rapidly run out of control against his better judgment. But, yet again, this was not entirely so, as you will discover.
As Bundy, for strategic purposes, moved his homicidal activities from one city to another, he no longer seemed to care about his well-being at all, openly picking up victims in front of numerous witnesses who could later identify him, and even introducing himself by his real first name.
Again, all apparent symptoms of psychosis. He had, I’m sure, insight enough to identify the cause of the weariness and boredom building up within himself, namely, the certainty that his search for the unholy grail was doomed to failure, and that his life, even by his own standards, was becoming increasingly tiresome and repetitious. Another aspect of the tragedy was that, knowing he was in pursuit of the impossible, he still could not give up the quest.
Contrary to socially engineered public opinion, even ‘criminals’ have more than sufficient virtues in their character to qualify as tragic figures. Which, in view of the fact that, as earlier opined, professional criminals have a surer and more pragmatic understanding of morality than the majority of the public, should not be surprising.
The thinking criminal shrewdly observes and accurately reads society, notes the characteristics of those who benefit most under its rules, and emulates their invariable deceit, greed and self-absorption.
Bundy had enjoyed the advantage of experiencing both polarised cultures, first the legal profession and then the criminal, both of which apparently did not offer the satisfaction he was seeking. He had run out of alternatives, but had obviously decided that he would keep running the least tedious of the two courses, probably hoping against all odds to be pleasantly surprised at some juncture.
Striving for elusive originality, fresh excitement and novelty, Bundy clashed his two experienced worlds together by abducting and murdering the daughter of a police chief! Naturally this would have given the particular crime an additional esoteric piquancy and verve in Bundy’s mind. But the axiom ‘Once tried, soon forgotten’ would doubtless still hold sway.
What next? The daughter of a priest, a judge, a politician? The principle would be much the same, and so would the victims. So no point in flogging a dead horse. This possibly inescapable ennui and spiritual lethargy which seem to creep up on many serial killers, an antecedent to increasing carelessness and indifference especially towards the end of their career, obviously contribute towards their capture, as detailed previously.
Is it the lack of drive and energy, the constitutional inability to take risks, the high threshold of boredom, the plodding capacity to perform the same monotonous job daily year in, year out, that differentiates the bovine conformist from the criminal? Is it merely a case of ‘what you’ve never had, you’ll never miss’? Or, less praiseworthy, ‘what you’ve never done, you can dream of doing’?
If the latter applies, the number of vicarious criminals must far outnumber the active. Not so much the silent majority, more the licentious. This of course implies that the law-abiding, by not satisfying their secret criminal desires, could well end up being more morally corrupt than the criminal who does and is quickly disillusioned by them.
Just as I previously assured you that you are rubbing shoulders with socially acceptable psychopaths daily without even knowing it, you can also be assured that there are more aspiring serial killers walking the streets of your cities at this very moment than there will ever be in prisons. I believe the public’s obsessive fascination with serial killers reinforces the premise.
Bundy next moved to Salt Lake City, then on to Colorado, casually raping and murdering on his travels, nihilistically disregarding the host of eyewitnesses building up against him.
He also displayed a suicidal underestimation of the pursuing police who, by this time, not only knew the man they were looking for but also the old beat-up Volkswagen he insisted on retaining. Bundy, then only twenty-nine years old, was obviously already riding the black crest of a death wish.
On the 16th of August, 1975, after a police car chased his Volkswagen through the dark, dusty streets of Salt Lake City, Bundy was arrested. His car was found to be full of incriminating but mainly circumstantial evidence linking him
with several murders.
Paradoxically, capture seemed to revive Bundy’s spirit in presenting him with a new venue and exciting challenge. The game was not over yet. This leads one to speculate whether Bundy, had he concentrated upon becoming a criminal lawyer, perhaps would have discovered that field to be intellectually stimulating and fulfilling enough in itself. I am sure he would have thoroughly enjoyed himself. In gladiatorial style, taking arms against the justice system, beating it by successfully using trickery and amorality to defend his obviously guilty clients to set them free. In short, the exercise of a legal form of criminality by which, when his guilty clients re-offended, Bundy would, in effect, be responsible for their crimes by proxy and could enjoy vicariously savouring them.
The irony and public play-acting involved would have appealed to him, as they do to politicians and other socially acceptable criminals.
In court to face charges, Bundy was the picture of respectability: sensitive, polite, plausible and charming, putting up a brilliant defence with a natural air of sweet reason and injured innocence. For the moment, prompted by expediency, his good side had wrested control away from the ‘hunchback,’ and Bundy probably half-believed some of the arguments he was now using to express his innocence. He bore the stamp of a good lawyer, being an astute liar and a deft relativist. His performance certainly impressed many people in the courtroom.
But the judge was less susceptible to smooth persuasion. Bundy appeared too clever by half. He sentenced him to one to fifteen years for kidnapping. The Colorado police then stepped in and arraigned Bundy on a charge of murder, that of Caryn Campbell.
When he appeared in a courtroom in Aspen to face the murder charge, Bundy, incredibly, was allowed to stroll into the library during a recess in the proceedings, and promptly escaped by jumping out of an unbarred window and making off on foot!
He remained at liberty for eight days, then was again arrested after a chase in a stolen car — another Volkswagen.
The American system of justice being what it is, Bundy managed to prolong proceedings over a period of months, simply on arguments re: the inadmissibility of certain strands of evidence against him.
Unbelievably, on 30th December 1977, Bundy managed to escape from prison yet again by breaking out of his cell through a ventilation shaft. He made for Florida.
It is a matter of record that Bundy had once inquired as to in which state the death penalty still existed, and was told Florida. So, in Bundy being drawn there, consciously or subconsciously, we see once again the death wish operating in him. His conscious realities were obviously becoming unbearable and he could not escape them, or himself; in prison, he had twice been compelled to escape to freedom; in freedom, he was equally induced to ‘escape’ back to prison.
Like a satellite falling out of orbit, Bundy was burning himself out re-entering the dual realities each time, and would attain his final incandescence in the electric chair in Starke State Prison, Florida.
Meanwhile, in freedom, he had more recreational killing to do before reaching his ultimate goal.
He broke into the Florida State University in Tallahassee and bludgeoned four students unconscious, raping and strangling one. A second died being raced to hospital. Bundy’s anguished psychic dilemma and suicidal spiral had made him more reactionally sadistic; he bit off the nipples of one of the victims. A third student suffered a crushed skull but survived. A month later, in Lake City, Florida, Bundy abducted, raped and murdered twelve-year-old Kimberley Leach, throwing her body into the Suwannee River.
The fact that Bundy chose to remain in Florida, despite the widespread hunt for him, and then actually returned to Tallahassee, where he had attacked the four students, is further stark evidence of his tenacious death wish. This subliminal resolution of despair exemplified what Pascal wrote:
‘We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent our seeing it.’
In the cold, small hours of 15th February, 1978, Bundy, significantly again driving another stolen Volkswagen, was chased and captured after a violent struggle with the police.
When a check of records revealed to the police who he was, Bundy must have secretly felt a tremendous burden lift from his spirit, knowing that he would certainly not be allowed to escape from custody a third time, and that the great game was effectively nearing an end.
Bundy had committed between two to three score of murders — he himself refused to give any definite body count. All that remained to him now was preparation of his final grand gesture against authority at the coming trial. Doubtless he applied himself to the challenge with buoyant enthusiasm, that uniquely paradoxical sensation of total liberty and panache one feels only when all is lost.
I myself experienced it. The Nietzschean dance of laughter and delight in confronting the abyss. Or the cold contempt of Balzac’s Vautrin:
‘They want us to repent, but refuse us pardon; they too have the instincts of wild beasts.’
But first, for his own psychological satisfaction, Bundy would try to explain himself — not excuse or incriminate himself — to some chosen academics who might understand. He picked a method of doing so which I myself once adopted and christened ‘analysis by hypothesis.’ This expedient method entailed his honestly answering questions on the basis that he was simply putting himself into the shoes of the hypothetical murderer, discussing the probable psychology and philosophy motivating the killer’s actions. In some instances it can be a self-delusive state of mind — such as when John Wayne Gacy continued to protest his innocence, despite a mountain of physical evidence to the contrary, including twenty-eight bodies buried under his own house!
This expedient device obviously allows the killer to explain his actions without incriminating himself, and obliquely reflects his inability to confront those actions head-on and publicly define his true nature. He also avoids putting the success of his ‘hidden agenda’ at risk.
There is, as previously touched upon, a sadomasochistic element in all serial killings, a psychic swapping of persona between the murderer and victim, in which each becomes the other. On the killer’s side, this occult element multiplies with each successive victim, cumulatively compressed with explosive force into the killer’s psyche in montage form. For the killer ever to reveal comprehensively his personal, psychologically deepest experiences in this no-man’s-land, this psychospiritual quagmire or force field, is tantamount to psychic suicide; like blowing his brains out from the inside. Therefore, this territory stands solidly protected against all attack, all reason, all advice, all corrosive emotion.
This state of being can be comprehended more easily if one realises that the killer, once caught, is already rendered half-dead by capture itself, the cover on half his psyche having been blown, leaving him revealed, restricted and caged forever in the damaged half which remains, belatedly longing for anonymity.
But if all the captured killer has to fear is execution by the state, this gives him the advantage and initiative once again. For, all hope gone, he need not explain himself to anyone; or he can selectively choose that which he wishes to reveal or withhold for his own recondite purposes. Much better to have no hope than false hope. That is my expressed opinion also.
The captured killer’s spirit feeds and regenerates itself on the hatred of the enemy. The will and intellect remain unbound. Men have died worse, been killed less kindly, in far bloodier battlefields since time began. So there is nothing outlandish in the fact that the serial killer can summon up the last vestiges of the dignity and nobility he was born with, and die like, say, Gary Gilmore in Utah, or the Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth:
Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it; he died
As one that had been studied in his death
To throw away the dearest thing he ow’d,
As ’twere a careless trifle.
Bundy was daily riding his roller coaster emotions, veering between the extremes of exhilaration and despair, kno
wing he was facing certain defeat but enjoying the hedonistic exhilaration and challenge of the final courtroom confrontation.
He dismissed his lawyers and took over his own defence, a vainglorious action that led him to make a literally fatal legal error.
His lawyers had previously advised him to strike a deal with the prosecution through plea bargaining; in return for confessing to certain murders and saving the time of the court, he would receive a sentence of life imprisonment.
Initially Bundy had agreed to accept this legal advice and cooperate. But then, for no apparent reason, he scorned to bargain and dismissed his lawyers. If memory serves me right, somebody or other once said, ‘The man who elects to legally defend himself has a fool for a client.’
I personally believe Bundy’s decision to defend himself in court was again influenced by the subconscious drive towards his own death. Preoccupation with death was fomenting an impatience with all such legal trivialities, and a contempt for the increasingly irrelevant, wearisome world he was in reality so eager to leave. He was too intelligent not to envisage the stultifying boredom and futility of spending the rest of his life behind bars.
Bundy was not the type of Dostoevskian figure who would choose to stand for eternity on a narrow cliff-edge in total darkness rather than accept death. Though not a pantheist like Wordsworth, Bundy would have by this time sided with the poet in one fatalistic sentiment, ‘the world is too much with us.’
