by Ray Black
Other psychological studies of the serial killer have noted the importance of birth order, with many being the first born into uncaring and unloving families. This again, sounds very familiar in Ted’s case. What were these demons within Bundy’s mind, which on the surface were not apparent, doing to him?
HIS VICTIMS
Ted Bundy’s first victim was Linda Healey in January 1974, just around the time that he stopped all contact with Stephanie.
About a month and a half after Linda Healey went missing a nineteen-year-old college student never arrived at the jazz concert she was going to and a month later a first-year University student was on her way to the cinema when she disappeared.
Over the period of two months another three young girls vanished.
Bundy had become a master of the lie and a true con artist. He would use a number of tricks to lure girls closer to him, acting out the injured party in order to get their sympathy. One such example is that he would have a fake plaster cast on his arm and then ask a passing girl to help him put something into his car.
More and more girls were going missing but at this point police were way off the trail. Ted had become a dormitory manager at the University of Utah – he was now closer than ever to his victims and nobody had a clue. Whilst in this role, Bundy killed two teenage girls, sixteen-year-old Nancy Wilcox and seventeen-year-old Melissa Smith. It is said that he murdered at least eleven times in the states of Utah and Colorado. Still there was nothing that would link such a respectable young man with such horrendous crimes. But things were to soon start adding up.
The detectives working on the case had all the pictures of the missing girls laid out side-by-side on a table. The resemblance between them all was uncanny, in fact they could of been mistaken for sisters. Each woman was young, attractive, with dark brown, shoulder-length hair with a centre parting.
It appeared that Ted Bundy had become so good at his acts of deceit that he was starting to get bored and desired a little more excitement. He decided to start using his own name when luring his victims.
In July 1974 at Lake Sammamish people were out enjoying the warm weather and taking part in various water sports, but by the end of the day two more girls had vanished within sight of their groups of friends. One of these girls, Janice Ott, was seen by passers-by speaking to man with a sling who referred to himself as ‘Ted’. Other women had apparently been approached by the same man, but they had been more fortunate. One of these women had gone with Ted to help him secure a sailing boat to his car, a tan colour VW Beetle. For some reason she became suspicious that something wasn’t quite right, and she managed to get away.
The name ‘Ted’ was now buzzing around and police had a good description of the man and his car. People started calling in with ‘suspects’ and one call in particular mentioned the name Theodore Bundy. Bundy was routinely checked along with other suspects by officers, but he appeared so above-board and clean that his name was filed away and forgotten – for the time being.
It wasn’t until another girl who had a lucky escape, and remembered everything, that Bundy was to become the prime suspect.
INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE
Carol DaRonch was window shopping in Salt Lake City when she was approached by a man in his twenties who said he was a policeman. He asked her if she had left her car in the car-park and requested her registration number. The plain-clothes policeman said that her car had been broken in to and she was asked to accompany the officer to her car to see if anything had been stolen.
Carol asked to see some identification and was shown what appeared to be a police badge. So she went with him to her car. On arriving at the car she noticed that nothing had been stolen – but Bundy was persistent in a very believable way. He asked her to accompany him to the station to make a statement. Still convinced he was genuine she followed him to his rusty old VW Beetle and got inside. Carol then began to panic when she smelt alcohol on his breath and noticed that he was driving, at speed, in the opposite direction to the police station.
Bundy stopped briefly in a side street and Carol tried to make her escape, but he was too quick for her and snapped a handcuff to one of her wrists. Ted then pulled out a gun but, with one hand still free, Carol’s instincts took over and she managed to struggle and jump out of the car and run as fast as she could. Carol had been lucky but Bundy was frustrated and now even more determined to claim a victim. That evening, only a few hours later, seventeen-year-old Debbie Kent would become his next victim. Throughout the winter of 1974 and into the spring of 1975 more and more women were falling victim to Bundy, but the police were still not on his scent.
That is not until the summer of 1975, when a transport policeman in Utah noticed a VW Beetle suspiciously parked just outside of Salt Lake County. The policeman was local to the area and had never noticed the tan coloured car before. When he put his lights on to get a better look at the registration number the Beetle drove off at high speed. The policeman immediately started a chase and eventually managed to get the driver of the VW Beetle to pull over.
When the man in the car produced his driving licence for the officer it was in the name of Theodore Robert Bundy. The car was then searched with Bundy’s permission. The passenger seat was missing and inside the officer found a crowbar, ski mask, rope, handcuffs, wire and an ice pick. Bundy was arrested and placed under arrest for suspicion of burglary.
Soon after his arrest police started to see connections between Bundy and the man that had attacked Carol DaRonch. Police also suspected that Bundy was responsible for the disappearance of Melissa Smith, Laura Aime and Debbie Kent. There were so many similarities that they felt sure it had to be Bundy. But they still needed evidence to support their case.
In the autumn of 1975 Ted Bundy was put in an identity parade of seven men. Police were not surprised when Carol DaRonch picked him out as the man that had attacked her a year earlier. Now the police were ready to launch a massive enquiry into their number one suspect – Mr Theodore Robert Bundy.
In February 1976 Bundy was put on trial for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. He sat in the court room looking extremely relaxed, not appearing to be at all worried about the trial. He probably felt that there was simply not enough evidence to convict him. When Carol took the stand and gave her account of the harrowing ordeal that took place, Bundy stared coldly at her and said that he had never seen Carol before in his life. The judge spent two days reviewing the case before deciding a verdict of guilty for aggravated kidnapping and sentenced him to fifteen years with a chance of parole on good behaviour.
While Ted was serving time for the attempted kidnap of Carol DaRonch, more and more evidence was being uncovered to link Bundy to many other murders and abductions. But Bundy continued to deny any connection.
Bundy was subjected to a lot of psychological testing and evaluation whilst in prison. The reports showed that he was neither psychotic, neurotic, a drug addict, an alcohol abuser, nor suffering from a character disorder – but they did conclude that he had an unhealthy dependency on women and seemed to suffer from a great fear of being humiliated by them.
So, did this fear and dependency on women come from his past relationships – especially that relationship with Stephanie? Why were other personality and character traits typical in such offenders not visible in Bundy? Maybe they just weren’t there or maybe his superior intelligence mixed with his interest in psychology – in which he excelled at university – managed to fool other psychologists into a false reasoning of his actions?
In October 1976, Colorado police filed charges against Ted Bundy for the murder of Caryn Campbell. Her body had been found and upon examination her skull showed dents made by a blunt instrument. An instrument which matched the crow bar that had been found in Bundy’s car the previous year. Hair was also found in the car matched the hair type of Caryn Campbell.
Whilst awaiting trial for this murder, Ted was moved to Garfield County Jail in Colorado and it was at this point that he decided to
sack his lawyer and represent himself in the trial which was set for November 14, 1977.
Throughout his four year rampage it was quite obvious that Bundy planned everything meticulously. Perhaps one of his greatest plans was when he was granted permission to leave the prison on several occasions to use the courthouse library for the purpose of research. This plan went into action on June 7, 1977 when Bundy managed to jump from an open window in the library and escape. He was not wearing any handcuffs or leg irons and therefore he did not look any different from the rest of the people walking around the town of Aspen. He had obviously planned this escape for some time.
Ted managed to avoid capture for six days, and lived off food stolen from cabins and campers. He finally found a car which had the keys left in it and fled, but was spotted by police on his way to Aspen. After his recapture, police ordered Bundy to wear handcuffs at all times, as they could not afford to make any more blunders in a case that had already made them look rather inept. But Bundy was not going to be foiled very easily. He was still like the man that Stephanie had fallen in love with the second time – cool, calculating, and confident, with a driving ambition.
In late December Bundy attempted another escape which was far more successful. He had managed to find an opening in the ceiling of his cell which happened to lead into the ceiling of a prison warden’s apartment. Once he knew the jailer had gone Ted walked out the front door to freedom.
By the time police had been made aware of his escape Bundy was on the road and by mid January he was in Florida – which would be the last state in which he would commit murder and the state in which he would die.
Ted acquired a new name – Chris Hagen – and using this fake identity managed to acquire a one bedroom flat in Tallahessee, Florida. Once again he just blended into his surroundings and was quite at home in his new lodgings just a stone’s throw from the Florida State University. In the early hours of the morning on January 15, 1978, Bundy crept into the Chi Omega sorority house armed with a solid wooden club. By the time he left, twenty-one-year-old student Margaret Brown had been strangled, twenty-year-old Lisa Levy had been sexually assaulted and then beaten to death with a club, and two other girls had been beaten with the wooden club but thankfully managed to survive. When detectives arrived at the sorority house they discovered bite marks on the dead girls.
Ted Bundy continued his spree for a little while longer possibly realising that he could be recaptured at any point. On the other hand, knowing the confident sort of man he was, he may have considered himself too clever to be recaptured for a second time.
Less than a mile away from the Chi Omega house, Cheryl Thompson’s moaning was heard by two girls in the flat next door. They had already heard banging and after calling her house and not receiving a reply they called the police. When the police arrived at Cheryl’s house they found her sitting on the bed holding her swollen head. She was barely conscious and was half naked – in fact, extremely lucky to be alive.
At this point, Bundy was not a known criminal in the state of Florida, especially as he was using an assumed name which had no connection with his past life. The evidence that was left behind at the sorority house was rather inconclusive, with the only firm evidence being the bite marks on the victims and the eyewitness account from Cheryl’s flat mate, Nita Leary, who had seen the man leave.
A couple of weeks later, in early February 1978, Bundy was ready to attack again. This time his target was a fourteen-year-old girl named Leslie Parmenter. She was approached by a strange man in a white van as she waited for her brother to come and collect her. The man said that he was a fireman and asked if she went to the nearby school. Leslie felt uncomfortable and had always been told by her father, a Chief of Police, not to talk to strangers. Luckily, just at that point her brother turned up. She got inside the car and told him what had been said. Leslie’s brother, Danny, followed the white van, took down its number plate and gave it to his father.
The sad thing is, that this incident was not reported to the police straight away, as a few days later Ted Bundy was to murder his last, and youngest, victim – twelve-year-old Kimberley Leach. Kimberley vanished from her school play-ground on February 9, 1978. The last person to see her was her best friend Priscilla Blakney who watched her get into a stranger’s car. Priscilla was unable to accurately remember what the car or the man looked like, and the evidence was not sufficient to give the police a positive lead.
The evidence that did help in them recapturing Ted Bundy came about when Detective Parmenter, the father of Danny and Leslie, started to track the registration number that Danny had taken down from the white van a few days before. He managed to trace the car back to a man called Randall Regan who told Detective Parmenter that his number plates had been stolen a short while ago, but he had already been issued with new ones. Detective Parmenter then took his two children down to the police station to show them a book of mug-shots – a book that contained the face of Ted Bundy. Immediately both of his children recognised the strange man in the white van to be Bundy.
Ted was finally arrested on February 15, 1978, as he drove a stolen car towards Pensacola. Once Bundy was identified, moulds of his teeth were taken to compare with the bite marks found on the bodies of the girls in the Chi Omega sorority house. The results were conclusive – they were a perfect match.
THE DEATH PENALTY
In July 1979, Bundy was convicted on two accounts of murder for the sorority murders and sentenced to death in Florida’s electric chair. Later the same month Bundy was convicted of the murder of Kimberley Leach and received a further death sentence.
However, Bundy was not quite ready to admit defeat. He continued pleading his innocence, used legal tactics to delay his execution, and offered confessions in exchange for a reprieve. Finally, after nearly ten years of denial Ted Bundy admitted his guilt but spoke of himself in the third person – describing an ‘entity’ within him that carried out those callous crimes.
In his final months when he agreed to be interviewed, Bundy seemed to suddenly have an answer for his actions. This answer came in the form of hardcore pornography, which he said was solely to blame for the way he was. He said that he had become obsessed with sado-masochist pornography and confessed that he had became excited when he felt he was in complete control. He said that rape had been his motive and that the killing came from the need to stop his victims testifying.
Finally the state of Florida became impatient with his stories and his legal manoeuvring and at 7 a.m. on January 24, 1989, Theodore Robert Bundy was executed.
It will never be known quite how many murders Bundy was responsible for, and this information has gone to the grave with him. It will also never be known why he did what he did. Is it possible to be too clever, so clever that a normal, everyday life is not enough to stimulate such a mind?
Bundy has even gone to his grave having the final analysis – in his long interviews on pornography it is clear that he has studied it from a psychological point of view. Pornography may be a reason why some criminals do what they do, but is it the reason why Ted did what he did?. Did Bundy make us believe what he wanted us to? Did Bundy out analyse the analysts?
The Yorkshire Ripper
Peter Sutcliffe terrorised the North of England in the late seventies and early eighties. In the space of five years he had claimed thirteen victims and was said to have been driven by God’s voice emanating from a gravestone which commanded him to ‘sweep the streets clean’.
Peter Sutcliffe, the killer dubbed as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and ‘Wearside Jack’ was responsible for the murder of thirteen young women and the attempted murder of seven others from 1975 to 1980. The search for the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ was the biggest manhunt Great Britain had ever seen, and it cost over £4m and used over five million police man hours.
So where did Sutcliffe’s sordid lust begin? At what point in his life did he suddenly get the urge to kill – or had it been there the whole time?
HIS
BACKGROUND
Peter Sutcliffe was born in Yorkshire, England on June 2, 1946. He was the firstborn son of John and Kathleen Sutcliffe and even though he weighed just 5lb at birth, he was a healthy baby.
Peter’s father, John, was an extremely ‘masculine’ man who loved both watching and participating in sport and going to the local pub with his friends for a few beers. John looked forward to the day that Peter would join him in his leisure activities.
But Peter did not grow up into the burly, confident man that his father was. In fact, Peter Sutcliffe had a completely different personality and character. Peter was a shy, quiet child who preferred the comfort of being at home reading with his mother then being outside fooling around and playing sport with his younger siblings and other boys of his age. It did not seem to appeal to him in the slightest. As a youth he felt rather intimidated by his father’s masculinity and found safety in his mother’s adoration for all of her six children.
This is often the way with the oldest child in a family, especially when the firstborn is a son. The boy can tend to take a step back from the rest of his siblings and let his brothers and sisters have the limelight and, instead, takes the role of the carer and helper. In many cases the oldest son may in fact be a father figure to his siblings, especially as, in a lot of cases, the father is out at work all day.
Peter also had the problem of being tiny at birth which meant he was always smaller than his peers. When he was at junior school he was never liked and never seemed to make the effort to integrate with his classmates. He would spend his break times hiding away from the other children and avoiding all the physical games that kids normally play. This was probably due to the fact he always came off worse due to his small stature and lack of strength.
