Ted Bundy

by Stephen G. Michaud

  TED BUNDY

  CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER

  THE DEATH ROW INTERVIEWS

  STEPHEN G. MICHAUD & HUGH AYNESWORTH

  with foreword by Robert D. Keppel,

  former Chief Investigator

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  © 1989, 2000 Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth

  Cover © 2019 Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Originally published in 1989 by New American Library, Penguin Putnam USA, Inc. and in 2000 by Authorlink Press, an imprint of Authorlink.

  This Sterling edition published in 2019

  ISBN 978-1-4549-3769-2

  For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or specialsales@sterlingpublishing.com.

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  Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan

  Front cover and title page photograph © Jerry Gay

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  Authors’ Note

  Some of the names have been changed to protect privacy.

  Foreword

  The first fact of serial murder is that these crimes exist most clearly in the mind of the serial killer himself. That was the most important lesson I learned in the course of investigating Ted Bundy’s initial killings in the northwest.

  And this is why Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer is such a valuable resource.

  Few, if any, serial killers have ever talked at such length, and with such clear self-knowledge, as Ted Bundy did with Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth.

  Ted was resourceful, intelligent, and relentless; he was forever hunting, always perfecting his approach to his victims. He chose ways to dispose of their bodies with infinite care, and he assiduously studied how police investigations are conducted in order to further reduce his chances of being caught.

  Bundy, above all, did not want to be caught, ever.

  What is more, for police investigative purposes, his case is prototypical. There is no question that it remains the exemplar of what works, and what does not work, when local law-enforcement agencies are faced with the fact that some unknown subject, almost certainly a male, has begun to periodically murder people, usually women or children.

  In Seattle and surrounding King County, we didn’t know we had a serial killer until Ted had killed at least eight young women in the region, probably more. The “Ted” investigation’s starting point was a summer day in 1974 when a white male subject, seen driving a Volkswagen and calling himself “Ted,” had apparently lured two women, separately and at different times, from a popular local lake park in broad daylight. All that we knew for certain was that Janice Ott and Denise Naslund had vanished.

  It would be two months before parts of their skeletons were discovered on a hillside east of Seattle, and another six months before the severely fractured skulls of four other Bundy victims (all of these women were killed prior to the summer of 1974) were found in a similar wooded location.

  The situation for local law enforcement was unprecedented – as it is every time a serial killer begins operating – and the case immediately presented us with a wide range of unique problems. One was coordination. At least five different and separate police agencies were involved in the early “Ted” investigation. We were separated from one another by distance – it is 265 miles from Corvallis, where Bundy abducted one of his victims, to Seattle – and by other features of geography: another coed victim had disappeared from a campus east of the Cascade Mountains, a physical barrier that seemed to preclude, at first, the possibility of a common suspect.

  Communications were a related difficulty. Each individual police agency had separate priorities. What was important to one agency was not necessarily important to another. We all used different methods of paperwork. Nor was it practically possible to keep everyone informed at the same time about developments in the case.

  These troubles were further aggravated by external factors. Seattle was a frightened, panicked city. Not every politician who spoke out at the time had the sense not to inflame those fears. Some segments of the news media clamored for information we could not divulge. And we all felt the stress of public pressure to apprehend “Ted” before he killed again.

  Little could we know that Bundy had driven on in his Volkswagen to Utah and was murdering there (and in Colorado and Idaho), even before we had any good idea of how many women he might have murdered in our area.

  Then there were problems we had no way of anticipating. Among these was the sheer volume of information (some potentially vital, the rest mostly useless, all of it difficult to evaluate) that quickly overwhelms a serial murder investigation. Officers and detectives are individuals with individual ways of pursuing leads. Until we had developed standardized tip sheets – who, what, when, and where forms that could be compared, collated, and studied systematically – the information we collected was really just a blizzard of jotted notes, most of them unintelligible except to the person who wrote them.

  Another unwelcome surprise was how serial murders tend to invalidate certain basic assumptions of traditional homicide investigation. Specifically, there is usually a connection of some sort between victim and killer. They are often related or acquainted. Because of this, and because at first we could not assume that all, or even any, of “Ted’s” victims were complete strangers to him, we were obliged to go by the book, investigating each victim’s circle of contacts and who among them might have a reason for killing her. Although this work generated much information, it turned out to be only marginally useful.

  Similarly – and this problem was peculiar to Ted Bundy as a suspect – we discovered the uselessness of showing his photo to possible witnesses. Even without the disguises and masks Ted used, he looked different in just about every photo taken of him. The two we had seemed to be of two different people, neither of whom resembled the “Ted” at the lake.

  We learned lessons of a different type when it came to organizing ourselves into a multi-agency investigative task force. First of all, the formation of a task force represents a police consensus that there is indeed a serial killer on the loose. That can be an important psychological hurdle. Once everyone agrees on the nature of the problem, far less time will be wasted on extraneous investigation not germane to the “task” implicit in the term “task force.” A task-force approach promotes better organization of case materials, too. And it absolutely forces a detective to think of what is important to the overall, long-range mission, rather than what seems important that day.

  Finally, the Bundy case demonstrated some intriguing apparent truths, borne out in later serial murder investigations. We know, for example, that the actual killer is often apt to be among the first suspects known to the police. One important practical application of this knowledge is that when a detective reviews a difficult, long-term case it is worthwhile to go back and look at what was done in the first few months. More than likely, the killer’s name or a key clue to his identity will appear in those early files.

  Bundy’s name was reported to us three times, once by one of his girlfriends. But we had 3500 other suspects, too. Although by standard investigative procedures we eventually would have taken a long look at Ted Bundy, this process was speeded by the use of a computer.

  Today, computers are taken for grante
d across such a wide range of uses, including police work, that it is necessary to recall what a relative rarity they were in the mid-1970s. We in the King County police force didn’t have one. But given the nature of our extraordinary problem with “Ted,” we saw that we needed to attempt extraordinary new measures if we were going to find him. It was in this context that we thought of the King County payroll computer (a huge and primitive machine by present standards) as a tool for digesting and sorting the mass of data we had collected. We discovered that the computer’s power is essential to serial murder investigation. These machines won’t solve a case – or at least they haven’t yet – but the computer allows an investigation to be focused. In hunting for “Ted,” we had numerous lists of potential suspects that we fed into the county payroll computer. We entered the names of the victims’ classmates, names from their address books, names of all our suspects, a list of registered Volkswagen owners, and so forth. Then we began asking the machine for coincidences. Whose name appeared on one, two, three, or four of the lists? Ted Bundy and twenty-five others appeared four times.

  We also personally sorted through the suspect files, looking for a top one hundred, so to speak, of the most promising individuals for further investigation. Bundy’s name was in that group, too.

  Thirteen months after we had begun searching for “Ted,” we had Theodore Robert Bundy, age twenty-nine, a former Republican campaign worker and at that time a law student in Utah, literally at the top of our pile. Then came the telephone call from the Salt Lake County sheriff’s office informing us that Theodore Robert Bundy had been arrested for a traffic violation and had been found with a lot of suspicious paraphernalia in his Volkswagen bug: namely, a pair of handcuffs, a crowbar, a pantyhose mask, and several lengths of rope.

  Ted’s chance arrest undeniably abbreviated his killing career, but it also ratified the use of computers to focus serial murder investigations. Because of the computer, we were poised to take a concentrated look at Mr. Bundy and, I believe, would have been able to help single him out as a suspect for police in four western states who did not know at that time that they were looking for the same serial killer.

  All these years later, the computer has become an instrument of serial murder detection in the form of VICAP, the FBI’s new national serial murder tracking program. In the state of Washington, we have established HITS (Homicide Information and Tracking System), which contains information on all murders in the state, not just serial killings. HITS now instantly provides homicide detectives in Washington with information that ordinarily would take them months or years to compile.

  The Bundy saga did not end in August of 1975 in Utah. He escaped custody twice and made his way to Florida in early 1978, where he killed three more victims; he was sentenced to death twice in 1979 and once again in 1980, the second time for the murder of a twelve-year-old girl, the crime for which he was ultimately executed, in January of 1989.

  Just after his apprehension in north Florida, Bundy provided police interrogators with broad hints of who he really was and what he had really done over a period of many years. Yet Ted was not then going to confess. And once he was sent to Death Row, few of us in law enforcement expected that he would ever talk, until, as did happen, Bundy perceived a possible personal advantage in doing so. Certainly, no appeal to his conscience was going to elicit the information we needed.

  Then, in the autumn of 1980, while I still was a detective with the King County police, Michaud and Aynesworth came to see me. They explained that they had been talking to Bundy for their book, The Only Living Witness, and that they believed I should hear some of the content of their taped sessions with Ted.

  They did not claim that what they had was a confession or anything that a prosecutor could take to court; Bundy had secrets that he was not then going to divulge. But what I listened to was shocking: Ted Bundy talking about himself in the third person, telling Michaud and Aynesworth, in considerable detail, what it was like to be a serial killer.

  This interview technique, allowing subjects to speak in the third person, gives them the chance to talk directly about themselves without the stigma of confession. Michaud and Aynesworth, given the luxury of extended time with Ted, put him at his ease. They avoided the error of impatience and were usually careful not to seem as if they were judging Bundy for the aberrant homicides he described. It was Bundy himself who first described his crimes as despicable.

  What their tapes and transcriptions demonstrated to me and to every other law-enforcement officer who has reviewed them is how effective the third-person approach can be. It was a pioneering effort. And I believe that it helped open the way for my own subsequent and substantive interviews with Bundy. At the very least, Michaud and Aynesworth’s exhaustive review of his hidden life helped to break down Ted’s dread of confession. As I later learned directly from Bundy, a long-term serial killer erects powerful barriers to his guilt, walls of denial that can sometimes never be reached.

  In 1984, my own extended confrontation with Bundy began with a letter from him offering to aid the northwest police in the search for “Ted’s” successor in the region, the so-called Green River Killer, whose murders of prostitutes had come to light two years before. Bundy invited me, as a representative of the Green River task force, to the Florida state prison, where we met twice to discuss “River Man,” as he called him. It was a singular experience to talk with one serial killer about another. And although Ted didn’t confess to me, either, in these sessions, they were a second step.

  The interviews established a personal level of communication between us. Perhaps as important, I seemed to emerge in Bundy’s mind as the one investigator he could trust, the detective to whom it eventually would be easiest to confess, in the first person, his crimes.

  At last, just before his execution, Bundy did talk directly about himself to me and then to other western law-enforcement officers who also had “Ted” cases. He finally confessed to thirty killings but admitted in detail to only a handful in an orchestrated effort to trade information for two or three more months of life. It didn’t work.

  Ted did not tell us everything he did – or even most of what he did – in detail, and I wonder whether some of the behavior he described to us should ever be publicly known. That leaves, for the general reader and law-enforcement professional alike, Ted’s broader testament to his life as a killer contained in this volume. Because of the interviewers’ efforts, Ted’s crimes can now exist more clearly in everyone’s mind, including those of the police officers who some day may have to hunt another Theodore Robert Bundy.

  – Robert D. Keppel, Ph.D.

  President, Institute for Forensics

  Formerly Chief Investigator,

  Washington State Attorney General’s Office

  Part One

  Ted Bundy’s most apt – and accurate – single-sentence self description was offered not to us but to the group of north Florida cops who interrogated him soon after his final arrest in Pensacola in February of 1978. Said Bundy to the police, “I’m the most cold-blooded son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.”

  Not until he had explicitly confessed to his crimes (at least thirty murders) in the last days of his life did the full meaning of what Ted meant by “cold-blooded” become apparent. Bundy wasn’t just a savage killer; he was a degenerate, too. All along there had been evidence that he sometimes mutilated his victims. But the perversity he acknowledged to Bob Keppel and the other investigators went beyond what any of them had ever guessed, or imagined, to be true.

  Yet the Ted that we came to know – at his invitation, initially, to act as his investigators and biographers – was also complex, often fascinating to interview, and a consummate gamesman. Besides the sickness of “the entity” he revealed to us, there was also the intelligence, arrogance, and even the charm that made Bundy such a compelling – while at the same time repellent – figure.

  In either incarnation, whether Ted was talking about his school days or detailing
the essence of victim “possession” – he never seemed to stop striving for a fuller, more comprehensible explanation for who he was and why he had become a killer. The other factor always at play was his innate need to manipulate.

  We discovered this at the outset in Bundy’s first letter to us, written November 4, 1979, from Florida State Prison. He had been on Death Row there for just over three months after his sentencing in Miami on August 1 for the murder of two sleeping coeds in the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in Tallahassee on January 15, 1978.

  “It’s too cold to sleep,” he wrote. “It may even be too cold to write. An arctic breeze blows through the broken windows across the hall from my cell, dropping the temperature to the point where my breath turns to fog. Who called Florida the sunshine state? He should be in here with me.”

  Nowhere in the letter did Bundy mention his pleas of innocence except to note that there are “those who wish to accept them unconditionally and to the exclusion of all guilt evidence.” These people, Ted wrote, were his solace. “As long as I have strong supporters,” he explained, “I have all I can ask for.”

  Bundy urged us to emphasize the mystery surrounding him; he specifically urged us not to search for evidence that he was guiltless as he claimed. “The facts to prove unequivocally that I’m innocent are not there,” he informed us. Bundy didn’t get to the point of his letter until two pages later:

  “I don’t care what you write just so you get it right and just so it sells.”

  The letter was signed: “Best regards, Ted Bundy.” Of the several self-delusions in Ted’s letter, the one that irritated us most was his assumption that we, as journalists, were ready to act as his tools.

  We had a basic agreement with Ted – already worked out in close consultation with his ardent partisan and soon-to-be wife, Carole Boone, that we would reinvestigate the murder allegations against him, plus interview Bundy at length for any information he might have to help us disengage him as a suspect in any of the two dozen killings he was then accused, or suspected, of having committed.