Ted Bundy

by Stephen G. Michaud

  TB: I was very tired. And it rained very hard that night. (Ted probably was tired – from hunting for victims and from drinking. He was correct about the rain.)

  SM: Okay. You had dinner at the Holiday Inn the night of the 8th. Do you remember the guy you had drinks with in the bar?

  TB: Only vaguely. I couldn’t describe him.

  SM: What time did you leave the next day?

  TB: It’s hard to say. It rained very heavily that night and was very cool the next morning. And I started to have breakfast there at the Holiday Inn about seven or eight o’clock. As I started walking toward the main building where the restaurant was, I noticed there were one or two highway patrol cars parked there. So I decided to avoid that. I didn’t even check out. I just got in the van and started back for Tallahassee.

  SM: You didn’t go back to Lake City Junior High School?

  TB: No.

  SM: Did you kill Kim Leach?

  TB: No.

  SM: You went directly west on 90? No stops for murder?

  TB: 90 is not the freeway – 10 is the freeway.

  SM: So you went on up to 10 and drove back to Tallahassee. Where did you get rid of the van?

  TB: Uh, there’s a high school there. What’s the name of it? Uh, Leon High School? I believe there was a residential district with a parochial school. Somewhere between those two schools I parked the van.

  SM: Did that ever show up in any of the police reports?

  TB: Not that I’m aware of.

  SM: And that was the only white van you stole?

  TB: Yeah.

  SM: Well, tell me more about that van.

  TB: It had a flat front on it – unlike the later models where the hood seems to go out a little bit. It had a bald spare tire. No jack.

  SM: Did you know who owned it? Did you check out the registration?

  TB: No.

  SM: Did you check out the name of the business in front of which it was parked?

  TB: No.

  SM: Did you leave the keys in it when you parked

  TB: I believe I left them.

  SM: Did you do anything to change that van at all?

  TB: No.

  SM: What about Leslie Parmenter (the teenaged daughter of a Jacksonville police detective Bundy approached in Jacksonville the day before he killed Kim Leach)? What was all that about? Was that you?

  TB: No.

  SM: What about her license-tag identification?

  TB (belches): Well, I don’t know.

  SM: Was that manufactured evidence?

  TB: Manufactured or something! I’m not sure. I stopped asking those questions a long time ago. I don’t think I ever, uh, figured that out. I saw the Parmenters twice – once at a hearing in Lake City and again in court. And they seem to be, uh, fairly sincere. Genuine, whatever.

  SM: That license tag, Ted. They got the right number. They did. And they reported it before you were even known to be in Florida.

  TB: I have no explanation for it.

  As far as we know, Bundy never directly acknowledged Kim Leach’s murder to anyone, except to tell FBI agent Bill Hagmaier of the Bureau’s Behavioral Science Unit that the little girl was not a preselected target. She was the final victim of what he called his final, “disorganized” phase of murder begun twenty-four days earlier with the slaughter at Chi Omega.

  Bundy saved that disclosure for the final weekend of his life. In the spring of 1980, nine years before, our questions about the Leach case had yielded nothing. When Hugh and I spoke on the telephone that night, we concluded that we weren’t going to get anything like a confession from Ted for any of his crimes. It was time to consider abandoning the whole project.

  Another interview with Ted was scheduled for the following week. We discussed telling him that we were walking away from the story unless he started telling the truth. Bundy, we surmised, would hold the door for me.

  But then it occurred to us: What about giving Ted the chance to talk without also overtly implicating himself in the murders? Why not offer Bundy the opportunity to speak in the third person? If somewhere inside him there was an urge to explain himself – and we believed that to be the case – then perhaps he’d be comfortable “speculating” about the killer. It wasn’t a brilliant thought. We had no idea if it would work. Then again, there was nothing to lose. After nine months of effort we were stuck, and our editors in New York were growing restive.

  March 26

  SM: Ted, your recollections of the Leach case don’t conform to reality.

  TB: Sure they do.

  SM: No, they don’t. (Bundy looks wary.) So Hugh and I have come up with another approach to this.

  TB: What’s that?

  SM: Well, no one knows the story better than you. Remember writing us? “I may not have all the facts, but I have the ones which count!”

  TB: I do. I did.

  SM: You haven’t shared them, though. What you can do, however, is analyze the whole thing for us.

  TB: Huh?

  SM: You’re the expert, Ted. You know the cases. You know the investigations. You’re the suspect. Who else is in a better position to pull this all together?

  TB: I’ve told you everything I know.

  SM: You’ve told us some of what you know. What you could tell us, though, is what sort of person you think might have committed the crimes. Assuming it was a single person, he must have a personality and motives that you could infer from the evidence – and from your own background in psychology. (Ted had an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Washington.)

  TB (sounding interested): You mean, for me to tell you what this guy. . . or guys. . . is like?

  SM: Yeah, but not like some shrink. We want the person who knows absolutely the most about this story to tell about it. We’re after an explanation here.

  TB: I’m not copping to anything but theft!

  SM: We realize that. What we need to know is who he is, and what he’s like. Not Ted Bundy, suspect, talking to me in the first person.

  TB (after a thoughtful pause): I think your idea may have some merit. I’ll have to think about it.

  March 27

  Bundy had made up his mind. With minimal explanation, he took the tape recorder and cradled it in his arms, closed his eyes, and began an abstract soliloquy on stress and its effect on “this personality.” Very soon I was lost, so I interrupted him.

  SM: Your description of stress – it seems vague to me.

  TB: Well, stress is a very ambiguous word in that it includes both the physical being and the emotional self. With respect to this personality, stress influenced development over a number of years. The stress doesn’t just appear. It’s present in its various forms for a long time and, as a consequence, certain alterations in the personality take place.

  I guess what is stress to you might not be stress to me. An individual in this sort of circumstance would not recognize the demands to perform well academically as stress. But ultimately this guy starts to wear down. If you just see it as “God, I gotta get this paper in today. I gotta get to class today. What am I doing here? Am I doing well enough to go where I want to go?” Those type things. The long-term effect of this is something you don’t recognize as a stressful thing.

  Obviously, everybody doesn’t react to these environmental influences in the same way. It has a peculiar, individualized effect. A lot of people would not have a bad reaction to the stress in a university setting. Stress is just a word; it’s nothing that pops up every morning out of the toaster. And there are continuing kinds of stress, things that can be looked at as continuing events. Whether it be career demands, or money problems, or relationships.

  SM: What kind of shocks or stressful events would you say this personality encountered?

  TB: It’s not an easy matter to isolate things. I mean, incidents which themselves could cause pressure or stress, be unpleasant to one degree or another or have a disorienting effect. You have to see it in its unique effect on the unique indi
vidual. There are no broad generalizations or predictions you can make. You just can’t predict behavior like that.

  Society wants to believe it can identify evil people, or bad or harmful people, but it’s not practical. If someone does something antisocial and deviant, that is a manifestation of something that’s going on inside. Once they do something, then they can be labeled. Predictions can’t be made until that point is reached.

  There are no stereotypes. There are no family backgrounds or personality types or life-styles that are, themselves, predictors. There are probably any number of persons in this prison whose family backgrounds were a large factor in putting them here. Family is very important, I believe. I’ve met many persons who have explained their adolescent years and their home life in such terms that it seemed inevitable that they would end up in trouble with the law. Robbers and burglars and what not.

  When you talk about persons who end up here charged or convicted of murder, that is slightly different – depending on the homicide. What we don’t understand is why someone would murder a person for apparently no reason. Not for monetary gain, (or) a crime of passion. We understand crimes of passion – where a man gets mad at his wife, or vice versa, and picks up a gun.

  But what we’re talking about is a hybrid situation. What is the motivation for it? What is the cause? We know what the effect is. We just don’t understand the cause.

  SM: The family in this instance is neither a force for stability or instability?

  TB: I think you could say that the influence of this person’s family history was positive. But not positive enough – not enduring, perhaps not strong enough to overcome the urges or compulsions that resulted. Most people think of attitudes being developed in the home. What I’m saying. . . in this instance, the influence of the family and the environment in which the person grew up were positive, but not so positive as to prepare this individual to totally avoid failure.

  Everyone has to expect a certain amount of failure. It’s trial and error out there. I don’t care how good your family background was.

  The thing is, some people are just psychologically less ready for failure than others. Some can handle failure in a positive way; others cannot. It would be too simplistic to say that because a person had trouble dealing with a career choice or a relationship with a coed, that this goes back to some defect in the way he was raised.

  Parents can do only so much for a child. If they offer a stable, loving home life, where there is little apparent friction, the model of sobriety and responsibility and so on and so forth. . . then you just can’t make those assertions that the family caused the aberration with any reasonable degree of probability.

  Other things come into play – a whole host of other things. They might be escapist kinds of behavior, drinking or watching television even. There is the effect of pornography, for example; not suggestive, but more illicit or expressed forms of pornography that’s in print or on film. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems on the surface.

  We sent men to Vietnam and they were able to kill, because the tactics taken by their leaders was to depersonalize the enemy. You’re not killing a man; you’re killing a “gook,” a Viet Cong. Under those circumstances, men kill very easily.

  Certainly the situation we’re discussing does not have the legitimacy or the atmosphere of war. And yet, the same psychological mechanisms are used by a person who kills indiscriminately – except he is not killing a person. He is killing an image. Or gaining some sort of gratification – just as some people might for bowling a perfect 300 game.

  It’s not an easy thing to visualize, to accept intuitively. This was a difficult thing for me to try to understand. There are no pat answers. If anybody’s looking for pat answers, forget it. If there were, the psychiatrists and psychologists would have had this thing wrapped up long ago.

  Perhaps it can be done this way: You take the individual we’re talking about – a unique personality with certain defects, if you will – and then you subject him to stress. Stress happens to come up randomly, but its effect on the person is not random; it’s specific. That results in a certain amount of chaos, confusion, and frustration. That person begins to seek out a target for his frustrations.

  The continued nature of this stress this person was under – the nature of the flaw or weakness in his personality, together with other elements in the environment that offer him a logical target for his frustrations or escapes from reality – yields the situation we’re discussing.

  That’s a broad overview. The real critical point of analysis here is why would a person with this kind of background, subjected to this kind of environmental stress, or this kind of environment in toto, seek out as targets for his dissatisfaction, frustration. . . call it psychopathology. I hate to use labels that are psychological or psychiatric because there are no stereotypes, and when you start to use those labels, you stop looking at the facts.

  You can say, “Okay, this guy passed through this kind of a life. All this stimuli went into a black box in his mind and it came out in a variety of ways. But in one area, it came out this way. In an apparent indiscriminate matter, this man ended up killing, murdering people. What happened in that black box? How can we say what stimuli were significant and which are not? What were those things that person saw and heard and felt and touched that resulted in this kind of behavior? And which do we just disregard? And then, why did that black box twist it?”

  I’m not sure anybody has the answers to these questions – least of all myself.

  I would say that if we took this individual from birth and raised him in the Soviet Union or Afghanistan or in eighteenth-century America, in all likelihood he’d lead a normal life. We were talking about the peculiar circumstances of society and of the twentieth century in America. There are a host of things to which a person is exposed which he would not be exposed to in a simpler culture, a more restricting or puritanical culture.

  What is inexplicable, I suppose, is why that predisposition is there in the first place. I think that’s what is inexplicable. For instance, why is this propensity activated and started to develop? I guess one analogy would be that some seem to prosper in a given soil and not in another. The soil we’re talking about is our culture in this country. We’re talking about the manner in which this propensity stops being something latent and starts being active – and develops into something which, for lack of a better description, is psychopathology.

  And not just a psychopathology, because there are a lot of people who are sick in the head who don’t act out. Or whose acting out does not become antisocial – or not as antisocial as the act of murder.

  What we’re talking about here, also, are those microscopic events in the mind – indistinguishable, undetectable events, like the melting of a single snowflake. I guess we know a great deal more about what makes a snowflake melt than the development of behavior that produces murder.

  SM: In this person, there are no identifiable shocks, traumas?

  TB: No. . . and none associated physically with women. There is really no trigger. It is truly more sophisticated than that.

  SM: Describe in more depth what you called turmoil, chaos.

  TB: You mean, how do I visualize it? I guess it is probably no more or no less than any young person would experience today who is going to college or just growing up. Nothing special, nothing peculiar, and nothing that is peculiarly related to the ultimate conduct that we are interested in. We could be talking at this point about anyone. A lot of things he understands and a lot of things he doesn’t. A lot of things make him happy; some things make him sad. That’s basically the kind of things I am trying to get across.

  I don’t have all the answers. I have never sat down and discussed this behavior before with anyone. So it is very hard to verbalize something which, by its very nature, is not only complex but often so subtle we can’t immediately put our finger on what’s going on – especially in its early stages.

  This condition is not immed
iately seen by the individual or identified as a serious problem. It sort of manifests itself in an interest concerning sexual behavior, as sexual images. It might simply be an attraction such as Playboy or a host of other normal, healthy sexual stimuli that are found in the environment.

  For most everyone that would simply be a sign of healthy interest, normal. But this interest, for some unknown reason, becomes geared toward matters of a sexual nature that involve violence. I cannot emphasize enough the gradual development of this. It is not short term.

  The individual does not particularly see himself as the actor where the violence is directed toward women. But he is fascinated by this kind of literature that depicts this kind of action.

  It is perhaps not so inexplicable when you understand the position of the women in the United States as they are marketed and used to sell things. Seen as objects of perfection, et cetera. Now, this is on a different level than this individual would deal with women every day, and not in the context of the sexual condition, because that is over here someplace, like collecting stamps. He doesn’t retain the taste of the glue, so to speak, all day long. But in a broader, more abstract way, it begins to preoccupy him.

  He has no hatred for women; there is nothing in his background that happened that would indicate he has been abused by any females. The only explanation would be that there is some kind of weakness that gives rise to this individual’s interest in the kind of sexual activity involving violence that would gradually begin to absorb some of his fantasy.

  And while he would not visualize himself as an actor, he would begin to fantasize about these situations. Once again, he was not imagining himself actively doing these things, but he found gratification from reading about others so engaged. Eventually the interest would become so demanding toward new material that it could only be catered to by what he could find in the dirty book stores.

  In a pornography shop you can find a variety of perversions in sexual conduct, from homosexuality, to abuse, to lesbianism, et cetera. People who market pornography are dealing with a special-interest group. Anyone who walks into one of these places is not just interested in a Great Dane humping someone or two men engaging in sexual activity. It is just not the way it works.