Ted Bundy

by Stephen G. Michaud

  She didn’t cause me to get caught. I got myself caught by the policeman – and that led to other things. That’s all there is to it. And I forgave her and I never considered that she did it to hurt me. There’s not that much to forgive her for. She is not responsible for me getting caught.

  HA: Do you expect to ever see her or hear from her again?

  TB (softly): No, no. I don’t suppose so.

  HA: There are those who say that Ted Bundy may fight for his life for five or six years, but that when the time comes. . . and you walk those last yards. . . it won’t be the same Ted Bundy they knew. They think that prison will have beaten you down into conformity. That you will sink deeper and deeper into yourself. You really don’t have that much in common with the ones I’ve seen on Death Row here, anyway.

  TB: Well, first of all, you don’t know what my life is like back on “R” Wing, but I suggest you compare notes with Steve and Carole and anyone else you’d like to, to get a perspective on me. I think you’ll find that I’m as emotionally. . . have as much emotional and intellectual vitality as I’ve ever had.

  Certainly, the effects of prison have taken their toll. But I don’t think that anyone could say that I’m crushed and defeated and empty – and that I’m sinking deeper and deeper into compulsive madness. Maybe you’ll have a suspicion, but I can guarantee you that the reverse is happening. I get stronger and stronger.

  I don’t know what your opinion of me is – and it really doesn’t make any difference. I mean, not your opinion but your observations, as to, you know, if I’m an empty shell, ashes inside, uh, uh. . . going deeper and deeper into some emotional morass or some madness, or whatever. But, uh, what can I say? I know what I’m like, and I know. . . I, uh. . . I know what’s happening to me.

  HA: I don’t know what’s happening to you. I don’t think any person can know that. But you seem pretty vital and strong. . . and damned alert to me. I don’t know what that means. You might have always been that way. Whether you’re stronger now, I couldn’t judge.

  TB: I feel. . . I believe I feel it – but maybe that’s just something to hang onto. But I know I’m. . . my habits are better than they have been and I’m more controlled and more disciplined than I have ever been.

  HA: Well, of course, most of that is not of your own doing. I’d like to move briefly to another area.

  You’ve commented on how wrong some people have been in describing Ted Bundy. Yet they’ve generally only interpreted what you’ve promoted via your behavior.

  You give people a feeling of being very cold, calculating, mocking. Cold hearted, very methodical. I think that at one time you probably hid behind this kind of a facade; it was needed by you when you didn’t feel like you were a part of things and so on. I’m not playing amateur psychologist here, but it seems almost as though, to buttress this place you felt you were in, you formed a definite contempt for a certain part of society – law enforcement, lawyers, and the like. . . and I think that definitely shows.

  You’re arrogant. You’re damn sick of a lot of things you’ve faced in society. A lot of things happened to you that you couldn’t cope with, and, to a great extent, you got even!

  TB: And this chain of events has made me a cold individual. And it’s made me very harsh on particular segments of society – like you said. And I’ve adopted a lot of the opinions and attitudes that prisoners – uh, which I think are reasonable under the circumstances. It’s necessary to adapt that way to survive. Uh, the people who are seemingly always assessing me – as to whether I’m cold or not or calculating or not – are more often than not people I – like psychologists or psychiatrists and reporters – for whom I have absolutely no need to come across as a warm, friendly person.

  I am really a private person. I have very few close friends. There’s no reason why, Hugh, and don’t take this personally, (but) there’s no reason for us, necessarily, to come across as (though you and I are) old, long-lost buddies.

  HA: Sure, and I don’t. . .

  TB: I mean, we’re sort of thrust together in a situation.

  HA: I haven’t tried to country-boy you.

  TB: No, you haven’t been soliciting my. . . soliciting me in that way. I mean it’s just. . . I mean to say, “Well gee, why doesn’t Hugh ever give me a detailed rundown on his childhood and his family life? What his kids are like? And his home? Is he cold? Is he calculating?” That’s not it at all. That’s not our goal here – to be, you know, long-lost. . .

  HA: I’d tell you all that if you asked me, though.

  TB: Yeah.

  HA: But there’s no reason for it to be that way.

  TB: There’s no reason for me to inquire into your love life or your domestic affairs. And yet, if I don’t do that, people say, “Well, he’s cold and distant.” I’ll tell that to some stranger who walks up and plops down a notebook and says, “Okay, tell me everything about yourself?”

  Well this guy doesn’t know me and he’s not going to get to know me. I don’t feel that it’s necessary to develop a deep friendship with him, because in most cases they’re my adversaries anyway. And I know the limitations of the field.

  I’ve adopted some pretty harsh attitudes about society, uh, in recent years, but, you know, that’s a response to what’s happened to me.

  HA: Well, you seem to. . . I probably wouldn’t say this, but you asked me how I felt or what I saw in you. Very frankly, you are damned composed. If I had been accused. . . or somebody had even intimated. . . that I had killed a bunch of people – and I’ve seen it as high as thirty-six girls – I would be pretty damned upset. I don’t know how I’d cope with it. I don’t know if I’d be strong enough to cope at all. But you, uh, sort of sit back and make fun of the cops and their blunders. . . and point ’em out. It simply doesn’t seem to touch you as much as I think it might me.

  TB: Well, of course, I don’t. . . you don’t know whether. I thought I would – I told myself back in Salt Lake City – that I would kill myself before I went to prison. Most people think that way. “I would die before I’d go to prison,” I told myself. I was fright. . . uh, fearful of it, thinking I would be raped and so on. But I survived. . . though I went through some horrible periods. The worst was the time I spent in the Salt Lake City jail – that first four or five months.

  Those were nightmarish times. I cried at night. I was, uh. . . I was a wreck! If I wouldn’t get a letter from Liz for three days I would go to pieces. It was rough, really rough. But I got over it. I learned how to cope with it because I wasn’t going to tear myself apart. I wasn’t going to destroy Ted Bundy because of the accusations. I was going to survive. Transcend it, overcome it. I couldn’t do that if I was tearing myself apart, feeling embittered and persecuted – though I felt those emotions. But I didn’t let them destroy or control me, after a short while.

  HA: That’s what I mean. I don’t know how you used to be, but you seem rather in control these days.

  TB: You get used to those accusations if they’re repeated and repeated as they have been for five years. You get immune to it. You see, I couldn’t endure this humiliation if I gave up. I’m a survivor. And I poke fun at the police because they’re damn. . . not incompetent. . . but they’re so ineffective. They may be incompetent, too, but by and large, they’re just not using their heads.

  And they’re protagonists. I shouldn’t look at them as my friends. I don’t. I don’t think I should. Since they are the ones who are challenging me and accusing me, I’ve every right to criticize them.

  HA: (You’ve) talked about justification and how it works on a killer’s mind. (You’ve) discussed police and how they operate. And you talked about how you had to grab control of yourself. Much of this, particularly when you reach inside for the feelings – even though I feel that’s part of the overall justification here – comes from a very intelligent man. I’ve had people comment how “brilliant” they think you are. How do you feel about this? How smart are you?

  TB: Well, I’m not stupi
d. But I’m not. . . I’m far from a genius, too. People use the “terribly bright, terribly handsome” thing as part of the image process. I’m not exceptionally handsome. I’m not exceptionally bright. I may not even be bright by some people’s definition – or handsome, for that matter. But it’s part of creating the myth of Ted Bundy – which is separate and distinct from my reality.

  Something that will shock people and make them wonder why, shake their heads or otherwise to make the story more sensational. You just. . . it just seems to be the theme that they’ve adopted in the Ted Bundy case. The bright, intelligent freak!

  HA: But you told Stephen that you were getting smarter all the time.

  TB: Well, I hope everybody is. I’m learning from my experience. And I’m mellowing with age and doing everything most people do – and finding that I enjoy my ability to see things and to move about and examine things much more now than I ever could before. Now I have frames of reference to understand why people behave the way they do. If that’s “getting smarter,” then it’s true: I am getting smarter.

  I enjoy my intelligence. I enjoy talking. . . enjoy trying to be articulate when I can, though sometimes I’m a bit embarrassed by the way I speak. I don’t consider myself smarter than other people, but it. . . I always look at others as being at least my equal. Now if they show themselves to be dumber, then I guess I have some contempt for them.

  HA: That reminds me: Stephen mentioned a fellow you told him about – an Italian barber in the Salt Lake City jail. He got out and was later caught in an armed robbery.

  TB: He escaped. What he did was. . . he’d been charged with several murders, but he’d always managed to beat them. They finally charged him with murder where there was an eyewitness who saw him leave the scene. So he decided to play crazy. And he read books and we’d talk about it. And he’d tell me what he was going to do. He started seeing little green bugs and said he felt the air sucking out of him; you know, real crazy stuff!

  He did this and he convinced a panel of psychiatrists that he wasn’t competent to stand trial. He knew exactly what he was doing. The guy was the barber. He ran the store. Whoever runs the store, especially in the county jails, he has it all together. He gets around and sells stuff. He was a businessman, very shrewd, and somehow, he convinced them he should go to a mental institution.

  He had confided in me that he knew how to get out of the state hospital because the inmates carried the keys. He was. . . here he was, getting out of a first-degree murder charge. . . and he was going to walk right out of the state hospital!

  And that’s what he did! He got the keys and sped away. . . and was later caught in LA.

  HA: Does that memory and that association give you any thoughts? You probably know enough about psychiatry to toss some interesting tidbits (around). Have you ever considered it?

  TB: I think I’ve made myself clear on that. Ted Bundy is not crazy, or anywhere near it. I have done some things I’m not proud of. Some of these things I may talk about; others I never can. But, just like I’ve told every lawyer I’ve ever talked to, forget any insanity defense for me. I’m not insane, by anybody’s stretch of the imagination. Think about it a minute. I’m not crazy. Everybody knows that.

  HA: Well, he’s (the guard) gone now, so we can talk without you holding that microphone under your arm. Why is Carole thinking you’re aiming to try to get out of here? And are you? What would you do on the street? You’d be recognized everywhere you went.

  TB: I don’t know why anybody would think I would want to leave this country club (laughs). Yeah, people here think about it all the time, talk about it, but only with those they trust implicitly, but it’s damned hard to do.

  I’m not going anywhere. (Bundy would plan an escape four years later, in 1984.) Sometimes they act like they hope I would. A smart man can make it, I think. . . but that’s a subject for another time. Listen, I’ve just admitted I’m as smart as the average guy and I’m not crazy. So why would I slip my white ass out of here, only to get it blown to smithereens by some of those rednecks who don’t get to shoot often? I’ll take my chances. (he lights a cigarette) But I guess anybody who’s already escaped from a couple jails always thinks, maybe, maybe. . .

  HA: If you got out, where would you go? Most of your friends probably wouldn’t care to take the heat of hiding you out. Where would you get any money?

  TB: Oh, I’d have to go somewhere where nobody knew me – that means Australia, South America, China. I’d have to travel at night, to a port town, and stow away on a ship. I’d never, ever contact family or friends. Couldn’t afford to. I trust my family, but there’s been too much heat on them already. And my friends might have read too much to remain objective about me.

  I’ve studied a bit about makeup and how to look like somebody nobody would be looking for, but. . .

  HA: So, you got out and ran away. There’s nothing in prison of a therapeutic nature that would change your habits, your inner problems. So, I assume, you would kill again – and pretty damn quick. Right?

  TB: Wrong! Wrong! We’re not dealing with me anymore. Let’s not take liberties here. We’ve created this individual, so we must use him. If the type of individual – the one who, we know, has killed numerous young women – were to be on the streets after a lengthy incarceration, we can assume that, yes, he would kill again. He’s received nothing – absolutely nothing inside a prison to help him sort out that sickness.

  Speaking about taking the heat. . . did I tell you about the trick I played on Don Kennedy’s (the defense investigator at the Leach trial) wife while we were waiting for the Leach verdict to come in?

  HA: No.

  TB: I was in the lawyers’ room there and I was making some phone calls, and I called Don’s house in Lake City and his wife answered. I said, “Is Don there?” I knew he wasn’t. I had seen him an hour before. I said, “Well, he’s supposed to pick me up here, in front of the courthouse. I’m out here and waiting. Do you suppose you can find him?” She said, “Who is this?” I replied “Ted Bundy.” The phone clicked and I damn near laughed my ass off. When Lynn (Thompson, another lawyer) came in later, he asked me what I was laughing about. . . Did I know something he didn’t?

  June 24

  HA: Let’s look back at what we’ve discussed. It seems to me that in talking about justification, he justifies as he murders. Justifies the attacks and the victimizations. Later, in retrospect, he realizes that these justifications and rationalizations are not legitimate.

  Is there any kind of feeling of remorse there that. . . maybe even though these people were nothing to him, they have families and loved ones and it might be of some value to let the people know where the bodies are – if it didn’t bother him or hurt him. What do you think he’d think about that?

  TB: He might think just like you said it here, but again, we’ve seen that almost six years in some cases have passed and no clues have turned up. No anonymous letters, uh, no information of that type. So for at least six years, we can see that whoever he is, he hasn’t (been) detected or found the need to reveal the, uh, locations of the remains.

  I would imagine that in the event that this person – or a person like this – were ever able to, uh, conquer, or eliminate from his mind and his behavior the need to act out in that fashion, then he would have to be so situated that he could do so without scarring himself.

  If, all of a sudden, in some way he was able to rediscover or rebuild those inhibitions, uh, that prevent most of us – that prevent most people from committing murder, uh, overnight, and the guilt that we would associate with the breaking of those kinds of taboos and inhibitions, then, if the cure would be as bad as the disease, he would be creating a situation where he would be living in a nightmare.

  So, if he were to put himself back together, he’d have to do so in sort of a prospective fashion, rather than a retrospective fashion – and then how he felt about killing would apply only from Day One on forward. And he would have to cut off the past and let it
float away.

  There’s nothing this man could do to bring back the persons he killed. There’s nothing he could do to decrease the anguish the loved ones have been through. So, uh (long pause). . . that would be one way of explaining it.

  HA: You don’t think that he would realize that letting the families know where the bodies were would ease their burden?

  TB: I don’t know. Personally, I don’t, uh. . . I don’t know how I would feel if I were someone whose – who had somebody close to them disappear under suspicious circumstances. Would I feel better knowing they were a pile of bones somewhere? Or worse? I mean, I just can’t. . . it’d be difficult to say.

  But whether or not that would actually be the case. . . like being at least partially irrelevant to – again, this individual would still be thinking about survival, and it would be inopportune for him to be sticking his neck in a noose, uh, in that fashion anyway.

  I mean, if the goal for putting himself back together again was to live and to minimize or eliminate his threat to others – toward innocent people – and to lead a healthy, productive life, it would be contradictory for him to go about confessing to crimes because he, uh, perceived the need on the part of those who knew the victim to know, in fact, that the victim was the victim. Does that make sense?

  HA: Maybe to a psychopath. It gets a bit convoluted, doesn’t it? Well, let’s move on. Suppose this person was caught. Would his main thrust be toward survival first?

  TB: Say the person wasn’t caught. I mean, caught or not, I suppose the individual. . . The goal is survival. Everyone I know of, their primary goal is to survive. Sometimes in different ways.

  HA: Would this person ever really want to change?

  TB: Well, we, we. . . uh, described this individual and found that his behavior, which was becoming more and more frequent, was also concomitantly, – I love that word, concomitantly – occupying more and more of his mental and intellectual energies. So he’s facing a greater, uh, more frequent challenge of this darker side of himself to his normal life.