Ted Bundy

by Stephen G. Michaud

  HA: Getting back. . . you described in some detail how it all began suddenly. It was months before the next time. . . then fewer months, then three weeks – until the demand became insatiable.

  TB: Hmmm.

  HA: How many people would this man kill? How many would you guess? Don’t look at me that way. One digit or two? I’ll hold up my fingers. I’ll play (Norman) Chapman, (a north Florida policeman who interviewed Bundy just after his final arrest). He even got three, didn’t he?

  TB: Well, he got to three. I was waiting until he got to four before I nodded.

  HA: Did you nod at three?

  TB: I nodded three. I thought that was outrageous enough. Uh, no, uh. . . what’s the digit? Oh, it’s. . . I don’t know (sighs, pauses), uh. . .

  HA: Do you want me to turn off the machine?

  TB: No, uh, the machine doesn’t bother me as much as. . . we’re talking about a personality type, not a person. Who knows how many persons there are like this. . . how many people they kill. They’ve killed too many.

  HA: But how many do you suppose he’d kill before he got caught?

  TB (laugh): Ummm. . .

  HA: You’ve said you want this book to be pretty damn accurate, haven’t you? Without your having to. . .

  TB: I want it to be. I want it to be informative. I want it to be, uh. . .

  HA: You also want people to pay attention to it – and so I’ve got to get into this – and you’ve got to understand this. It’s sad, but. . .

  TB: Yeah, but I think it’s safe to. . . whatever the police say; it doesn’t make any difference. Uh (long pause), the importance to me of this book is not how many, but. . .

  (A prison employee walks by, carrying a sports referee’s striped jacket. Bundy mentions that he once officiated a basketball game. Hugh allows that he had also been a referee, professionally. The subject of victims is brought up again.)

  TB: There’s a certain amount of pressure on you to make the call. You’re looking. . . you’re there, and you obviously don’t treat it like a lark. You won’t sit down in the middle of the action, have a Coca Cola, and chat with the guys on the sideline. You’ve got a job to do and you’re involved in it. And, depending on the different kind of game it is, you might depend on just how important your role is, uh, for a person who, who’s. . .

  For a person who’s committed, uh, fifty or one hundred murders, uh, perhaps he’d view his role as being serious – that he had an important. . . or he attached some significance to it. But maybe not any more than you would attach to refereeing an important football or basketball game.

  And I tried to make this clear when we were talking about the hunter, uh, somebody’s going hunting. I mean, uh, at each stage of that process, the individual’s feelings would be different.

  And when he’s fifteen. I mean, it’d be a much more mystical, exciting, intense, overwhelming experience. . . than when he’s fifty. And when – even within that given hunting expedition – the feeling of sighting the animal would be different than shooting it or showing it to your buddy. Or putting it in the trunk and taking it home and butchering it and having it for dinner.

  At each stage, there’s a different set of emotions involved. And it’s not to say that deer hunting may not be commonplace to some people, but some might say, “Oh God, it’s hunting season again,” and pick up the gun and go out with the kids.

  And that’s the way some guys may approach killing their fellow human beings. It’s hard. . . I find it. . . to accept that.

  HA: I don’t know if it’s hard to accept, but it’s hard to understand. I guess – unless you’ve been in that position.

  TB: How does a person. . . how does a soldier deal with war?

  HA: Well, he has the justification built in, you see, there.

  TB: So does the mass murderer.

  HA: Really?

  TB: The justification’s built in, at least it would. . . that’s one way to approach it.

  HA: Could you expand on that a bit, because I don’t. . .

  TB: I’m trying to find some illustration that helps you.

  HA: I think war would be a better example than refereeing sports.

  TB: Well, I mean it’s a different. . . it’s more to the point.

  HA: Now, you say the justification is built in. What justification is built in to kill another human being? For your own enjoyment? That’s what it amounts to. What justification? You can’t say, “Well, they deserved to die. They’re not very nice people. I need this feeling.” I just don’t understand.

  TB: Sure. Well, like any justification of that sort, let’s consider the justification of a soldier who develops. . . “rationalization” is the word. . . that you’d develop to cope with shooting large numbers of his fellow human beings that he didn’t know.

  Well, first of all, he didn’t know ’em. So what! In the urban masses. . . in our urban society, we don’t know a whole lot of people, so, uh, uh, uh. . . now I suppose there’s also (the rationalization) “He would have gotten me if I hadn’t gotten him.” Which might not fit into what we’ve got here, but on the other hand, uh, there might be some mass murderers who might say, “Well, she or he would have hurt if I hadn’t hurt them.” And they might also say, “Well, there’s so many people, they won’t be missed.”

  So what’s one less? What’s one less person on the face of the planet? What difference will it make a hundred years from now? Again, they are rationalizations, but not rational; justifications but not just.

  That could apply to any number of different things, but it also applies to the persons who are able. . . who are trying to cope with their need to kill. They’re not coping with what’s really driving them to do that. Mainly, they don’t know what it is. They can’t see it. They don’t want to see it – so they come up with those and other justifications.

  And again, we’re just throwing up any number of things to try to make some sense out of it. . . and I’d say. . . the victim was luring them or trying to arouse them, uh, in some way. They deserved it, you know, or, uh, all sorts of things like that. It’s a common excuse on the part of child molesters, rapists, and the like, that, uh, that they would say that the victim lured them on or was trying to excite them or arouse them, when, in fact, that was probably not the case. But that’s just the justification used to, uh, make some sense out of his crime.

  HA: But that justification: Is that only before, or is it evident afterwards also?

  TB: I would expect it to continue. Just as it is for the soldier in the field. Now clearly, as we know, the soldier in the field comes home, and some men are scarred psychologically because they’re trying to deal with this. Many just never deal with it. I would venture that not everybody who came back from World War II or Korea or Vietnam is a basket case. . . because they just kind of – most of them – put it to rest over there.

  Hey, I had a job to do! I did it. I mean, I didn’t know those people. We don’t find American tourists going over to Germany and shooting German men working in the field anymore, because. . . uh, the surface justification for that is no longer there. It’s a very curious way of dealing with it, but. . .

  (After a break for lunch, where Bundy scarfed down three ham and cheese sandwiches from the “store,” the interview is resumed where it had broken off.)

  HA: Where were we? Oh yes, we were discussing justifications.

  TB: How would a person who was considered partially sane and had subscribed to society’s norm – uh, rules, ethics, and morals, at least on the surface and probably deeper than that – I mean, how in the world could he live with the knowledge he has, somewhere inside his brain? That he kills! How do you deal with that? How do you cope with it? How do you square it with how other things are? With the way he is supposed to behave? With the way the rest of the people behave?

  And you have got to come up with some justification. The guy isn’t going to say, “Well, I’m a weak, sick human being.” I mean, that’s not justification for a person who doesn’t wa
nt to perceive himself to be sick, a weak human being and one who has a maladaptive behavior. He’s got to come up with something that is a little bit, uh, uh, less incriminating than that.

  HA: But the more intelligent a person is, doesn’t that make it harder to justify?

  TB: No, it would be easier!

  HA: Why?

  TB: Because it would be easier to construct a more elaborate, uh. . .

  HA: More imaginative?

  TB: More imaginative, more elaborate, more free, uh, justification.

  HA: But how long does this justification last? When he examines his behavior later on and he talks about it later, does this hold up?

  TB: Certainly not, but (laughs). . . that’s not the point. We’re talking now about. . . we’re both looking at a person from the top of the mountain – in the clear, cold light of the morning. We’re saying, you know, this guy’s really not thinking clearly. We see how this thing is developing. We see what went wrong. Why didn’t he realize this? Because he didn’t realize. He didn’t have time; the rat-race, so to speak.

  Uh, he probably couldn’t. . . certainly you can’t. . . we cannot sit here and neither one of us are going to say that a person like this is justified in killing. . . in, in. . . we can’t say “indiscriminately” because there was a certain amount of discrimination involved apparently, but justified, in killing young women because he said to himself, “Well, we’re already suffering from a population problem.”

  Or they’re trying to lure him, or, uh, uh, they deserve it. . . or any of these other things. It’s totally absurd. We know it’s not right. We know it’s not reasonable or logical or justifiable. And yet, we have to, uh, by definition, this person’s behavior was not grounded in serious self-examination. Nor was it rational.

  If it had been rational, if he’d been rational, he would have realized what was generating, what was, uh. . . He may have looked at himself or had, uh, sought out somebody else to help him look at himself – and to find out what was actually the cause of his problem.

  HA: But this individual. . . you said he probably thought he had dealt with this himself and had licked this situation. I recall one time you discussed the case of the woman in the orchard, where he thought he had whipped his urge to kill and was just going to rape the girl. And he accidentally murdered her.

  TB: Hmmm. Hmmm.

  HA: In dealing with this kind of thing, he’s trying to perfect it by himself. These justifications must have been examined in great detail. And at some point, (they) must have been recognized for what they were. . . or he would probably have not moved ahead to try to correct it. Is that probable?

  TB: Well, yeah – examining it in great detail. Let me see if I can come up with an analogy. It’s like trying to examine what’s in the medicine cabinet by, in great detail, examining what’s in the mirror. Uh, he wasn’t seeing through, perhaps, the morass of justifications and obfuscations that he’d created and indulged in – and what he was closely examining was the reflection in the mirror, not what was behind it. Not what was really going on. Uh, does that help at all?

  And so, with that principal shortcoming in mind, he was. . . well, on the one hand he thought he’d looked at the problem and dealt with it. He had. But he was just sort of a. . . I hate to use the phrase “time bomb” because it’s so frequently used, but he was just ticking away. Where he was just a problem looking for an opportunity, not looking for it, but, I mean. . .

  HA: If he had the insights and the hindsight that you enjoy now, would he continue doing this sort of thing? If he had the ability, as you have, to examine this behavior, would he still be likely to kill and kill nevertheless?

  TB: Well, obviously it’s. . . I don’t care if a man is a raving maniac. Let’s start over. You’re talking about a man who has a type of (long pause) what will we call it. . . “personality disorder”? I still don’t know what in the world to call it. But if this person of maladaptive behavior – this part of him that is compulsive and uncontrollable – had the ability to truly look into himself, he’d recognize what it was that was causing him to think and act the way he was (long pause). . . and if he was able to control, isolate, and identify those things about himself that gave rise, as it were, to this weakness (pause), I think there would be a high degree of likelihood that he would no longer engage in this kind of behavior.

  Of course, we have to put out there any number of stipulations. We have to assume that this isn’t a disorder of biochemical origin, uh, underpinnings.

  HA: Or, as you also suggested, possibly genetic.

  TB: Or genetic, or something. With the individual we’re talking about, it’s hard to say, although it appeared to be one of these environmentally based conditions, an aberration, as it were, almost. It’s, uh, it almost has a foundation – and the interaction between the organism and environment, which could conceivably be reversed if we knew what the stimuli was in the environment that was arousing the organism – the human being – in the man’s mind. That, of course, is the big test.

  Now, behavior modification: I am very familiar with it and I’m not familiar with some of the other ones, like group therapy, individual therapy – there are a variety of them.

  Ostensibly, there are probably as many effective therapies as there are effective therapists. And the same therapy could not be used by another therapist. At any rate, I didn’t mean to come across like behavior modification was the end-all answer to all human problems. It’s one I’m familiar with and it’s applicable to a variety of disorders. It’s no panacea. I was just using it to cite an example of how one could attempt to go about treating somebody for this kind of disorder.

  HA: This individual, this killer. . . would vary his M.O.s as he became more adept, as he became more knowledgeable of what it took. How much variance would there be? You’ve said that in most cases, he liked to take the victims home, and, if possible, keep them as long as possible. . . reasonably possible. Now, this must have been damn hard to do. If the man had a full-time job. . . if he ever had any drop-by friends. It would seem almost impossible.

  How often would he do this? And would it last for several days?

  TB: What I said, was. . . that in those situations where he couldn’t do it, he didn’t do it. We’ve used our knowledge of facts and circumstances surrounding the cases in the northwest – some of them – to try to come up with an answer to that. And we really don’t know for sure. We just don’t know.

  HA: But it was the desired thing! And whenever it could happen, it probably did. When all this was going on in this man’s life, was there any struggle to try to not do this? Was there any attempt, say, to have a girlfriend that this person would go to, to try to keep himself somewhat level? Would he have a normal sex life with one or more ladies?

  TB: Oh, surely. Again, I mean. . . we can see that this kind of person, because one of the primary reasons he did this. . . uh, committed the murders. . . was a search for a release of stress or feelings of low esteem or anger, hostility, resentment, whatever. It was channeled for some reason toward women. Young women – and in a particular way.

  That does not mean that what he was suffering from was, in fact, a sexual problem or that he hated women. Uh (long pause), so we could expect that he had normal sexual relationships with, with a woman or with women – which would not be interfered with in any way with the other conduct. He wouldn’t let it interfere.

  HA: Is there other stimuli that might, like alcohol – extreme alcohol use – get the roles mixed up, causing him to actually try to murder one of the girls with whom he is having a “normal” relationship sexually?

  TB: Anything’s possible, and we’d expect that. . . well, boyfriends murder girlfriends all the time – and they’re not mass murderers. So we’d expect that even in a fit of rage, that, uh, it might be possible for him to kill a girlfriend, but it would not, in all likelihood, be related to his other problem.

  You see what I’m saying? Uh, but more likely than not, as we’ve witnessed th
e development of this darker side of this person’s life, we’d expect to see how very closely controlled and separated this part of him became, and how he was able to keep it, uh, more or less, from those around him who thought he was normal. And because this separation was so distinct and well maintained, we would find it unlikely (that) the roles could get confused.

  HA: This person, we assume, may be more clever than many of those who try to find and stop him. Would he ever have the urge to leave clues or toy with the police. . . write letters or something like that?

  TB: Well, we’re talking about – it’s hard to say whether this person was, in fact, more clever than the police. And it’s not necessarily so – talking in general terms now – that criminals that get away with lots of crimes are smarter than the police.

  The police are actually at a grave disadvantage in trying to solve any crime, especially one that has been fairly well planned out and where the criminal is as conscious of what constitutes evidence and what doesn’t and tries to minimize or totally eliminate traces of evidence.

  A policeman could have an IQ of 200, or 180 and still not catch a knowledgeable criminal with an ordinary IQ of 100. It’s just that the police are at a. . . How in the world, do you solve these crimes – I mean, unless you’re some kind of incredible clairvoyant – if there’s no evidence? It doesn’t mean the cops are dumb.

  It just means they don’t have the tools. And they can’t anticipate the crime. They can’t – if the evidence isn’t there, there’s no way they. . . I wanted to use the word “manufacture”. . . it. They certainly can manufacture it, but only after they have a suspect.

  Law enforcement – the solution of crimes – is, in my opinion at least, a random kind of thing. It’s almost by accident. The way most criminals catch themselves is because they don’t plan things out and they act impulsively. The police are just there to apprehend the criminal who has already caught himself.