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Ted Bundy: The Man Next Door |
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Over the course of forty-two years Theodore Robert Bundy would have many names and wear many masks. To his mother, Louise Cowell, he was the ideal son. Too his political friends, he was a bright young man on the way up in the legal profession as maybe a future governor. To his girlfriends he was a dream come true, a tender lover, an attentive companion, a romantic suitor, and he was the kind of man who sent flowers and wrote love poems; however, these were the lucky ones because the other members of their sex served as "food" for his insatiable appetite to kill. The real Ted stalked them, abducted them, raped them, tortured them, strangled them, beat them, and even tore their flesh with his teeth like a wild beast. He often dismembered them and discarded their bodies as if they were nothing to him. This malicious killer terrorized and killed women and girls of ages ranging from twelve to twenty-four years. His final tally of victims is fifty-six women. What kind of catalyst would make a creature react this way? | |
| Ted Bundy: The Poloroids |
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Pornography is defined as pictures, films, or writings that deliberately arouse sexual excitement. In Ted Bundy's last days, he turned the blame why he killed those innocent women to pornography. He claims it is what drove him to his madness. He once told that before killing his victims, he used them to animate his sick fantasies. Given sufficient leisure, he would make them dress in certain clothes and pose in ways that recreated pornographic images that appealed to him. Many of the images came from cheap pornographic magazines that Bundy would like to read (Jerry Spangler, Pornography Fueled Fire that Burned in Killer's Heart pg. B3). Sometimes he took Polaroid snap shots of the young women during these sessions and kept them as souvenirs. "When you work hard to do something right,", he confessed, "you don't want to forget it." |
| Ted Bundy: The Overwhelming need for power. |
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Besides his twisted sexual abnormalities, Ted Bundy had an overwhelming need for power. In one of his last confessions, Bundy told how he strangled victims and then used a hacksaw to dismember them at all the joints in their bodies. He would often behead them and cut their hands off. Afterwards, he would carry the hands around with him in a bag for days. Psychologists believe that many serial killers take a "souvenir" with them after they murder, and the hands were Bundy's "Souvenir." Psychologists also say that in carrying around the hands, Bundy felt very powerful because he was taking the risk of being caught. |
| Ted Bundy: The Media Circus |
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In his trial, he represented himself and made the court room a circus. The jurors were surprised to find that at one point in the trial, he took on the role of the defendant, defense, and attorney. He even went as far as to question some of his victims, and "Forever changed their lives, and set terror in their hearts" (Thom Lane, Serial Killers Grip on U.S. Imagination pg. 112). After the jury came back with a unanimous finding of guilty, the punishment was death by the electric chair. He was executed on January23, 1989, at 7:00 a.m. The crowd of people outside the prison had to be contained by local police. The crowd was shouting things such as "Fry, Ted, Fry" and "BBQ Ted." His last words to his mother were " I am sorry I've given you such grief. A part of me was hidden all the time!" Probably the most ironic thing is that a woman pulled the switch that ended his life. |
| Ted Bundy: The Breakdown of a Killer |
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Ted Bundy had all the traits of a serial killer. He was an intelligent man who graduated from the University of Washington with a GPA of 3.4. The fact that he raped and mutilated every woman he murdered proves his tremendous sexual abnormality. He had a consuming need for power which he displayed in his trial and the way he carelessly discarded his victims. " I would take their bodies and just throw them in the woods," he would say, "With a whole bunch of little beasties who would, in effect, destroy every last shred of them" (Bundy, 43). He is classified as a psychopath because he admitted to knowing right from wrong and that he just didn't care. In fact, when asked whether or not he regretted the atrocities he committed, he only took pity upon himself. He also had the highest death toll to date of any recorded serial killer on the American continent. All of these traits amounted to one of the largest public safety hazards in American history; a man so monumental in his terror that the world was forever changed in the wake of his madness. |
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