Unspeakable Acts

by Sarah Weinman

  When I asked Ted Bundy’s attorneys whether they would describe him as a psychopath, their responses were not just unanimous but unambiguous. “No,” Minerva said, without hesitation. “I think he was severely, deeply mentally ill,” he said. “Psychotic. I always believed that.”

  “I think we understood why he did what he did,” Coleman said. “We knew it was a product of a mental illness.”

  “He was mentally ill,” said Joe Nursey, a lawyer who worked with the defense team during Ted Bundy’s abandoned plea bargain and subsequent trial, and is now a supervising attorney at New York’s Office of the Appellate Defender. “Anybody who looks at it with any degree of honesty knows that he was mentally ill,” Nursey said. “Just being with him long enough, you saw it . . . His mind [didn’t] function rationally: on any level, on anything.”

  Nelson was silent for a long time as she considered my question. “You know,” she said, “‘psychopath’ to me implies some kind of evil motivation, like an evil corporation knowingly polluting. And I don’t see that in Ted. He was much more like an addict.”

  More often than not, the lawyers I spoke with found the term “psychopath” so poorly defined that they didn’t feel comfortable applying it to anyone. The word, Coleman said, “becomes a cop-out. Judges latch onto it to avoid having to deal with what’s actually going on. It’s presented to juries as a way for them to not struggle with understanding the defendant’s behavior, and to attribute to it this label that basically explains everything.”

  “It’s a cheap word,” Nursey said. “It’s a word that is used to avoid trying to understand something in a larger context. Medicine has not developed to the point where we understand the mental illness that leads people to commit what appear to everybody to be random, cold-blooded acts of violence . . . These are out-of-control people, but we won’t acknowledge that they have a mental illness. We just want to say they’re pure mean.”

  For decades, Ted Bundy has served as the textbook example of psychopathy not just for tabloid readers and true-crime enthusiasts, but for revered psychologists like Hare. But after hearing the same thing about Ted Bundy from so many of the people who both knew him as a person and accepted his guilt, I had one question left: If Ted Bundy wasn’t a psychopath, who is?

  “The better question,” Nursey told me, is, “‘Does the term have any real meaning?’ And it doesn’t.”

  One of the most troubling aspects of Hare’s description of the psychopath, particularly in Without Conscience, is its sheer simplicity. There is only one diagnosis, “the psychopath,” into which every patient must fit. Personal history, age, gender, past trauma or abuse, evidence of brain injury, and diagnoses of other personality disorders or even mental illnesses don’t enter into the equation. And while it is comforting to believe that the only reason a person can commit or be complicit in the most horrific of crimes is because they were simply born bad, we have to wonder whether this sense of comfort leads us to accept certain conclusions not because they are logical, but because we want them to be true.

  We can say that Ted Bundy was a psychopath, but we can also attribute his behaviors to the mental illness his lawyers observed in him, and doing so reveals a very different picture from the one we know. It shows us a man who appears to have been unable to control his actions or make the decisions that would have saved his life, who put on shows of competence and superiority because he needed to force the world to see a version of himself that he was no longer sure existed, and who loudly proclaimed his own innocence because, to him, it had become a kind of truth.

  “I think he always viewed himself as being two personalities, in effect,” Coleman told me. “One good and one bad. He viewed the good Bundy’s role as protector of the bad Bundy, because that was the only way to protect the good Bundy . . . So denying that he was guilty—I don’t think, in his mind, he was doing anything contradictory. He really did believe it.”

  “The person standing before you couldn’t kill anyone,” Ted told the jury at one of his trials. It was a tactic he used repeatedly, despite the fact that it never convinced anyone of anything. “The bottom line,” he told another jury, at his Orlando trial, “is that the person who murdered Kimberly Leach is not in the courtroom today.” The jury deliberated for less than an hour before recommending the death penalty.

  Dr. Al Carlisle, the psychiatrist who evaluated Ted prior to his sentencing in Utah, concluded after six weeks of interviews that “the constant theme running throughout the testing was a view of women being more competent than men. There were also indications of a fairly strong dependency on women, and yet he also has a strong need to be independent. I feel this creates a fairly strong conflict in that he would like a close relationship with females but is fearful of being hurt by them. There were indications of general anger and, more particularly, a well-masked anger toward women.”

  Polly Nelson researched Ted’s childhood in preparation for the evidentiary hearings, and learned, she wrote, “that, contrary to Ted’s description of an idyllic family background, his grandfather had been a violent and bizarre man who beat his wife and talked aloud to unseen presences. Ted’s grandmother had been hospitalized for depression several times and treated with electroshock therapy.” Eventually, “the family had conspired to get Ted and his mother out of his grandfather’s house—and out to Seattle to start a new life.” But, Nelson wrote, “Ted’s mother denied there had been any problems.”

  Ted told a similar story. He was fiercely protective of his mother, especially when it came to guarding her from any suggestion that she might have influenced his behavior. During Carlisle’s evaluation, Ted insisted he felt no resentment toward his mother, because “she had sacrificed a great deal to have and raise an illegitimate child.”

  “My mom loved me enough to give birth to me, to care for me and love me,” he wrote to authors Michaud and Aynesworth. “This seemed to be more than enough.”

  Louise Cowell was 17 when she gave birth to Ted in a home for unwed mothers. She decided to give her baby up for adoption, and left him there. When she returned three months later, it was not because she had changed her mind about being a mother, but because her parents had changed her mind for her. When Louise brought Ted home, her parents alternated between passing him off as her brother and simply hiding him away.

  “She tried to do the right thing,” Nelson said. “She knew her limitations and her feelings about him. And then she was pressured to do otherwise. She was young.”

  Carlisle also noted Ted’s intense attachment to Liz. During his evaluation, Ted wept as he recounted a time when Liz had been unfaithful. “My world was so destroyed,” he said.

  “In this life we are fortunate to find one person to love and love completely,” Ted wrote to Liz shortly after his first arrest. “I am lucky because I love you in this way . . . In this hour when my whole life is threatened, the only thing I regret is losing you and [your daughter]. So I give you one more thing. It is the one part of me that cannot be taken away. I give you my love as deep and as powerful as any human being can have for any other. I give it to you as the woman who has captured my soul . . . Without you there would be no life.”

  At the sentencing hearing for his Utah trial, Ted was particularly outraged by Carlisle’s claim that he was dependent on women. “Good grief!” he said. “I don’t know that there’s a man in the courtroom who isn’t. And if he isn’t, maybe there’s something wrong with him. Our mother is a woman.”

  “I think when you are as desperately dependent on something as he was . . . you resent it,” Nelson told me. “I think a lot of men feel that way.”

  “He received no pleasure from harming or causing pain to the person he attacked,” Ted said, in one of the many interviews he conducted with Michaud and Aynesworth under the premise that he was theorizing about what the real killer might have done. “He received absolutely no gratification,” Ted insisted. “He did everything possible within reason—considering the unreasonableness of the situ
ation—not to torture these individuals, at least not physically.”

  Lisa Levy was unconscious when Ted Bundy assaulted her, raping her with a hair spray can and nearly biting her nipple from her breast. How many of these other girls and women were unconscious, or already dead, when he carried out his assaults? In many cases, we cannot know, just as we cannot know what need he served by staying with some of his victims’ bodies until dawn, and by returning to their corpses sometimes weeks after he killed them, perhaps until there was nothing left to return to.

  “If there was anything he was ashamed of,” Nelson said, “it was that. Any kind of contact he had with the body after death. He couldn’t wrap any story around that.”

  We have found a way to wrap a story around most of Ted Bundy’s actions. In all too many depictions of him, there is, lurking in the background, the idea that every man wants to rape women, but Ted Bundy just got carried away and took things too far. The necrophilia, the mutilation, and the destruction and visitation that seemed to feed his compulsion more than any recognizably sexual motive are harder to cram into a ready-made narrative. They reveal a man who perhaps felt the need not to revel in his victims’ pain but to destroy the body that should have given him the love he needed but never gave him enough, never enough so that he could truly feel it, never enough so that he could finally become whole—or else to steal inside it, to disappear, and to no longer be alone.

  When I talked with Nelson, I asked her if Ted Bundy’s gradual progression to serial murder seemed as inevitable to her as it did to him. “I wouldn’t say it seemed inevitable to him,” she countered. “He was always hoping it wasn’t. We all think we’re strong enough to resist our temptations, and like all of us, he just thought, OK, I’m stronger than this. Now I know, so now I really can be strong.

  “And whether anything could have happened at any time,” she continued, “so that this could not have happened, I think definitely . . . I think he’s on a spectrum, and other people are on parts of that spectrum, and very few of them end up like he did. But he had all the right ingredients.”

  THE JUNGLE GROWTH OF CENTRAL FLORIDA STOPS abruptly about a mile from Florida State Prison. The trees disappear. The sky is suddenly endless. The first real clue that you are approaching the complex is a sign that reads, FLORIDA STATE PRISON NOW HIRING. If you’re not going in for a job interview, or to meet with an inmate, it is easy to drive straight past it. There is no place to pull off the highway, let alone a marker setting one drab stretch of shoulder apart from the rest, and this seems right to me. I came here because I wanted to see the spot where so many people shared so much joy at the death of a man, and because maybe by standing in this place I would understand not just their joy but the man whose death inspired it. But there is no place to look at, and I am looking for something no one has. I am looking for an answer.

  Of all the aspects of the psychopath diagnosis that Ted Bundy challenges, perhaps the most striking is the one that does not apply to him at all: satisfaction. Psychopaths, Dr. Hare assures us, celebrate the way they are, and see the rest of us as weaker beings. One never encounters descriptions of the psychopath that include not just the way their inability to feel love harms the people around them, but what it is like to survive without love, and to endure what must, at times, seem like an empty hell.

  Nor does one encounter the suggestion that the psychopath can, with age, feel moments of relief, flickers of love, as Nelson says Ted Bundy felt for his daughter. The same daughter left Ted’s life forever in 1986, when Carole Ann Boone quietly moved back to Washington, taking their child with her. “I think he agreed to it,” Nelson said of their departure. Before they left, Ted drew so close to an execution date that he had said goodbye to his family—his head already shaved for the electric chair’s sponge—before he received a stay. Ted seemed to recognize, Nelson said, that his wife and daughter would have a better life without him. And, she added, “as things were heating up so much, [his daughter] was going to see the news or the newspaper. He didn’t want her to have that impression of him.”

  Then, too, there was the question of whether Ted Bundy truly wanted to stop. After his first escape, in Aspen, he told Michaud and Aynesworth, he didn’t feel the urges that had dominated him before his arrest. He believed that he had cured himself, and was free. The second time he broke out of custody, he was high on the thrill of escape until he got as far south as Atlanta. Then, suddenly, something happened.

  “I was waiting for the bus,” Ted said, “and I was watching all these people—these people who had real lives, backgrounds, histories, girlfriends, husbands and families. Who were smiling and laughing and talking to each other. Who seemed to have so much of what I wanted. All of a sudden, I just felt smaller and smaller and smaller. And more insecure, too. And more alone . . . Bit by bit by bit, I felt something drain out of me.” Within two weeks, he would murder Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman.

  A lifetime is not long enough to comprehend the pain Ted Bundy caused. I limit myself to one woman’s life and I know I cannot fathom such a loss, let alone such losses. I don’t believe anyone can. I am powerless to understand, to begin to imagine, just who his victims were. I can tell you only what I have learned from true crime: that Lynda Healy was studying child psychology; that Georgann Hawkins’s mother called her “the Pied Piper” because of how many friends she always had at her side; that Donna Manson made a list titled “Things to give to people,” and it went:

  A string of beads

  A taste

  A rose

  An ear

  A hand to help

  I will never grasp the totality of these women: of both their own lives and the lives that touched theirs; of their loves and fears and anger; of the possible worlds they walked beside, and the world as it was, as it was when it was theirs, and in moments that were theirs alone, and that could never be translated for the public into another humanizing fact, another reason that this was a girl who deserved to live.

  “You can go as high as you want,” Bundy told Aynesworth when the writer wondered how many victims the “person” they were discussing might have killed, at a time when both men understood they were talking about Ted Bundy himself. “The higher the number,” Bundy said, “the better. The more horrified people will be, the more they will read, and the more interested they’ll be in finding out what makes a person like this tick . . . Make it up. I’m not going to do it. I can’t . . . but you can.”

  Ted Bundy was adamant about the few insights he did have about himself. If he could not explain why his compulsions had emerged, he could at least cling to the knowledge that there was a time when they had not controlled him. In response to Beverly Burr, a Tacoma resident who begged him to confess to the murder of her eight-year-old daughter, Ann Marie, Ted wrote: “You said she disappeared August 31, 1961. At the time I was a normal 14-year-old boy.” In a few years, things would change forever. But not then. Not yet.

  “We’re right down to it,” Bundy said near the end of his final meeting with Nelson and Dr. Lewis, hours before his death. “I’ve pieced together an explanation of sorts which makes sense, yet I don’t know. I wish I did know . . . that’s what I’d like to understand, why. I think for me sometimes it’s sadly, just because.

  “Forgive me for digressing a little,” he said. “Maybe this will help. You asked me why I never sought help. At first I didn’t think I needed it. Then I suffered from delusions that I could handle it myself. Then it was too late because I knew if I sought help, that was—I didn’t trust anybody.”

  Dr. Lewis asked Ted to relax as deeply as he could, to reach back into his childhood, and to tell her what he saw. “Ted had laid his head down on his hands,” Nelson wrote, “but his handcuffs cut him and he was unable to concentrate. I cupped his head in my hands. I had never been this way with Ted before, touching him, comforting him. But today was different . . . Today I was a human being and he was a human being.”

  “Well,” Bundy said at last, “loo
king back now I couldn’t, I couldn’t, certainly didn’t, see it or understand it. I can only say that . . . what I lacked and didn’t understand and express was love.

  “By love,” he said, “I mean the ability to sense someone else’s feelings and when to comfort them and to protect them and do good things for them. And in turn have that same kind of feeling, be the focus of that same kind of feeling.

  “I feel that it wasn’t there in me,” Ted said. “I mean, how else?”

  WHEN I FIRST LEARNED ABOUT TED BUNDY, I WAS 16 AND working through myth after myth, trying to understand why the dark forces inside a man needed, so badly, to destroy me. Sometimes victimhood seemed inevitable. And sometimes it seemed like the best thing that could happen to a girl. Once you were dead, you could be loved forever. Once you were dead, no one asked if you had fought back hard enough, if you hadn’t really wanted it after all.

  I learned, from all these stories, that there were good men who wanted to save me, but only after I was dead, and I learned that there were bad men who wanted—needed—to kill me. But I didn’t understand where this need came from, and the answers people gave me never made sense. He wanted to be evil. He had become superior to other men—the less capable of love he was, the more superior he became—and he realized there was nothing to stop him from possessing all the women he wanted, because isn’t that what all men wish they could do? And that, as far as I could tell, was why you weren’t supposed to put the good men in a room with the bad man for too long: they were afraid they would start seeing things his way.

  So I went to the bad men. Listen, I said, to the shape I conjured, who usually looked like Ted, usually was Ted, though our life spans had overlapped by just a few months. Listen, I said, when I imagined him driving me up the mountain some dark night, up a narrow logging road, the way long, the radio gone to static. Listen, I’d say. Just tell me what you need from me. Why is my body the one you have to tear apart? What do you think you’ll find?