by Ann Rule
It may be presumptuous on my part. I am neither a trained psychiatrist nor a criminologist. Yet, after almost ten years of knowing Ted through all the good times and the bad times and after researching the crimes he has been suspected of and those he has been convicted of and after agonizing reflection, I realize that I may know Ted as well as anyone has ever known him. And I can conclude only, with the most profound sense of regret, that he can never be healed.
I doubt that Ted will understand the depth of my feeling for him. The knowledge that he is undoubtedly guilty of the grotesque crimes attributed to him is as painful to me as if he were my son, the brother I lost, a man as close to me in many ways as anyone I have ever known. There will never be a time in my life when I will not think of him.
I have felt friendship, love, respect, anxiety, sorrow, horror, deep anger, despair, and, at the end, resigned acceptance of what has to be. Like John Henry Browne, and Peggy Good, like his mother and the women who loved him romantically, I have tried to save Ted’s life … twice. Once he knew it, and once he didn’t. He received the letter I mailed in 1976 when I begged him not to kill himself, but he never knew that I had tried to arrange a plea bargain in 1979 that might have meant confinement in a mental hospital instead of the trials that led him inexorably toward the electric chair.
And, like all the others, I have been manipulated to suit Ted’s needs. I don’t feel particularly embarrassed or resentful about that. I was one of many, all of us intelligent, compassionate people who had no real comprehension of what possessed him, what drove him obsessively.
Ted came into my life, however peripherally, at a time when all the beliefs I had held smugly for many years had been shattered. True love, marriage, fidelity, selfless motherhood, blind trust—all those marvelous truths were suddenly only wisps of smoke blowing away in a totally unforeseen gust of wind.
But Ted seemed to embody what was young, idealistic, clean, sure, and empathetic. He seemed to ask nothing but friendship. He was, in 1971, a decisive factor in the verification that I was a person of worth, a woman who still had a great deal to give and to reap. He was most assuredly not a predatory male eager to “hit on” a newly divorced woman. He was simply there, listening, reassuring, giving credibility to what I was trying to become. Such a friend is not easy to turn one’s back on.
I have no idea what I was to him, what I seemed to remain to him. Perhaps I gave back to him only what he had given to me. I saw him then as quite perfect, and he must have needed that. Perhaps he could sense an emotional strength in me, although I surely did not feel it myself at the time.
He may have known that he could count on me when the going grew perilous for him. In times of deepest stress, he would turn to me, again and again. And I did attempt to help him, but I could never really assuage his pain because Ted could never bring himself to expose the soft underbelly of his anguish. He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him. It must have taken incredible effort.
The parameters of that shadow man were constructed with such care. One misstep and they could all come apart.
The Ted Bundy the world was allowed to see was handsome, his body honed and cultivated meticulously, a barrier of strength against eyes that might catch a glimpse of the terror inside. He was brilliant, a student of distinction, witty, glib, and persuasive. He loved to ski, sail, and hike. He favored French cuisine, good white wine, and gourmet cooking. He loved Mozart and obscure foreign films. He knew exactly when to send flowers and sentimental cards. His poems of love were tender and romantic.
And yet, in reality, Ted loved things more than he loved people. He could find life in an abandoned bicycle or an old car, and feel a kind of compassion for these inanimate objects, more compassion than he could ever feel for another human being.
Ted could—and did—rub elbows with the governor, travel in circles that most young men could never hope to enter, but he could never feel good about himself. On the surface Ted Bundy was the very epitome of a successful man. Inside, it was all ashes.
For Ted has gone through life terribly crippled, like a man who is deaf, or blind, or paralyzed. Ted has no conscience.
“Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” but conscience is what gives us our humanity, the factor that separates us from animals. It allows us to love, to feel another’s pain, and to grow. Whatever the drawbacks are to being blessed with a conscience, the rewards are essential to living in a world with other human beings.
The individual with no conscience, with no superego at all, has long been a focal point for study by psychiatrists and psychologists. The terms used to describe such an individual have changed over the years, but the concept has not. Once it was called a “psychopathic personality,” and then it became “sociopath.” Today, the term in vogue is “antisocial personality.”
To live in our world, with thoughts and actions always counter to the flow of your fellow men, must be an awesome handicap. There are no innate guidelines to follow: the psychopath might well be a visitor from another planet, struggling to mimic the feelings of those he encounters. It is almost impossible to pinpoint just when antisocial feelings begin, although most experts agree that emotional development has been arrested in early childhood, perhaps as early as three. Usually, the inward-turning of emotions results from a need for love or acceptance not filled, from deprivation and humiliation. Once the process has begun, that little child will grow tall, but he will never mature emotionally.
He may experience pleasure on only a physical level, an excitable “high,” and a sense of euphoria from the games he substitutes for real feelings.
He knows what he wants, and, because he is not hampered by guilt feelings or the needs of others, he can usually achieve instant gratification. But he can never fill up the lonesome void inside. He is insatiable, always hungry.
The antisocial personality is mentally ill, but not in the classic sense or within our legal framework. He is invariably highly intelligent and has long since learned the proper responses, the tricks and techniques that will please those from whom he wants something. He is subtle, calculating, clever, and dangerous. And he is lost.
Dr. Benjamin Spock, who worked in a veterans’ hospital dealing with emotional illnesses during World War II, commented at the time that there was a pronounced cross-sex problem in dealing with psychopathic personalities. The male psychopaths had no difficulty in bewitching female staff members, while the male staff picked up on them rapidly. The female psychopaths could fool the male staff but not the women.
Ted’s retinue of friends and companions was always heavily weighted with women. Some loved him as a man. Some women, like myself, were drawn to his courtly manners, his little-boy quality, his seemingly genuine concern and thoughtfulness. Women were always Ted’s comfort and his curse.
Because he could control women, balance us carefully in the tightly structured world he had manufactured, we were important to him. We seemed to hold the solution to that dead hollow place inside him. He dangled us as puppets from a string, and when one of us did not react as he wanted, he was both outraged and confused.
I believe men, on the other hand, were a threat. The one man whom he felt he could emulate, the man whose genes and chromosomes dictated who he was, had been left behind. When Ted told me for the first time about his illegitimate birth, I sensed that he seemed to consider himself a changeling child, the progeny of royalty dumped by mistake on the doorstep of a blue-collar family. How he loved the thought of money and status, and how inadequate he felt when he found himself with women who were born to it.
Ted never really knew who he was supposed to be. He’d been taken away from his real father, and then taken away from his grandfather Cowell, whom he loved and respected. He could not, would not, use Johnnie Culpepper Bundy as a role model.
I think his feelings toward his mother were marked with a raging ambivalence. She had lied to him. She had robbed him of his real father, although rational considerat
ion shows that she had no choice. But half of Ted was gone, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to make up for that loss.
Still, he clung to his mother, tried to live up to her dreams that he must excel, that he was her special child who could do anything. Of all the women that Ted was involved with romantically, it was Meg Anders who lasted the longest, and it was Meg who was the most like Louise Bundy. Both of them are small, almost frail, women. And each was left alone with a child to raise. Each of them traveled far from her family home to start a new life with that child. Meg Anders and Louise Bundy are the two women who, I believe, suffered the most agony when Ted’s facade shattered.
The men that Ted was drawn to were all men of power, either through their accomplishments, their intellect, or their easy mantle of masculinity: his lawyer friend in Seattle. Ross Davis, head of the Washington State Republican Party. John Henry Browne, the dynamic public defender. John O’Connell, his Salt Lake City attorney. Buzzy Ware, the brilliant Colorado attorney he lost. Millard Farmer, denied to him by the Florida courts. Policemen had that same kind of power—especially Norm Chapman of Pensacola, who exuded strength, masculinity, and, yes, the ability to love.
Like a little boy who yearns to be important, to be noticed, Ted played perverse games with policemen. In many of his crimes, he would assume their mantle, their badges, and he would, for that time, be one of them. Although he often called policemen stupid, he needed to know that he was important to them, if in only a negative sense. If he could not please them, then he would displease them so much that he had to be noticed. He had to be so notorious that all other criminals would pale in comparison.
It is interesting to consider that when Ted confessed his escape and his intricate credit card thefts, when he discussed his terrible fantasies, it was to policemen. His voice on the tapes made in Pensacola is excited and full of pride. He is triumphant and in his element on those tapes, doing exactly what he wants to be doing as if he were laying a gift before them, expecting praise for his cunning. Those detectives were men who could appreciate his cleverness, and, as he said, “I’m in charge of entertainment …”
I have no doubt that Ted would have given anything in the world to have been able to change places with big, easygoing Norm Chapman. Because that man—whatever his limitations—knew who he was … and Ted never had.
Women were easier to deal with. But women held the power to hurt and humiliate,
Stephanie Brooks was the first to hurt him badly. Although Ted had dated only infrequently in high school, he had longed for a relationship with a woman who was beautiful and wealthy. Stephanie did not make Ted an antisocial personality. She exacerbated what was already smoldering there. When she walked away from him after their first year together, he was ashamed and humiliated, and the rage he felt was out of all proportion. He was the little boy again, a boy who had had a toy wrenched away from him, and he wanted it back. True, he would smash it, and the relationship, when he got it back, but he had to have the opportunity to do that.
It took him years, but Ted did accomplish the seemingly impossible task of reworking the outer Ted until he was able to meet Stephanie’s standards for a potential husband. Then … then, he could humiliate her just as she had humbled him. And he did. Once she had promised to marry him, he changed suddenly and sent her away. He put her on the airplane to California without so much as a kiss, saw her stunned face and turned his back on her.
But it didn’t seem to be enough. His revenge brought no lessening of the void in his soul, and it must have been a terrible realization for him. He had worked, planned, schemed so that he could reject Stephanie, sure that he would feel whole and serene again, and yet he still felt empty.
He still had Meg, and Meg loved him devotedly, would have married him in a minute. But Meg was too much like Louise. Any love he felt for either of them was tempered with scorn for their weakness. Somehow, he would have to punish Stephanie more.
It was, of course, only three days after Stephanie left Seattle in January of 1974 that Joni Lenz was bludgeoned and raped symbolically with the metal bed rod as she lay sleeping in her basement room.
And so the answer to the question put to me so many times is yes. Yes, I believe Ted Bundy attacked Joni Lenz, just as I now am forced to believe that he is responsible for all the other crimes attributed to him. I have never said it out loud, or in print, but I believe it, as devoutly as I wish I did not.
The victims are all prototypes of Stephanie. The same long hair, parted in the middle, the same perfectly even features. None of them were random choices. I think some of them were chosen, watched for long periods before the attacks occurred, while others were picked rapidly because they were convenient targets during those times when Ted was in the grip of his maniacal compulsion.
But they all resembled Stephanie, that first woman who had pierced Ted’s carefully constructed facade and revealed the yawning vulnerability beneath. That damage to Ted’s ego could never be forgiven. None of the crimes filled the emptiness. He had to keep killing Stephanie over and over again, hoping that each time would be the time that would bring surcease. But the more there were, the worse it became.
Ted had said that “my fantasies are taking over my life,” and I don’t believe that he had any control over them. The compulsion that he mentioned in his first letter to me after his arrest in Pensacola dominated Ted. Ted did not dominate the compulsion. He could manipulate other people, but God help him, he could not stop himself.
He also said that acting out his fantasies was a “downer,” and the depths of those downers can be only imagined by a rational mind. Since an antisocial personality has no empathy at all for others, it was not his victims’ pain that tormented him. It was that there was no relief for him.
All of his victims were so lovely, so carefully chosen, that during the time they were living players in his obsessive rituals, he thought he cared for them. The rituals themselves left the chosen limp, bleeding, and ugly. Why did it have to be that way? He detested them for dying, for becoming ugly, for leaving him—again—alone. And, in the midst of the awful aftermath of the fantasies, he could not truly comprehend that it was he who had wrought the destruction.
Madness, yes, but madness is what I am trying to understand. Holding the reins of power was no fun when there was no one left to terrorize with that power.
I think the rest of the carefully regimented games came about accidentally, an extension of the killing games. Driven by rage, revenge, and frustration, Ted killed. The sexual aspect of the murders was not a matter of satiating his drives, but rather the need to humiliate and demean his victims. He felt no true sexual release, only the blackest of depressions.
It was only after the killings that Ted realized just how newsworthy he was. He began to exult in the thrill of the chase, and it became a part of the ritual, a part even more satisfying than the murders themselves. His power over the dead girls lasted such a short time, but his power over the police investigators went on and on. That he could do these things, take more and more chances, refine his disguises so that he could come out in the light of day—and still remain undetected—was the ultimate euphoria. He could do what no other man could do, and do it with impunity.
How often he would talk to me of being in the limelight, being the Golden Boy. It became life and breath to him.
And the games became more intricate. When Ted was finally arrested in Utah in 1975 by Sergeant Bob Hayward, he was outraged. One must understand that he actually felt this sense of indignation. As an antisocial personality, he could feel no guilt. He had only taken what he wanted, what he needed to feel whole. He was incapable of understanding that one cannot fulfill his own desires at the expense of others. He had not finished with the games, and the stupid police had ended them before he was ready.
When Ted complained throughout the years about jails, prisons, the courts, the judges, the district attorneys, the police, and the press, he was not aware that there was another side
to it all. His reasoning was simplistic, but to him it made sense. What Ted wanted, Ted should have, and there was the blind spot in his superior intelligence. When he wept, he wept for only himself, but his tears were real tears. He was desperate, and afraid, and angry, and he believed that he was completely within his rights.
To convince him otherwise would be akin to explaining the theory of relativity to a kindergarten child. The mechanisms needed to understand the needs and rights of others are not integrated into his thinking processes.
Even today, I cannot hate him for that. I feel only profound pity.
Ted has often bragged to me that psychiatrists and psychologists could find nothing abnormal about him. He had masked his responses, another red-flag indicator of the antisocial personality.
Dr. Herve Cleckley, the Augusta, Georgia, psychiatrist who interviewed Ted prior to his Miami trial (the evaluation that Ted felt he was tricked into), is an expert on the antisocial personality, and he acknowledges that standard tests seldom reveal this aberration.
“The observer is confronted with a convincing mask of sanity. We are dealing not with a complete man at all, but with something that suggests a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly.”
The antisocial personality does not evince the thought disorder patterns that are more easily discerned. There are few signs of anxiety, phobias, or delusions. He is, in essence, an emotional robot, programmed by himself to reflect the responses that he has found society demands. And, because that programming is often so cunning, this personality is extremely hard to diagnose. Nor can it be healed.
My first niggling doubt about Ted’s personality came when he forgave Meg so quickly for betraying him to the police. True, he had loved her to the extent he was capable of loving, and Meg had never humiliated him. He was the dominant partner in their relationship, and he had humiliated her again and again. But he never viewed her betrayal as an act of revenge on her part. I think she may have been the one woman in his life who helped to fill even a small corner of his barren soul. Although he could not be faithful to her, neither could he exist without her.