Some of Bundy’s courtroom worshipers “sent him lewdly suggestive notes or asked for his autograph. Others were content to sit for a full day in court, happy if just once he would look their way,” wrote Michaud and Aynesworth, adding that he had a “national following” and received “heavy fan mail.”
Who were these women? How could they love a creature called Ted Bundy?
One Ted groupie contacted anthropologist and writer Elliott Leyton because she saw him on television in 1986 promoting his book Hunting Humans. After the show, he was told he had an urgent phone call. The woman at the other end of the line said she was desperately in love with Bundy. “She asked did I think he really did it. I said that there was no question in my mind. But that didn’t seem to deter her,” said Leyton.
In her letters to Leyton “she admitted that she had an uncontrollable passion for Bundy,” he recalled. The woman was single, in her late twenties or early thirties, and worked in a hotel in Toronto. Although she had never met the serial killer, she told Leyton she couldn’t stop thinking about him, that she was “obsessively involved in a kind of romantic fantasy about Bundy.” She stopped writing after a few months and Leyton never heard from her again.
Bundy was incarcerated at Florida State Penitentiary during the decade between his death sentences and his execution. Prison administrator Paul Decker said he had never seen an inmate with as many groupies as Bundy, “a variety of women … [Bundy had] quite a number of personal relationships with women.”
All through Bundy’s trials and years of appeals, “he would always have at least one woman entranced with him, living for the few moments she could visit him in jail, running errands, proclaiming his innocence,” writes Rule. The most steadfast, Carole Ann Boone, married him and had his child.
Like other women in love with killers, Carole needed and wanted love so much that she created a fantasy lover whom she named “Bunny.” Also, because Bundy was a serial killer, his notoriety gave Boone status. She was not a nobody anymore but Ted Bundy’s wife. Her opinions, ideas, life story, feelings—she, Carole Ann Boone, was a magnet for hundreds of reporters from all over the world.
Like other women who love murderers, Boone gave up everything in her life for her man. She relocated from Seattle to Gainesville, Florida, to be near him, taking her son from a previous relationship with her. When Boone went public about their relationship, she lost her county clerical job and had to subsist on whatever reporters were willing to pay her for interviews. She became Bundy’s voice in the outside world. From the moment they connected, she was a true believer, utterly convinced of his innocence. She had to be, in order to maintain her fantasy. She worked tirelessly, albeit unsuccessfully, to prove the charges against him false. Boone spent years being enraged at the press, the prosecution, the legal system—the forces in society that had ganged up on her poor, innocent Bunny.
Finally, as Ted Bundy stood charged with dozens of heinous murders and was facing death, as he was described in the media as one of the most vicious sexual sadists and serial killers ever, Carole Ann Boone married him. While acting as his own defense attorney, Bundy got Carole on the stand and asked her if she wanted to wed him. She replied, “Yes,” and he said, “Then I do hereby marry you.” Although the method was unconventional, it was legal, and the two would remain bonded in unholy matrimony until Bundy’s execution.
Like the Toronto woman who was obsessed with Bundy, Carole did not love Ted Bundy, the man, because he didn’t reveal himself to her, or to anyone. She loved Bunny, her own creation, what she wanted him to be—not what he was.
Sitting through Bundy’s trial, Carole Boone managed to believe in the innocence of her fantasy lover because the side of himself that Bundy showed was charming and courteous; he could not possibly be a serial killer. Boone’s ability to deny was shored up by Bundy’s incredible lies. “He hoodwinked Carole to the extent that she believed he didn’t do it despite what the evidence showed,” said Investigator Keppel. Two years before Bundy’s execution, Carole Boone stopped believing in her husband’s innocence and stopped visiting him.
Journalist Richard Larsen, author of Ted Bundy: The Deliberate Stranger, a man who knew Bundy in Washington long before his arrest, speculated on why Carole Boone stopped believing in her Bunny. “She didn’t really tell me, but probably a good conclusion is the accumulation of circumstance, circumstance, circumstance. Probably the events in the sorority murders, the fact that Ted was living adjacent to the sorority house, that the police description resembled him, and the rather powerful set of circumstances [surrounding the murder] of the twelve-year-old girl. These were the cappers of her conclusion.”
Although all these facts were brought out during Bundy’s trial, it took eight years for Carole Boone to believe they were true.
The FBI agent who spent the last five days of Bundy’s life with him said that, even then, the serial killer did not lack the company of women. “One of his lady attorneys started seeing him regularly,” said Special Agent William Hagmaier III.
Attorney Diana Weiner, who represented Bundy in civil matters, was described in the Sarasota Herald Tribune as knowing a Ted Bundy who was quite different from the serial killer the public knew: “While emphasizing that she isn’t trying to minimize the heinous acts Bundy committed, Weiner says she believes Bundy was genuine in expressing remorse and sensitivity toward others.”
According to the article, Weiner said, “I think the public is unwilling to accept that there could be a commonality between Ted Bundy and the rest of humanity or that Ted Bundy could have, at the end of his life, sought to tell the truth, confess or have any moral compunction to do so.”
Could Weiner have fallen under the charismatic killer’s spell? “He has inspired passionate love and hopeless love,” write Michaud and Aynesworth, adding that Bundy’s psychopathology was what he used to “bind women to him.” Put another way, he was the consummate sociopath. The cons he used for tricking women into getting into his car so he could then sexually brutalize and kill them were the same cons he used on the women who “loved” him.
JOHN WAYNE GACY
On death row in Illinois, John Wayne Gacy had been waiting to die since 1980 for the hideous sexual murders of thirty-three youths. (He was executed on May 10, 1994.) The epitome of the serial killer who blends into the background, Gacy was a jovial, outgoing, friendly man, considered sociable and charitable. He organized town parades and dressed as a clown to cheer up sick children in the local hospital. Once nominated “Man of the Year” by the Jaycees of Springfield, Illinois, he was even photographed with former first lady Rosalynn Carter at a local political rally.
He lived in a quiet Chicago suburb and was married twice, fathering two children with his first wife, Marlynn. During his second marriage, to Carol, he began his killings. They lasted for a period of about six years, between 1972 and 1978. At the beginning of 1975, as he and Carol were divorcing, Gacy’s drinking, pilltaking, and murders escalated. Neither of Gacy’s wives, nor his neighbors, friends, or acquaintances, had the remotest idea of his monstrous self.
Today, more than a decade later, Gacy still denies he is a serial killer. His claim is that journalists have painted an inaccurate portrait of him. In many of his letters quoted in They Call Him Mr. Gacy, a collection of his correspondence, he repeats this line: “There is a great deal of difference between John Gacy, the man, and John Gacy, the Media monster.”
They Call Him Mr. Gacy is replete with letters from women desperate to meet a sadistic serial killer. The writers tell of their unhappy marriages, traumatic experiences, deviance—and above all, loneliness. Most of the women express sympathy for Gacy and a belief in his innocence. Their letters are full of the denials and fantasies we have seen expressed by all women who love murderers.
From Randi, Maine, August 13, 1984: “I have this obsession with you. I can’t for the life of me stop thinking about you. I would like to meet you someday. I would like to get to know about you personally. I do
n’t think, to tell you the truth, you got a fair trial… I would like to have you as a friend; I live in these back woods with my parents and it gets awfully lonely.”
From Lynn, New York City, November 28, 1987: “I was an attractive girl who got scarred through some fault of her own and now live as a recluse. I only like to know people who have crossed over to the other side. I am still healthy and feel beautiful in a very rough hewn sort of way but I can’t relate to most normal things or situations. I create companions out of my dolls and work on a phone S&M service (at home) so I’m able to keep my worldly interaction limited. I am a mental stimulation junkie—need to read or watch movies all the time. Roller skate in my apartment for hours to ease frustrations. Have a dog who I jerk off… I wonder about you and where you’ve been.”
From Carolyn, Centralia, Illinois, June 12, 1980: “My marriage took me down but I’m coming up slow but sure. Ha. Do you ever have visitors? I feel sorry for you and I hope everything works out!”
From Terry-Sue, March 2, 1988: “I am a 34 year old black sexy mama. I am looking for a swinging good time whenever you get out. I know you killed them boys but I don’t care… P.S. This is a train letter. Please send it to the rest of you killer friends.”
From Kerri, Milwaukee, March 3, 1988: “I’ve just got over a bad relationship with my x-boyfriend. He was a real bitch—but rather exciting. We would have these wild fights where we would hit each other, scream at the top of our lungs. John I got ‘great lungs.’ Wait til you see—perhaps by photo.”
From Nancy, Phoenix, Arizona, March 22, 1988: “I wish to express my sorrow for the many years you have spent in prison and on death row. I have from the very beginning believed in your innocence, and still do till this day.”
From Wanetta, on January 28, 1989: “I am aware that you might not choose to answer my letter, that will be a great loss for me to have the chance to confer with the infamous John Gacy, would be a great honor to someone like me who finds you one of the most intelligent murderers of our time.”
Gacy is not handsome, youthful, or charismatic. He doesn’t have Bundy’s appeal to women nor did he have avid fans and groupies following his case. He has, however, achieved celebrity status. And the abundance of letters he gets from strangers, women he has never met or contacted, shows how many lonely, deluded women out there want contact with a notorious killer—either to become notorious themselves or perhaps because they’re attracted by his deviance.
Of the many women who tried to meet Gacy, perhaps the most successful was an Illinois mother of eight, Sue Terry, who first wrote to Gacy after reading about him in a newspaper. Instead of being repulsed by Gacy’s crimes, Sue felt empathy. Herself a victim, she saw in Gacy a fellow sufferer—common to many women who love men who kill. “I thought maybe he is in prison because someone had made a mistake. I thought he might be innocent,” she said.
Although he responded to her letter as if he didn’t trust her, she went to visit him anyway. Sue was “shocked” when she met Gacy. “He’s got real soft, kind blue eyes. He relaxed me, the way he talked. I can’t explain it. It was like being in another world,” she said. The forty-six-year-old woman visited the serial killer for a year. They also wrote to each other every day and talked on the phone, according to Sue. “I was in love with him. I never had anybody treat me as nice as he treated me.” For Sue Terry, who describes her life as “hard and rough,” who experienced a series of abusive relationships, unwanted pregnancies, and feelings of victimization, Gacy was the first person she ever met who acted as if he cared.
Using denial and compartmentalization, Sue was able to avoid the truth about Gacy so she could view him as a kind, considerate man and fall in love with him. “I really and truly believed he was innocent. How could people do this to John? He was the nicest, kindest, sweetest person in the world… It wouldn’t be the John I know to do something like that.”
Like so many women who love men who kill, Sue grew up in a home without a father; he’d abandoned the family when she was two. “I had a mother and [step]dad who cared about me, but for some reason, my brothers were the main thing in [my mother’s] life.” At fourteen, after an affair with a married man, Sue gave birth to her first baby. Pregnant again a few years later, she found herself still single when her boyfriend died in a car accident. Next, she had two children with “a man who really cared about me and loved me, but I never really loved him in that way … I was depressed.”
The relationship she had right before she met Gacy was the worst of her life. She lived for five years with a violently abusive man who tortured her: “He cut the ends of my fingers off, bone and all. He beat me so bad… Me and my kids slept in cars, did anything to get away from him. He kicked my teeth out and cut my face… [I needed] over one hundred stitches.
“I see this on television, where women kill their husbands. If I could have, I would have. I would be in prison now for murder.”
Finally, Sue managed to leave her tormentor and until she met Gacy, had nothing to do with men. But Gacy was different from other men. He had killed, over and over; he had committed the crime Sue could only talk about. Much of Sue’s attraction to Gacy has to do with his ability to act while she could only threaten or imagine (like Maria in Chapter 1). Even though she denied his guilt, somewhere inside Sue knew he had really murdered the thirty-three boys and young men.
Sue and Gacy were close for about a year until he bragged so much about his murders, she could no longer maintain her illusions about his innocence. It’s difficult for a woman in love with a murderer to deny his guilt if he admits it. Once, when Sue took her children to prison to visit Gacy, her son said he had heard of a serial killer with more victims. Gacy became angry. “It made him mad to think someone had killed more than he did. He said, ‘No, he didn’t. I killed more than he did.’… I had seen the cold, mean side of John Wayne Gacy.” Another time, referring to his victims, he told Sue, “All those boys were prostitutes.”
Today, only Sue’s sixteen-year-old daughter believes Gacy to be innocent. “He still writes to my little girl… She just kind of feels sorry for him. He’s got her believing now that if he dies, they killed an innocent man. She doesn’t think he’s guilty.”
Gacy conned Sue into believing he was wrongly convicted just as he is now tricking her daughter. “He is the world’s greatest manipulator. I don’t know how, but believe me, he just does it. He could con a snake.”
THE HILLSIDE STRANGLERS: KENNETH BIANCHI AND ANGELO BUONO
Kenneth Bianchi looked up to his older cousin, Angelo Buono. When the younger man moved from his home in Rochester, New York, to L.A. at the age of twenty-six, he and his cousin began to pal around. Buono, forty-four, was a street-smart, macho kind of guy who “lived with a strict code,” according to Gerald Chaleff, Buono’s defense attorney. Buono married three times, had seven children, and was a self-employed car upholsterer. He was also a known troublemaker, thief, and bully whose children called him The Buzzard. Buono did not have any charm; he was the darker, grimmer side of the killing duo.
Bianchi “is the consummate con man, always got something going on in his mind, always trying to set something up. [He has] above-average intelligence, a gift for gab, and he’s good- looking, according to some women,” said Sgt. Frank Salerno of the L. A. Sheriff’s Department, one of the principal investigators on the Hillside Strangler case.
Although the two men were very different, they had enough in common to allow them to kill as a single unit. Both saw women as objects to be discarded when their usefulness was over. Both liked to torture and kill women for kicks. They observed the machismo rule of the streets: men dominate, women are dominated.
“Bianchi loved to kill and he was crazy. Buono just kind of manipulated the whole thing. If a girl didn’t do what she was supposed to, they would just kill her,” said social worker Lois Lee.
During a five-month period between October 1977 and February 1978, the cousins raped, tortured, and strangled ten young women an
d girls. They gassed some victims, injected cleaning solution into others, burned a few, and sexually brutalized all. Their two youngest victims were twelve and fourteen. They dumped the bodies like so much garbage on hillsides in Los Angeles.
It wasn’t until Bianchi murdered again in Washington State that the cousins were apprehended. Bianchi, ordered to leave L.A. by Buono to let things cool down, moved to Bellingham, Washington, but after a while, he felt the urge to murder. Killing was his work and he didn’t feel good unless he was working. In January 1979, Bianchi strangled two college girls to death.
Caught when police became aware of similarities in the Bellingham murders and the unsolved Hillside Stranglings, Bianchi tried a variety of ruses to get himself off. He constructed an elaborate scheme—which almost succeeded—in which he pretended that he had multiple personalities. Some psychiatrists bought his act, but others didn’t. He was finally deemed to be sane—or sane enough to accept the consequences of his acts under the law.
As did Bundy and Gacy in their communities, Bianchi lived as a model citizen in Bellingham. He even had a girlfriend with whom he had a son. “The arrest of Kenneth Bianchi on suspicion of murder was a surprise to everyone in Bellingham who had known him. Kelli Boyd, Ken’s girlfriend and the mother of his baby, always thought of him as a gentle man who was kind to her and to his friends,” wrote Jack Levin and James Alan Fox in Mass Murder: America’s Growing Menace.
When police presented Bianchi with evidence of his guilt and refused to believe his multiple-personality hype, he decided to accept a deal. He would plead guilty to the Washington murders and to five of the California killings and would also testify against his cousin. In return, he would receive a life sentence instead of the death penalty.
Women Who Love Men Who Kill Page 20