Manhunters

by Colin Wilson

  Bundy would later confess that he had again been watching girls undress outside the sorority house when he was overwhelmed by the impulse to break in and commit rape.

  Three weeks later, on February 6, 1978, Bundy—who was calling himself Chris Hagen—stole a white Dodge van and left Tallahassee; he rented a room at the Holiday Inn, using a stolen credit card. The following day, twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach walked out of her classroom in Lake City, Florida, and vanished. Bundy returned to Tallahassee to take a date out for an expensive meal—paid for with a stolen credit card—then absconded via the fire escape, owing large arrears of rent. At 4 a.m. on February 15, a police patrolman noticed an orange Volkswagen driving suspiciously slowly, and radioed for a check on its number; it proved to be stolen from Tallahassee. After a struggle and a chase, during which he tried to kill the policeman, Bundy was captured yet again. When the police learned his real name, and that he had just left a town in which five young women had been attacked, they suddenly understood the importance of their capture.

  Bundy seemed glad to be in custody, and began to unburden himself. He explained that “his problem” had begun when he had seen a girl on a bicycle in Seattle, and “had to have her.” He had followed her, but she escaped. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “I feel like a vampire.”

  On April 7, a party of searchers along the Suwanee River found the body of Kimberly Leach in an abandoned hut; she had been strangled and sexually violated. Three weeks later, surrounded by hefty guards, Bundy allowed impressions of his teeth to be taken, for comparison with the marks on the buttocks of the dead student, Lisa Levy.

  Bundy’s lawyers persuaded him to enter into plea bargaining: in exchange for a guarantee of life imprisonment—rather than a death sentence—he would confess to the murders of Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, and Kimberley Leach. But Bundy changed his mind at the last moment and decided to sack his lawyers.

  His trial began on June 25, 1979, and the evidence against him was damning: a witness who had seen him leaving the sorority house after the attacks; a pantyhose mask found in the room of Cheryl Thomas, which resembled the one found in Bundy’s car; but above all, the fact that Bundy’s teeth matched the marks on Lisa Levy’s buttocks. The highly compromising taped interview with the Pensacola police was judged inadmissible in court because his lawyer had not been present.

  Bundy again dismissed his defense and took it over himself; the general impression was that he was trying to be too clever. The jury took only six hours to find him guilty on all counts. Judge Ed Cowan pronounced sentence of death by electrocution, but evidently felt some sympathy for the good-looking young defendant. “It’s a tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity. You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer. . . . But you went the wrong way, partner. Take care of yourself . . .”

  Bundy was taken to Raiford Prison in Florida, where he was placed on Death Row. On July 2, 1986, when he was due to die a few hours before serial killer Gerald Stano, both were granted a stay of execution.

  But at 7 a.m. on January 4, 1989, Bundy was finally led into the execution chamber at Starke State Prison, Florida; behind Plexiglas, an invited audience of forty-eight people sat waiting. As two wardens attached his hands to the arms of the electric chair, Bundy recognized his attorney among the crowd; he smiled and nodded. Then straps were placed around his chest and over his mouth; the metal cap with electrodes was fastened on to his head with screws and his face covered with a black hood. At 7:07 a.m. the executioner threw the switch; Bundy’s body went stiff and rose fractionally from the chair. One minute later, as the power was switched off, the body slammed back into the chair. A doctor felt his pulse and pronounced him dead. Outside the prison, a mob carrying “Fry Bundy!” banners cheered as the execution was announced.

  The Bundy case illustrates the immense problems faced by investigators of serial murders before the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program made it all simpler by computerizing crimes and suspects. When Meg Anders telephoned the police after the double murder near Lake Sammamish, Bundy’s name had already been suggested by three people. But he was only one of 3,500 suspects.

  Later Bundy was added to the list of 100 “best suspects” that investigators constructed on grounds of age, occupation, and past record. Two hundred thousand items were fed into computers, including the names of 41,000 Volkswagen owners, 5,000 men with records of mental illness, every student who had taken classes with the dead girls, and all transfers from other colleges that they had attended. All this was programmed into thirty-seven categories, each using a different criterion to isolate the suspect. Asked to name anyone who came up on any three of these lists, the computer produced 16,000 names. When the number was raised to four, it was reduced to 600. Only when it was raised to 25 was it reduced to 10 suspects, with Bundy seventh on the list. The police were still investigating number six when Bundy was detained in Salt Lake City with burgling tools in his car. Only after that did Bundy become suspect number one. And by that time, he had already committed a minimum of seventeen murders.

  Detective Robert Keppel, who worked on the case, is certain that Bundy would have been revealed as suspect number one even if he had not been arrested.

  The Bundy case is doubly baffling because he seems to contradict the basic assertions of every major criminologist of the past century. Bundy is not an obvious born criminal, with degenerate physical characteristics, as Cesare Lombroso suggested in Criminal Man (1876); there is (as far as is known) no history of insanity in his family; he was not a social derelict or a failure. In her book The Stranger Beside Me, his friend Ann Rule describes him as “a man of unusual accomplishment.” How could the subtlest “psychological profiling” target such a man as a serial killer?

  The answer to the riddle emerged fairly late in the day, four years after Bundy had been sentenced to death. Before his conviction, Bundy had indicated his willingness to cooperate on a book about himself, and two journalists, Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, went to interview him in prison. They discovered that Bundy had no wish to discuss guilt, except to deny it, and he actively discouraged them from investigating the case against him. He wanted them to produce a gossipy book focusing squarely on himself, like bestselling biographies of celebrities such as Frank Sinatra. Michaud and Aynesworth would have been happy to write a book demonstrating his innocence, but as they looked into the case, they found it impossible to accept this; instead, they concluded that he had killed at least twenty-one women.

  When they began to probe, Bundy hedged, lied, claimed faulty memory, and resorted to endless self-justification: “Intellectually,” say Michaud and Aynesworth, “Ted seemed profoundly disassociative, a compartmentalizer, and thus a superb rationalizer.”

  Emotionally, he struck them as a severe case of arrested development: “He might as well have been a twelve-year-old, and a precocious and bratty one at that. So extreme was his childishness that his pleas of innocence were of a character very similar to that of the little boy who’ll deny wrongdoing in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This gave Michaud the ingenious idea of suggesting that Bundy should “speculate on the nature of a person capable of doing what Ted had been accused (and convicted) of doing.” Bundy embraced this idea with enthusiasm, and talked for hours into a tape recorder. Soon Michaud became aware that there were, in effect, two “Teds”—the analytical human being, and an entity inside him that Michaud came to call the “hunchback,” the Mr. Hyde alter ego.

  After generalizing for some time about violence in modern society, the disintegration of the home, and so on, Bundy got down to specifics, and began to discuss his own development.

  He had been an illegitimate child, born to a respectable young woman in Philadelphia. She moved to Seattle to escape the stigma, and married a cook in the Veterans Administration Hospital. Ted was an oversensitive and self-conscious child who had all the usual daydreams of fame and wealth. And at an early stage he became a thief and someth
ing of a habitual liar—as many imaginative children do. But he seems to have been deeply upset by the discovery of his illegitimacy.

  Bundy was not, in fact, a brilliant student. Although he struck his fellow students as witty and cultivated, his grades were usually Bs. In his late teens he became heavily infatuated with a fellow student, “Stephanie Brooks,” as Ann Rule calls her in The Stranger Beside Me, who was beautiful, sophisticated, and came from a wealthy family. She responded and the couple became engaged. To impress her he enrolled at Stanford University to study Chinese; but he felt lonely away from home, and his grades were poor. “I found myself thinking about standards of success that I just didn’t seem to be living up to.”

  “Stephanie” wearied of his immaturity and threw him over—the severest blow so far. He became intensely moody. “Dogged by feelings of worthlessness and failure,” he took a job as a busboy in a hotel dining room. And at this point began the drift that eventually turned him into a serial killer. He became friendly with a drug addict. One night, they entered a cliffside house that had been partly destroyed by a landslide, and stole whatever they could find. “It was really thrilling,” he remembered.

  He was soon shoplifting and stealing “for thrills,” once walking openly into someone’s greenhouse, taking an eight-foot tree in a pot, and putting it in his car with the top sticking out of the sunroof. He also became the official driver for Art Fletcher, a black councilman who was the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Washington State. He enjoyed the sense of being a “somebody” and mixing with interesting people. But Fletcher lost the election and Bundy took a job as a salesman in a department store. He met Meg Anders in a college beer joint, and they became lovers—she had a gentle, easy-going nature, which brought out Bundy’s protective side. But his kleptomania shocked her.

  In fact, the criminal side—the “hunchback”—was now developing fast. He acquired a taste for violent pornography—then (in the 1960s) easy to buy. And one fateful day, walking round the university district, he saw a young woman undressing in a lighted room. This was the turning point in his life. He began to devote hours to walking around, hoping to spy on more young women undressing. He was back at the university, studying psychology, but his night prowling prevented him from making full use of his undoubted intellectual capacities. He obtained his degree in due course and tried to find a law school that would take him. He failed all the aptitude tests and was repeatedly turned down. A year later, he was finally accepted at the University of Utah College of Law—he worked for the crime commission for a month, as an assistant, and for the Office of Justice Planning. His self-confidence increased by leaps and bounds. When he flew to San Francisco to see “Stephanie,” the girl who had jilted him, she was deeply impressed, and willing to rekindle their romance. He was still involved with Meg Anders, and entered on this new career as a Don Juan with his usual enthusiasm. He and “Stephanie” spent Christmas together and renewed their engagement. Then he dumped her as she had once dumped him.

  By this time, he had committed his first murder. As noted, he had for years been a pornography addict and a Peeping Tom. (“He approached it almost like a project, throwing himself into it, literally, for years.”) Then the “hunchback” started to demand “more active gratification.” He tried disabling women’s cars, but they always had help on hand. He felt the need to indulge in this kind of behavior after drinking had reduced his inhibitions. One evening, he stalked a young woman from a bar, found a heavy piece of wood, and managed to get ahead of her and lie in wait. Before she reached his hiding place, she stopped at her front door, and went inside. But the experience, he said, was like “making a hole in a dam.”

  A few evenings later, as a woman was fumbling for her keys at her front door, he struck her on the head with a piece of wood. She collapsed, screaming, and he ran away. He was filled with remorse, and swore he would never do such a thing again. But six months later, he followed a woman home and peeped and masturbated as she undressed.

  He began to do this repeatedly. One day, when he knew she had forgotten to lock her door, he sneaked in, entered her bedroom, and jumped on her. She screamed and he ran away. Once again, there was a period of self-disgust and revulsion.

  This was in the autumn of 1973. On January 4, 1974, he found a door that admitted him to the basement room of an eighteen-year-old woman. Now, for the first time, he employed the technique he later used repeatedly, attacking her with a crowbar until she was unconscious. He then savagely rammed a bar torn from the bed inside her vagina, causing internal injuries. But he left her alive.

  On the morning of February 1, 1974, he found an unlocked front door in a students’ house and went in. He entered a bedroom at random; twenty-one-year-old Lynda Ann Healy was asleep in bed. He battered her unconscious, and then carried her out to his car. He drove to Taylor Mountain, twenty miles east of Seattle, removed her pajamas, and raped her. When Bundy was later “speculating” about this crime for Stephen Michaud’s benefit, the interviewer asked: “Was there any conversation?” Bundy replied: “There’d be some. Since this woman in front of him represented not a person, but, again, the image of something desirable, the last thing we would expect him to want to do would be to personalize her.”

  He then bludgeoned Lynda to death; Bundy always insisted that he took no pleasure in violence, but that his chief desire was “possession” of another person. Now the “hunchback” was in full control, and there were five more victims over the next five months. Three of the young women were taken to the same spot on Taylor Mountain and there raped and murdered—Bundy acknowledged that his sexual gratification would sometimes take hours. The four bodies were found together in the following year.

  On the day he abducted the two young women from Lake Sammamish, Bundy “speculated” that he had taken the first, Janice Ott, to a nearby house and raped her. He then returned to the lake to abduct Denise Naslund, taking her back to the same house and raping her in view of Janice. He then killed them both, drove their bodies to a remote spot four miles northeast of the park, and dumped them.

  By the time he had reached this point in his “confession,” Bundy had no further secrets to reveal; everything was obvious. Rape had become a compulsion that dominated his life. When he moved to Salt Lake City to enter the law school—he was a failure from the beginning as a law student—he must have known that if he began to rape and kill young women there, he would be establishing himself as suspect number one. This made no difference; he had to continue. Even the unsuccessful kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, and the knowledge that someone could now identify him, made no difference to him. He merely switched his activities to Colorado.

  Following his arrest, conviction, and escape, he moved to Florida, and the compulsive attacks continued, although by now he must have known that another series of murders in a town to which he had recently moved must reduce his habitual plea of “coincidence” to an absurdity. It seems obvious that by this time he had lost the power of choice. In his last weeks of freedom, Bundy showed all the signs of weariness and self-disgust.

  Time finally ran out for Bundy in January 1989. Long before this, he had recognized that his fatal mistake was to decline to enter into plea-bargaining at his trial; the result was a death sentence instead of life imprisonment. In January 1989, his final appeal was turned down and the date of execution fixed. He then made a last-minute attempt to save his life by offering to bargain murder confessions for a reprieve—against the advice of his attorney James Coleman, who warned him that this attempt to “trade over the victims’ bodies” would only create hostility that would mitigate against further stays of execution. That same year, Ressler attempted to arrange an interview with Bundy for his research project—Bundy was articulate and intelligent, and Ressler hoped to add something to what he knew about the motivation of serial killers. His plan did not work out at that time, but two years later he was surprised to receive a letter from Bundy saying that he would like to become a consultant to t
he BSU. This was fairly obviously a long-shot attempt to delay his execution; if he could become a valuable consultant, his chances of being executed would be correspondingly smaller.

  At their meeting, Bundy stuck out his hand even before Ressler extended his (establishing himself as being in charge of the situation) and told Ressler how much he admired his writing. (Ressler had at this time only cowritten one book on sexual homicide.) Bundy said he wondered why Ressler had not come to see him earlier, and Ressler replied he had tried but been unable to because Bundy’s appeals were still pending. Bundy apologized, explaining that he would very much like to talk to someone on his own level of understanding—a clear attempt at manipulation reminiscent of John Gacy.

  Bundy agreed to answer questions on a “speculative” basis—as with his earlier interviews with Michaud and Aynesworth—and described how he had abducted Caryn Campbell from a hotel at a ski resort in Colorado in January 1979. But he would not admit that he had actually done this, and “after three or four hours of this sort of dancing around the issues,” said Ressler, “I realized that Bundy would never talk, that he would attempt to con people . . . until executed, and I went home.”