His mood disorder presented itself by 1967, at the latest. He began to have severe bouts of depression; he would be unable to attend classes, would isolate himself with alcohol and marijuana, and had increasing trouble controlling his fantasies. When the mania aspect of his bi-polar disease kicked in, he got involved in politics, felt “charismatic,” “oozed sincerity,” according to one admirer, changed majors, and for several years maintained a seemingly normal relationship with a divorcee with a young child.
His mother, Louise, thought Ted's “trouble” (meaning the murders of at least 30 women and possibly dozens more) began when Ted was rejected by a girlfriend. They met in the fall of 1966, Ted's first term at the University of Washington. Referred to as “Stephanie,” “Marjorie,” “Susan,” or “Diane,” (all pseudonyms) in books about Ted, she was pretty, with long hair parted in the middle and from a California family with money. She was “wealthy, poised and worldly,” everything Ted wasn’t. She eventually broke things off with Ted; later, she told investigators that she had tired of his games (including sneaking up on her and trying to frighten her) and had concluded that his boyishness was really immaturity. A couple of years later, when he had worked on his more refined persona, he re-met “Stephanie.” They became close again; in fact, she thought they were engaged. And then he suddenly dropped her, with no explanation. It had been a ruse, a game, just like the ones he and Doug Holt used to play on friends in Tacoma. It was one of his “getting over” games, tricking her to get even for the heartache she had caused him.
For years, people would theorize that the young women he murdered—many with long hair, parted in the middle—were stand-ins for “Stephanie” or even his mother. (Later, Ted said that he wasn’t pursing a “stereotype” so much as a “certain class” of woman.) If his first murders were committed in 1974 (and not in the 1960s, as many believe), then they began just a month after he played his trick on “Stephanie.” Most detectives and psychiatrists who studied Ted discount the possibility that he was “killing,” over and over, the girl who had first rejected him. Thousands of young women at the University of Washington had long hair parted in the middle, were pretty, and lived in sororities. One of them was Julie Burr, who not only was at UW when Ted was, but often visited Lake Sammamish, the scene of one of Ted's most infamous crimes. Their paths may have very well have crossed.
Ted's cousin, Edna Cowell, also at UW, introduced him to all her friends; they all had long hair parted in the middle. In fact, a friend of Edna's was a close friend of Ted's first known victim, Lynda Ann Healy. Like Ted, Healy was a psychology major at UW, and they reportedly had classes together. One night, Edna's friend had a date to meet up with Healy; she never showed up. She had been abducted that morning, January, 31, 1974, from her basement apartment near UW. Her remains, and the remains of three other victims, were found on Taylor Mountain, east of Seattle, in March, 1975.
In the fall of 1969, Ted met Elizabeth Kendall in a bar near campus. Liz was 24 years old and divorced, with a two-year-old daughter. Liz and Ted dated for five years, until 1974, when he moved to Utah for another try at law school (after dropping out of UPS). During Ted and Liz's relationship, at least 10 young women disappeared in the Pacific Northwest. Most were students on college campuses in Oregon and Washington. When Ted moved to Utah to attend law school, the killings mysteriously stopped in the Northwest and began in Utah and Colorado. Liz began to suspect that her boyfriend could be the mysterious “Ted” police were looking for.
Ted's cousin, Edna, got to know Liz, but they were never close, probably because of Liz's insecurities. “Ted and I were good friends, and she’d be incredibly jealous, insecure, super-needy,” according to Edna. In her defense, it was not easy to be Ted's girlfriend. She experienced firsthand Ted's moodiness, disappearances, secrets, and games. Like the others, she didn’t understand his love of startling people. There were indications that Ted was hiding parts of his life. As police looked for a young man with a cast on his arm or crutches, who tried to lure women to his car by asking them for help with his books or a sailboat, (often using a quasi-British accent), Liz found plaster of Paris and crutches in Ted's apartment, and a hatchet under the seat of his car.
In a memoir of her life with Ted, Liz Kendall wrote that twice, when they were having sex, Ted deliberately put his arm on her windpipe, choking her. At least one of those times Ted went into a trance, and she had trouble getting him to let go. Then, on the Fourth of July weekend, 1974, the two were floating down the Yakima River. Liz was perched on the edge of the rubber raft when suddenly he “lunged” at her, put his hands on her shoulders, and pushed her into the river.
As she struggled in the icy water and managed to pull herself back into the raft, he was expressionless, she wrote. The incident happened just days before one of Ted's most horrific crimes, the murders of two young women he lured separately from Lake Sammamish State Park on July 14, 1974. That's when police finally had a name for the man they were looking for. There were several women whose lives were saved that day because they declined to help the man who said his name was “Ted.”
But Liz saw evidence of the “other” Ted, too, the one that warned her to not walk in a park late at night, the one who brought home stray animals, the one who watched cartoons and had tickle fights with her young daughter. The one who comforted her when she found herself pregnant with his baby, and when they agreed to an abortion. Ted even became a Mormon, because Liz was.
One day while shopping together at a mall in north Seattle, Ted suddenly shoved a package he was carrying at Liz and took off running. She heard a woman with two young children scream and point at a man who had grabbed her purse. Ted caught the purse-snatcher and turned him over to security. Eventually, Liz Kendall called police with her suspicions that her Ted was the Ted they were looking for. More than once she was told he had been checked out and eliminated as a suspect.
During his college years Ted stepped up his nighttime activities. He would later tell police in Florida that he felt “most alive at night,” and he would refer to himself as a “vampire.” According to an FBI report compiled after his execution, Ted “was involved in voyeuristic activities throughout his life and actually studied his victims without their knowledge through surveillance and occasional clandestine entry of their residences.” He later admitted to conducting “dry runs,” picking up a woman and “releasing her unharmed to test his skills.” His voyeurism turned into more dangerous fantasies in 1973, when he bought his first Volkswagen, a tan, 1968 model, for four hundred dollars. (In 1975 he sold that VW and bought a newer one.)
The million dollar question is: when did Ted's behavior evolve from dry runs to murder? To the end of his life, Ted Bundy would not reveal when he committed his first murder. Some, including author Ann Rule, think Ann Marie Burr may have been his first victim.
Ted was a paid work-study student and Rule, a former police officer who had started her career as a writer, was a volunteer at a Seattle crisis center telephone hotline. Forced to leave police work because of her eyesight, she sometimes wrote reports for police departments, summarizing evidence on cases. And she began to sell magazine articles to detective magazines, like the ones Ted used to read. Years later, Ted denied having anything to do with the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr because it was “close to home” and because Ann was so young, according to Ann Rule. But serial killers frequently won’t admit to killing children; it is the ultimate stigma, and one other inmates are unforgiving of. Bob Keppel, who helped investigate the “Ted” murders as a King County detective, came to know Ted Bundy well. When Keppel asked Ted about Ann Marie Burr, “He did not want to talk about this case, and every denial he made was unconvincing,” Keppel wrote.
Ted claimed he committed his first murder in May, 1973, when he picked up a hitchhiker near Olympia, Washington. The FBI could never confirm that, and never found a body that matched Ted's confession.
But the Ted Bundy legend begins earlier. On June 23, 1966, two stew
ardesses, Lonnie Trumbull and Lisa Wick, both 20 years old, were attacked in the apartment they shared on the east side of Seattle's Queen Anne Hill. They were found the next morning by their third roommate, who had stayed with another stewardess that night. Trumbull was bludgeoned to death but Wick, badly injured and comatose for days, survived. Doctors said she might have died if she hadn’t been sleeping on curlers; they bore some of the brunt of the bludgeoning.
The three roommates, all from Portland, had graduated from the United Airlines training school in Chicago six weeks before the attack. While Wick was recuperating from brain surgery, police showed her a photo of Richard Speck, by then a suspect in the killing of eight student nurses in Chicago on July 14, 1966; she didn’t think it was Speck. (Speck was convicted and sentenced to death; he died in prison in 1991 at age 50 of a heart attack.) About three weeks after the Seattle attack, the newspapers reported that Wick had been able to give the police a description of the man who killed her roommate and assaulted her. She described him as a slender blonde man, about 30 years old. One newspaper gave a few other details: it said he had a receding hairline and a light complexion, was around five feet, nine inches tall and weighed about 165 pounds.
Ted was 19 years old the summer of 1966. He was five feet, ten inches, weighed about 165 lbs., and had thick, curly brown hair. (When his killing spree was in high gear, he was good at changing his appearance; he would part his hair on the other side, wear a fake moustache, or change his posture. And he knew how to alter the impression he made, whether wearing his tennis whites to a park in the summer, or a suit and bowtie in court.) He was in the midst of moving from Tacoma to Seattle, where he would attend the University of Washington. According to an FBI chronology of his life, he attended the University of Puget Sound until April, 1966, and was not at the UW until September of that year. He didn’t appear to have a job that summer.
In early 1968, Ted dropped out of the UW, and traveled. He went to San Francisco, Denver, and Aspen, where he skied. He also went to Philadelphia and presumably saw his grandparents. When he returned to Seattle, he worked from April, 1968, until July, 1968, at a Safeway grocery store in the neighborhood where Lonnie Turnbull and Lisa Wick were attacked. Besides that coincidence and the fact that they were beaten with a piece of wood—a weapon Ted often used—there is no evidence that it was his first crime. A favorite suspect of the Seattle police was the apartment owner's son, who later committed suicide; a newspaper article about the murder was found in his belongings. But Ann Rule says Lisa Wick wrote to her, saying she believes Ted Bundy was their assailant, and he remains a suspect in the minds of some long-retired police officers.
Ted went east again, in January, 1969, and enrolled at Temple University in Philadelphia. He was there just one semester. On the way east he stopped to visit his cousins, the Cowells, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Jack Cowell, the UPS music professor Ted looked up to, had received his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1966, then joined the faculty at the University of Arkansas.
Ted's cousin Edna remembers his stop in Fayetteville. “He asked my parents for money. I don’t remember if they gave him any,” she said. Ted stayed a few days, Edna took him out for a meal, to a 1950s-style drive-in, and then he continued his trip east. The Cowells moved back to the northwest in 1985, although Edna returned to Seattle in 1970 to attend the University of Washington.
There's a danger in romanticizing Ted's trips east, in 1968 and 1969. He is depicted as looking for answers as to who he was and who his father was. He may have traveled to Vermont, he may have visited The Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, he may have seen his birth certificate for the first time, he may have finally learned once and for all that he was illegitimate and that the woman he once thought his sister was actually his mother. Or not. He told so many different people so many different stories; he could shrug off his illegitimacy, or cry in the laps of girlfriends.
One thing Ted did for sure in 1969: he went into New York City, a lot. He told his attorney, Polly Nelson, and psychiatrist, Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, that he often took the train from Philadelphia to New York City. “I remember coming into New York this time, this very first time I was going to try something, you know, of course it was very... amateurish... I bought a fake mustache and bought hair stuff—some hair dye. I registered in some seedy hotel-motel under a false name and all these things. I had this horribly inept plan in mind, and I wasn’t sure exactly where it was going to go.” His plan, he said, was... “following some woman in some hotel to her room and rushing in on her and doing... I wasn’t sure what... I think sexually assaulting her.”
This is likely the visit east when his great-aunt, Virginia Bristol, after attending a concert with Ted, suddenly felt frightened as they stood on a platform waiting for a train. She said Ted started to verbally ramble, that he looked crazy, and she was afraid to be alone with him.
On Memorial Day, 1969, just as Ted prepared to leave Pennsylvania and head west again, he made a stop at the New Jersey shore. That weekend, a parkway maintenance worker discovered the bodies of two young women in underbrush off the Garden State Parkway. Nineteen-year-olds Susan Davis and Elizabeth Perry had spent the holiday weekend like thousands of other young people, staying at a rooming house in Ocean City, going to the boardwalk and beach, and hitting the clubs. They were found stabbed to death three days after they were expected home. Before he was executed, Ted did a series of interviews with a court-approved forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Art Norman. Norman says that Ted—speaking in the third person, which he did a lot of before he died—claimed responsibility for the “Co-Ed Murders.” Or did he? Stabbing was not his modus operandi: bludgeoning was.
Ted told Dr. Lewis, in recorded interviews, that a visit to Ocean City in 1969 was the first time he... “...approached a victim, spoke to her, tried to abduct her, and she escaped.” The experience left Ted with the realization of how “inept” he was. “Let's say, this first incident in ’69,” he told Dr. Lewis. “It was two years later before I did another one, and then six months later before I tried another one, and then finally the first (murder).”
The Ocean City murders were never solved, and never definitely linked to Ted. It is just one of thousands of times Ted would contradict himself. Although he implicated himself in the 1969 New Jersey murders, he also claimed that he first murdered in 1973.
That was about the time Ted's name and photo first appeared in the Seattle Times. Shortly after Ted graduated from the University of Washington in 1972, he went to work for the re-election campaign of Governor Dan Evans. Evans was challenged by former Washington governor, Democrat Albert D. Rosellini. During the last weeks of the campaign, reporters noticed a handsome young man who appeared at all of Rosellini's speeches and appearances. Finally, Richard W. Larsen of the Seattle Times asked the young man who he was. He said his name was Ted Bundy and he was a graduate student working on a thesis in political science. Eventually, another reporter put two-and-two together and realized that Ted was spying on Rosellini for the Evans campaign. It created a minor controversy, but it was nothing like the dirty tricks that campaigns had pulled before. Ted had impressed Republican party leaders, Larsen did a story about him for the paper, and a friendship was born. Governor Evans wrote a letter on Ted's behalf to the University of Utah law school. Ted was accepted.
Like Ann Rule, Larsen found himself good friends with the man who would soon become the nation's most famous serial killer.
Between 1974 (possibly earlier) and 1978, Ted Bundy killed dozens of young women and girls. Many were students at colleges in the Pacific Northwest. The FBI believed Ted planned and visited some locations before his murders. Susan Rancourt, a student at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, may be an example. She vanished April 17, 1974, within days of a visit Ted paid to his former high school friend, Jerry Bullat, who was attending the college at the time.
His cousin, Edna Martin remembers when she first heard of his first arrest, in 1975. She
was working on a crab boat out of Dutch Harbor, Alaska, when the captain called her to the bridge. There was a phone call for her from her brother, telling her that Ted had been arrested in Salt Lake City. They had known, of course, that police in Washington were looking for a man who said his name was “Ted,” who drove a tan VW, and who was a suspect in the murders of young women. Now, in Utah, where he was attending law school, Ted had been stopped for attempting to evade police and found with a car full of burglary tools. He was released, but rearrested several weeks later for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal homicide.
Martin says she felt “fractured.” She left the crab boat and went to see him in Seattle. He was out on bail and visiting the city. He returned to Utah for trial, and by the time he was convicted on those charges, the evidence linking him to dozens of killings had added up. Her parents were “shocked and appalled and sick at heart,” Martin said.
Legions of young women would write to Ted in prison; dozens would proposition him. They only saw the Ted who might have become the lawyer, the politician, the smart husband. They saw the handsome young man, sometimes in a suit and bowtie, standing trial. Somehow, lost in the fascination that was the life and crimes of Ted Bundy, is just how horrific his crimes were. He bludgeoned his victims with a crowbar or a piece of wood; he strangled them while raping them; he used metal bed frames, sticks, and ice picks to rip up their vaginas and anuses; he buried them, but kept some of their heads (one time he had as many as four in his apartment). He burned some of the skulls in Liz's fireplace. Sometimes he would return to the site where he disposed of their bodies and wash their hair and put makeup on them. He was only sexually interested in his victims when they were semiconscious, unconscious, or dead. But he didn’t just have sex with dead girls. He had sex with decomposing bodies.
Ted and Ann: The Mystery of A Missing Child and Her Neighbor Ted Bundy Page 10