Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  Mixed-Category Killers

  The FBI system also classifies homicides as a mixture of both organized and disorganized. The reason for this could be two or more killers working as a team. An attack may begin organized but be interrupted and deteriorate into chaos. The youthfulness of the offender or the use of drugs or alcohol can alter a personality of the offender from one crime to another. Critics of the organized/disorganized model argue that the “mixed” classification demonstrates the weakness of the system—too many serial killers do not fit into the neat categories and are thus classified “mixed”—a meaningless classification.

  How these three categories manifest themselves in actual behavior is best illustrated with some actual case studies of offenders that reflect these organized/disorganized/mixed characteristics.

  Ted Bundy: The Ultimate Organized Serial Killer

  All roads in the empire of serial killers lead to Ted Bundy. Bundy was so organized that the police never located the crime scenes where his first seventeen victims were actually killed. Six of his victims remain missing to this day. Bundy referred to himself as “the only Ph.D. in serial murder.”

  What serial killers from Jack the Ripper to the Boston Strangler are to “then,” Ted Bundy is to “now.” He is the American psycho: the very essence of both fact and myth in a simultaneous representation of everything we know and think we know the new breed of serial killers are. Bundy is special because he was attractive, educated, and like us—that is, those of us who represent some kind of middle-class aspirations linked to the promise held out by our belief in a college education and hard work.

  Albert DeSalvo, whom you met previously, sold by his father to some farmer at age nine, and the killers you will meet later in this book—Ed Gein, all alone on his remote Wisconsin farm; crazy young Herb Mullin and the voices in his head; Henry Lee Lucas in a shack with his glass eye; Jerry Brudos hunched down in his basement workshop with body parts in the freezer—all dwell in a world that we think serial killers should come from: a dark insane place that does not belong to us. Our world is going to work on Monday morning, showing up in class on time, mowing the grass, going to the weekend barbecue, paying the rent and credit card bills at the end of the month, going out on Friday night, and knowing more or less where we will be six months from now. In our world, serial killers came from the outside as predators, not as neighbors from next door or among our dinner guests. That is, until we met law school student and crisis prevention counselor Ted Bundy.

  Bundy’s story has been told in minute detail in numerous contradictory books and summarized in countless encyclopedias of murder. He was an archetypical organized killer and could also be classified as a “power/ control” or “anger-excitation” killer type. (See the next chapter for more details on these categories.) I’ll try to summarize here the essential history of his case and try to knead out some of the contradictory kinks between the various histories.

  Ted Bundy was born as Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vermont, to Louise Cowell, age twenty-two. From birth Bundy was already in a category in which the FBI survey found 43 percent of sexual and serial killers: he had only one parent. His mother was single and had become pregnant in Philadelphia. The story of who the father was remained obscure. The Cowell family were very strict Methodists and deeply shamed by Louise’s pregnancy. In September she went away to the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Vermont, accompanied by a local church minister’s wife. After giving birth to Ted in November, Louise returned to Philadelphia, leaving Ted behind in Vermont for three months.

  Back in Philadelphia, her father, Sam Cowell, pretended to adopt Ted as his son from some unknown orphanage. Louise, it is said, pretended to be his sister. Nobody knows for sure when Ted unraveled the mystery of his birth history because he gave conflicting stories about it afterward.

  Most biographies of Bundy simply state that Ted and his mother lived in Philadelphia for four years and then Louise moved to Tacoma, Washington—clear across the continent. In Tacoma she was employed as a church secretary and met and married John Culpepper Bundy, a hospital cook, from whom Ted took his surname.

  Reports and memories of Bundy’s childhood in his biographies are relatively mundane and undramatic: Bundy was ashamed of his family’s lower-class status; he was embarrassed to be seen in the family’s working-class Rambler automobile and had fantasies of being adopted by TV cowboy actor Roy Rogers. Bundy missed his grandfather; Bundy wanted to live with his great-uncle Jack, a university music professor in Tacoma who had a grand piano in his house. When Bundy was eight he was no longer allowed to jump into bed with his mother and stepfather; Bundy was threatened by the birth of four other children after his mother married John; Bundy’s playmates remember that he had a short temper. Nothing in the biographies indicates that Bundy grew up in anything but a loving and nurturing family, or that his mother or stepfather treated him any differently from his four siblings. His stepfather was reported to have a short temper, but there are no reports that he abused Ted or his mother, nor did Ted Bundy make any such claims. Ted Bundy’s brothers and sisters apparently had an excellent relationship with their elder half-brother. Bundy’s mother maintains that because he was her first-born, she was especially attentive to Ted.

  His classmates from public school remember Bundy as an intelligent, happy, and popular child with many friends and a good academic record. One of his friends recalled that Bundy had a very subtle and intelligent “on the mark” sense of humor. Bundy had a paper route.

  Once in high school, people’s recollections of Bundy suddenly become more clouded. Bundy is said to have been withdrawn and his academic progress was mediocre. He no longer was as popular as in junior high school. His friend recalled that he lost his confidence and appeared tongue-tied in social situations, not only with girls but with meeting new people in general.

  Bundy later recalled that in high school he felt alienated from his old friends, feeling that they had somehow moved on but he did not. As far as learning appropriate social behaviors, Bundy felt that he had “hit a wall” when he got to high school and wondered whether it was perhaps a genetic thing. He claimed he did not have any role models at home to help him in school.86

  For some mysterious reason that nobody can seem to explain, once Bundy got to high school he no longer fit in. There was nothing really wrong with him, yet he became isolated. A woman who today is an attorney and went to high school with Bundy remembers that when Bundy was seventeen he was well known and popular but not in the “top crowd.” She remembers him as being shy. That she remembers him at all is to Bundy’s credit—so many serial killers are invisible in their adolescence.

  He had only one date with a girl, and Bundy said that in high school sex was “over his head”—he knew or understood little about it. In prison, Bundy said that in matters of high school male-female relationships he was “dense,” not understanding when a woman was particularly interested in him. Remarking on comments that he was handsome, Bundy said he did not believe that about himself. He remembered not understanding how friendships worked or what underlay social interaction.

  The descriptions of Bundy in many ways are those of a typical high school student—just so, so typical. He was not among the most popular students at his school and he was not among the despised losers—in other words, again he was like most of us. He was not mocked, rejected, or sneered at, but neither was he the most popular kid in school.

  There is one dark tremor in Bundy’s adolescence. When he was fourteen, eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr vanished near his Tacoma neighborhood. Many years later police would suspect that Bundy might have been responsible.

  After Bundy was executed in Florida’s electric chair in 1989, investigative journalist Myra MacPherson attempted to dig deeper into Bundy’s history to solve the mystery of how his homicidal personality was formed. MacPherson was puzzled by how Bundy’s biographies leapt from his mother’s time in Philadelphia to her sudden departu
re four years later to Tacoma, Washington. Nothing was said about the four years that child Ted lived with his grandparents.87

  Ann Rule, for example, in her brilliantly definitive portrait of Bundy and his crimes, The Stranger Beside Me, after stating that little Ted was told to call his grandparents “Mother” and “Father,” devotes only one short paragraph to his relationship with his grandfather:

  Ted adored his grandfather Cowell. He identified with him, respected him, and clung to him in times of trouble.88

  After interviewing Ted Bundy for months, the authors of The Only Living Witness had only this to say about the first four years of Bundy’s life, during which, if some psychologists are correct, 75 percent of a person’s life knowledge is acquired:

  Just before his fourth birthday, Teddy and his mother left Philadelphia to join her uncle and his family in Tacoma, Washington. Later, a story attributed to the adult Ted Bundy had it that Louise posed as his older sister, not his mother. This is not so; he always knew her as Mom. However, the little boy was angry and confused about being torn from his grandfather, who doted upon him, and his grandfather’s comfortable old house.89

  When MacPherson interviewed Bundy’s surviving relatives, a disturbing picture began to emerge about his roots. Bundy’s grandfather apparently had an explosive temper and was even feared by his brothers, one of whom said, “I always thought he was crazy.” The grandfather often struck his wife. The grandmother was severely depressed and repeatedly hospitalized and given shock treatments. One of Ted’s cousins reported that the grandfather, who was a church deacon, kept a large collection of pornography and that little Ted one day found it and pored over the images.

  Apparently, Ted was in fact calling his grandfather and grandmother “Daddy” and “Mommy” and perceiving his real mother as his older sister. Bundy’s great-aunt said that the other members of the family were suspicious about Ted’s “adoption” by Louise’s parents. Her mother was not well enough to care for a child, and everybody suspected that Ted was actually Louise’s child.

  Nobody knows exactly when Bundy discovered his true birth history, and Bundy told conflicting stories about it. In some versions he found out when he was in university that his “sister” was in fact his mother, but his school friends claim that there was never any question of Louise Bundy being anybody but his “mom.” Another friend recalls that Bundy told him when they were in high school that he was born illegitimate.

  MacPherson writes that only recently did Bundy’s mother admit that her father on occasion beat her mother. Did little Ted witness his “father” with the porno collection beating his “mother”? And why did his “sister” suddenly, when he was four, take him away clear across the country and become his new mother? Moreover, upon her arrival in Tacoma, his mother changed Ted’s last name to Nelson. No satisfactory explanation has yet been given for that shift of identities. MacPherson hints at all sorts of dark possibilities as to why the identity of Ted’s supposed real father has never been discussed. Nor do we know the reasons why Louise suddenly packed up and left Philadelphia when Ted was four.

  Several psychiatrists who interviewed Bundy argue that he may have shown symptoms of somebody who witnessed something horrific and traumatic in his early childhood, and had been suppressing and sublimating that memory since. MacPherson also uncovered the story of three-year-old Ted lifting the covers of his fifteen-year-old aunt’s bed as she slept and slipping in three butcher knives beside her. According to Ted’s aunt:

  He just stood there and grinned. I shooed him out of the room and took the implements back down to the kitchen and told my mother about it. I remember thinking at the time that I was the only one who thought it was strange. Nobody did anything.

  If MacPherson’s premise is correct, then unpleasant but minor episodes in Bundy’s childhood take on a different context and magnitude. Just like the 81 percent of the killers in the FBI study, Bundy in his adolescence showed a history of stealing. Researchers found an index card listing Bundy as a juvenile suspect in some burglaries, but the details of the incidents were destroyed when Bundy turned eighteen. His high school friends remember that Bundy forged ski lift tickets and that all his skiing gear was stolen. Skiing was one of the few group activities in which Bundy participated and excelled in. Years later some of his victims would be dumped along the mountain roads leading to the region’s ski areas. Bundy’s exposure to pornography as a child, if true, then pegs him in another 81 percent of childhood experiences reported by serial sex killers.

  The isolation, the feeling of being different from the rest, puts Bundy into a category reported by 77 percent of all killers in the FBI study. When Bundy graduated from high school in 1965 he was one of the first members of the baby boom generation—his class was the biggest in the school’s history, with 740 students. That too must have contributed to his sense of anonymity and isolation.

  It seems that from a very young age, Bundy was obsessed with being too poor, with being too low in the social class structure. His dreams of being adopted by Roy Rogers had less to do with his role as a cowboy on TV as with his personal wealth as a successful television actor. Little Ted wanted to live rich. He also dreamed of living with his great-uncle Jack, who had a grand piano in his house, a symbol for Ted of wealth. When his mother took Ted as a child to buy clothes, he apparently pulled his mother to the most expensive fashion items. Even after he was arrested for murder, he wrote letters from jail lamenting the absence of “chilled Chablis.” Many years later, when asked what he felt when he killed, he once replied, “How do you describe the taste of bouillabaisse? Some remember clams, other mullet.” He even affected a strange little aristocratic accent that was vaguely English—he was a young Anthony Hopkins–Hannibal Lecter before the character was ever written.

  While his snobbery and obsession with class in themselves did not make him kill, they might have instilled in him unrealistic expectations that he could not live up to. He was already infected with a deep sense of insecurity, perhaps because of some early childhood trauma in Philadelphia, and the humiliation and shock of failing to realize his expectations led to his withdrawal into that secret world of fantasy that serial killers retreat to.

  Bundy was most to the point when he dismissed reports of him being handsome and popular. In the end it did not matter what Bundy’s circumstances really were; what counted was what Bundy thought and perceived them to be. Bundy could have been superstar attractive—but if he did not feel that way, of what consequence was it?

  After graduating from high school, Bundy entered the University of Puget Sound in 1965. Like most first-year university students Bundy was lost in a series of huge, impersonal, crowded introductory classes and lectures. Bundy recalled that as a lonely year for him. He no longer had his neighborhood buddies to hang out with and did not feel socially adept enough to make new friends. Bundy lived at home his first year in college. His mother recalled that he got good grades but did not get involved with social life at school. Every day he came home, studied, slept, and went back to school.

  In the spring of 1966 Ted Bundy met the love of his life. Her name was Stephanie* and she was older than him and ahead of Bundy in school by two years at the University of Washington. She was a tall, beautiful, elegant young woman with long dark hair parted down the middle. She came from a wealthy family in San Francisco—exactly the kind of background that Bundy aspired to. She was everything that Bundy dreamt of. For some time, Bundy admired her from afar but was too shy to approach her.

  One day he found out that Stephanie was going skiing and he nonchalantly asked her to give him a ride in her car. On the ski slopes, Bundy was confident and masterful. On the ride back home in the car, Bundy charmed Stephanie and they became lovers. She was, perhaps, Bundy’s first sexual experience.

  Bundy worked hard at romancing Stephanie. Beatrice Sloan, a sixty-year-old widow whom Bundy befriended, lent him her car so that he could impress Stephanie. Mrs. Sloan remembers Bundy as a “lovable rasca
l” and sympathized with his need to impress his girlfriend. Once she lent Bundy her best crystal and silverware when he cooked a gourmet meal for Stephanie. Ted and Stephanie became a steady couple.

  For his second year, Bundy transferred to Stephanie’s university and enrolled in Chinese language studies. He said he chose the most exotic and obscure area of study to separate himself from the crowd. That year was probably the happiest of Bundy’s life. He excelled in his learning of the Chinese language. He showed off his girlfriend to his neighborhood friends and family.

  Yet years later, Bundy stated that it was precisely in this happiest period of his life that he began to act out a compulsion that was sparked inadvertently. Walking down a street one evening, entirely by chance he saw through a window a woman undressing. The sight so excited him that he began to compulsively seek out opportunities to peep through windows. Bundy recalled that this was not an overwhelming compulsion; he would not break a date, postpone an important meeting, or rearrange his life in any way. His voyeuristic forays fit the dictates of his daily routine. But he said that he devoted, nonetheless, an enormous amount of time and energy to fitting his window-peeping activities into his schedule; he became very adept at it and highly addicted to it.

  In the spring of 1967 Stephanie graduated, and it is said that by that time she was getting bored with Bundy. She felt he was too childish, too immature. It bothered her when he sneaked up on her, tapped her on the shoulder, and vanished before she could turn around. Perhaps, despite Bundy’s claims that they did not affect his normal life, his voyeuristic activities were making him a less attentive lover. Later, when Bundy began to kill, his other lovers reported the onset of a “sexual laziness,” a cold, perfunctory performance. Hoping to ease herself out of her relationship with Bundy, Stephanie told him that she intended to go back home to San Francisco upon her graduation. To her surprise and dismay, Bundy told her he had been offered a scholarship at Stanford University in San Francisco for a summer session in Chinese studies. He followed her down to California.