Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy

Theodore Robert Bundy was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped, and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. After more than a decade of denials, before his execution in 1989 he confessed to 30 homicides that he committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. Bundy expressed a lifelong resentment toward his mother for never talking to him about his real father, and for leaving him to discover his true parentage for himself.

About Ted Bundy in brief

Summary Ted BundyTheodore Robert Bundy was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped, and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. After more than a decade of denials, before his execution in 1989 he confessed to 30 homicides that he committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. Bundy was regarded as handsome and charismatic, traits that he exploited to win the trust of victims and society. He would typically approach his victims in public places, feigning injury or disability, or impersonating an authority figure, before knocking them unconscious and taking them to secluded locations to rape and strangle them. He decapitated at least 12 victims and kept some of the severed heads as mementos in his apartment. Bundy expressed a lifelong resentment toward his mother for never talking to him about his real father, and for leaving him to discover his true parentage for himself. Some family members have expressed suspicions that Bundy might have been fathered by Louise’s own violent, abusive father, Samuel Cowell, but no material evidence has ever been cited to support this. Bundy once called himself \”the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.\’ Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Raiford, Florida on January 24, 1989. He was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, to Eleanor Louise Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. His birth certificate is said to assign paternity to a salesman and Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, though other accounts state his father is listed as \”Unknown\”.

Louise claimed she had been seduced by an old money war veteran named Jack Worthington, and the King County Sheriff’s Office has him listed as the father in their files. Bundy lived in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, who raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied birth outside of wedlock. In 1987, however, Bundy spoke warmly of his grandparents and told biographer Ann Rule that he \”identified with, \”respected,\” and clung to his grandfather. Bundy exhibited disturbing behavior at an early age. He once threw his younger sister down a flight of stairs for oversleeping, and at least once flew into a violent rage when the question of Bundy’s paternity was raised. In 1950, Louise changed her surname from Cowell to Nelson and at the urging of family members, she left Philadelphia with her son to live with cousins Alan Scott and Jane Scott in Tacoma, Washington. Bundy feared electroconvulsive therapy for depression and feared standing by the kitchen table surrounded by knives from the kitchen and standing by his sister’s bed. He told a girlfriend that a cousin showed him a copy of his birth certificate after calling him a “bastard,” but he told biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth that he found the certificate himself. In some interviews, Bundy told Rule he was a ‘sadistic sociopath’ who took pleasure from another human’s pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after.