Florida governor Bob Martinez remained unmoved. “Justice has been on hold for a decade,” he announced, “and it’s about time that Ted Bundy paid for his crimes.” To the viewers across the country who tuned in to watch the countdown to Bundy’s execution, it was hard to imagine that the man whose name had become synonymous with the term “psychopath” deserved to draw another breath.
“‘Ted Bundy’ is to serial killers,” Bundy’s postconviction lawyer Polly Nelson once wrote, “as ‘Kleenex’ is to disposable handkerchiefs: The brand name that stands for all others.” In America, in the decades since Ted Bundy’s crimes, captures, trials, and resulting infamy, the term “serial killer” has itself become a kind of brand name for evil, one promising an ever-familiar fable about inhuman darkness disguised in human form, appearing out of nowhere, and terrorizing humanity until humanity can destroy it.
“If it should ever occur to you to relate this to anybody,” Ted Bundy told one of the detectives he confessed to in the hours before his death, “you can tell them that I get no secret joy or pleasure out of it. That my own special kind of hell and madness that I lived in ten, twenty years ago was as wrong and as terrible as it could be. And I’m sorry.”
Is it possible to see this apology as genuine? Is there any sense in trying? Ted Bundy is the textbook psychopath who shows us how to recognize the evil in our midst. His story is the story we all know. And yet the longer you listen to it—and listen not just to the legend, but to the people who knew Ted Bundy, and even to the man himself—the more you will find yourself hearing the story of a man who was not a mastermind, was not a genius, and who seems to have understood as little about what motivated him as the people around him did. As you draw closer to its center—and closer and closer to the demon core—you may begin to feel that the longer you spend inside this story, the less sense you can find.
IN THE FALL OF 1974, TED BUNDY MOVED AWAY FROM Seattle to start his first year of law school in Utah, and left behind not just an adoring girlfriend, a proud family, and a vast circle of friends, but a region in panic. Between February and July of 1974, eight young women had gone missing—seven in Washington and one in Oregon—and local detectives had few leads. Almost all they had to go on was the fact that on the day both Janice Ott and Denise Naslund vanished in broad daylight from Lake Sammamish State Park, a man in a cast had been seen introducing himself to various women and asking them to help him move his boat. One woman accompanied the man as far as the parking lot and noticed that he drove a light brown Volkswagen Beetle. No one saw him approach 18-year-old Denise, who disappeared after she left her friends to go to the bathroom, but a witness did overhear the man introducing himself to Janice, a 23-year-old social worker who was sunbathing when a stranger knelt beside her and asked for help.
“Sit down and let’s talk about it,” Janice said. To the witness who later described their interaction to the police, the conversation seemed warm and friendly. The man promised he would give Janice a ride in his boat, and in the meantime, he introduced himself. His name was Ted.
Later, media accounts of what were then known as “the Ted Murders” suggested that Washington police immediately realized they had a repeat offender on their hands, and that the killer had held Seattle in his thrall since the disappearance of his first known victim, Lynda Healy, in the early hours of February 1. In fact, it wasn’t until “Ted” turned up at Lake Sammamish, nearly six months later, that the now eight missing persons cases were linked.
It was also the first time some of the cases had received significant investigation. Despite the eerie circumstances surrounding the disappearances—Donna Manson had left a pot of soup on a burner turned to warm in her Evergreen State College dorm room; Kathy Parks had left her desk lamp on in her room at Oregon State University; Susan Rancourt had just put a load of clothes in the dormitory washing machine when she vanished from Central Washington State College—police officers were still inclined to dismiss the girls as runaways until they were overwhelmed by evidence to the contrary. Sometimes even that wasn’t enough. After Lynda Healy, a 21-year-old University of Washington student, disappeared from her own bedroom in the middle of the night, her housemates pulled back her covers to find that both Lynda’s pillow and the mattress beneath it were soaked with blood. The police were unimpressed. Probably, they said, Lynda woke up with a bad nosebleed and took herself to the hospital. She was sure to turn up soon. Detectives believed their alternate explanation for the bloodstains also ruled out the possibility of foul play: “Because they assumed Lynda Healy was possibly having her period at the time of her disappearance,” wrote Bob Keppel, the King County detective who would help head the area’s “Ted Squad” task force, “[the police] couldn’t figure out why anyone would kidnap her—they assumed no kidnapper would want to have sex with her.”
The “Ted” killer’s “method of operation seemed flawless, almost scholarly, leaving his hapless pursuers on the police task force very little in the way of clues,” Keppel wrote of the investigation in his book about the case, The Riverman. Yet for nearly six months—quite possibly for longer—the killer had evaded the police in part because of their own blindness. Because they assumed Lynda had simply walked off into the night, the officers who investigated her disappearance didn’t see the need to dust her room for fingerprints or to test a semen stain they found on her sheets. What evidence they did remove from the scene was destroyed six months later, as routine then dictated in a missing persons case—well before the police were able to conclusively link Lynda’s disappearance to the seven that followed: Donna Manson the following month, then Susan Rancourt, then Kathy Parks, Brenda Ball, Georgann Hawkins, Janice Ott, and Denise Naslund, and then . . .
There was nothing to worry about, until suddenly there was. After Janice and Denise both disappeared from Lake Sammamish in a single afternoon, the police started paying attention. So did the press. “Our investigation collapsed under the volume of unsolicited tips and Ted sightings,” Keppel wrote, “because we had no way to manage the information that was suddenly pouring in . . . the backlog of calls was so huge that Denise Naslund herself could have called in and told us she was fine and we wouldn’t have found the message for a week.”
The missing persons case turned into a homicide investigation on September 7, 1974, when two grouse hunters found a human skull, spinal column, and rib cage on a wooded mountainside overlooking Interstate 90, east of Seattle. Searchers found a second spine and jawbone the following day. And in the underbrush there was one final clue: three grease spots—remnants of the oil that soaked into the earth as three bodies lay side by side, disintegrating until they were nothing but bones. By the following day, investigators had identified two of the three sets of remains: they belonged to Janice Ott and Denise Naslund.
“The worst we feared is true,” King County detective Nick Mackie told the press.
The news terrified the region. This was not the kind of destruction locals were used to, and it suggested that something was changing, that something might already be gone. In the past, a local woman told Tacoma’s News Tribune, “murder was something you read about happening in California or somewhere. Now it’s right in our backyards.” Captain Herb Swindler of the Seattle Police Department consulted a psychic about the case and argued that a “demon cult” might be to blame, while others theorized that “Ted” was the Zodiac Killer, or a disciple of the Manson Family. Yet even as investigators dealt with the public’s mounting terror, they still found time to undermine one another’s work. When the Seattle Police Department and the King County Sheriff’s Office created a combined task force, King County officers withheld information from the Seattle PD, worried that the competing jurisdiction might solve the case first and steal the glory. The joint task force folded within weeks. If nothing else, Bob Keppel would later recall, the people they investigated were always cooperative. “Everyone that we talked to as a suspect was helpful,” Keppel told Bundy biographers Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth. “Even the best suspects, the murderers we talked to. ‘Hey, man, I kill people,’ they’d say. ‘But I don’t kill like that.’”