Ted told a similar story. He was fiercely protective of his mother, especially when it came to guarding her from any suggestion that she might have influenced his behavior. During Carlisle’s evaluation, Ted insisted he felt no resentment toward his mother, because “she had sacrificed a great deal to have and raise an illegitimate child.”
“My mom loved me enough to give birth to me, to care for me and love me,” he wrote to authors Michaud and Aynesworth. “This seemed to be more than enough.”
Louise Cowell was 17 when she gave birth to Ted in a home for unwed mothers. She decided to give her baby up for adoption, and left him there. When she returned three months later, it was not because she had changed her mind about being a mother, but because her parents had changed her mind for her. When Louise brought Ted home, her parents alternated between passing him off as her brother and simply hiding him away.
“She tried to do the right thing,” Nelson said. “She knew her limitations and her feelings about him. And then she was pressured to do otherwise. She was young.”
Carlisle also noted Ted’s intense attachment to Liz. During his evaluation, Ted wept as he recounted a time when Liz had been unfaithful. “My world was so destroyed,” he said.
“In this life we are fortunate to find one person to love and love completely,” Ted wrote to Liz shortly after his first arrest. “I am lucky because I love you in this way . . . In this hour when my whole life is threatened, the only thing I regret is losing you and [your daughter]. So I give you one more thing. It is the one part of me that cannot be taken away. I give you my love as deep and as powerful as any human being can have for any other. I give it to you as the woman who has captured my soul . . . Without you there would be no life.”
At the sentencing hearing for his Utah trial, Ted was particularly outraged by Carlisle’s claim that he was dependent on women. “Good grief!” he said. “I don’t know that there’s a man in the courtroom who isn’t. And if he isn’t, maybe there’s something wrong with him. Our mother is a woman.”
“I think when you are as desperately dependent on something as he was . . . you resent it,” Nelson told me. “I think a lot of men feel that way.”
“He received no pleasure from harming or causing pain to the person he attacked,” Ted said, in one of the many interviews he conducted with Michaud and Aynesworth under the premise that he was theorizing about what the real killer might have done. “He received absolutely no gratification,” Ted insisted. “He did everything possible within reason—considering the unreasonableness of the situation—not to torture these individuals, at least not physically.”
Lisa Levy was unconscious when Ted Bundy assaulted her, raping her with a hair spray can and nearly biting her nipple from her breast. How many of these other girls and women were unconscious, or already dead, when he carried out his assaults? In many cases, we cannot know, just as we cannot know what need he served by staying with some of his victims’ bodies until dawn, and by returning to their corpses sometimes weeks after he killed them, perhaps until there was nothing left to return to.
“If there was anything he was ashamed of,” Nelson said, “it was that. Any kind of contact he had with the body after death. He couldn’t wrap any story around that.”
We have found a way to wrap a story around most of Ted Bundy’s actions. In all too many depictions of him, there is, lurking in the background, the idea that every man wants to rape women, but Ted Bundy just got carried away and took things too far. The necrophilia, the mutilation, and the destruction and visitation that seemed to feed his compulsion more than any recognizably sexual motive are harder to cram into a ready-made narrative. They reveal a man who perhaps felt the need not to revel in his victims’ pain but to destroy the body that should have given him the love he needed but never gave him enough, never enough so that he could truly feel it, never enough so that he could finally become whole—or else to steal inside it, to disappear, and to no longer be alone.
When I talked with Nelson, I asked her if Ted Bundy’s gradual progression to serial murder seemed as inevitable to her as it did to him. “I wouldn’t say it seemed inevitable to him,” she countered. “He was always hoping it wasn’t. We all think we’re strong enough to resist our temptations, and like all of us, he just thought, OK, I’m stronger than this. Now I know, so now I really can be strong.
“And whether anything could have happened at any time,” she continued, “so that this could not have happened, I think definitely . . . I think he’s on a spectrum, and other people are on parts of that spectrum, and very few of them end up like he did. But he had all the right ingredients.”
THE JUNGLE GROWTH OF CENTRAL FLORIDA STOPS abruptly about a mile from Florida State Prison. The trees disappear. The sky is suddenly endless. The first real clue that you are approaching the complex is a sign that reads, FLORIDA STATE PRISON NOW HIRING. If you’re not going in for a job interview, or to meet with an inmate, it is easy to drive straight past it. There is no place to pull off the highway, let alone a marker setting one drab stretch of shoulder apart from the rest, and this seems right to me. I came here because I wanted to see the spot where so many people shared so much joy at the death of a man, and because maybe by standing in this place I would understand not just their joy but the man whose death inspired it. But there is no place to look at, and I am looking for something no one has. I am looking for an answer.
Of all the aspects of the psychopath diagnosis that Ted Bundy challenges, perhaps the most striking is the one that does not apply to him at all: satisfaction. Psychopaths, Dr. Hare assures us, celebrate the way they are, and see the rest of us as weaker beings. One never encounters descriptions of the psychopath that include not just the way their inability to feel love harms the people around them, but what it is like to survive without love, and to endure what must, at times, seem like an empty hell.
Nor does one encounter the suggestion that the psychopath can, with age, feel moments of relief, flickers of love, as Nelson says Ted Bundy felt for his daughter. The same daughter left Ted’s life forever in 1986, when Carole Ann Boone quietly moved back to Washington, taking their child with her. “I think he agreed to it,” Nelson said of their departure. Before they left, Ted drew so close to an execution date that he had said goodbye to his family—his head already shaved for the electric chair’s sponge—before he received a stay. Ted seemed to recognize, Nelson said, that his wife and daughter would have a better life without him. And, she added, “as things were heating up so much, [his daughter] was going to see the news or the newspaper. He didn’t want her to have that impression of him.”
Then, too, there was the question of whether Ted Bundy truly wanted to stop. After his first escape, in Aspen, he told Michaud and Aynesworth, he didn’t feel the urges that had dominated him before his arrest. He believed that he had cured himself, and was free. The second time he broke out of custody, he was high on the thrill of escape until he got as far south as Atlanta. Then, suddenly, something happened.
“I was waiting for the bus,” Ted said, “and I was watching all these people—these people who had real lives, backgrounds, histories, girlfriends, husbands and families. Who were smiling and laughing and talking to each other. Who seemed to have so much of what I wanted. All of a sudden, I just felt smaller and smaller and smaller. And more insecure, too. And more alone . . . Bit by bit by bit, I felt something drain out of me.” Within two weeks, he would murder Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman.