A lifetime is not long enough to comprehend the pain Ted Bundy caused. I limit myself to one woman’s life and I know I cannot fathom such a loss, let alone such losses. I don’t believe anyone can. I am powerless to understand, to begin to imagine, just who his victims were. I can tell you only what I have learned from true crime: that Lynda Healy was studying child psychology; that Georgann Hawkins’s mother called her “the Pied Piper” because of how many friends she always had at her side; that Donna Manson made a list titled “Things to give to people,” and it went:
A string of beads
A taste
A rose
An ear
A hand to help
I will never grasp the totality of these women: of both their own lives and the lives that touched theirs; of their loves and fears and anger; of the possible worlds they walked beside, and the world as it was, as it was when it was theirs, and in moments that were theirs alone, and that could never be translated for the public into another humanizing fact, another reason that this was a girl who deserved to live.
“You can go as high as you want,” Bundy told Aynesworth when the writer wondered how many victims the “person” they were discussing might have killed, at a time when both men understood they were talking about Ted Bundy himself. “The higher the number,” Bundy said, “the better. The more horrified people will be, the more they will read, and the more interested they’ll be in finding out what makes a person like this tick . . . Make it up. I’m not going to do it. I can’t . . . but you can.”
Ted Bundy was adamant about the few insights he did have about himself. If he could not explain why his compulsions had emerged, he could at least cling to the knowledge that there was a time when they had not controlled him. In response to Beverly Burr, a Tacoma resident who begged him to confess to the murder of her eight-year-old daughter, Ann Marie, Ted wrote: “You said she disappeared August 31, 1961. At the time I was a normal 14-year-old boy.” In a few years, things would change forever. But not then. Not yet.
“We’re right down to it,” Bundy said near the end of his final meeting with Nelson and Dr. Lewis, hours before his death. “I’ve pieced together an explanation of sorts which makes sense, yet I don’t know. I wish I did know . . . that’s what I’d like to understand, why. I think for me sometimes it’s sadly, just because.
“Forgive me for digressing a little,” he said. “Maybe this will help. You asked me why I never sought help. At first I didn’t think I needed it. Then I suffered from delusions that I could handle it myself. Then it was too late because I knew if I sought help, that was—I didn’t trust anybody.”
Dr. Lewis asked Ted to relax as deeply as he could, to reach back into his childhood, and to tell her what he saw. “Ted had laid his head down on his hands,” Nelson wrote, “but his handcuffs cut him and he was unable to concentrate. I cupped his head in my hands. I had never been this way with Ted before, touching him, comforting him. But today was different . . . Today I was a human being and he was a human being.”
“Well,” Bundy said at last, “looking back now I couldn’t, I couldn’t, certainly didn’t, see it or understand it. I can only say that . . . what I lacked and didn’t understand and express was love.
“By love,” he said, “I mean the ability to sense someone else’s feelings and when to comfort them and to protect them and do good things for them. And in turn have that same kind of feeling, be the focus of that same kind of feeling.
“I feel that it wasn’t there in me,” Ted said. “I mean, how else?”
WHEN I FIRST LEARNED ABOUT TED BUNDY, I WAS 16 AND working through myth after myth, trying to understand why the dark forces inside a man needed, so badly, to destroy me. Sometimes victimhood seemed inevitable. And sometimes it seemed like the best thing that could happen to a girl. Once you were dead, you could be loved forever. Once you were dead, no one asked if you had fought back hard enough, if you hadn’t really wanted it after all.
I learned, from all these stories, that there were good men who wanted to save me, but only after I was dead, and I learned that there were bad men who wanted—needed—to kill me. But I didn’t understand where this need came from, and the answers people gave me never made sense. He wanted to be evil. He had become superior to other men—the less capable of love he was, the more superior he became—and he realized there was nothing to stop him from possessing all the women he wanted, because isn’t that what all men wish they could do? And that, as far as I could tell, was why you weren’t supposed to put the good men in a room with the bad man for too long: they were afraid they would start seeing things his way.
So I went to the bad men. Listen, I said, to the shape I conjured, who usually looked like Ted, usually was Ted, though our life spans had overlapped by just a few months. Listen, I said, when I imagined him driving me up the mountain some dark night, up a narrow logging road, the way long, the radio gone to static. Listen, I’d say. Just tell me what you need from me. Why is my body the one you have to tear apart? What do you think you’ll find?
“It’s funny how he’s still the poster boy for serial killers after all these years,” Nelson said, near the end of our conversation. It was hard for me, I told her, to imagine knowing the real person first, and then watching the myth be built around him. I had only ever known the myth.
“Not that he’d be unhappy with that,” she said. “He would much rather go down as a brilliant, manipulative serial killer than a disturbed individual, out of control and sad. You’re going to be ruining it. That was worth a lot to him.”
Why am I trying to ruin this for you, Ted? Why am I here? It’s not just because I was a girl, and you were the worst of all the bad men I ever learned about, and I thought figuring out why you needed me to die would mean figuring out why the whole world did. It’s not just because calling you “a force of evil” isn’t good enough for me—not just because, more and more, I am coming to believe that “evil” refers to nothing, means nothing, attaches itself to acts of violence or cruelty, but is never, by itself, an identifiable force. And it’s not just because I learned to understand my value to society by imagining how much I would be missed if I were taken away by someone like you, and it’s not just because I studied these stories to learn how to survive (don’t take the shortcut through the alley, don’t talk to strangers, don’t go into “thin air”), and it’s not just because you are human and I am human. It’s because I see myself in you.
AS A TEENAGER, THE STORY I FOUND WHEN I LOOKED and looked for the evil people seemed to see when they looked at Ted Bundy was always, to me, the story of a lost boy: one who couldn’t understand relationships and connections around him, and who was always on the outside, looking in. “I didn’t know what made things tick,” Bundy told Michaud. “I didn’t know what made people want to be friends. I didn’t know what made people attractive to one another. I didn’t know what underlay social interactions.”
The first time I read these words—still a teenager, still meant to identify with the murdered girl and no one else—I recognized them as my own. I had to think through nearly every interaction in advance. I felt I had no basic understanding of the people around me, and this made me feel like I was completely alone in the world, and sometimes meant that when I looked at the people around me, I could feel only fear, and sometimes hostility. Something had broken—who knew what, or when, or how?—in my early life, in my ability to trust people, to reach out, to feel that I could be seen and known as I was, and loved unconditionally. Some early relationship had faltered enough, some early trauma had broken me enough, to make me feel so lost—this, at least, is what I think now: something happened. And then something else happened. Something lost hold of me; something gave. I learned, slowly, to trust other people. I reached for them. I knew them. I loved them, and I felt their love.