Ted Bundy: The Life and Crimes of One of America’s Most Notorious Serial Killers

*Includes pictures *Includes Bundy's own quotes about his life and crimes *Includes online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet.” – Ted Bundy “I don't think anybody doubts whether I've done some bad things. The question is: what, of course, and how and, maybe even most importantly, why?” – Ted Bundy For most people, Ted Bundy is the quintessential serial killer - a good-looking, highly intelligent man who used his charm to lure an untold number of women to their deaths. In fact, as the judge announced his death sentence, he noted Bundy’s intellect and mused that he would have enjoyed hearing Bundy try a case before him had he remained simply the genius law student he had once been. Bundy, of course, ended up choosing a far different path, going on a historic crime spree during the 1970s so prolific that estimates of his kill count vary by dozens, a debate Bundy was only too happy to stoke. On one occasion, when the FBI estimated he was responsible for 3 dozen murders, Bundy replied, "Add one digit to that, and you'll have it." On another occasion, he claimed the estimate of 3 dozen was close to accurate. Whatever the actual number, what is known is that the murders ranged from coldly calculated approaches of women in public places to breaking into homes at night and bludgeoning victims to death. Bundy often kept mementoes to commemorate the crimes, ranging from victims’ possessions to their severed heads. As is natural in cases like this, attempts to understand Bundy’s pathology have been ongoing for decades, with separate diagnoses of narcissistic personality disorder and bipolar disorder, and one prison official described Bundy’s changing personalities: “He became weird on me…Almost a complete change of personality … that was the day I was afraid of him.” Unfortunately, Bundy proved resourceful in other ways aside from committing murder. After he was initially caught in Utah in 1975 and being tried for attempted assault, murder charges were brought against him in Colorado, but Bundy escaped prison twice in succession, allowing him to commit an untold number of additional crimes until he was caught again in Florida in 1978. Shortly before his death, in an interview with the popular Christian psychologist Dr. James Dobson, Bundy blamed his problems on pornography and claimed to have found God and repented, yet he had noted in a letter in 1977 that he almost never looked at porn magazines, telling future biographer Ann Rule, “Who in the world reads these publications? … I have never purchased such a magazine, and [on only] two or three occasions have I ever picked one up." . Regardless of his motives, after nearly a decade of denials, Bundy confessed to having killed at least 30 women across 7 states in just a 5 year period the decade before. In her work on the serial killer, Ann Rule labeled him “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." Even a member of his own defense team, Polly Nelson, called him “the very definition of heartless evil.” Ted Bundy: The Life and Crimes of One of America’s Most Notorious Serial Killers looks at the life of the serial killer and the crimes he committed.