TED BUNDY

Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy

Introduction

Ted Bundy is one of the most notorious serial killers the United States has ever seen. He was responsible for a number of brutal murders in the Pacific Northwest, Utah, Colorado, and Florida between 1969 and 1978. Bundy's early years had been unsettled and he had a history of petty theft; but he fooled many people because he was a charming and handsome young man, a law school graduate who did charity work and campaigned for the Republican Party. Bundy procured his victims by pretending to be injured, then asking women for help so he could drag them into his car. He had already killed several women in Seattle when, on November 8, 1974, he approached Carol DaRonch in Salt Lake City. This was to be his downfall—at least temporarily. He got her into his car, then tried to handcuff her and pulled out a gun. But DaRonch escaped. Bundy went on to kill seventeen-year-old Debbie Kent that same night.

Caught in August 1975, he was identified by DaRonch in a police lineup, convicted of her kidnapping, and sentenced to fifteen years. In April 1977 Colorado indicted him for the January 1975 murder of twenty-three-year-old Caryn Campbell and transferred him to Garfield County jail to await trial. Because he acted as his own attorney, Bundy was allowed to use the courthouse library to prepare his defense. He jumped from a window in June 1977 during one such visit, an escape that is the subject of the police memo below. Bundy was recaptured eight days later.

Discussion

Ted Bundy struggled to explain his propensity to kill. If one so intimate with the nuances of murder cannot articulate his own madness, how can those who never venture into the wild expect to do so? (Egger 2002)

Overview

When a mysterious sniper began shooting people in the Washington area last fall, residents tried to discern a logical pattern in his behavior. To avoid the killer's favorite venues, shoppers stopped walking across parking lots and motorists passed up self-serve gas pumps. Meanwhile, experts and pseudo-experts crowded the airways with theories about the killer. Many of the predictions, some of them by ex-FBI profilers, mirrored the confidential profile that the FBI had prepared for the task force hunting the killer: A lone shooter, and he would probably be white. As the entire nation now knows, the suspects are two black men, John Allen Muhammad, 41, and 18-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo. (Rule 2001)

The off-base speculation by former FBI profilers led some critics to question the reliability of the FBI's much-vaunted psychological “profiling” technique, which re-creates a suspect's physical and behavioral traits from crime scene evidence. The FBI refuses to discuss its profile, which former Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles A. Moose, who headed the task force, reveals in his new book about the investigation. (Keppel 2005)

There is little doubt, however, that the profilers' guesses reflect the agency's heavy reliance on statistical probabilities. Since most serial killers are lone, white males, ex-FBI profilers opined the Washington ...