Ted Bundy： The Killer Of A Thousand Faces - Serial Killer Documentary

Ted Bundy： The Killer Of A Thousand Faces - Serial Killer Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Florida State University, Tallahassee, January the fifteenth, nineteen seventy eight,
around two forty five am, the serial killer on the
run broke into the chi Omega sorority house and attacked
four women.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
The Spraye. He beats people. He knocks people's teeth out.
He bites the buttock of one of the victims.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
The blistering attack on all four students lasted just fifteen minutes.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
He could strike like a chameleon, pam and take his
prey in.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Just four years. In the mid nineteen seventies, a sadistic
killer kidnapped, raped, and murdered at least thirty young women.
A few lived to tell of their terrible audom.

Speaker 4 (00:55):
We leaned in. I thought he was going to kiss me. Instead,
he said, I'm going to kill you.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Initially convicted of only kidnap and assault, it is suspected
that Bundy may have raped and slaughtered up to one
hundred young women. Sentenced to death for his terrifying crimes,
Ted Bundy is undoubtedly one of the world's most evil killers. Seattle, Washington.

(01:42):
Ted Bundy began his reign of terror in the Pacific
Northwest and spread it across seven US states. He would
eventually confess to the kidnap, rape, and murder of thirty
young women between nineteen seventy four and nineteen seventy eight.
Two of his victims were just twelve years old.

Speaker 5 (02:04):
This is a man who killed and the most violent,
the most terrifying way.

Speaker 6 (02:10):
He would before death, he.

Speaker 5 (02:12):
Would break bones, he would rip parts of the body off.
He would keep parts of the body mutilated after he
did it. This is a person who ravaged his victims
intending to cause pain.

Speaker 4 (02:25):
He was a monster because he just enjoyed killing. One
of his interviews, the interviewer asked him point blank. He said, Ted,
why did you kill? And Ted kind of raised one
eyebrown kind of smile and says to the like it.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Ronda Stapley was a college student in Salt Lake City, Utah,
in nineteen seventy four. She says she survived a vicious
attack by Bundy and was so traumatized she kept her
ordeal secrets for more than thirty years.

Speaker 4 (02:56):
Nobody went out at night, nobody even walked to the
library alone. There was terror, in fear among women everywhere.
Ted Bundy was one of the most evil people in
the world.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
When Bundy was finally caught in nineteen seventy eight. He
was incarcerated at the Leon County Jail in Florida. Sheriff
Ken Katsaris, who oversaw all the county's prisons, was charged
with keeping him behind bars.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
He was evil, but you could not discern that even
if you knew he was evil. He came across as brilliant, charismatic, smart.
So you put together the evil with all of those
positive traits, and you have a very dangerous person.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
This killer's story begins in nineteen forty six. Theodore Robert
Bundy was born on the twenty fourth of November at
the Elizabeth Lundhome for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
This was the nineteen forties in America that the ideal
nuclear family was mum and dad who were married, that
nice family unit where everything is very neat and very defined,
and people who were outside of that ideal really were stigmatized.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
To avoid that judgment, Ted's twenty two year old mother, Eleanor,
moved back to her parents' home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where
her parents bought up Ted as their own.

Speaker 5 (04:31):
So the unusual part of his childhood is how he's raised.
He's adapted by his grandparents. He's raised alongside a person
who he has tald is.

Speaker 6 (04:41):
His sister, but she wasn't.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
She was actually his mother.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
This arrangement went on for almost four years with Ted's
grandparents as his main careers.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
His grandfather was quite a violent character, so that suggests
to me that very early on in his life he's
almost in a bit of a survival mode, not safe
within this home.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Just before his fourth birthday, Eleanor moved to Tacoma, Washington.
There she met and married Johnny Bundy in nineteen fifty one.
They formally adopted Ted when he was five years old.
The couple had four children together, but Ted reportedly didn't
form a close bond with his new family and still
believed his mother was his sister.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Ted Bundy is somebody who has always been really conscious
of his social class. He came from quite humble beginnings
that the family were quite poor, and he was really
quite aware of that and really quite embarrassed and shame
by it.

Speaker 1 (05:36):
And exceptionally bright student. Ted Bundy enrolled in the University
of Washington in nineteen sixty six to study Chinese. Their
age twenty, he met and fell in love with a
woman called Stephanie.

Speaker 5 (05:50):
This was his dream girl, This was the woman he
was going to marry. This is the woman to which
he was dedicated. It was romance in the real sense
that you could imagine it, but she's certainly dubbed him.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
One of the reasons that she cited was that he
wasn't ambitious enough. And I think this would have really
hit ted Bundy quite hard because this feeds into his
anxieties around his social class and those feelings of unease
and those feelings of not being good enough. So what
we've got happening here is this resentment brewing.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Bundy dropped out of university in nineteen sixty eight. The
following year, he returned to the East Coast in what
he later described as a bid to understand his roots
whilst they're Bundy unearthed the family secret.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
He discovers his true identity. He discovers that the woman
that he's considered to be his sister for his whole
life is actually his mother, and he discovers his birth certificate,
and the birth certificate says he's illegitimate.

Speaker 6 (06:50):
The two most.

Speaker 5 (06:50):
Important women to him his mother and his mother surrogate,
and the woman he wanted to marry. In essence, both
deny and abandon him. Eificance to him of that is
that women simply cannot be trusted.

Speaker 1 (07:05):
In nineteen sixty nine, ages twenty two, Bundy returned to
the University of Washington and this time enrolled as a
psychology major. There, he met and started dating a single
mother called Elizabeth. Their turbulent relationship would last into the
mid nineteen seventies.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Women server a function for him. They provide a roof
over his head, meals on the table, sex, useful contacts
with other people, so he has got quite a parasitic lifestyle.
He will hook on to particular people and get from
them what he wants, and then he will just discard
them and move on.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
In nineteen seventy one, Bundy got a part time job
at Seattle's Suicide Hotline crisis Center.

Speaker 2 (07:50):
What he's doing is he's performing the role of the
respectable middle class young man. He wants to be seen
to be helping other people. He wants to be seen
to be doing socially worthy things, and this also feeds
into to the work that he becomes involved in in
terms of political campaigning.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
When Bundy graduated university, he joined the Republican governor's re
election campaign. Then, in September of nineteen seventy three, Bundy
was accepted into law school at the University of Puget
Sound in Tacoma, just thirty miles south of Seattle. Before
beginning the law course, he went on a trip to California.

(08:32):
Whilst there, he rekindled his relationship with his first love, Stephanie,
despite still dating Elizabeth.

Speaker 5 (08:41):
All of a sudden, he's a different man. He's working
for the governor, he's town, he's successful, he looks like
he's good.

Speaker 6 (08:48):
Enough for her.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Finally, Ted Bundy and Stephanie gets engaged and they plan
to get married. And Stephanie's very excited about this, but Ted,
very coldly just drops her.

Speaker 5 (08:59):
Well, this was all about, was how far this man
would go for revenge, to have the kind of narcissistic
victory that he would not be her that rejected him
and then rejected her.

Speaker 1 (09:11):
Sumarily, having taken back control by ending the relationship with Stephanie,
twenty seven year old Ted Bundy returned to Washington and
decided he needed to show womankind who was boss. Just
after midnight on January the fourth, nineteen seventy four, Bundy
broke into the basement apartment of an eighteen year old

(09:33):
dancer and university student.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
She was at home asleep in her house one night
when Ted Bundy broke in and he beat her with
a metal pole and he raped her, and she was
in a really terrible state. Many people think this is
something that just kind of came out of the blue,
but I would say absolutely not, it didn't. I think
this was an attack that was built up to. We

(09:58):
offer fined with offenders behavior before they get to the
point of raping and attacking people. And in Ted Bundy's case,
this was voyeurism. So he had a history of peeping
through women's windows and watching them get undressed, and it's
something that gradually builds and it's not enough for him
and he ratchets at up to the next level.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
The violent assault left the young woman unconscious for ten days.

Speaker 7 (10:24):
She sustained injuries from the blows to the head that
will cause brain damage and brain swelling, and when he
sexually assaulted her with a metal bar that caused damage
to her internal organs, and she was left permanently altered
by those injuries.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
Seattle, Washington, February nineteen seventy four. It was here that
twenty seven year old Ted Bundy attacked again and turned
from rapist to killer.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
And it's no coincidence that she's a university student who
he sees as privileged, who he sees is undeserving, whereas
he's somebody who's really hard done by. And it is
that constant jealousy, that constant underlying feeling of shame, that
drives a lot of his violence.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Bundy's chosen target was a twenty one year old University
of Washington student called Linda. He broke into her room.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
He very severely attacks her. He really does bash her
her skull when he carries out the assault on her.
She doesn't survive the attack.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
That night, after he'd attacked and killed Linda, Bundy moved
her away from the campus. He dumbed her body in
the dense woods of Taylor Mountain Forest, a thirty minute
drive from the university.

Speaker 2 (11:45):
It's very important that he maintains control over the victims
even after he's killed them, so he doesn't just leave
them where they are. He wants to be able to
know where they are. He wants to have control over them,
so he chooses a local beauty, Taylor Mountain. It's a
place that people generally go to enjoy, but for him,

(12:05):
it really is at a macabre dump site.

Speaker 1 (12:08):
Linda's body was found a year later in nineteen seventy five.
Her death mark the start of a furious spate of
killings that this time, Bundy quit law school in Tacoma
after just six months. He returned to Washington not as
a student, but as a predator.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
He would lure women over to his car, saying that
he needed their assistance with something, and he'd often be
wearing a sling to make it appear that he'd injured himself.
And he was good looking, he was charming, he was respectable.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Bundy's trademark VW. Beetle became his favorite method for abducting
women before taking them to a remote spot to attack them.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
When he hit it was like a sharp grabbing its prey.

Speaker 6 (12:54):
Bam.

Speaker 7 (12:56):
He'd use a blunt object to bludgeon his victim, and
then he strangled them.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
After eight aggravated murders of young women in the first
half of nineteen seventy four, a rate of more than
one a month, fear spread across the Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
I think Ted Bundy enjoys the feelings of power. He
enjoys the feelings of control. So you start to see
the attacks get closer together because he's having to escalate
his offending to get that same feeling of power. You know,
with psychopaths light Ted Bundy, they're prone to boredom, so
they will start to mix it up a bit and

(13:34):
offend in different ways.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Then in the summer of that year, Bundy changed his
mo He now decided to attack in broad daylight. On
July the fourteenth, at Lake Sammamish State Park, just over
fifteen miles southeast of the University of Washington, Bundy attacked
two young women, twenty three year old Janis and nineteen
year old Denise. Denise was last seen entering a public

(13:58):
restroom in the past.

Speaker 2 (14:00):
There are some witnesses to these crimes and that there's
one common denominator, and that seems to be a man
called Ted who drives a BW beetle, so that begins
to narrow the field a little.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
Bundy later said that he kidnapped both women from the
state park within a few hours of each other. He
raped them and made one watch as he murdered the other.
Bundy disposed of their bodies in an area two miles away.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
It's reported that Ted Bundy spent time with the bodies
of his victims, that he shampooed the hair of some
of them, that he painted their fingernails.

Speaker 5 (14:44):
What his m always consists of is taking these two
facets of his personality, and he used one of them,
the intelligent, the charming, the carrying, the one that would.

Speaker 6 (14:54):
Help wash the hero. He'd use that to seduce.

Speaker 5 (14:57):
Them into his private presence. And then the monster, the face,
the face of rage, would come out and this would
plunder this woman asunder.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
In September of nineteen seventy four, Bundy left Washington and
moved east to Salt Lake City. The twenty seven year
old had been accepted into law school again, this time
at the University of Utah. On the surface, he looked
like an ordinary student, but inside was a cunning serial killer.

Speaker 4 (15:33):
He was not.

Speaker 3 (15:36):
Your average person. He was bright, brilliant. He felt like
he was a chameleon in that he could disguise himself,
he could change his colors, and he could take advantage.

Speaker 1 (15:52):
Bundy later claimed that he first killed in Utah on
October the second nineteen seventy four. The victim was just
sixteen years old, and her body was never found. Ronda Stapley,
a University of Utah pharmacy student, was waiting for a bus.

Speaker 4 (16:12):
I had a dental appointment downtown, and while I was downtown,
I decided I would walk over to a city park.
And then my mouth started to become a numb from
the dental surgery, and I could tell that I needed
to go home to some aspirins pretty soon, so I
went over to where the bus stop was.

Speaker 1 (16:27):
The bus did not show, but Ted Bundy did. He
pulled his VW Beetle up to the bus stop and
offered her a ride.

Speaker 4 (16:35):
He was nicely dressed, handsome. He told me that he
was a last student, and I was feeling pretty lucky.
What college girl wouldn't want to meet a law student.

Speaker 5 (16:49):
Unlike other serial killers, he did not target prostitutes, which
are easy victims. He targeted young, attractive, intelligent, often beautiful,
and successful women. This he could do because of his
intelligence that made him a unique threat and danger.

Speaker 1 (17:06):
After a couple of blocks with Ronda in the car,
Bundy took a turn away from the university.

Speaker 4 (17:12):
Very politely, He says, I hope you don't mind, but
I have a short errand run. And I said, I
thought you were taking me to the zoo and he
said no, I said near the zoo. And we kept
driving up that canyon and then down another canyon.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
Bundy drove up into Big Cottonwood Canyon, just southeast of
the city.

Speaker 4 (17:31):
At this point he stopped talking to me. He just
had both hands on steering wheel and was just driving.

Speaker 1 (17:37):
As Bundy came to a corner, he slowed down.

Speaker 4 (17:40):
In my mind, I thought that he is looking for
a place to pull over and park and make out,
and so in my mind, I'm trying to figure out
how do I get out of this situation without embarrassing
either of us.

Speaker 1 (17:51):
Bundy pulled off the road and into a secluded picnic
area and parked the car.

Speaker 4 (17:56):
And then he turned towards me and he leaned in
close to my face. I thought he was going to
kiss me. Instead, he said, do you know what, I'm
going to kill you? And he put his hands on
my throat and started squeezing.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
She fell unconscious. When Ronda eventually woke up, she was
lying on the picnic table with Bandy on top of her.

Speaker 4 (18:19):
He is sitting on my chest with all of his
weight on my chest and stomach, and I told him
get off. I can't breathe, and he says, stop struggling,
and I'll let you breathe. And so I helped still,
and he kind of rocked up onto his knee so
it took some of the pressure off. And then he
put his hand over my nose and mouth and cut
off my hair that way. And he would do that

(18:40):
until I would just go unconscious, and then he would
kind of bring me back. He liked watching me fade
in and out of consciousness.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
Ronda had just one chance to save herself.

Speaker 4 (18:51):
The last time. When I regained consciousness, I noticed that
he wasn't standing by me anymore. Pitt Kenyon was pitch
black with dark. There was a little light coming from
the dome light of the car because he had opened
the door to the Volkswagen. Was fiddling around with something
in the backseat. And I used that opportunity to just
run the opposite direction. I just jumped up and ran. Fortunately,

(19:14):
or just by pure luck or grace of God, or
intervention from above or something, I happened to fall into
the mountain river, which wasn't very deep, but it was
really really fast, and it swept me away. There was
water swirling around boulders and flowing over boulders, and of
course was smashing into those. And eventually I was able

(19:36):
to climb out and rearrange my clothes so I could
walk home. And that's what I did, is I just
walked home.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Roonda kept her attack by Bundy a secret for more
than thirty years.

Speaker 4 (19:50):
I felt embarrassed and stupid and ashamed, and plus I
was religious LDS Mormon girl, and the teachings at that
time that if you have a choice of losing your
life or losing your virtue, it would be better for
you eternally if you last your life. So I decided
the best thing for me to do was just to

(20:12):
suck it up and pretend it never happened and go
on with my life.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
Ronda's escape did not deter Bundy's murderer's plans. A few
weeks later, in November nineteen seventy four, Bundy was prowling
a mall in Murray, Utah, post as a police officer disguised,
he managed to entice an eighteen year old telephone operator
called Carol to get into his car. He planned on

(20:37):
raping and killing.

Speaker 2 (20:38):
Her, and this goes wrong. It fails, she gets away.

Speaker 1 (20:43):
During the struggle, Carol had managed to open the car
door and escape.

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Ted Bundy is not the kind of guy who just
gives up and goes home. He's got his mind set
on it. He wants to get what he wants that night.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
Now two of Bundy's victims had escaped death. The next
would not be so fortunate. On November the eighth, Bundy
kidnapped seventeen year old Deborah as she left a theater production.
She was on her way to pick up her brother.
Deborah was never seen again.

Speaker 5 (21:16):
What happens with Bondi and many other serial killers. They
have to kill, They kill, they get a release. Sometimes
they get a little extra release by returning to the
corpse and having a small dose of the arousal, which
they can live through by toying with their trophies and
toying with the corpse itself, and then they have a

(21:39):
rest period.

Speaker 1 (21:41):
All the time twenty seven year old Bundy had been killing,
he was still seeing his long term girlfriend Elizabeth in Seattle.
In the autumn of nineteen seventy four. He also got
involved with Carol, a single mother and a divorcee.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
He presented as completely normal, and so many people were
taken in by him.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Ted Bundy had yet to appear on the police radar
as a suspect, but thanks to eight eye witnesses who
saw him in July of nineteen seventy four at Lake Sammamish,
the Washington State Police were on the lookout for a
man who'd introduced himself as Ted and was driving a
Tan VW Beetle.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
This guy has reported to me, nice looking in his twenties,
just at an average college guy. He doesn't look like
a monster, and nobody thinks that a serial killer looks
like this.

Speaker 1 (22:34):
Police issued a composite sketch based on the descriptions they had.
It was broadcast on national television and was seen by Elizabeth.
She called the police. She gave them Bundy's details, as
well as those of his car, but the police dismissed
the tip because reportedly Bundy was a clean cut law student.

(22:57):
A year later, the twenty eight year old headed cross country.
He raped and killed three young women in Colorado. In May,
he assaulted a twelve year old child she'd been abducted
from her Junior High School in Pocatello, Idaho.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Here we've got Ted Bundy seeing an opportunity and actually
seizing it with not too much regard to the risk.
And that's not really his previous mo o. He's used
that charm before, but this is quite disorganized and this
is something that will lead to his downfall.

Speaker 1 (23:33):
Bundy had got away with multiple murders and despite a
sketch of him in circulation, had not been identified by police.
In June nineteen seventy five, he returned to Utah and
killed a fifteen year old girl in Provo. Two months later,
Bundy was driving erratically through a Salt Lake City suburb
in his tan VW Beetle when he was spotted by

(23:54):
a Utah Highway Patrol officer.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
Ted Bundy is pulled over by a police officer who
notices that that the front passenger seat is missing, there's
an ice pick, there's a crowbar, there's a ski mask,
and all of this looks incredibly suspicious. But Ted Bundy,
being that the charming manipulator, has an explanation for all of.

Speaker 1 (24:14):
This, suspicions were aroused, but the Utah police did not
have enough evidence to detain Bundy for anything to do
with the murders. Instead, three Utah detectives flew to Seattle,
where they met up with the Washington police. Together, they
interviewed Bundy's long term girlfriend, Elizabeth. She told them that

(24:35):
she'd found some strange items in the apartment a year earlier,
including a meat cleaver and a bag of women's clothing.

Speaker 5 (24:42):
What happens over the course of the lives of serial
killers is the time it takes them to need another killing,
to need, if you will, another savage, evil meal gets
shorter and shorter and shorter. Their control gets less and
les less and less. The way they perpetrate their crimes

(25:03):
becomes wilder and more foolish.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
With the FBI on his trail, Bundy sold his VW,
but it was found by police. Inside they discovered strands
of survivor Carol's hair and hairs from two other women.
On October the second, nineteen seventy five, detectives found Bundy
in Utah, arrested him, and put him in a lineup

(25:27):
their Carol positively identified him as her abductor.

Speaker 2 (25:33):
This is where he's taken his eye off the ball.
This is where he started making mistakes. He's been so
driven by his wants and his desires that he stopped
to actually risk assess what he's doing.

Speaker 1 (25:45):
Unable to find enough evidence to charge him with any murders,
Bundy only stood trial for Carol's aggravated kidnap and assault
on June the thirtieth, nineteen seventy six. Bundy was sentenced
to serve one to fifteen years and was eventually moved
to the Garfield County Jail in Colorado.

Speaker 4 (26:06):
I felt relieved that he was arrested and wasn't a
thread on the street anymore.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
Just as police were gathering enough evidence to charge him
with the murder of a twenty three year old woman
in snow, mass Bundy pulled a major surprise.

Speaker 2 (26:20):
There's a preliminary hearing and Ted Bundy, being the incredibly
arrogance individual that he is, decides that he's going to
defend himself in courts.

Speaker 5 (26:29):
Bundy was savvy about how the system operated. By being
his own lawyer. He had access to the law library
system of the jail and he was allowed to go there.
Notwithstanding that once you got access to the law library system,
you could go right out the window, which he did.

Speaker 1 (26:46):
Bundy escaped and went on the run in Colorado. He
was caught six days later. A year later, he pulled
another surprise.

Speaker 2 (26:55):
He's in his style and he notices that there's a
hole in the ceiling and one he manages it and
he gets through the hole and he comes out in
the apartment that belongs to the chief jailer, and he
literally walks out of the front door of the prison
and he's away again.

Speaker 1 (27:11):
Free and on the loose. Bundy made his way to
the peaceful college town of Tallahassee in the Sunshine state
of Florida.

Speaker 5 (27:19):
I suspect that when Bunny knows he's at the end
of his rope, he's been arrested enough times, had enough
interactions to realize that this story is going to come
to an end. So it's in Florida that he goes
on his rampage.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Around two forty five am on January the fifteenth, nineteen
seventy eight, Ted Bundy broke into the Caui Omega sorority house.

Speaker 2 (27:42):
He's somebody who's familiar with college towns with college buildings,
so I think he knew that there were many women
in this house, and that was his intention all along.

Speaker 5 (27:51):
Within fifteen minutes, he'd attacked four women, brutally cracking their skulls,
breaking their collar bones.

Speaker 1 (28:00):
One year old Margaret was hit with a piece of
firewood and then strangled to death with her stockings. Twenty
year old Lisa was beaten, unconscious, raped and killed.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
The attack is incredibly brutal, this rape. He beats people,
He knocks people's teeth out, He bites the buttock of
one of the victims.

Speaker 5 (28:20):
The magnitude of the terror for the victim is as
intense as the magnitude of the rage by the perpetrator.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
Two others were both severely beaten and assaulted. Miraculously, they
survived within the hour. The Sheriff of Leon County, Kencatsaris,
was called to the crime scene.

Speaker 3 (28:42):
When I got there, I did check with the investigators.
They had secured the scene. We knew that we had
two who were obviously dead and two that they believed
may die. You could tell which one was first, You
could tell which one was second, third, and fourth, but

(29:05):
you could tell how much energy that he expended.

Speaker 1 (29:12):
This was not the end of Bundy's activity.

Speaker 3 (29:15):
That night, As I'm standing outside of the sorority house,
we get a call that there's strange noises coming from
a condo next door, and I sent an investigator immediately
because I said, six blocks away, could it be he's
doing it again, which only tells you he couldn't help himself.

Speaker 1 (29:41):
Bundy had broken into another apartment where he savagely beat
another student.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
She was in a pool of blood when my investigator
went in the condo or the apartment, and Bundy was
leaving out the back window, but she tended to the
injury at first.

Speaker 1 (29:59):
Still free. A few weeks later, Bundy struck again, this
time in Lake City in northern Florida. His victim was
another little girl who was just twelve years old.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
He is a prolific serial killer at this point in time.
Serial killing is his hobby, it's his vocation. It's something
that he feels that he's good at, and more so,
he's getting away with it. And when somebody's getting away
with it, they're certainly not going to stop, and if
anything they're offending is only going to get worse.

Speaker 1 (30:30):
Bundy dumped the girl's brutalized body in woods, about thirty
miles west of Lake City. He then stole a car
and made his way west into the Florida Panhandle. Three
days later, on February the fifteenth, nineteen seventy eight, an
alert Pensacola police officer stopped America's most notorious serial killer

(30:52):
near the Alabama Stayed Line for driving suspiciously.

Speaker 3 (30:56):
He just had a gut feeling that something might be wrong,
and of course it came out over his radio after
he called it in.

Speaker 6 (31:05):
The vehicle had been stolen.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
After a brief struggle in which the officer was forced
to fire a warning shot, Bundy was arrested. He was
taken to the Leon County Jail in Tallahassee, Florida.

Speaker 3 (31:20):
I had him in custody for over two years in
my detention center.

Speaker 6 (31:25):
My jail.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
I had him so locked up that he wasn't going anywhere.
He not only was in a secure jail cell, but
I had him in a cell that we had lined
with armor plate steel in sheets that were welded in
terms of the seams, floor, walls, ceiling. There was no

(31:51):
light fixture that he could remove like he did in Colorado.
And then I put extra locks on the door, heavy
impenetrable locks in addition to the jail key law, and
they were in the hands of several people.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
When she discovered that Bundy was arrested for murder, his partner, Elizabeth,
finally left him. At the same time, detectives in Washington
State tried to build their case against Bundy and prove
that he was a serial killer. Sherif Ken Gatsaris was
also doing some digging of his own.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
I went to his cell one day, talking to him
through the port. I told him, I said, Ted, I
think I know what's going on with you. You've had
a problem with your mother because you were born out
of wedlaw.

Speaker 6 (32:48):
She withheld who your father was. You've never forgiven.

Speaker 3 (32:53):
Her, and that has a lot to do with what
you're doing in terms of taking it out on women.

Speaker 6 (33:01):
He immediately.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
Opened his eyes wide with anger. He wanted to kill.
He immediately started trashing his cell, throwing things about, and
he grabbed the shower rod, which was welded in place.
He ripped it from its position, which meant a lot of.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
Power intellectually shed If Ken Knsaris was more than a
match for Bundy, he managed to go the serial killer
into a game changing revelation.

Speaker 3 (33:33):
He would taunt me with Ken as he would refer
to me with that sarcastic twist of that name. Just
three letters, but he would say Ken, and then he
would say the evidence is there, you just can't find it.
And I thought, then I know what he's referring to.

(33:55):
He signed one of those bodies.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
This was Ken's eureka moment.

Speaker 8 (34:00):
He used his teeth and clamped hard twice to leave
a signature, and I realized we had a very deliberate
double bite impression double.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
Meaning he bit down and then he came out and
bit again.

Speaker 6 (34:22):
That was his signature.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
Ken Katsaris was convinced that bike marks left on the
bodies of his victims were the smoking gun that would
show once and for all that Ted Bundy was indeed
America's most vicious serial killer. But to convict Bundy, the
Sheriff of Leon County needed to prove it.

Speaker 3 (34:44):
When I viewed the two bodies of the young ladies
at the morgue on the slab, just barely twenty years
of age, I had a one month old little girl
at home, and I had a two year old daughter
at home, and I just kept flashing images that this

(35:06):
could be them. I made myself a promise in the morgue,
somebody's going to pay for this.

Speaker 6 (35:15):
I will find this person.

Speaker 1 (35:18):
During his regular interactions with Bundy, the sheriff realized that
in the Cai Omega Sorority house attack, Bundy had left
a bite mark on the left buttock of Lisa, one
of the victims.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
I was teaching the forensics of homicide investigation, and I
was teaching the advanced concepts, so I knew that these
bites were going to be important.

Speaker 1 (35:43):
Sheriff Kenkatsaris determined that if you could get an impression
of Bundy's bite, he might be able to match it
to the marks left on Lisa's body.

Speaker 3 (35:54):
I needed an exemplar. I needed his teeth marks, and
that became I think it consumed me. How can I
get them?

Speaker 1 (36:07):
The prison officers tried some novel techniques to get the
clean impression they needed for a comparison.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
We gave him different kinds of fruit because we weren't
sure which one the core would leave the best bite impression,
and that inmate said, you're getting fruit. I don't get
any fruit, And I think he became suspicious that something
was going on with that, because he quit eating his fruit.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
After that fruit tricks failed, the sheriff and his team
had a trailblazing brainwave.

Speaker 6 (36:39):
Then it struck us. It just it hit.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
What about a search warrant for his mouth?

Speaker 6 (36:49):
We can just go serve it.

Speaker 3 (36:51):
That would get the bite impression.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
Ken decided to take Bundy to his own dentist.

Speaker 3 (36:57):
I personally went to Ted Bundy's and I said, you're
coming with me.

Speaker 6 (37:03):
I told him to put his brace on.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
I had a special brace developed now called the Bundy Brace.

Speaker 6 (37:09):
It was spring loaded.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
So that when he would straighten out his leg, you
could hear that spring pop in the place. That way,
if he tried to run, he'd be running with one
stiff flay.

Speaker 6 (37:20):
I told him to put his brace on.

Speaker 1 (37:23):
Bundy reluctantly went with Ken to the dentist's.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Office, and I escorted him up the stairway because he
couldn't walk it very well with the brace. And then
the door opened and there stood three men with little
white smocks on and the dental chair behind them. And
he knew, he knew the jig was up. He knew,

(37:51):
and that's when I knew that he knew that the
bite marks were deliberate and they were put there for
a purpose.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
Ken told Bundy that he had a warrant and they
were going to get a bite impression from him.

Speaker 3 (38:02):
And I had the judge put in there that we
could use any and all force reasonably necessary. I showed
him the contraptions that they used post mortem to keep
the mouth open, and he looked at me. He sat
down in the dental chair, smiled and said, Ken, you

(38:27):
know I'm not a violent person.

Speaker 6 (38:29):
Do what you need to do.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
The bitemark impression that the sheriff obtained would prove vital,
improving that Bundy was in fact a killer. His trial
for the murder of the two students in the Cayomega
sorority house and the assault of three more young women
began in Miami on the twenty fifth of June nineteen
seventy nine. It would be the first national televised trial

(38:55):
in America.

Speaker 3 (38:56):
I said, I'm going to Bradley because I haven't had
an opportunity to complete my research on insteatus of Florida law.

Speaker 4 (39:07):
I was watching the trial on TV and I saw
how arrogant he was, and he wasn't in shackles. He
was dressed pretending to be his own liar, dressed like
a liar, smiling and flirting with the people in the audience,
just being mister charismatic, and that was kind of sickening.

Speaker 1 (39:26):
On July the twenty fourth, nineteen seventy nine, the jury
convicted Ted Bundy on two counts of first degree murder
and three counts of attempted murder. He was given the
death sentence twice.

Speaker 3 (39:39):
The only real evidence we had was the bite impression.
And obviously I felt good because I found that I
was conflicted. Yes, I understood that this was congratulations, but
it was no congratulations. These women had suffered. Some suffered

(40:00):
and live, thank God, others died. How do you celebrate?

Speaker 1 (40:06):
Bundy would spend ten years on death row fighting his execution.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
Ted Bundy exhausted every legal avenue he possibly could to
save himself from the death penalty, So the cost of
his trial and his appeals was around about nine million
US dollars, which was a lot of money at the time.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
At the sentencing for the rape and murder of a
twelve year old girl in Lake City, Florida, Bundy represented
himself sensationally. He used the opportunity to propose to Carol.
Carol met Bundy in Seattle in nineteen seventy four. She
would profess his innocence until the eve of his execution.

(40:46):
She had a daughter in October of nineteen eighty two
and claimed that Bundy was the father serial killers.

Speaker 5 (40:53):
They are intense, they are moving, and they are real,
and I think some women are excited about that. Some
women need that terror, that terror, that excitement, especially if
somehow they could be near the flame with about being
burned by its touch.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Over the ten years that Bundy was on death row,
he slowly confessed to thirty documented murders.

Speaker 2 (41:18):
He has knowledge of murders that he's committed which the
authorities don't know about, and he's going to use that
to his full advantage. And he's going to drip feed
some of this information out bit by bit in order
to try and buy himself sometime.

Speaker 1 (41:33):
As the appeals ran out and as the death sentence neared,
a macabre fascination with Bundy grew.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Just before his execution, we started to see this immense
media circus around the event. We started to see radio
shows playing the sound of frying bacon on air, and
they had a Bundy countdown. People had ted Bundy dances
and barbecues.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
At seven sixteen am on January two, twenty fourth, nineteen
eighty nine, age forty two, Ted Bundy was finally executed.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Even when he was being walked to the electric chair,
he was shouting out names of victims right up until
the end. He's trying to buy himself more time. He's
trying to just gradually give away some of this knowledge
about his crimes.

Speaker 5 (42:20):
It's a sad thing from a scientific point of view
that he would die without telling us or giving us
any hint about whether or not there was something in
his life that we don't know about that helps explain
his conduct.

Speaker 4 (42:36):
I was not really happy, but kind of relieved. Normally
I don't very often agree with the death penalty, but
with humor, it was necessary.

Speaker 2 (42:45):
So many people were taken in by him, despite the
fact he was leaving this trail of bodies behind him.
Monsters don't always look like monsters. Sometimes they look like
the guy next door.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
Arguably America's most notorious murderer, Bundy was this aptively depraved.
He used his charms to kidnap, rape, and kill, by
some estimates, up to one hundred young women and girls,
making Ted Bundy one of the world's most evil killers.