Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters (22 page)

Despite Bundy’s professed attachment to Liz, he was having an affair with another counselor at the hospital. She told police, years later, that when she was making love with Bundy one day, he shoved his forearm under her chin and began to choke her.

Perhaps sensing an oncoming crash like the one that occurred after his disastrous romance with Stephanie, Bundy turned to politics once more for refuge. It was an election year in 1972 and Bundy went to work for the incumbent governor, Dan Evans. Sometimes he was sent out to reconnoiter the opposition’s rallies. Bundy wore disguises such as wigs and false mustaches on these jobs. He began to display a remarkable chameleon-like ability to radically change his features by getting a haircut, growing a beard, or even parting his hair differently. Several people commented that Bundy was a true changeling.

Once again, Bundy seemed to have regained equilibrium despite his failure at his first job after graduation and rejection from law school. After the election was over, he was rewarded for his good work on the governor’s campaign. Bundy’s curriculum vitae for 1972–1973 reads as follows:

• Crime Commission Assistant Director: October 1972 to January 1973. As assistant to the director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Commission, suggested and did the preliminary investigation for the Commission’s investigation into assaults against women, and “white collar” (economic) crime. Wrote press releases, speeches, and newspaper articles for the Commission. Participated extensively in the planning of the Commission’s activities for 1973.
  
• Criminal Corrections Consultant: January 1973. Currently retained by the King County Office of Law and Justice Planning to identify recidivism rates for offenders who have been found guilty of misdemeanors and gross misdemeanors in the twelve county District Courts. The purpose of the study is to determine the nature and number of offenses committed subsequent to a conviction in District Court.
  

In May 1973 Bundy was hired as a consultant by the state Republican Party central committee to analyze cost overruns in government spending. He worked for the committee chairman, Ross Davis, and was often a guest at his home. Davis remembers Bundy as “smart, aggressive, exceptionally so, and a believer in the system.” His wife Lisa recalls, “He didn’t talk much about himself, but I didn’t feel he was trying to hide anything. He spoke of his mother and family in loving terms.” Occasionally Ted Bundy babysat the couple’s children, and he ate dinner at their house at least once a week.

Bundy also reapplied to law school and with some aggressive lobbying he was accepted at the Utah College of Law in Salt Lake City—he was scheduled to begin classes there in September. Somewhere in this period, Ted Bundy also bought a car—a bronze-colored Volkswagen Beetle. It was the second time he had bought that model. Bundy apparently liked the auto for its classless status; it was an inexpensive vehicle, but sometimes preferred by the wealthy as a stylish second car for errands in the city.

That summer, Bundy was sent to California for a Republican Party conference, and while there he decided to look up his lost love, Stephanie. Bundy was no longer a “loser.” He projected now the aura of a “take charge” man: a college graduate with political ambitions, outspoken, confident, and about to enter law school. Stephanie liked what she saw and they rekindled their romance.

By August 1973, Bundy had truly surpassed some formidable setbacks and obstacles. He had achieved much: From a disappointed and failed college-boy reject, Bundy built himself into a psychological counselor, a respected political hand, an often-invited dinner guest, a rescuer of lives, a student of law; somebody who, some said, might very well be a future state governor. And now he reconquered his first and true love, the woman he had lost five years ago. True, there were a few rough spots along the way, such as his burglaries and window peeping; and true, there was a cloud on the horizon—he was now deeply involved with two women and he would have to deal with that. Otherwise, though, Bundy appeared to be healed. Who would have thought that six months from now he would begin brutally raping and murdering women.

At the last minute Bundy switched law schools. Over the summer his friends from the Republican Party argued that it was not wise for Bundy to go to a law school in Utah if he had plans for a political career in Washington State. Bundy applied and was admitted to the school of law at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. He wrote the University of Utah, telling them that he had been in a serious car accident and could not attend classes that year. Why he told that lie is unclear, but perhaps he was embarrassed, after lobbying the university so hard for admission, to switch schools at the last minute.

Some biographies of Bundy link this change of schools with his subsequent outbreak of killing. The story goes that when Bundy arrived at the law school in Tacoma, he discovered that it was located in an anonymous office building. It was not an “Ivy League” institution as he had imagined, but a drab, third-class school, and it is theorized that the snob in Bundy revolted—he immediately began to fail in all his classes, in a collapse very similar to the one six years earlier in San Francisco. Bundy’s biographers maintain that this new intolerable failure triggered his homicidal crimes. But it is highly improbable that Bundy went through an application process to the school in Tacoma without visiting its facilities. Moreover, if he was applying late to the school, he probably would have had to go there in person to deliver his application materials, and since his family lived in Tacoma, it would have been a convenient trip. (Seattle is about a thirty-minute drive from Tacoma.) It is improbable that Bundy was surprised by anything he saw at the school when he started classes. Something else must have happened.

We know that in the last seven years Bundy had been window-peeping and trolling aimlessly at night in the residential neighborhoods near the university, seeking some sort of satisfaction out of his fantasies. Nobody knows for how long the fantasies themselves had existed; probably since childhood or early adolescence. At points, it appears that Bundy took his fantasies on “test runs,” as when he disabled women’s cars. These points probably marked cycles that came and went, but intensified with every reappearance. Bundy described them as cyclical depressions: “Not mood swings, just changes,” he said. He said he had no difficulty projecting a false cheerfulness for short periods of time while at the same time hiding a huge part of his life that nobody knew about.

Many biographers of Bundy associate his failure at Stanford in the summer of 1967 with his breakup with the girl of his dreams, Stephanie. We are not sure, however, at what point in the sequence of events Stephanie actually began to withdraw from Bundy. In fact, events might have happened the other way around—his collapse at Stanford might be associated more with his success, rather than with some failure with Stephanie. Prior to meeting Stephanie, Bundy already had notions and fantasies of what his ideal woman would be like; Stephanie seemed to fulfill those criteria. But as we all know, real-life lovers rarely match the ones in our fantasies. It is precisely after Bundy began dating Stephanie that he said he “inadvertently” began his nocturnal trolling. It was when he successfully realized his fantasy of acquiring a beautiful girlfriend that he might have realized that it was not enough. It was not what he really wanted. That was exactly when he began to prowl in the night.

Bundy claimed that violent pornography began to slowly solidify his vague fantasies and compulsions into concrete ideas and actions. Perhaps, but most likely Bundy was in a state of denial when he said that. Bundy’s violent fantasies were probably formulated much earlier, but he had the intelligence and education to be embarrassed about them—perhaps he even suppressed the early memory of them.

The pressure on Bundy was coming from three sides: the violent fantasies that he
really
wanted to fulfill; the attempts to realize ambitions that he felt he
should have
realized; and the anxiety, perhaps guilt, at the contents of his violent fantasies. A less intelligent, less thinking, or less ambitious person than Bundy might not have thought or worried much about the inappropriateness of his violent desires. Perhaps Bundy was even worried that his fantasies, if they ever took control of him, would be socially embarrassing and ruinous to his career plans—which is exactly what happened.

It was no doubt a fantasy of Bundy’s that he could get his girlfriend from six years ago to fall in love with him again, and remarkably, she did, fulfilling that fantasy. It was truly an extraordinary achievement no matter how you look at it. It is very possible that everything that Bundy had done in the last six years, he did with the purpose of regaining the love of Stephanie. The evidence is there: His failed studies in urban planning in the fall of 1967 resulted only because he was too late in applying to architectural school—Stephanie had expressed to him her admiration of architects.

Now in the fall of 1973, Bundy had reconquered his lost love. Stephanie flew to Seattle to spend time with Ted. To make sure that Liz would not stumble upon them, Ted checked Stephanie into a hotel in Seattle.

Without Liz ever finding out, Ted and Stephanie became engaged to be married, and he brought her to the Davis house for dinner and introduced her as his fiancée. Bundy borrowed their car and took Stephanie on a romantic trip into the mountains where they used to go skiing in their college days. At the end of the trip, Lisa Davis took some photographs of Ted and Stephanie with their arms around each other in front of the Davis house, and then drove Stephanie to the airport.

Almost immediately, as soon as Bundy reunited with Stephanie, his life began to fall apart, beginning with a dismal performance at law school. It is probable that when Stephanie agreed to marry him, Bundy must have realized that his fantasy in reality was meaningless—it was false. Bundy once said, “I always felt somehow lost in my life.”

Bundy must have felt that there was something else that he truly wanted to be doing other than becoming a lawyer to win the heart of a beautiful dark-haired woman. All he really wanted, deep down, was just to possess her body; he did not need her love and companionship, he realized. When he was on death row, Bundy explained that he received no pleasure from harming or causing pain to his victims. He did not torture them. What really fascinated him was the hunt for his victims and their capture and, as he said, “possessing them physically as one would possess a potted plant, a painting, or a Porsche.”

Bundy’s cyclical disappointment upon realizing his goals is typical of the cyclical psychology of serial murder. When serial killers “realize” their murderous goals by killing, they frequently find the experience of murder disappointing and need to commit another in some improved way, hoping for a better payoff to the fantasy.

Ann Rule writes that in December 1973, she saw Bundy at a Christmas party. This time he was there with his girlfriend, Liz, and he introduced her to Rule. She assumed that Bundy had gotten over Stephanie and that Liz and Ted were living together. Liz told her she was returning home to Salt Lake City for the Christmas holidays, while Ted was going to stay in Seattle to study.

As soon as Liz left to visit her parents in Utah, Stephanie arrived in Seattle to spend time with her fiancée and discuss their marriage plans. Later, Stephanie testified that Bundy had changed radically since their last time together in September. He did not buy her any Christmas presents, but showed her a very expensive chess set he bought for a friend. He was very unenthusiastic about the expensive presents she had bought him. His lovemaking was very cool and mechanical. Once he left her alone for an entire day to work on a “school project.”

He told Stephanie that there was another woman and that although it was over with her, she called often and that he needed to “get loose” of her before he could devote himself to Stephanie. When Stephanie attempted to discuss their marriage plans, he dodged the issue and went into a tirade about his illegitimate birth history. On the last evening before she returned to San Francisco, they did not make love, Stephanie said. Stunned and confused, she flew home on January 2, 1974.

On January 4, an eighteen-year-old woman went to bed in her basement apartment in a big old house near the University of Washington. When she failed to appear for breakfast the next morning, her housemates assumed she was sleeping late. By midafternoon they began to worry and went downstairs to investigate. They found her door unlocked and saw her sleeping in her bed, but not responding to their calls. As they approached closer they discovered to their horror that her face and hair were matted with blood. Somebody had detached a heavy metal rod from her bed frame and fractured her skull with it. Then the intruder inserted into her a vaginal probe, a speculum, the kind that is carried by medical supply houses, and brutally wrenched her genitals apart, seriously injuring them. She remained in a coma for ten days, and when she awoke she remembered nothing of the attack. It must have occurred while she slept. She remained brain-damaged for the rest of her life.

Bundy, the former medical supply house delivery driver, is today believed to have committed this crime.

On the night of January 31, 1974, Lynda Healy, a psychology student at the University of Washington, went to bed in her basement apartment in a big house shared by several college girls. Lynda worked part-time announcing ski reports at a local radio station and needed to get up very early in the morning. One of her housemates, Barbara Little, who also had a basement apartment right next to Lynda, heard Lynda’s electric alarm clock go off as usual at 5:30
A
.
M
. Barbara rolled over and went back to sleep.

About half an hour later, Barbara’s own alarm went off. As she got up, Barbara was surprised to hear Lynda’s alarm still buzzing incessantly next door. She went into Lynda’s room and turned on the light. Everything seemed to be in order, although Barbara was surprised to note that Lynda had made her bed before she left—usually she made it only after she got home from classes. Barbara turned Lynda’s alarm clock off. The radio station phoned, saying that Lynda had not arrived. Barbara assured the station that Lynda had left already and would be there shortly.