The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy excerpt by Stephen Michaud

I last saw Ted Bundy on a miserable day in early June. The Florida sun came up hot in the morning; there was a feel of bloat in the air, a rank sponginess that shortens the breath and makes the skin feel dirty, prickly.

Hugh and I drove southeast from the Quality Inn in Lake City along State Highway 100 toward the maximum-security prison near the remote hamlet of Raiford. It is a thirty-five mile trip through the middle of north-central Florida, a flat, unrewarding stretch of scraggly pine trees and truck farms. This is not the Florida of Art Deco South Beach, Disney World and orange groves. This landscape is rural and mostly poor and has much more in common with the backwaters of southern Georgia than it does with the tourist country that begins farther down the Florida peninsula toward Orlando.

We passed a convenience store that serves free coffee to highway patrolmen. A bit further along the straight, two-lane highway is the town of Lulu with its tiny post office and well-attended Baptist church. A good deal of praying and singing (and stomping and hollering) in the name of the Lord goes on in this part of Florida. On the car radio that morning there was a choice of farm reports, country music and gospel hours.

A massive semi zoomed by. Around Lulu, the country people are accustomed to the roar of the big rigs as they barrel up and down Highway 100. They are also accustomed to the splotches of fur, feathers, and spines squashed flat into the pavement under the truckers’ wheels. Buzzards and nimble crows work Highway 100 like so many Eighth Avenue hookers, with one eye on their business and the other on the lookout for The Man. As a car or truck approaches, the scavengers fly straight up and just high enough to clear the vehicle’s roof. Then they alight again on the roadway. Once in a while, the slower birds will misjudge a truck’s height, or fail to notice another tall truck just behind it.

It was only eight-thirty in the morning, but already waves of heat shimmered up from the highway. We turned, and the road opened up onto a broad plain. To the right is the Union Correctional Institution, which is in Union County, and then the Florida State Prison itself, just a rifle shot away across the New River in Bradford County. Prison cattle stood motionless along the roadside, stupefied by the heat and the humidity. Their milk, which the prisoners consume, is often redolent of soil. Interspersed with the cows were inmate work gangs out with their uniformed guards, who cradled shotguns and wore sunglasses that coruscated in the bright morning light.

It was a banal vision of purgatory; the sullen, shuffling cons toiling under a heavy sun that glinted hard at them from their keepers’ shielded eyes. Stasis and timeless futility are common to all prisons; it only seemed more pronounced that day because of our mood. Hugh was hacking and wheezing from a respiratory infection. My brain was cottony from a hangover, and my stomach was sour from too much black coffee and aspirin.

When we arrived at the prison itself, both my hands were cramped and sore from clutching the steering wheel, as if I’d been hanging from it.

For months, I had been coming to the prison to see Ted. Each time I drove up, I would be accosted by a blue-clad trusty, leaning on a rake in the parking lot, wanting to know if I was an attorney. This day, to my surprise, the importuning felons were missing. And gone, too, were the raucous seagulls that in the springtime wheel and screech above the prison kitchens, or stand nattering at one another under the guard towers. Many inmates will swear that they are served creamed chicken with suspicious frequency during seagull season.

The tedium of prison life and prolonged isolation’s regressive effect on personality are in large part responsible for such fears. Many convicts retreat into juvenile narcissism; they will exercise their bodies with monkish devotion, immerse themselves in dietary and nutritional literature, and spend hours in careful, loving scrutiny of their hair, their skin, their teeth, their hands and feet.

Ironically, this neurotic self-absorption is fostered by an environment which apart from the threat of violence and the influence of drugs and alcohol is physically the healthiest that most prisoners have ever known. In some respects, a prison is a hothouse. The inmates vegetate like exotic flora. They lead orderly lives, consume a balanced diet, and are protected in their isolation from many contagious diseases and the majority of the modern world’s everyday threats to psychic well being. Much more sinister forces shape them.

Convicts generally do not age as quickly as do people on the outside. Nevertheless, their health is a constant preoccupation. Some inmates at the Florida State prison are persuaded that beef liver from the prison slaughterhouse, freshly butchered and stuffed hot from the animal into plastic bag, is a favored masturbatory vessel among the kitchen workers. As a result, many prisoners refuse to eat the beef liver on psycho-hygienic grounds.

More feared and gossiped about than the food, however, is the prison medical staff. One story widely credited inside the walls has an inmate being given an injection for an abscessed tooth. The needle misses, and he develops an ear infection. After surgery, he goes deaf in that ear as the infection spreads to his other ear. During a second operation, the doctor fumbles with his scalpel and puts out the prisoner’s eye. Eventually, the man is returned to his cell; he is deaf, blind in one eye, and missing one arm due to complications following an improper administration of anesthetics.

The swamp thrum of a billion insects greeted Hugh and me as we walked from our rental car toward the prison itself. Ahead was a pastel lime-colored structure enclosed by a double row of high cyclone fences topped with razor wire. Between the two fences is an open area once patrolled by guard dogs. The fearsome-looking Dobermans and German shepherds have been retired ever since a pair of the animals accompanied a group of prisoners on an attempted escape.

Theodore Robert Bundy was among the more than 1,400 felons then housed at the Florida State Prison. He and 180 or so other inmates were kept in Q, R, S and T wings, the lock-down blocks of the longest Death Row in the United States. These men do not mingle with the general population of the prison; in Ted’s case, that would mean almost certain assault by fellow inmates whose rough notions of justice prescribe no mercy for so-called baby rapers.

Instead, Ted and the rest of the men on The Row spent almost all their time alone in individual cells, awaiting the day when, as the story had it, a guard would place a taut rubber band around the condemned man’s penis, pack cotton wadding up his rectum, and lead him down to Old Sparky for electrocution.

John Spenkelink was executed at Florida State Prison (Ted later would occupy his cell in the spring of 1979). The day Spenkelink was put to death, a popular Jacksonville disc jockey aired a recording of sizzling bacon and dedicated it to the doomed killer.

Bundy was taken to Death Row that summer after he was convicted in a Miami courtroom for the “Chi Omega killings.” It was a sensational trial, the first on national television. Two hundred and fifty reporters with an audience on five continents applied for credentials to cover the trial.

 Above Judge Edward D. Cowart’s fourth-floor courtroom in the Dade County Metropolitan Justice Building, an elaborate media center was established to handle the crush of newspeople. ABC News underwrote a special satellite hookup that brought the trial into an estimated forty million American homes.

Center stage was the defendant himself arguably the most profound enigma in the history of U.S. criminal justice. Handsome, arrogant, and articulate, he drew scores of rapt groupies to the jammed courtroom each day. Some were cookie-cutter blondes desperate to catch Ted’s eye. Then there were the blue-haired and dewlapped geriatrics come over from their retirement bungalows along the lower stretches of Collins Avenue, hoping to catch a glimpse of the young man whom the newspapers were calling the “Love-Bite Killer.”

Here was no two-bit loner or galumphing yokel with a mean streak. Ted was the mediagenic 32-year-old former law student from Tacoma, Washington, his mother’s darling, and a Republican of faintly liberal stripe whose confident manner and political acumen, some thought, might have taken him to the governor’s mansion and beyond. Yet locked within him or so the state contended, was a depravity off the scale of human understanding. And he was on trial for the sickening penultimate spasm of an alleged four-year cross-country murder binge that had left dozens of young women violated, mangled and dead.

Bundy, charged prosecutor Larry Simpson, had come silently in the early morning hours of Super Bowl Sunday 1978 to the upstairs bedrooms of the Chi Omega sorority house on the campus of Florida State University in Tallahassee. There, with the agitated purposefulness of a shark in feeding frenzy, he hunted from room to room with an oak club.

He fled before the urge was spent, but in a scant few minutes two girls were murdered and two others lay battered senseless. One victim was found with her brain exposed from a blow to her forehead. He had sodomized the other dead girl with a Clairol hair spray bottle. Evidence showed that at the moment of her death, he bit at her right nipple, nearly tearing it from her breast. Then he rolled her over and sank his teeth twice into her left buttock, leaving a jagged wound.

Paramedics led one of the stunned survivors from her bed holding a plastic pail beneath her chin to catch the gush of blood from her shattered mouth.

Then, as the police arrived at this scene of carnage, there came a report from less than three blocks away; another sleeping coed had been savaged in her duplex apartment. She would survive, but only because the furious thumping of her attacker’s club had been loud enough to awaken her neighbors, who frightened the assailant away.

A month later, on February 15, 1978, Ted Bundy was captured in Pensacola, Florida. He was charged with the Chi Omega slaughter, and subsequently also indicted for the kidnap and murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach, a Lake City, Florida, schoolgirl, whom he’d abducted six days before his arrest.

A jury would conclude that Ted killed her and then dumped her partially clad body under an abandoned hog shed, where it was found nearly two months later. It was the unofficial surmise of some forensic experts that Kimberly’s throat had been slit and that a knife had been taken to her genital organs.

The man who committed these outrages had been regarded by those who believed they knew him as sincere, bright, often courtly around women. He had a high intelligent forehead and a straight patrician nose inherited from his mother. Under even brows that he sometimes plucked, his expressive eyes could be a gentle blue. Together with a sensitive mouth, they created the illusion of depth to his nature. More than once a woman used the term “beautiful” to describe Ted Bundy.

Ted’s male friends admired him; they detected a power in him. Older men marked Bundy for his solid, conventional turn of mind, and his look of purpose. Several of them treated Ted as if he were a likable and deserving nephew or a younger brother.

His case or cases shocked these people terribly. Long before a national audience was fascinated and mystified by Bundy’s story, Ted’s friends in Washington State, and then Utah, were incredulous at local news reports alleging that he was a serial killer, an incubus who alone and undetected had murdered untold numbers of innocent girls.

At first his supporters clung to the belief that some dreadful error had been made. Yet an unmistakable pattern finally did emerge, a pattern of sudden death and sorrow wrought by a man of outward gentility and hideous covert longings.

So diabolically crafty had he been in his first years of killing that what was known of the deaths was more guess and inference than anything else. From the few bones that were found, it appeared that the girls had been strangled or bludgeoned, or both. They were all young, and most of them were college girls. He often stalked them first, and then approached them on a pretext. In a matter of seconds, they were gone. Only one young woman was known to have escaped him, and the circumstances of that assault suggested he silenced his prey quickly once they were within his power.

He often drove hundreds of miles with their dead or unconscious bodies in his car, and then stripped and dumped the girls at pre-selected forest sites. Sometimes he returned several times to visit their remains and to relive what he’d done to them. By the time most of them were found, they were totally decomposed. Their skulls (if he didn’t keep them as souvenirs) as well as their skeletons some showing telltale striations left by animal teeth were often strewn for several hundred yards. What little soft-tissue evidence was left suggested rape and mutilation. The victims’ caved-in skulls attested to his incredible fury.

Had Ted Bundy fit the public’s sex-killer stereotype, the readily identifiable lunatic, these tragedies might not have provoked the terror that they did. But as one of Bundy’s friends later explained to me, “Ted was one of us.” He shattered the comfortable preconceptions about the sort of person capable of such monstrosities, presenting the world a figure both gross to contemplate and wholesome to behold; a likable, lovable homicidal mutant.

Yet even this perception of Ted was false, or at best superficial. All it did was recognize in horror and fascination that the stereotype is a vain assumption. “People,” said Bob Dekle, the Florida assistant state attorney who prosecuted Bundy for the murder of Kim Leach, “think a criminal is a hunchbacked, cross-eyed little monster slithering through the dark, leaving a trail of slime. They’re human beings.”

But within Ted Bundy that slithering hunchback did exist, residing behind what one eminent psychiatrist termed a sociopath’s “mask of sanity.” The mask is a fabrication and nothing more, but it is generally impenetrable. In Ted, the cross-eyed creature lurked on a different plane of existence, and could only be seen by means of a tautology; you had to infer it before it could be found.

Thus, the only doctor who did not assume Ted Bundy was a killer was also the only doctor not to conclude he was mentally disturbed. Once the assumption of guilt was made, nearly all the classic criteria of Antisocial Personality Disorder were identified and duly noted in him; violence, disregard for truth and social norms, thieving, impulsivity, inability to feel guilt or remorse and all the rest. But before that time, no one could see Ted’s behavior for what it was, because no one could see behind the mask. Ted alone and only partially understood the hunchback.

It allowed him to hide reality from others, and to deny it to himself. It also conferred on Bundy a preternatural power to manipulate, a capacity whose affect was akin to magic. It was this power that made him such an effective killer, and so impossible to track down. It was a key to his two successful escapes from Colorado jails.

And he used it to bind women to him. Over the years, several would be physically intimate with Bundy (happily), and many more wished they could be. He inspired passionate love and hopeless love, such as the sort felt by his wife, Carole Boone, whom Bundy cruelly encouraged to believe him innocent until just before his 1989 execution. Boone married Bundy after he was condemned to death we helped engineer the courtroom coup and later bore him a daughter.

The press stories about Ted stressed his apparent normalcy, his intellect, his attractiveness, his Republicanism. They didn’t report he was a compulsive nail biter and nose picker, that he was no genius (IQ: 124) that he was at best a fair student in college and a failure in law school, that he was poorly read, that he frequently mispronounced words and that he stuttered when nervous and had acquired only a surface sophistication. Against a backdrop of mass insane homicide, Ted instead emerged as a variety of criminal genius, a nearly fictive character (once again like an actor) who wasn’t stereotypically a loner or a loser because he didn’t look like one and so must be something else: Evil Incarnate, the Devil’s issue.

Even the closer profiles of him, some well researched (and one by an older female acquaintance with an active imagination) were suffused with a kind of awe at his works.

Extensive articles appeared in the Reader’s Digest, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan and elsewhere. Seven or eight books (we’ve done two) have appeared. All attempted with varying degrees of success to fathom the essential mystery of the man, and each found a different Theodore Robert Bundy: the Killer Next Door, the Deliberate Stranger, the Stranger Beside Me (an unintentional instance of irony) and the Phantom Prince.

Each book entertained the possibility, or concluded, that Ted was in some way deranged. Each offered evidence of this and whatever alleged insights the author felt compelled to share. Ultimately, however, each writer had to confront unaided Ted’s unlit interior realm, his Golgotha. At its edge, each was foiled as we were. As we were, that is, until the day we met the hunchback.

Hugh and I followed a tortuous route to this confrontation, a journey that began in 1978 with a call from Kathy Robbins, my agent. Kathy told me that Ted Bundy, the noted alleged murderer, wanted to tell his story in a book.

At the time, I was working for Business Week magazine. Years before, I had covered several murders and kidnappings while working for Newsweek magazine, most notably the 1973 Houston, Texas, case of homicidal pedophile Dean Corll, the notorious Candy Man, who with two young accomplices, tortured and murdered as many as thirty small boys. Serial killers, however, were hardly my forte.

After some reflection, I called Hugh in Dallas, where he was then based as chief investigator for the ABC newsmagazine 20/20. I had worked for Aynesworth in Houston when he was the Newsweek bureau chief there. He had assigned me to the Corll case; through it and several other stories Hugh taught me a good deal of what I know about reporting. Given the sheer complexity of the Bundy story unlike other such crime sagas it stretched across both time and geography and would involve reporting in several states Hugh was the perfect partner. His reportorial experience with criminals and cops extended back to the Clutter family murder case: Dick and Perry, and their 1959 slaughter of the west Kansas farm family that Truman Capote turned into his masterpiece, In Cold Blood. Aynesworth covered much of the bizarre story for UPI.

Without much hesitation, Hugh agreed to take on Ted’s story with me, both of us unprepared for where it would lead us.

The first surprise was mine:

Ted, it turned out, had grown up not five miles from where I was raised. We had a number of mutual acquaintances. Moreover, we were both born in Burlington, Vermont; Bundy in 1946, I in 1948. While still quite young, both of us were moved by our mothers from Vermont to Tacoma, Washington. Ted at the time was an only child. I was the youngest of four. Neither of us knew his natural father, although unlike Ted I was born within wedlock.

We both attended Tacoma public schools, were swept by the same local fads, later drank the same regional beer and knew the same kinds of girls. We were both blue-eyed and of the same general height, weight, frame and coloring. And we were both left-handed.

I once ran down these curiosities to my sister, Susan. “Well, have you ever killed anyone?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

She laughed. “That’s what Ted says.”

Thanks, Sue.

Ted contended that he was a victim himself, of incompetent defense attorneys, poisonous pretrial publicity, and manipulated evidence. He said he was caught in a monstrous tangle of circumstance that had led him from a life of promise and public spirit to unjust prosecution, imprisonment, and three death sentences. He was, he said again and again, innocent.

There had been disturbing elements in both his trials. Eyewitnesses waffled and were vague. The scientific evidence was at times equivocal and produced sharply differing opinions among the experts called by both sides to testify. No fingerprints were found. In fact, in the dozens of cases from Seattle to Florida in which the police have sought to implicate Bundy, there was not a single bit of physical evidence that incontrovertibly demonstrated his involvement in anything more sinister than car theft.

This question of evidence, we would learn, was Ted’s personal test of guilt and innocence, part of his complex mental apparatus that turned contention into belief, flimsy rhetoric into creed. We would soon have to deal with that.

But in the beginning, Bundy regaled me with stories of his boyhood (he once fantasized being adopted by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans), his academic career (he’d thought about going into law enforcement), his loves and his frustrations. His memory was acute for details of his jail breaks, the uneven course of his schooling, and his involvement with Washington state Republican politics. He spoke of his attorneys, his judges and his juries.

Ted recounted tales from the eight lockups he’d been in and shared the thousands of letters he received. Nuns, mental patients, housewives, lawyers, groupies all total strangers wrote to Ted all the time with offers of salvation, sex, money, friendship, forgiveness, and abomination. A man identifying himself as a medical doctor suggested that he and Ted switch brains. Another wanted to know if Bundy would agree to be put under suspended animation rather than electrocution; the idea was for doctors to harvest organs from the unconscious Bundy as needed, and for him to be available for vivisection experiments, as well.

Bundy felt this sort of material was sufficient to our purposes. In some ways, he was his own most avid fan. He envisioned an exciting, gossipy book with naughty details, just like the best-selling books about Hollywood celebrities. He did not want to discuss guilt except to deny it and he actively tried to dissuade Hugh from investigating the cases against him, ostensibly his main reason for working with us in the first place.

We were of a different mind. The content of the book, as far as we were concerned, would be determined by what we learned about Ted and not just what he wanted us to learn. We talked with him not just as his biographers, but also as licensed private investigators attached to his prospective appeals attorneys.

In that capacity, we would have been pleased to demonstrate Ted’s innocence. Instead, Hugh and I quickly concluded that Ted was every bit the killer his prosecutors and the police said he was possibly far more successful at serial murder than any of them realized. Our minimum victim count was 21 girls. It seemed possible that he killed twice that many. In view of that, we had no interest in producing the gauzy, self-serving narrative Ted desired.

Yet Bundy had nothing to gain by confessing to us. He had been twice tried and convicted of murder; he knew he was guilty, of course, and that nothing we would write would in any way prevent his ultimate date with Old Sparky, probably at least eight years away.

When I tried to turn our Death Row conversations to substantive issues, he hedged or lied outright to me. Not only did he have nothing exculpatory to offer us, not a single credible alibi for any of the killings, or even a supportable interpretation of the known facts, but he turned the interviews into a game of chutes and ladders, pleading a faulty memory at times, or lapsing into long, impenetrable silences.

Hugh and I soon wearied of this, and actively began to consider shutting down the project. Yet we had, over the weeks, taken note of two behavioral clues, distortions in Ted’s personality that suggested a novel avenue of approach.

Emotionally, Ted struck us both as a severe case of arrested development. From all that he said, and all that Hugh had learned of his past, he might as well have been a twelve-year-old, a precocious and bratty pre-adolescent. Whether a cause or a consequence of his condition, this apparent emotional retardation resulted in a diseased child’s mind directing the actions of an adult male body.

The second clear signal we saw was Ted’s profound capacity to dissociate. He was a compartmentalizer, and a superb rationalizer. His mind was a maze of walls. This, we would learn, was a key to understanding his entire (bizarre) mental edifice.

Taken together, the emotional immaturity and power of compartmentalization, we felt, could explain how Ted could live with while also denying his homicidal acts. It had required weeks to reach this level of understanding, which we achieved just as we were about to abandon Ted to his fantasies, his conceits, and his bizarrely selfless wife. However, in light of this new perspective, we decided to try one last stratagem.

The childishness was so extreme that we were reminded of youngsters who will deny wrongdoing even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. An example would be the crash of a picture window breaking, and the discovery of a baseball on the floor within.

Outside the shattered window stands 12-year-old Johnny, baseball bat in hand. Johnny clearly knows something about the shattered glass, but so fearful is he of taking blame that Johnny will stonewall any questions, adamantly insisting he knows nothing.

However, if you can eliminate the confessional “I,” and instead ask the young boy how he thinks the ball was propelled through the window, he might grasp that opportunity to tell the truth, obliquely, in a way that to his immature mind he is not actually accepting responsibility. Bundy himself even had proposed such a protocol at the point in his legal proceedings when possible plea bargains were discussed. Ted had suggested he simply be sent away for the balance of his life, a sentence he’d accept without further legal battles so long as he did not have to say, “I did it.”

So we re-packaged that proposal.

Why, I asked him, couldn’t he speculate on the nature of a person capable of doing what he had been accused (and convicted) of doing? The word confession didn’t arise. I reminded Ted that no one knew as much about the case as he, and for legitimate reasons. He had vast firsthand knowledge gained by virtue of being a suspect in all the killings, as well as his background as a former psychology student plus, of course, his intelligence.

Ted agreed to think over the idea, an immediate indication that we had guessed right about him. The next day, I returned to the prison and found Bundy more than just amenable to the idea; he embraced it enthusiastically.

This was March 27, 1980, the day I first met the hunchback.

Ted leaned forward in the tiny prison interview room, lit a cigarette, and grabbed my tape recorder, which he cradled in his lap. At first I didn’t understand what he was doing. In an even, professorial voice, Bundy began to speak of themes in modern society violence, the objectification of women, the disintegration of the home, anonymity, stress. When I interrupted, he shushed me and told me to be patient. This was going to take a while.

Ted at last turned from sociology to specifics, and began describing the killer. Within “this individual,” he explained, there dwelt a being Ted sometimes called it “an entity,” “the disordered self,” or “the malignant being.” The story of it’s beginnings came slowly, chronologically, a consistent tale of gathering sociopathy that nurtured itself on the negative energy around it.

Occasionally, Bundy would entertain a question, but for the most part I was there to pay for lunch, light his cigarettes, and change the tapes. He was chary on specifics, and skirted many cases where, I guessed, he feared that one slip could provide a vital link Bundy had no interest in being prosecuted for murder yet again. Yet, protected by his use of the third person, he forged ahead in detail to explain how thoughts on sex in general came to concentrate on sexual violence, how the “entity” used pornography to shape and direct itself, how the sickness within drew Bundy toward ever-increasing shows of violence, and how the killer managed to mask his disordered self from his unsuspecting intimates.

As Ted familiarized me with his private bedlam, he took pains lest I develop overly simplistic impressions. He wanted me to understand to the extent that I could. The killer did not suffer from a split personality, or schizophrenia, he emphasized. “It is truly more sophisticated than that,” Ted said.

He called it a “hybrid situation,” a sociopathology in which the “entity” was both in and of the killer, not some alien presence or second self, but a purely destructive power that grew from within. The several psychiatrists for whom we later played these tapes unanimously agreed there was no doubt that Ted’s descriptions were autobiographical. Critical elements of the third-person narrative could only have been drawn from first-person experience. Not trained to look for these keys, I still never doubted that Ted was telling me his story. When the hunchback emerged, the creature spoke directly to me.

Some of Ted’s revelations came wrapped in metaphor. Others he described with clinical detachment. But the common thread was Bundy’s own sense of discovery as he struggled to put the ineffable into words. It was as if in the telling that he, too, was seeing the hunchback’s genesis for the first time. “How do you describe the taste of bouillabaisse?” he asked rhetorically. “Some remember clams, others mullet.”

What a strange comparison.

He insisted that violence was never an end in itself, that the sex was almost perfunctory, and that to the extent it was possible the victims were spared pain. Not that the “entity” was moved by any humanitarian impulses; it was just that gratification lay not in the assault, but in possession the key to understanding Ted.

It was increasingly clear that a child’s mind had directed this homicidal rampage. The fantasies he described were crude, more typical of what you’d expect from a misinformed twelve-year-old than an adult. There will always be a question as to how early in his life Ted actually became a killer. He did sustain several adult sexual relationships at the same years that he also was killing, but as Bundy explained to me, the disordered self, the thing inside Ted that impelled him to kill, knew his victims through a warp of twisted perception. Only by means of his astounding capacity to compartmentalize had Bundy been able to keep the hunchback from raging through the mask and destroying him. When at last it did, Ted became the hunchback. No longer its protector, he and the entity fused.

I felt I was encountering a wholly novel form of derangement. Rather than being overwhelmed, defeated by his illness, Ted appeared to be inhabited by it. The two, man and hunchback, interacted. Above all, I saw elements of will, conscious will, taking part in the creation of this entity, as if Ted had wanted to become a killer.

Seeing this, knowing this about him as he sat knee to knee in a cramped and sweltering cubicle buried in the middle of the prison, I myself began to dissociate. A wall, a necessary wall of dispassion, went up in front of me as Bundy spoke in a low voice, holding the tape recorder close to him and darting glances at the guards who periodically looked in on us through a glass pane in the door.

There were times of intense concentration when his features would freeze and a distant, stony quality came into his voice, as if the hunchback had taken corporeal form. More than once, a horizontal white line, like a welt, appeared across his right cheek. It fascinated me because it didn’t follow the contour of his face at all. It was as if an invisible finger were digging a nail into his skin.

I was frightened at these moments, fearful for my own well-being, at least no more so than I am at the sight of a shark cruising around behind aquarium glass. Far more disconcerting were moments such as the time I pressed Ted for an explanation of how a victim was subdued. Bundy laughed heartily and remarked, “You, too, Steve, could make a successful mass killer. I really think you have it in you!”

Like it or not, I was bound to him, if for no other reason than Ted had allowed me to see the hunchback, taken me into his inner world. Such distilled horror, once seen, never leaves you.

After many weeks of this I could absorb no more. It was Hugh’s turn. In the coming months, Bundy would edge closer to an outright confession than he did with me, but not before the two of them fell to snarling at each other.

My role had been to go easy on Ted, befriend him, let Bundy dictate the pace, maintain control. Hugh played hardball, and Bundy was not at all happy with Aynesworth’s intolerance for elliptical thinking.

“What gratification would there be in having intercourse with a dead girl?” While a perfectly reasonable question, when Hugh posed it to Ted, who performed all sorts of sexual acts with dead girls, Bundy was manifestly displeased. Hugh, for his part, was constantly rankled by Ted’s weary sighs meant to convey his lofty impatience with this plain vanilla gumshoe. He dogged Ted with questions derived from my interviews with Bundy, and Ted bridled. “I’m not going into that,” he would say. “This is already too thinly disguised. I’ve gone further now than I wanted to.”

But that was to come. On that steamy June day in 1980 we walked with our briefcases toward the main gate and under the gaze of a guard holding a rifle high above us in the watchtower. We passed through an external sally port, in which one gate must close before the second one opens. After the inner gate creaked open and rumbled shut, a concrete walkway led to the double doors of the prison entrance itself, and behind the doors to a small waiting area. There we were greeted by a man at a glass-enclosed control panel.

His name was John Boutwell, and he was a twelve-year veteran of prison employment. Mr. Boutwell was responsible for checking our briefcases and identification. Generally, this took about ten minutes time enough to adjust to the prison’s incessant clangor and time enough to glance over the sports pages of the Gainesville Sun, which only rarely was not folded neatly on a shelf inside the booth.

John Boutwell was thorough. Routine had not dulled the sharp interest he took in our belongings, even to the point of politely asking to see the innards of our tape recorders. He always asked to see my private investigator’s license, despite a first-name familiarity. Never did he fail to compare me with my license photo and physical description printed on the front of the card.

Next, we approached a third barred gate, and prepared to pass through Boutwell’s metal detector. Change, pens, belts, keys, shoes, and even my glasses had to be removed. The aged machine could still be set fine enough to register the coin in a penny loafer.

Accompanied now by a guard, we walked through another clanging gate and proceeded down a long, yellowish-tan corridor with a linoleum floor waxed and buffed to a constant high gloss by the inmates. The walls were bare, and were it not for the constant sonic assault of banging metal gates echoing in every direction, this part of the prison could have been mistaken for some functional and well-maintained wing of a municipal building.

Up a few steps and through another gate controlled by yet another prison employee in another glass-enclosed booth and we arrived at the center of the prison a four-way intersection called Grand Central. To the right we could see through floor-to-ceiling bars at the cellblocks opening onto either side of a long spacious hallway. At the very end stood Old Sparky behind a locked door. Straight ahead was the prison laundry. And behind us were the five locked gates made of a specialty steel so hard and costly to manufacture that many states couldn’t afford to use it in new prison construction.

A crowd of inmates, mostly blacks on their way to work in the prison laundry, walked past us in silence. None appeared older than twenty-one. A white prisoner who had killed a cop was led in manacles by a guard who seemed half asleep. We turned left toward The Colonel’s office, a suite of rooms (also protected by steel gates) from which The Colonel oversaw prison security. Two of these rooms, each fitted with glass windows so that their occupants could easily be observed, were set-aside as conference areas for inmates and their attorneys and/or investigators. It was necessary to reserve these rooms days in advance.

Outside The Colonel’s office stood a bright yellow wire cage. Seated within it were seven inmates. Six were young blacks wearing blue prison-issue dungarees, which signified they were from general population and would not necessarily be spending the rest of their lives in this place. The white inmate wore blue dungarees, too, but also an apricot T-shirt over a gray sweatshirt. He was accustomed to the Florida heat. On his sockless feet were green plastic thongs.

“Hey, home boy!” Ted called to me as usual. “Where’ve you been?” He was affecting a heavy southern black accent. Ted had been waiting in the cage for more than two hours.

Generally I could tell within a few minutes whether it was going to be a productive day with Bundy. Any of a number of things might be going on with him. He could be depressed, stoned, angry, distracted or simply dull. This morning Ted was listless and grouchy; it was not likely to be a good day.

“Have you seen Carole?” he asked.

This was a recurring sore point among us. Ted’s wife lived on the edge of poverty in Gainesville, from where she and her teen-aged son Jamey drove to the prison each weekend to visit husband and stepfather. Bundy nagged at us constantly to stay in touch with Carole, and to keep her informed of our progress. While Boone could be good company she had a very quick wit Bundy was creating a difficult situation: Carole, who was sustained by her faith in Ted’s innocence, didn’t know the content of our discussion. She did know that Hugh and I believed Ted was guilty, which could make our meetings uncomfortable. Carole thought us to be contemptible fools, no better in her view than the police and prosecutors who had put her beloved Bunny on Death Row.

As it happened, that day I had a two-day-old note to Ted from Carole, which I handed over. He glanced at it, smiled briefly, and inquired as to my health. Consigned to his last address with three death penalties over his head, Bundy nevertheless concerned himself with what he regarded as my poor diet and drinking habits. We once wagered which of us would expire first. Ted owes me $50.

I allowed that I was fine, all things considered, and the three of us settled into a desultory chat that ranged from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign to Ted’s concerns over the moral climate in which his stepson Jamey was being raised. In this way we chewed up our two allotted hours, and then rose to leave. Ted was now Hugh’s responsibility; I had a head full of impressions to sort out, and scores of tapes to transcribe before I could start sketching out this difficult saga.

I did take one last look at Ted’s hands as we departed. They were thin, almost delicate, with slender tapering fingers and well-kept nails. Ted had recently broken himself of the habit of biting them. I wondered again at the frightening strength it had taken to bind ligatures so tightly that the rope and victim’s skin fused together. Where in Ted was the power behind those enormously damaging whacks of his oak club?

He had introduced the entity to us, tried to explain it, and then would finally collapse (or better, be transformed) under the pressure of confronting himself. But he would never be able to take Hugh and me that final step to comprehension of murder so grotesque as to defy imagination. We could never know the hunchback, and both of us like to think the limitation was ours. I heard all about it again and again and again as I transcribed those prison tapes. In time, we could retell it. We could give it context. But we could not get our minds around it. It was like the taste of bouillabaisse.

No one noticed that he was different, not like other children. His aunt Julia would later report some scary episodes with knives, but otherwise he looked and acted like other children. He believed in Santa Claus, hated vegetables, and sometimes-imagined ogres and scaly things crouching in his closet, waiting for night to fall.

But he was haunted by something else: a fear, a doubt sometimes only a vague uneasiness that inhabited his mind with the subtlety of a cat. He felt it for years and years, but he didn’t recognize it for what it was until much later. By then this flaw, the rip in his psyche, had become the locus of a cold homicidal rage.

He was born to a prim, modest department store clerk, the eldest of three daughters in the family of a Philadelphia nurseryman. Her story has always been that in 1946, fresh out of high school, she was seduced by Jack Worthington, a rakish veteran of the recent war, who hinted to her of an old-money pedigree. At least that’s what she claimed. Much later, family members would express open doubts about this story, directing a defense psychiatrist’s attention to Louise’s violent, possibly deranged, father, Samuel Cowell.

Whatever the truth, Louise was pregnant in an era not congenial to single young women in such a predicament. Nor was she insulated from her problem by family means. She braved her way through the first seven months of her term, before traveling north to the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. On November 24, 1946, she gave birth to her love child. Louise called him Theodore. She had always liked that name.

Just before his fourth birthday, Teddy and his mother left Philadelphia to join her uncle and his family in Tacoma, Washington. Ted told us that the move upset him. Either as a deliberate falsehood, or due to some trick of memory, he described his early days in Philadelphia as an idyll, saying he loved his grandfather Cowell and the comfortable old house where the family all lived together. He said he didn’t understand why he and Louise had to go live with great-uncle Jack, why Louise needed to get away, to start a new life. In light of what the family would later disclose, Ted’s recall becomes a mystery in itself.

He hated Tacoma at first. After Philadelphia, the Puget Sound mill town seemed raw and impermanent to him just a jumble of ugly brown and gray buildings on a hillside jutting out into the frigid salt water of Puget Sound. Ted would outgrow his initial distaste for his new home, but he never got over an arrogant disdain for anything he regarded as common. This attitude was linked to how he felt about himself, his deep self- doubt, and also to his later conviction that life had wronged him.

Jack Cowell was only a few years older than his niece, Louise, and Teddy always called him uncle. A music professor at Tacoma’s College of Puget Sound, Uncle Jack was a man of both accomplishment and refinement. His gleaming dark piano, the classical music that filled the house, his air of cultivation, drew Teddy to him. Early on, he decided to pattern himself on Uncle Jack.

Louise went to work as a secretary at the Council of Churches office in downtown Tacoma. There she was befriended by a female coworker who coaxed the tentative newcomer into attending young adult nights at the First Methodist Church. One evening, Louise was introduced to John Culpepper Bundy, known as Johnnie, a soft-spoken native North Carolinian who recently had mustered out of the Navy in nearby Bremerton.

Johnnie’s drawl made him seem a little slow, a serious drawback as far asTeddy would be concerned. He was unlettered, and his prospects in life were those of a modest southern country boy. With his Navy hitch over, Johnnie had decided to stay in the northwest. He found a job as a cook in a Veterans Administration hospital a few miles south of Tacoma. It turned out to be his life’s work.

From the start, Johnnie and Louise saw something special in each other. Johnnie was steady and uncomplicated, and he fulfilled Louise’s first and ultimate requirement by accepting both her and her son. She was also drawn to his mild disposition, although her son Teddy would later learn the consequences of provoking his quiet stepfather.

For Johnnie, Louise was a gentle, God-fearing woman whose history began on the night they met. He didn’t ask questions, and Louise did not go into details. From what Ted told us of his boyhood, he seems to have tried to block Johnnie, the interloper, from his mind. Clearly, Johnnie’s presence upset him. Ted remembered staging a scene in a Sears store parking lot and wetting his pants. He conceded that this tantrum and others probably were a result of his jealousy over Louise, and his fear that Johnnie’s advent would further disrupt his world.

Louise miscarried the summer following her May 1951 marriage to Johnnie. Then a daughter, Linda, was born in the last part of 1952. Here was another confusing mystery for Teddy. He didn’t know where babies came from or how they were made. But he knew it had something to do with Johnnie, and he believed throughout his entire life that Louise suffered a good deal at Linda’s birth. According to his mother, however, the pregnancy was uneventful.

Ted also told us that it was around this time that his parents broke him of the habit of crawling into bed with them when he grew frightened in the middle of the night.

The earliest evidence of Ted’s behavior outside the family comes from his first grade teacher, Mrs. Oyster. According to Louise, Teddy was very fond of Mrs. Oyster. On his report card, the teacher wrote Louise that Teddy grasped the numbers one through twenty, knew the meaning of one hundred, was at ease before the class, and expressed himself well. Ted told us he was “unsettled” when Mrs. Oyster left to have a baby and was replaced by a substitute teacher.

However much this affected him, he was definitely upset by his second-grade teacher, who he described as a doctrinaire Catholic named Miss Geri. “She was about five feet tall,” Ted recalled, “with the shape and menacing attitude of a cannon ball about ready to explode” Teddy Bundy, a Protestant, felt Miss Geri discriminated against him; and he vividly recollected the day he said she broke a ruler over his knuckles for having socked a classmate in the nose during a playground scuffle.

Ted was about seven or eight at this point, a not-unusual child from all appearances, and so far only minimally affected by his flaw the presence of which he could only sense through the uneasiness he often felt. He sometimes escaped into fantasy, particularly the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans adoption fantasy, a key feature of which was having his own pony and everything else he wanted. His first gesture of defiance was passive, occasioned by the arrival of a black family on the previous all-white block where the Bundy’s lived. There were fears that property values would be hurt. Teddy knew that Johnnie was particularly concerned. So he went out of his way to make friends with one of the black children, he told me. “That house,” Bundy recalled, “was a warm friendly place, fairly bursting with clouds of pungent odors emerging from the kitchen. Smells that never came from my parents’ house and that I just found terribly exotic.”

At home, Ted felt deprived. He was jealous of his cousin John, Uncle Jack’s boy, and contemptuous of his own family’s modest station in life. Ted told me he was mortified by the sensible Ramblers Johnnie drove, so much so that he recalled being “humiliated” to be seen in them. Likewise, from the time he could first walk and talk, little Teddy always pulled his mother to the most expensive racks in clothing stores. The preoccupation with material possessions would stay with the boy and intensify. Even the little Teddy was deeply class-conscious.

With the birth of another child, brother Glenn, in February of 1954, the Bundy’s had outgrown their second house. The following summer they moved to a roomier tract house that would be large enough to accommodate the present family, plus the final two arrivals: another daughter, Sandra, in 1956, and a son, Richard, in 1961.

Teddy found this new neighborhood decidedly unappealing. The tract had been thrown up with little regard to esthetics. It looked to Teddy as if every bit of vegetation had been scraped away, leaving ragged clumps of Scotch broom to invade where graceful firs once towered above.

He became close friends with two boys in his new neighborhood, and they would continue to be his nearest pals all the way through high school.

One was a gregarious kid named Terry Storwick. The other friend was a roly-poly youngster named Warren Dodge. Terry and Warren both found Teddy to be great company, even if he was a little aloof at times brittle, even. There was also the matter of Teddy’s temper. Behind his house in the field of Scotch broom, the boys played guerrilla war games, using as weapons spear ferns which, when lopped off a foot or so above the ground made perfect missiles to fling at one another. One afternoon in the heat of combat, Warren caught Teddy just below the eye with the clotty, fibrous root that formed the nose of the fern missile. In an instant, Teddy was on top of Warren, his fist cocked. Terry and the other boys pulled him off.

The incident stayed with Terry Storwick, not because the show of anger was so unusual for an overexcited kid, but because the child was Teddy Bundy. “Ted kept himself separate from situations,” Terry told me. “So it was something to see him get involved. When he got hit in the eye, he definitely got involved.”

Ted’s short fuse got him into other boyhood scrapes, too. At Boy Scout camp, he shoved a plate in another scout face for having hatcheted a small tree. On another scout outing, he tangled with a kid named John Moon. “Bundy hit him over the head with a stick,” Terry Storwick remembered. “It was a very deliberate attack on another person. The way John Moon described it, he was attacked from behind.”

Storwick continued: “It was real easy to see when Ted got mad. His eyes turned just about black. I suppose that sounds like something out a cheap novel, but you could see it. He had blue eyes that were kind of flecked with darker colors. When he got hot they seemed to get less blue and darker. It didn’t have to be a physical affront, either. Someone would say something, and you could just see it in his face. The dark flecks seemed to expand.”

Like most mothers, it was Louise, not Johnnie, who took the direct hand in raising the Bundy family. “We didn’t talk a lot about real personal matters,” said Ted. “Certainly never about sex or any of those things. My mom has trouble talking on intimate, personal terms. There’s this logjam of feeling in her that she doesn’t open up and explain.

“We never spoke about her childhood, aside from the fact that she grew up in my grandfather’s house with my aunts and my grandma. And that she was extremely successful in high school. The head of everything! I read her yearbook. She was president of this, and president of that, a terribly popular person. Her big disappointment was that she had one B in three years of high school.”

Ted reflected for a minute, concentrating hard on this issue. “Then, I don’t know,” he went on at last. “Something intervened. I can remember her having some resentment that there was only one scholarship offered in her school, and the richest girl got it. Of course, my mom didn’t have any money to go to school. And she didn’t think it was very equitable that the other girl, who had straight A’s, got the scholarship. Even years and years later, I detected a strong sorrow in her voice when she told me about it.”

Ted described his own youth as solitary. One of his favorite boyhood pastimes was listening to late-night talk radio. Alone in the dark of his room, he would pretend he was part of a special and secret world. “I’d really get into it,” he told me. “As people would be calling in and speaking their minds, I’d be formulating questions as if they were talking to me. It gave me a great deal of comfort to listen to them, and often it didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference what they were talking about. Here were people talking, and I was eavesdropping on their conversations.”

As Bundy matured physically, he developed into a well-coordinated athlete, and a handsome young man. Yet the mental maturity was not there, and never would come. Ted was extremely self-conscious. He considered himself too skinny to compete with the bigger boys. “I attempted to get on the school basketball team and a couple of baseball teams, and I failed,” he said. “It was terribly traumatic for me. I just didn’t know what to do. I thought it was something personal.”

He turned to solitary sports. Terry Storwick remembered. “Ted really took to skiing. He found the money somehow to buy good equipment. He was pretty serious about it, and he considered himself a pretty good skier.” Bundy’s costly ski gear was mostly stolen, a fact that would have shocked family friends who knew the eldest Bundy boy as a regular churchgoer with his parents, vice-president of the Methodist Youth Fellowship, and a promising teen-ager interested in a career in law enforcement. They could not have imagined the Ted who, along with several other boys, devised a crude ski-lift ticket forgery scheme that involved the careful bleaching and dying of the color-coded passes. They were never caught.

Far more ominous, however, was the bitterness and hostility, also unsuspected, seething inside him. One day, as Ted explained to me, he was rummaging through some of his parents’ papers, where he found his birth certificate. “Unknown” was typed in under “Father’s Name.” According to an enigmatic letter he later sent us, “It was not an agonizing occasion. I saw it more as an opportunity to make a decision about who I was.”

Bundy never elaborated on what that decision was. He wrote that he took a long walk and came home reconciled to this new knowledge. “It may have gone something like this: `I am who I am, and what I am I owe to my Mom, Dad, Granddad and others who raised me.’ (Not necessarily profound, but not a bad beginning for a young kid.) Why be concerned about someone I never knew? My Mom loved me enough to give birth to me, care for me and love me. This seemed to be more than enough.”

However, Bundy’s onetime fiancée, Liz Kendall (a pseudonym) reported the discovery a little differently. Ted’s cousin John taunted him about his illegitimacy, Kendall recounted in her book, Phantom Prince. According to her, Bundy at first angrily refused to believe his cousin, and would not believe him until John produced the birth certificate himself. Kendall wrote that Bundy was furious with his mother for causing him such humiliation.

Terry Storwick’s unclouded recollections probably are as reliable as any. He is the first person with whom Ted shared his knowledge. “Ted never told me how he discovered he was illegitimate,” Storwick recollected. “We were in high school and were down at my parents’ beach place talking about some personal subject. It might have had to do with how he was arguing with his dad. He just said, `Of course, you know that’s not my real father.’ It was a bell ringer! A lot of things fell into place for me right then and there. I said, ‘Well, why is your name Bundy?’ He went on to tell me that he’d been born in Philadelphia. Very vague stuff. The rat didn’t marry his mother and such. I think he was wondering how I was going to think about him. It seemed to me that this was kind of like being adopted, or something. So, I said. ‘There are people who love you now.’ I think I said I thought it was no big deal.”

“But he said something to the effect that for him it made a big difference. This was important to him. It wasn’t just something to be swept under the rug. When I made light of his situation, he said, ‘Well, it’s not you that’s a bastard.’ He was bitter when he said it.”

Following discovery of his illegitimacy, Ted’s attitude toward Johnnie hardened into outright defiance. “Ted’s mother loved him very much,” Terry Storwick told us. “I’m sure that she protected him from Johnnie’s temper. It wasn’t that Johnnie was an unreasonable man; I think his temper was a reaction to Ted’s animosity.”

The schism between man and boy was expressed in Ted’s sudden refusal to call Johnnie “Dad,” after having done so for years. He began calling Johnnie “Father,” and then, finally, “John.” “You know, Ted was way ahead of Johnnie when it came to intellectual things,” said Storwick. “He could just talk him into holes in the ground, leave him no way out but to use his body. Johnnie is a man of few and simple words, and Ted was his match by the time he was in the sixth grade. 

A couple of times I thought his dad was going to kill him. The anger was there, you know. “Back then, John Bundy was a wiry little sucker, well muscled. I remember one particular occasion at their lake place. He was out cutting wood or something. Ted was, I guess, showing off for me smart assin’. John took a swing at him. If he would have connected, he would have laid Ted flat on his ass. He had a temper as quick as Ted’s.”

The first sign of serious problems in Ted’s inner world was a sudden and complete halt to his social development. It was a quiet crisis, easily missed by others, but acutely perplexing, and painful, to him. “In junior high school, everything was fine,” he told me. “Nothing that I can recall happened that summer before my sophomore year to stunt me, or otherwise hinder my progress. But I got to high school and I didn’t make any progress.” He sounded genuinely perplexed. “How can I say it? I’m at a loss to describe it even now. Maybe I didn’t have the role models at home that could have aided me in school. I don’t know. But I felt alienated from my old friends. They just seemed to move on, and I didn’t. I don’t know why, and I don’t know if there is an explanation. Maybe it’s something that was programmed by some kind of genetic thing. In my early schooling, it seemed like there was no problem in learning what the appropriate socials behaviors were. It just seemed like I hit a wall in high school.”

I asked Bundy if he took these issues to his mother or a counselor to discuss them. “It never crossed my mind,” he answered. “I didn’t think anything was wrong, necessarily. I wasn’t sure what was wrong and what was right. All I knew was that I felt a bit different.”

For Terry Storwick, his friend’s social withdrawal was all the more mysterious for the fact that Ted was so bright and amusing. “He was a lampooner. He had the darts, you know,” Storwick said. “He was very funny, and very much on the mark. To me, he just seemed wonderfully subtle. He could make me laugh with a gesture, or one or two words, where I’d need sentences and pictures and diagrams to get the same thing across. I took this to be a token of his intelligence.

“He didn’t have the confidence, however, to follow it up. He could have been a really strong influence on a lot of people if he had had the self confidence to go along with the intellect. It seemed to me that he was just tongue-tied in social situations. It didn’t have to be girls; meeting new friends, meeting new people from another school was a difficult thing for him to do.”

Decades later, Storwick could see in his mind’s eye Ted “walking down the hall with that half-aggressive, half-hopeful expression. I’m sure he was slighted a lot. At least in my circle of friends, it was important to be popular. We’d be standing in the hallway and someone would come up to me and say, `Hey, we’re going to have a party Friday. Can you come over?’ Ted would be standing there and he wouldn’t be asked. It wasn’t that he was singled out for ridicule, but you have to remember that Ted was a very sensitive person very sensitive.”

Ted Bundy had but a single date throughout his three years at Woodrow Wilson High School in Tacoma. He told me that he would have liked to go out more, but he never could tell if a girl liked him, so he assumed she did not. “I’m particularly dense, or insensitive, not knowing when a woman’s interested in me,” he explained. “I’ve been described as handsome, and all this shit, or attractive. I don’t believe it. It’s a built-in insecurity. I don’t believe I’m attractive.”

Sex baffled him. When his buddies talked about girls and what they were doing with them, or wished they were doing with them, or lied about what they were doing with them, Ted listened without comprehension, he told me. “I had trouble grasping any of it. It kind of went over my head.”

He felt at ease in only two environments the ski slopes and the classroom. “I spoke up in class,” he explained. “It’s a formalized setting, and the ground rules are fairly strict. Your performance is measured by different rules than what happens when everybody’s peeling off into little cliques down the hallway.” Because he was articulate and cultivated an image of serious-mindedness to hide his loneliness, Bundy was regarded as scholarly by the other students at Wilson. Yet for all his seeming seriousness of purpose, his grades were only good, not great. He left high school with just above a B average, good enough to earn Ted admission to Uncle Jack’s school (by then renamed the University of Puget Sound), together with a small scholarship.

Outwardly, conditions seemed ideal for this bright, attractive young man to step forward into the world, to overcome his shyness, and to seize this opportunity. Few people at Wilson High would have been surprised to hear that he eventually went on to law school, and became a rising star in the local Republican firmament.

The closer people felt to Ted, the surer that likelihood seemed. Yet the next thing that many of his boyhood acquaintances would know of the diffident boy with the half-hopeful expression was that police suspected him of a string of hideous murders. They’d sort back through their memories, trying to recall something odd or different about him, something identifiable in his past that would help explain this tragedy. They couldn’t. Not even Bundy’s closest friend, Terry Storwick, can connect the Ted he knew with what Ted became. As we spoke, Terry’s eyes teared up at times with the pain of memory. Aloof though Ted was, the two boys felt a bond, even a debt on Terry’s part; Ted once saved Terry’s niece, Wendy, from drowning.

“There is no way,” Storwick said, his voice breaking, “that the person I grew up with could have done the things they said he did. And there’s no way for me to reconcile the image of the mass murderer and the kid who came running to my back porch when the first snow fell in November, all excited to go skiing. In between those two images, something happened. Definitely, something popped.”

Ted’s critical challenge from his teen years onward was the perfec­tion and maintenance of a credible public persona, his mask of sanity. Lacking true adult emotions, he had to put on the look of normalcy while inside him the tumult raged unabated.

He underwent a process of mock acculturation, like an alien life form acquiring appropriate behavior through mimicry and artifice. It was painful and confusing to him, each frequent misstep a stab at the child bewildered by his inability to handle the simplest adult rela­tionships. “I didn’t know what made things tick,” Ted told me. “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.”

His happiest moment during his first year of college came when he bought a ’58 Volkswagen bug for $400. The little car meant freedom to Ted. He could get in it and drive and be alone whenever he wanted, a reprise of his early boyhood when he and his collie, Lassie, would disappear out into the trees for hours. Ted loved VWs. He would own two in his life; the second one, a light brown ’68, eventually would yield evidence of his secret life.

Ted lived at home for his freshman year. “He got along fine, as far as I could tell,” his mother remembered. “He got good grades that first year.” Louise was not alarmed that her son “never got into the social life of the school at all. He’d come home, study, sleep, and go back to school.”

By Ted’s account, “my social life was a big zero. I spent a great deal of time with myself. It was a lonely year for me, and it was worse because I didn’t have my old neighborhood buddies around.” He declined to join a fraternity and can still recall how cowed he felt in the presence of self-assured, hearty fraternity brothers. Al­though he was rushed, he wouldn’t join because “I didn’t feel socially adept enough. I didn’t feel I knew how to function with those people. I felt terribly uncomfortable.”

Ted only spoke when spoken to, or in class. He made no new friends. For all intents, he was an invisible man that year. Instinctively, Bundy turned to the classroom as his stage for build­ing an identity. He had found in high school how easy it was to appear scholarly; the ability and willingness to speak up often were enough to set him apart. But freshman survey courses taken in large, impersonal lecture halls offered scant opportunity to be anything but anonymous and small, the way Ted felt most of the time. He was very disappointed.

Then one day he attended an international affairs lecture on main­land China and immediately was struck with the notion that here was an area where people might take notice of him without threatening him. He didn’t think about how much work the subject might entail. Ted saw the Chinese language as exotic, glamorous, a bright cloak in which to wrap himself.

The following autumn, he enrolled as a transfer student at the Uni­versity of Washington’s first-rate Asian studies program in Seattle. As at UPS, he did not see himself measuring up to Fraternity Row, so Ted took a room in a dorm. But he was right about his new major; it did set him apart from the run of the undergraduate population at the huge university. He threw himself into the arcana of ideograms and earned high grades. He acquired a little restaurant Chinese, learned to use chopsticks, and actually made a few friends.

He had made a start at fabricating the public Ted: scholarly, bright, witty, serious-minded, wholesome, and handsome. He developed an air of cool self-assurance, a look that women could not resist. Ted lured females the way a lifeless silk flower can dupe a honey bee. At least twice in his life, the beguilement would endure. With other females, like his first true girlfriend, the spell eventually shattered.

Marjorie Russell (a pseudonym) was a coed at the University of Washington. A lissome beauty nearly six feet tall, she was wealthy, poised, and worldly. Marjorie was from a class into which Ted previously had enjoyed only upward glimpses. Moreover, she knew what she wanted out of life. She was, in short, everything that Ted Bundy was not and wished to become. He showed her off like a possession to his old friends.

Warren Dodge was impressed. “I was kind of surprised that Ted had some­thing like her with him,” Dodge remembered. He soon took her home to meet his mother. “She was very nice,” said Louise. “At that time, Ted was very serious about her.”

At twenty years of age, Bundy was no more sexually advanced than he’d been in high school when the other boys’ talk had gone over his head. Certainly any lust he felt toward Marjorie at this juncture was well hidden. They spent nights together, but he did not make any sexual advances. Ted was content to be boyish and charming, as if introducing carnality to the relationship would somehow taint it.

The summer following his sophomore year he spent down amidst the gum trees and palms and tiled roofs of Stanford University, where he was enrolled in an intensive Chinese language program. He had gone to Stanford mainly to please and impress Marjorie, but it was a mistake.

He was accustomed to being alone, but he was not ready to be alone away from home. Ted missed familiar things. Quickly, he fell behind the other students, and that made it all the harder for him to socialize with them. And there was Marjorie. “I found myself thinking about standards of success that I just didn’t seem to be living up to,” he told me.

At Stanford, Ted’s immaturity was exposed, a particularly hateful experience for him because he had now failed in the one arena the classroom that had always been his refuge.

Then Marjorie dropped him. As she later told investigators, what had been his winning boyishness now struck her as puerility. She wearied of his fawning attitude and she was tired of his games. Ted would often sneak up behind her, tap her on her shoulder, and then vanish. That annoyed her. She advised him to grow up.

Ted’s brother Glenn recalled that Marjorie “screwed him up for a while. He came home and seemed pretty upset and moody. I’d never seen him like that before. He was always in charge of his emotions.” Louise Bundy remembered something similar. “As I understand it, she told him she couldn’t wait around for Ted to have it made. If she found somebody else, she’d go that way. He was pretty hurt by that.”

Ted did not understand what had happened to him, why the mask he had been using had failed him. This first tentative foray into the sophisticated world had ended in disaster. It would usher in another period of isolation in which he would brood on his situation, keeping to himself until a better, more workable mask could be fashioned. The rest of 1967 was, as he remembered, “absolutely the pits for me the lowest time ever.”

He gave up on Chinese altogether after hav­ing wasted a year in its study. For no better reason than Marjorie having once said that she admired the architect’s role played by Al­bert Finney in the movie “Two for the Road,” Ted applied to the Uni­versity of Washington’s architectural program. The school was filled. So, on the advice of a university counselor, he turned to urban plan­ning and failed at that, too. That fall, it was all that he could do to go to class; to concentrate on the material was out of the question. The professors’ words meant nothing. His class notes were indecipherable. The university envi­ronment had turned hostile, frightening. He developed a phobic dread of encountering Marjorie on campus. By Christmas, he with­drew from school.

He saved a little money, borrowed more, then took off on a flying trip around the country. Ted went to California, to Aspen, Colorado, and back to Philadelphia to visit his grandparents. Dogged by his feelings of worthlessness and failure, he came home to Seattle in the spring of 1968, still unable to face a return to school. He took a small apartment and went to work as a busboy in a hotel dining room as well as a night stocker in a Safeway store.

“I absorbed all this uncertainty,” Ted told me, “and all this confu­sion about why I was doing what I was doing, wondering where I was going, all by myself. Because I’m not the kind of person who social­ized a lot, there was no way to let off steam.”

Following his return to Seattle, he made a friend named Richard, a sometime thief and drug user whose life at the fringe of society fasci­nated Ted. At age twenty-one, Ted hadn’t been exposed to an outlaw element more sinister than the circle of ski-lift ticket counterfeiters he knew in high school. Now he would encounter the possibility of illicit excitement on a higher plane.

Stealing, especially shoplifting, came naturally to Ted. The unso­cialized child within him wanted things expensive, shiny things such as rich people owned and Ted had no adult compunctions about acquiring them illegally. Moreover, theft was an adventure, a game, a kind of advanced variation on hide-and-seek, not unlike tap­ping people on the shoulder and then disappearing.

One night, Ted and Richard sneaked down to a beach near Seattle where landslides had pulled down a cliff-side house. They were after anything they could find. “We went down there in the dead of night,” Ted told me. “The house was full of shit! I still have some luggage from there. It was really thrilling.”

Ted was not a thief in any ordinary sense; he didn’t take money and he wouldn’t take merchandise for the purpose of selling it. The need was much closer to kleptomania, and it was overpowering. Yet he was never once caught for shoplifting anything, a remarkable fact in light of the number of thefts he made and the way he went about them. Even professional shoplifters, people schooled in the most refined techniques of their trade, customarily have long arrest re­cords.

His first principle was anonymity. Once he decided what he wanted, he would put on his good suit and comb his hair he wanted to look presentable and forgettable then he’d down two or three quick beers. “I’d drink just to pump myself up,” he told me. “I felt I wouldn’t have any inhibitions. I didn’t want to be looking over my shoulder and appear nervous. That’s important.”

He stole a television, a stereo, home furnishings, cookware, cloth­ing, and artwork things that he wanted to own. Typical of his ex­peditions was the day he decided he wanted a tree for his apartment. “I walked into the side entrance of this place and went into their greenhouse,” he said. “I saw this Benjaminus tree and picked it up. This fucker was eight feet tall, heavy, and a little bulky. But I just walked out the side gate, lifted the thing up and down through the sunroof of the car. There was a good five feet of Benjaminus sticking out of the top as I drove away.”

Around the time he was burgling the house on the beach, Ted bumped into an old acquaintance from high school. They talked for a bit on the street corner, then the friend casually mentioned that if Ted was interested he might latch on in some capacity working for Art Fletcher, a black small-town city councilman who then was contend­ing to become the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor. Sev­eral mutual acquaintances were already working for Fletcher.

Ted Bundy jumped at the chance. “I just pitched right in,” he told me. “Oh, boy! Here we go again! I hadn’t had a social life for some time. It just felt good to belong again, to instantly be part of some­thing.”

If Ted Bundy the thief inhabited one corner of his personality, then elsewhere there resided Ted Bundy the committed Republican. Ever since high school, when he had delivered a Rockefeller nomination speech at a mock GOP convention, Ted had been drawn to politics. In his senior year, he had joined the re-election effort of a local Re­publican congressman and had loved the experience.

“The reason I loved politics was because here was something that allowed me to use my talents and assertiveness,” he said. “You know, the guy who’d raise his hand in class and speak up. And the social life came with it. You were accepted. You went out to dinner with people. They invited you to dinner. I didn’t have the money or the tennis-club membership or what­ever it takes to really have the inside track. So politics was perfect. You can move among the various strata of society. You can talk to people to whom otherwise you’d have no access.”

He immediately quit his jobs and went to work as a full-time Fletcher volunteer. Ted’s finances were strained, but it was well worth it to him. It was a time when the bulk of committed, politically conscious young people were part of the peace movement. Ted Bundy, however, was foursquare for the Establishment. He had no intention of aligning himself with the outsiders, the dispossessed, or the poor.

That fall, Ted had the great good fortune to be named Art Fletcher’s official driver. Had he remained in college, Ted would have been starting his junior year. But he had been so traumatized by Marjorie and his collapse in Chinese that he was still two years away from being able to successfully resume his studies.

He was still a virgin, too, and might have remained so indefinitely if sex had required him to make the first move. However, one night while away from Seattle on campaign business he drank himself into a near stupor at a GOP official’s house in eastern Washington. When Ted drank, he often got drunk. That night, he had to be taken to someone’s home to sleep it off. As he remembers the night, he was installed in a downstairs bedroom, only semi-conscious, when the lady of the house gently crawled into bed beside him, stripped him of his clothes, and relieved him of his virginity. His role in the seduction was entirely passive.

Politics is a seasonal business. After Art Fletcher ran a close second in the November election, his driver was thrown back on his own resources. During the campaign, Ted had watched how people get along, and had acquired by rote some of the social skills he could not come by naturally. He had matured into a slim, even-featured young man with clear blue eyes and an ironic smile. He took meticulous care with his appearance and dressed with a casual, studied tweedi­ness. The clothes he couldn’t buy he stole.

All the elements of the mask were now coming together, forming a seamless facade. Bundy took a temporary sales job in a Seattle de­partment store, one from which he had shoplifted and where he learned something new about himself he had a knack for chatting up the women customers. He could sell them anything. He saved up some money, sold his ’58 VW, and headed once again for Philadelphia. He hoped that he could start school again there, in his grandfather’s town, and away from the physical reminders of his days with Marjorie.

He spent the first half of 1969 at Temple University with mixed results. A special urban affairs project was never completed, but he did moderately well in theatrical arts classes. Ted learned a little something about acting and make-up. He also bought a false mus­tache. By now he had made yet another realization about himself: his face lacked any single characteristic that stood out above the rest. Like the personality he was creating, his face could be anything he wanted it to be. The mustache, combing his hair differently, gaining or losing a few pounds, growing a beard all changed his appearance dramati­cally. He could, when he wished, be as anonymous as he wanted. He had, as one of his judges later observed, “the face of a changeling.”

Ted Bundy returned to Seattle in the summer of 1969 and took a room at Ernst and Frieda Rogers’s house, one of several University District rooming houses where single people usually students could find an inexpensive place to stay. The Rogerses took an instant liking to him. Ted was polite. He kept his room clean and tidy. He was happy to run Mrs. Rogers to the store or to help Ernst with jobs around the house. He seemed like a gentle person to Frieda. She would remember the time they had coffee to­gether in her kitchen. An outsized fly began to buzz around them. Frieda started to swat it, but Ted jumped up, exclaimed, “Don’t kill it!” and chased the fly out the window.

He lived around the corner from the Sandpiper tavern, a college beer joint where he had some success in picking up girls. On the last night of September 1969, he walked into the Sandpiper and sat down at the bar. Across the crowded dance floor sat Elizabeth Kendall (pseudonym), twenty-four, an appealing medical secretary and divorcee out for an evening of fun with a group of her friends. Ted finished a pitcher of beer at the bar before he found the courage to approach her. As he recalled the occasion, Ted walked over to her and asked for a dance. “I’m sorry,” Liz replied. “I can’t dance.” On most nights, that would have been enough to send Ted Bundy into a funk. “For my somewhat tentatively developed ego,” he explained to me, “it was always a less than pleasant experience for someone to say that they didn’t want to dance. I never got over that.”

Emboldened by his beer, however, Ted was brave enough to ask one of Liz’s friends to dance. She said, “Sure!” and rose. Moments later on the dance floor, Ted noticed Liz now was dancing, too. He flashed her a wolfish smile and said, “Well, you really can’t dance, can you?”

Liz found Ted very charming.

According to her, he introduced himself as a law student and said he was working on a book about Vietnam. She didn’t necessarily buy the business about the writing project, but Ted was so good-looking and smoothly confident that by the end of the evening, she recalled, “I was already planning the wedding and naming the kids.” She took Ted home with her that night.

Both had drunk a good deal; they slept together clothed. In the morning, her daughter, Joanie (pseudonym), was up early demanding pop tarts and chocolate. Ted was delighted by the little girl, but Liz made it clear that he should leave, and he did. But he couldn’t get Liz out of his mind. She had struck a chord in Ted. He idealized her as he had Marjorie, but there was also some­thing about Liz something he couldn’t quite articulate, that made him feel he had known her all his life.

The daughter of a successful Utah doctor, she had gone through an early and painful marriage that left her with a distinct distrust of men. She also had a jealous streak, exacerbated by insecurity and Ted’s later philanderings. Knowing nothing of mature love and respect, he could only seem to be something, or someone. For Liz, he had created the Ted Bundy who wrote books and went to law school. In truth, he was a dropout and working as a legal messenger when they met. Like a child, he couldn’t foresee the consequences of his living out this fantasy, just as he could not see how his own babyish behavior had cost him Marjorie.

It wasn’t three months after he met Liz that they began to discuss marriage. They took out a license and talked to her relatives about using their home for the ceremony. When he could no longer sustain the charade, Ted stunned Liz by theatrically tearing up their marriage license on the pretext it was too soon and sudden for them to marry. A short while later, he confessed his true station in the world. Liz forgave him.

Liz saw as much of Ted at this time as did anyone. They made love several nights a week, went on day excursions with Joanie, visited his family, telephoned each other constantly. Yet even she did not penetrate the mask. In love with Ted dazzled by him she rationalized away his lies and appears to have handled his petty cruelties by responding in kind. When Ted hurt her by ignoring her or made her jealous by seeing other women, she hurt him back. Liz dealt with Ted at his level.

In retrospect, it seems improbable that a woman could be quite so utterly gulled. But she was not alone. His mother detected nothing. The stores from which he stole detected nothing. His Republican friends the scores of campaign workers and elected officials detected nothing.

By now, there was more and more for Ted to keep hidden. From what he later told us at the prison, it is certain that by this stage he had a strong appetite for violent pornography. He has conceded to police interrogators that he crept around the University District late at night. Sometimes he stole things from houses. Sometimes he peeped into women’s windows.

Also developing within him were cyclical depressions. “It wasn’t dictated by the cycle of the moon, or anything else,” he told me. “Not mood swings, just changes. It’s goddamn hard for me to describe it. All I wanted to do was just lay around, just consume huge volumes of time without doing a thing. Even in these periods, however, I’m capable of being genuinely cheerful and gregarious at least for a limited period of time. I be­came expert at projecting something very different. That I was very busy. I had a huge part of my life that nobody knew about. It didn’t take much effort at all.”

Ted felt that, on the surface at least, Liz took the marriage license scene and his lies in stride. When he told her that he was still two years short of an undergraduate degree, she urged him to return to school. Liz gave him a couple hundred dollars to cover tuition and helped launch him into yet another major, psychology.

Ted could offer a number of reasons for choosing psychology, but he conceded to me that the decision “was probably an outgrowth of my confusion about myself.” He did feel good about the choice, and beginning with the University of Washington summer term of 1970, he tore into the subject with demonic intensity. Ted did not miss a single question on one final exam. He wrote a paper on schizophrenia that won high praise from his professor. Ted was driven.

“It was a marvelous feeling, he said, “to have purpose and to do well at the same time.”

The periods of malaise abated for a time, but he couldn’t stop his late-night patrols or his impulsive thievery. From May of 1970 until September of 1971, he drove a delivery truck for Ped-Line, a family-owned medical supply company. Once he stole a photograph from a doctor’s office and was caught. His boss let him off with a stern lec­ture. The company didn’t know until later that he had been stealing from them, too. Among the things he took was a container of plaster casting material.

Ted’s next job was in a work-study program run by the Seattle Crisis Clinic. One night a week, he took calls from the frantic, the lonely, and the suicidal. At least once a month, there would be the high drama of a call from someone who had already taken a lethal dose or slit his or her wrists. Ted would keep the caller on the line long enough for the number to be traced, then there would be the tense minutes until he could hear the police breaking into the caller’s home.

The people he felt most sensitive to were women. “I had the best results with women who were lonely and had been abandoned by their husbands or mates,” Ted said. “I felt they really hurt the most. They were reaching out because they were alone, and really needed someone.”

Ted finally accumulated enough credits by the spring of 1972 to earn his degree in psychology. He had decided by then that he wanted to become a lawyer. His grades were good enough, but despite hundreds of hours of preparation, his Law School Aptitude Test results a key to admission were but mediocre. He was particularly embarrassed by his poor showing on the grammar part of the exam. Every law school turned him down.

He left the Crisis Clinic job in May of 1972, and was hired under a federal grant to work with psychiatric outpatients at Seattle’s Harborview Hospital. He continued to keep his life with Liz carefully sequestered, allowing him to have a brief affair with Cynthia Holt (pseudonym), a fellow Harborview counselor. According to Holt, Ted was often cold and almost abusive with his cases that summer; he was more apt to lecture than to counsel. Bundy was further suspect by the hospital staff of calling patients at home at night, making anonymous threats and talking inappropriately of sexual matters.

Cynthia shared with Liz and Marjorie and a number of other women the unsettling memory that she was willingly, happily intimate with a serial killer. She told Hugh that the forearm Ted once shoved up against her throat as they were making love was no accident of overexuberance; Bundy could have killed her at that instant.

But the most curious part of their affair and the aspect the local police later were most interested in was the occasional long drives Ted would take her on through the hills behind Lake Sammamish, the area where many of his victims later were found.

“Ted,” Holt said, “was supposedly look for an aunt or some old woman who was family. He said he was trying to find her place. I’ll never forget it because it was my car and my gas and I was not exactly pleased to do this. I kept driving and driving and I kept saying to Ted, `What does the place look like? At least tell me what the place looks like, so I can help!’ There was never any description. We just drove around.”

Later, Ted’s cousin John told police that he and Ted often hiked together in this same area. John reluctantly led Bob Keppel to the trails they used in and around the vicinity of Taylor Mountain.

Ted felt a personal sense of futility at Harborview, he told us, a feeling of inadequacy and helplessness with his patients that more or less mirrored his personal life. He said he concluded that summer that the social sciences weren’t capable of helping sick people. Psychology had failed him. To his joy and relief, however, 1972 was another election year; Bundy could take another vacation from himself. He looked up some old friends from the Fletcher campaign, and through them soon was busying himself as volunteer on the re-election campaign for GOP governor Dan Evans.

Vistas reopened. The young women who worked with Ted were captivated by his handsome features, fastidious dress, and correct manners. He flirted with them. Ted was unfailingly polite to his superiors, and impressed some of the wizened veterans on the governor’s staff with his dedication and ready grasp of hardball politics. Ralph Munro, one of Evans’s top op­eratives and later Washington’s secretary of state, knew Ted slightly from the 1968 campaign. “He was very friendly, very open,” Munro recalled. “There were other people in the 1972 campaign that I probably knew better, but I remember him being there and being involved. I thought he was bright, sharp. He had good ideas.”

This was the Ted Bundy who’d be remembered to reporters, the absolutely normal young man with no hint of the flaw in his nature. Liz, however, was beginning to see glimpses of the real Ted. Glimpses of the hunchback.

He once threatened to “break your f***ing neck” if she ever ex­posed him for the thief he was. She remembers that late one night he came by to retrieve a crowbar he had left under her radiator. Liz saw something bulging from his pocket and pulled it out; it was a surgical glove.

Another night, she awoke to find Ted examining her body under the bedclothes with a flashlight. Later he tried to talk Liz into anal sex, which she refused in horror to consider. She did allow him to tie her up a few times before they made love. He used her pantyhose, which she noticed he found immediately in her bureau without need­ing directions.

Still, he could be her warm and caring Theodore, the idealized lover capable of great tenderness. During this period, Liz seems to have been much more concerned about losing Ted to his fancy Re­publican friends or another woman than she was about the danger signs. Later, they’d terrify her.

After the 1972 election, Ted made a second, successful attempt at law school admission. He prepared an elaborate new packet of mate­rials to support his candidacy (including a letter from Governor Evans and a wordy denunciation of LSAT tests as inadequate mea­sures of his true potential). The ploy worked: Ted was accepted by the University of Utah College of Law for the term beginning in the fall of 1973.

Meanwhile, he went to work at the Seattle Crime Commission, where he stayed for just a month. He wrote articles for the commission’s newsletter, attended its meetings, and aided with pilot studies of white-collar crime and rape prevention.

One day while he was out shopping with Liz, Ted spotted a purse snatcher and ran the man down. He held the suspect until the police arrived. Ted’s heroics were duly noted by the Seattle Times, the first-ever mention of Ted Bundy in the newspapers.

With help from his political friends, Ted then found a job at the King County Office of Law and Justice Planning. His assignment was to study recidivism among those convicted of minor offenses in King County justice courts. He had access to nearly all pertinent arrest records, rap sheets, and the like. For weeks, he scoured thousands and thousands of arrests, noting with interest how poor the coopera­tion and coordination were among the various police and judicial jurisdictions. Ted was amazed to find rap sheets showing arrests that had never resulted in a trial, but neglecting to list convictions for other crimes. There were habitual criminals with two or three dozen arrests shown, but he couldn’t figure out from the records what happened to the people. They had just fallen between the cracks.

This was a period akin to his campaign interludes. Ted’s hopes and expectations were rising again after the disappointments of the pre­vious summer at Harborview. In May of 1973, he went to work in Olympia for Ross Davis, the new head of the state GOP central com­mittee. Earning what for Ted Bundy was the princely salary of $1,000 a month, he studied cost overruns in the party computer system for Davis, and helped with several other research projects. Those around Ted at the time remember that he looked up to Ross as if he were a big brother or favored uncle.

Ted loved to play with the Davises’ two small children. Ross’s wife, Sarah, recalled that Ted seemed to fit comfortably into their family that summer. “He didn’t talk much about himself,” she said. “But I didn’t feel he was trying to hide anything. He spoke of his mother and family in loving terms.”

That summer of 1973, Ted also saw a good deal of Marlin and Sheila Vortman, a law student and his wife who had been active in the 1972 Evans campaign. Like Ross Davis, Marlin was sturdy and purposeful, something of a big brother figure to Ted. Marlin also knew Ted to be a little quirky. One day, he visited his younger friend and was surprised at the quality of Ted’s possessions; they spoke of grander means than Marlin knew Ted to command. Odder still was Ted’s explanation that he often came and went from his second-floor room by means of a ladder. He did so, he said, be­cause he didn’t want to disturb his fellow roomers.

Marlin persuaded Ted that he, like Vortman, should attend law school at the University of Puget Sound rather than go out of state for his legal training. The newly opened University of Puget Sound law school, he argued, would put Ted in touch with local lawyers and would be a more suitable school for someone with local political ambitions. Ted agreed. He applied to UPS and was accepted into the night law school. Rather than admitting to the Utah people that he had changed his mind, Ted invented a story for them. He wouldn’t be able to attend school in Salt Lake City that autumn, he wrote, because he had been injured in an automobile accident.

Ted almost totally excluded Liz from this part of his life. The Dav­ises didn’t know she existed, and she was hostile toward Marlin, whom she correctly guessed had more influence on Ted’s decisions and actions than she did. At this time, she was also unaware that her boyfriend felt he had some unfinished business to attend to in Cali­fornia.

In July of 1973, Ted flew to San Francisco to see Marjorie Russell. Although it was Liz whom Ted claimed he loved, Marjorie had re­mained on his mind for years. He had kept in touch with her from time to time, but now he was ready to confront her again. Happy in his work and fairly bristling with confidence now that his legal edu­cation was about to begin, he felt an aura of personal magnetism shimmering about him. He felt that he looked different and acted different.

He was different, at least in Marjorie’s eyes. She later told the police that she found her erstwhile wishy-washy beau transformed into a Man of Action. He seemed to be in control now.

Once again, Ted was acting out a fantasy. He had tailored his out­ward appearance to suit Marjorie’s expectations, and duped her into believing that he had changed. While he was in the role, Ted also believed he had changed.

Back in Seattle, as the summer of 1973 drew to a close, Bundy wound up his work for Ross Davis. One afternoon, he drove his re­cently acquired ’68 Volkswagen bug over to the Davises’ house for a visit. Outside in the driveway with Ross, he opened the car’s trunk to rummage for something. There was plenty of junk to sort through — Ted Bundy was a pack rat. But as Ross cast an idle glance into the trunk, his eyes picked out a particularly unusual item in the jumble. There, resting in the clutter of tools and rags and other paraphernalia, was a pair of handcuffs.

Unbeknownst to Liz, Marjorie, his family, and his friends, Ted was an immediate and thorough failure in law school. Eight years after he had first been enrolled as a freshman at the University of Puget Sound, Ted expected to return as a graduate student and to find clear-­eyed and fastidious young men like himself. What he encountered on orientation day was a motley assortment of aspiring legal scholars who ranged in appearance from the well groomed to the scruffy. And instead of his vision of an ivied citadel —Ted Bundy’s idea of what a proper law school should look like — he found a small night school housed temporarily in an anonymous office building in downtown Tacoma. He was appalled.

Ted was unbothered that he had to subsist that autumn on unem­ployment checks, but the perceived taint of attending a “second rate” law school was every bit as demeaning to him in his mid-twenties as Johnnie and Louise’s boxy Ramblers were to him as a child. Rigidly fixed on image and emotionally incapable of having much perspec­tive on his circumstances, Ted could not make the best of the situa­tion. In no time, he was hopelessly behind the rest of the class, unable to grasp what his professors were trying to teach him; it was a repeat of his 1967 burnout in Chinese studies. The rest of the fall and winter of 1973 would be a period of unrelieved dolor for him.

By December of 1973, Ted had secretly reapplied to the University of Utah College of Law. He told no one of the decision until the following spring, and the new application to Utah made no mention of his current enrollment at the UPS night law school. Utah accepted Ted once again, but he would not be leaving for Salt Lake City until September of 1974.

In the middle of his year at UPS — when the young girls began to disappear around the region — Ted kept up a convincing show of eager involvement with his studies. He attended classes faithfully until near the end of the spring term, and he applied himself to the material every few weeks when it was his turn to lead his study-group discussion. He wasn’t lying to Liz or his mom when he said that he spent much of his time in the law library. What he didn’t tell them was that he spent most of his time there daydreaming. Fanta­sizing.

He was driven ever deeper into himself, into his cyclical and secret depressions. In his solitude, Ted devised complex rationales for the gaps between his wish to succeed and the reality of his failure, all the while guarding the secret of his inner turmoil from the people who thought they were close to him. He was very good at the deception, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when the occasion demanded. But his tissue of deceits began to dou­ble back on him at Christmastime. Liz had flown to Utah to be with her family, while Marjorie, ignorant of Liz and almost everything else to do with Ted, came north for the holidays.

For a week, she stayed with Ted in the Vortmans’ apartment while Marlin and Sheila were away on vacation in Hawaii. While the pre­vious summer Ted had even convinced himself that his life was back on course, now he had to re-create the role of Changed Man from memory. He succeeded too well; Marjorie liked what she saw and she wanted to talk marriage. They discussed it for days — Marjorie in earnest and Ted, under mounting pressure, with the appearance of sincerity. He conned Marjorie again, just as he had repeatedly conned Liz. She flew home to California thinking that she was engaged to be married.

Ted’s well-practiced faculty for compartmentalization was at work again. He took Marjorie to the airport and kissed her good-bye. Then he sped in his Volkswagen over to see the other woman he insisted he loved. Ted found Liz in her kitchen with an apron on. The tableau was warm, domestic. He remembers that dinner aromas filled the air that night. Liz smiled up at him and soon they were making love, the most passionate love they had ever made.

A month later, as the futile search for Joyce and Jim Healy’s daugh­ter Lynda was being given periodic mention in the Seattle papers, Ted had his one final confrontation with Marjorie. She had occupied a segregated section of his mind for seven years, an ideal woman whose heart he’d won, lost, recaptured, and now would break. Just as Ted could never fully explain to us his feelings for Liz, he also never understood his relationship with Marjorie. He hadn’t exchanged a word with her since their Christmas be­trothal; he had hoped by ignoring the situation to make it go away. But she telephoned him at his apartment on a Saturday evening. He had just returned from taking the Law School Aptitude Test for yet another time and was tucking into a six-pack of beer when the phone rang.

“Why the hell haven’t you written or called!” he remembered Mar­jorie yelling. “What kind of way is this for you to treat me?”

Partially anesthetized by the beer, Ted listened serenely to her tirade. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t explain. He just acted cool. “Don’t ever bother to get in touch with me again,” she told him.

“Well,” Ted recalls replying, “far out, you know.”

She hung up and he cracked open another beer. “I felt like the gods had spoken,” he told me. “I felt doubly relieved. This meant it was all off my back.”

The rest of what we were able to establish about Ted’s movements during these months comes principally from his own and police records.

• January 31, the night Lynda Ann Healy was abducted from her basement bedroom, Ted attended his contracts class at UPS in Ta­coma. He would have been back in Seattle in the early evening.
• March 12, when Donna Gail Manson left her dorm room at Ever­green State College on her way to a jazz concert and was never seen again, Ted Bundy’s dated law school notes indicate that he did not go to school. For the preceding months, these notes show a pattern of regular attendance, but they grow sketchy toward the end of March and stop altogether in early April.
• April 17, the date Susan Rancourt left her dorm advisers’ meeting and vanished at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, a VW similar to Ted’s was seen parked at Taylor Mountain, where Ted’s third dumping ground was later discovered.
• May 6, when Kathy Parks disappeared 250 miles south of Seattle in Corvallis, Oregon, Ted filled his VW’s gas tank in Seattle and cashed two checks for a total of $20, sufficient money to cover the cost of a 500-mile round trip. During this period, Ted’s gas-credit-card slips reveal that he did an extraordinary amount of driving, far more than would be expected of a money-short law student whose car-pool responsibilities were re­stricted to a single sixty-mile round trip from Seattle to Tacoma each week.

He chose April to inform Liz that he had decided to transfer to Utah; typically for Ted, he did so in a dramatic scene with tears and hand wringing. He didn’t tell Liz that he had arranged the move four months earlier. Ted was also going to need a summer job, so he drove down to Olympia and secured work at the Washington State Depart­ment of Emergency Services.

The DES was a catch-all agency. Its duties included coordinating local disaster relief and search and rescue teams. One of its functions was to help in the hunts for Lynda Healy, Donna Manson, and Susan Rancourt. The search for Kathy Parks was Oregon’s responsibility. Brenda Ball, Georgann Hawkins, Denise Naslund, and Janice Ott were still alive at this juncture.

But the emphasis at DES in the summer of 1974 was upon a differ­ent sort of emergency. The OPEC oil embargo had severely disrupted fuel supplies in Washington. At the time, there was no such thing as a federal or state Energy Department, and so it fell to DES to help bring order out of chaos by allocating the state’s dwindling fuel re­sources.

Ted’s arrival at the office in May of 1974 caused the customary stir among the female employees. The males, too, found him charismatic. One who remembers Ted cutting a handsome figure that summer is Larry Diamond. “Frankly,” Diamond told me, “he represented what it was that all young males anywhere ever wanted to be. He held that image. I wanted that image, and because of that I was jealous of him. I think half the people in the office were jealous of him. The males and all of the women were taken by him, down to the crease in his trousers. If there was any flaw in him it was that he was almost too perfect.”

Bundy, who was assigned to work on the DES biennial budget, became something of a mentor to Diamond. He was more familiar than Larry with politics and politicians. He showed Larry how things got done within the state GOP administration. But Bundy didn’t share too much of himself, even on subjects as universally popular among men as the curve of a particular woman’s leg or her bust dimensions. “He could have damn near any woman he wanted,” Diamond recalled. “Most men talk of women in the sense of fantasy. He didn’t. It was almost like he compartmentalized them. “Ted,” Diamond continued, “was almost one-dimensional if I think about it. It’s like there ís a very beautiful storefront that’s attrac­tive and lures you in. But when you get inside to see the merchandise, it is sparse to say the least.”

A more fateful encounter for Ted Bundy that summer was with Carole Boone, later to become his wife and mother of his child. Carole would one day remake her life for Ted; her subsequent loyalty and devotion to his cause would beggar reason.

In the summer of 1974, she was a lusty-tempered free spirit regarded generally as the most competent staff member at DES. She is remembered by other DES employees as a sister/mother figure who did her work well but who also was not above starting a rubber-band fight, or leading a circle of her closest co-workers on three-hour liquid lunches in the Voodoo Room at the nearby Bailey Motor Inn. She had the wit and intelligence to do almost anything.

At the time she met Ted Bundy, her personal life was in tatters. A favorite uncle had recently died. She was newly divorced from her second husband. She was trying to raise her son, Jamey, and she was in the midst of a messy affair with “a large, unpleasant man,” as she later described him to me. “I liked Ted immediately,” she later recalled. “We hit it off well. He struck me as being a rather shy person with a lot more going on under the surface than what was on the surface. He certainly was more dignified and restrained than the more certifiable types around the office. He would participate in the silliness partway. But remember, he was a Republican.”

According to Carole, Ted made it clear he’d like to date her, but their relationship deepened not into love at first, but into friendship and affection for each other. Part of the attraction was Ted’s sensitiv­ity to Carole’s emotional problems. “I guess I was closer to him than other people at the agency,” she said.

Carole noticed that from early June onward Ted’s health seemed to deteriorate. During three weeks in August, according to her, he lost fifteen pounds. She attributed his poor health to the complex DES budget, which he had to finish before leaving for Utah in September. It hadn’t helped that a cleaning woman had thrown out a cardboard box filled with Ted’s budget files.

She noticed, too, that Ted was receiving a number of acrimonious calls from Liz. She tried not to eavesdrop on them; just as Ted would politely walk away when she fought by phone with her lover. But Carole could see that the calls from Liz made Ted nervous and cranky.

Ted and Liz had reached another crisis. According to Liz’s book, she was waiting for some firm commitment from Ted before he left for Utah. She feared that their relationship would dissolve as Ted established himself in a new town and met new people especially women.

The previous autumn, she had discovered a bag of women’s clothing in his apartment. At other times she had noted the container of plaster Ted had taken from Ped-Line as well as a pair of crutches. Liz had been too embarrassed to say anything. Then she observed a progressive ebb in his sexual ardor, beginning in the spring of 1974.

Now, his erratic and sometimes bizarre behavior was beginning to frighten her.

On Saturday, the sixth of July, the two of them went river rafting. Liz’s book describes the day as peaceful and sunny. They drank a few beers and were drifting along quietly when Bundy suddenly lunged at her and shoved her into the water. She came up stunned and shouted her irritation at him. His unnerving response was not to respond at all; she was looking at a malefic stranger who didn’t seem to recognize her. Finally, he said, “It was no big deal. Can’t you take a joke?”

Liz chose to bury the incident. The following Saturday, the day before Denise Naslund and Janice Ott were abducted from Lake Sam­mamish State Park, Liz telephoned Ted at Johnnie and Louise’s house in Tacoma. She wanted to know if Ted would be free to see her the next day.

“No, I can’t,” she remembers him saying. “I have other things to do.”

“What other things?” she pressed.

“Just things, Liz,” he answered.

As she got ready for church the next morning, Ted arrived unex­pectedly and asked Liz her plans for the day. According to her, Ted was eager to know where she was going. She named a small park where, she hoped, he might join her. He didn’t.

Late Sunday afternoon about an hour after Denise Naslund disappeared Liz returned home to a phone call from Ted; he asked her to have dinner with him and was at her door within ten minutes. Ted said he was starving.

They went to a bowling alley reputed to serve the best hamburgers in Seattle. The burgers were huge. Liz barely finished hers; Ted devoured two and then wanted to go for ice cream. She noticed he had a cold that had worsened since they had talked that morning. He looked tired, too, and was unusually quiet. In response to her questions, he said he’d spent the day cleaning his car and doing chores around the house.

As Terry Storwick had noted years before and as several witnesses would attest Ted’s eyes gave away much in times of stress. Now Liz saw it, too. She recounted: “As I looked at him across the table, I was struck by how close together his eyes looked. They were a little puffy from his cold, but it was odd that I had never noticed it before.”

After dinner they returned to her house, where Ted, in spite of his cold and tiredness, insisted upon taking her ski rack which they had used to transport his bicycle on the rafting trip from atop his car and putting it back on Liz’s VW. Then he drove home.

Ted’s DES work records would later reveal that he missed the Thursday and Friday prior to Sunday the fourteenth, as well as the following Monday and Tuesday. He said he was out sick with the cold that Liz remembers.

Ted Bundy was back at work at the DES office by the time the first composite sketches of the Lake Sammamish “Ted” were published. He took a good deal of kidding from Carole Boone, Larry Diamond, and the others. “Gee, Ted,” they would say, “you sure look a lot like that guy. And you do own a Volkswagen.”

Mark Adams, Ted’s former employer at the medical supply company, saw the composites, too, and remarked to himself how alike they were to Ted Bundy. Adams kept these impressions to himself.

Someone else thought Ted Bundy looked like the composite. He was one of Liz’s office friends. As she tells the story, the man handed her the July 22 Seattle Times carrying the latest composite drawing. “Don’t you think this looks like someone you know?” she recalled him asking. “Doesn’t your Ted have a VW?”

Liz tried to laugh, but she went home that night and compared her several snapshots of Ted with the newspaper picture. She noted several similarities particularly in the jawline and around the eyes but an equal number of discrepancies. Moreover, published reports indicated that the Lake Sam “Ted” drove a metallic brown VW bug; Ted’s was a dull light brown.

Her fears, however, would not subside a dilemma shared by thousands of women in and around Seattle. Panicked by the latest disclosures from Lake Sam, these women flooded the police with hysterical calls. Acquaintances, strangers, boyfriends, even husbands, were being turned in to the police at the rate of hundreds a day. In the overwhelming majority of cases, these women had far less substantive reason for fear than did Liz Kendall.

At last, she decided to call the special “Ted Hotline” anonymously, but nothing conclusive came of it. After the papers reported that a man using crutches had solicited help with his briefcase in the Uni­versity District, her thoughts flew to the crutches she had seen in Ted’s room. She placed another anonymous call to the police, but wouldn’t tell the officer her boyfriend’s name. “I can’t talk to you over the phone,” the policeman said. “You need to come in and fill out a report.” Liz hung up.

As the summer wore on, Liz was torn between dread at what Ted might be capable of and apprehension over his coming departure for Utah. There continued to be unsettling experiences, such as the time she discovered a hatchet under the seat of his car, or the afternoon that she secretly searched his room and found an eyeglass case filled with a bewildering assortment of keys. Another time, when she re­turned from a brief trip to Utah, Ted met her at the airport. “I felt as if I’d been hit in the stomach,” she wrote. “All his curly hair was gone. It was the shortest haircut I’d ever seen on him, and it changed his appearance dramatically.”

Throughout August of 1974, Ted Bundy attacked the DES budget in the haphazard fashion so characteristic of his school work. As his early September departure date approached, he’d bear down for sev­eral days, then go flat and do nothing. His last night in the northwest was spent at the DES office with Liz, and it wasn’t until the early hours of the next morning that he at last completed his work.

Ted and Liz drove back up to Seattle, where he hurriedly packed his VW. They breakfasted together and afterward he humored her when she asked him to pose for her camera. Ted was exhausted and Liz was near tears during these final moments. They embraced and kissed, then he jumped in his bug and drove off.

Within days Elzie Hammons, the grouse hunter, stumbled across the desiccated bones and sinews of Denise Naslund and Janice Ott. In a brief news conference, Nick Mackie of the King County police officially acknowledged what the Seattle newspapers had been sug­gesting for months. “The worst we feared,” Mackie told reporters, “is true.”