#Ted bundy heads on display serial#

He liked to inflict pain and suffering and fear.' Bundy's childhood neighbor Sandi Holt described him as a bully, saying, 'He liked to terrify people. Louise's younger sister Julia recalled awakening from a nap to find herself surrounded by knives from the kitchen, and three-year-old Ted standing by the bed, smiling. īundy occasionally exhibited disturbing behavior at an early age. Bundy expressed a lifelong resentment toward his mother for never talking to him about his real father, and for leaving him to discover his true parentage for himself. Biographer and true crime writer Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally, wrote that he did not find out until 1969, when he located his original birth record in Vermont. Bundy eventually discovered the truth, although his recollections of the circumstances varied he told a girlfriend that a cousin showed him a copy of his birth certificate after calling him a 'bastard,' but he told biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth that he had found the certificate himself. Family, friends, and even young Ted were told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister. įor the first three years of his life, Bundy lived in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandparents, Samuel (1898–1983) and Eleanor Cowell (1895–1971), who raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied birth outside of wedlock at that time. In the 2020 documentary film Crazy, Not Insane, psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis claimed to have arranged a DNA test which confirmed that Bundy was not the product of incest. Some family members expressed suspicions that Bundy might have been fathered by Louise's own father, Samuel Cowell. Louise claimed she had been seduced by a war veteran named Jack Worthington, who abandoned her soon after she became pregnant. His father's identity has never been confirmed by some accounts his birth certificate assigns paternity to a salesman and United States Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, though according to others the father is listed as unknown. Ted Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, to Eleanor Louise Cowell (1924–2012, known by her middle name) at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. 'Ted,' she wrote, 'was the very definition of heartless evil.' Bundy was executed at Florida State Prison in Raiford on January 24, 1989.īiographer Ann Rule described Bundy as 'a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death and even after.' He once described himself as 'the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet,' a statement with which attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, agreed. For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two trials. Facing murder charges in Colorado, he engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults in Florida, including three murders, before his ultimate recapture in 1978. He then became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in several states. In 1975, Bundy was arrested and jailed in Utah for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault.

On a few occasions, he broke into dwellings at night and bludgeoned his victims as they slept. He decapitated at least twelve victims and kept their severed heads as mementos in his apartment. Bundy often revisited his victims, grooming and performing sexual acts with the corpses until decomposition and destruction by wild animals made any further interactions impossible. He would typically approach his victims in public places, either feigning a physical impairment such as an injury, or impersonating an authority figure, before bludgeoning them into unconsciousness and taking them to secondary locations to be raped and strangled. īundy was regarded as charismatic and handsome, traits that he exploited to win the trust of both his victims and society as a whole. Bundy's true victim total is unknown, and is likely significantly higher.

After more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 murders he committed in seven states between 19.

#Ted bundy heads on display serial#

Theodore Robert Bundy ( born Cowell November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped, and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier.