Hourly History - Ted Bundy: A Life From Beginning to End

Copyright 2017 by Hourly History.

All rights reserved.

Theodore Robert Bundy is an American serial killer. There are those who know the name Ted Bundy but have no idea about the extent and brutality of his crimesan indicator of just how notorious this man became. Ted Bundy is something of a bogeyman, a phantom menace, a name invoked by older generations to warn young women of the fate that could befall them should they be bold enough to walk home alone at night.

But by looking closely at the life of Ted Bundy, we can see that he was just a man. Nothing more, nothing less. A man whose early life was challenging, but no more so than most, who grew up with a desire to hurt and kill women, a desire he made into a reality.

Between the mid to late 1970s, Ted Bundy kidnapped, assaulted and murdered dozens of young women and girls across Washington State, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. While Bundy confessed to carrying out 30 homicides, many believe the actual death toll of his murder spree is much higher. Sometimes Bundy abducted women who were walking home alone at night, and sometimes he snatched them in broad daylight. Often, Bundy pretended to be injured and convinced sweet-hearted young women to help him load books into his car. At times, Bundy entered womens homes and bludgeoned them to death in their beds. During Bundys most famous crime he walked into a sorority house and killed two women in their beds, almost killing two more. For a time, no one felt safe.

Bundys confessions came in a horrifying wave of information, unleashed just before his execution in an attempt to buy himself some time. Was he telling the whole truth? Were there murders he declined to admit to? Perhaps murders he couldnt even remember?

Its entirely possible that some young women who went missing during Bundys serial killing years had no one to miss them or were written off as runaways when they disappeared. These possible victims will remain wherever he dumped them or, if they are found, will return to the earth as one of far too many Jane Does.

We imagine that when a monster unleashes on the world, there are people who will stop that monster, will make him accountable for his crimes. Its impossible to bring people back from the dead or undo the trauma experienced by survivors, but at the very least we can make the monster pay. Yet, as this book will show, using the U.S. justice system to stop a monster is rarely that straight-forward. Whatever the final death toll, Bundys crimes against women go down in history as one of the most terrifying serial killing sprees of all time. This is the story of his victims.

For his entire childhood and into his early adulthood, Ted Bundy did not know the real identity of his mother. Ann Rule, Bundys most notable biographer and a friend of Bundys before he was exposed as a serial killer, suggests in her book The Stranger Beside Me that Bundy did not know who his mother was until he was 24 years old. Its possible that Bundy suspected the truth before this time but had no proof.

The truth was kept from Bundy during his early life; the woman he believed to be his mother was actually his grandmother. Bundy was born on November 24, 1946, in the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont to Eleanor Louise Cowell. Bundy was raised to believe that Louise was his sister and that his grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, were his parents.

At the time of Bundys birth in the late 1940s, it was still considered scandalous in American society for a child to be born out of wedlock. Not only was Louise Cowell unmarried when she became pregnant with Bundy, but she did not know or was unwilling to reveal the identity of his father. In an effort to protect their grandson and daughter from the intense stigma associated with illegitimate children, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell took on the role of father and mother to Bundy.

Even close family members and friends believed that Bundy was Samuel and Eleanors child. Still, it seems all was not well in the Cowell household. While Bundy generally spoke well of Samuel and Eleanor, information emerged once Bundy was incarcerated that painted a very different picture. Bundy described the early years of his life as marred by the violent and abusive behavior of his grandfather, Samuel Cowell.

In descriptions corroborated by other members of the family, Bundy revealed that Samuel was a bully, a bigot, and a racist and that he displayed behavior consistent with mental illness. Samuel would launch into abusive rants about people of different races or religious beliefs and was physically violent towards the family. He also had a habit of speaking aloud to invisible presences.

Bundys true parentage was such a sensitive topic in the Cowell family household that Samuel would fly into a violent rage at the vaguest mention of it. Members of the extended Cowell family who witnessed these rages later said that Samuels anger was so extreme that they came to believe that Bundy was in fact the result of incest between Samuel and his daughter, Louise. Eleanor Cowell also suffered from mental health issues and underwent electroconvulsive therapy as treatment for her depression.

In 1950, when Bundy was four years old, Louise, Bundys real mother, decided to remove herself and her child from this challenging home life and moved to Tacoma, Washington. Here in Tacoma, Louise and Bundy initially lived with Louises cousins, Alan and Jane Scott. In 1951, Louise met Johnny Culpepper Bundy at a church singles night, and the pair married a year later. Johnny and Louise went on to have four children together, and while Johnny formally adopted Ted soon after his marriage to Louise, Johnny and Ted never became close. The Bundy house was small for such a large family and money was tight. Ted was extremely introverted, but his parents didnt see his shyness as problematic and allowed him to fully indulge it while they dealt with their more demanding children.

Its difficult to describe Bundys childhood beyond the indisputable facts as Bundy himself offered radically different accounts of his own life at this time. Bundy attended Woodrow Wilson High School and graduated in 1965. He appears to have been a mediocre student, fairly well-known and well-liked but struggled to make real friendships. Bundy told biographers that he had no friends as a teenager and chose to be alone as he struggled to understand social interactions.

It was during Bundys high school years, he told biographers, that he first became intrigued by sexual violence. Bundy described searching for images of naked women in his neighbors trash barrels and reading and watching true crime, looking for descriptions of sexual violence, but then later refuted this. It was also during Bundys high school years that he began to commit crimes. Bundy described looking through neighbors windows in an attempt to see women undressing but was never charged or questioned about his voyeurism. Bundy was, however, arrested at least twice on suspicion of burglary and auto theft. Bundy would steal in order to fund his expensive hobby of snow skiing.

The police expunged Bundys criminal record when he reached the age of 18, and he was able to move into adulthood and attend the University of Puget Sound with a clean criminal record.