

Bundy expressed a lifelong resentment toward his mother for never telling him about his real father, and for leaving him to discover his true parentage for himself. īiographer 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 neighborhood Roxborough, Pennsylvania, with his maternal grandparents, Samuel Knecht Cowell (Septem– December 4, 1983) and Eleanor Miriam Longstreet (Febru– April 25, 1971) who raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied birth outside of wedlock at that time. However, in the 2020 documentary film Crazy, Not Insane, psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis claimed she received a sample of Bundy's blood and that a DNA test had confirmed that Bundy was not the product of incest. Some family members expressed suspicions that Bundy was sired by Louise's own father. Ĭensus records reveal that several men by the name of John Worthington and Lloyd Marshall lived near Louise when Bundy was conceived. Louise claimed she met a war veteran named Jack Worthington, who abandoned her soon after she became pregnant.

His biological father's identity has never been confirmed his original birth certificate apparently assigns paternity to a salesman and United States Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, though a copy of it listed his father as unknown. Ted Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, to Eleanor Louise Cowell (Septem– December 23, 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." For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two trials, and was executed at Florida State Prison in Raiford on January 24, 1989.īiographer Ann Rule characterized him 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." Bundy 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. Facing murder charges in Colorado, Bundy 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 homes at night and bludgeoned, maimed, strangled and/or sexually assaulted his victims in their sleep. He decapitated at least 12 of his victims, keeping their severed heads as mementos in his apartment. He frequently revisited the bodies of those he abducted, grooming and performing sex acts on the corpses until decomposition and destruction by wild animals made further interactions impossible. To this end, Bundy typically simulated having a physical impairment such as an injury in order to convince his target that he was in need of assistance with something, or would dupe her into believing he was an authority figure. His usual technique involved approaching a female in public and luring her to a vehicle parked in a more secluded area, at which point she would be beaten unconscious, restrained with handcuffs and taken elsewhere to be sexually assaulted and killed. īundy often employed charm to disguise his murderous intent when kidnapping victims, and extended this tactic vis-a-vis law enforcement, the media and the criminal justice system to maintain his claims of innocence. After more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 murders committed in seven states between 19.
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Theodore Robert Bundy ( né Cowell November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier.
