Ted Bundy

What the record shows

Ted Bundy, born Theodore Robert Cowell, was an American serial killer who murdered young women and girls in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Idaho and Florida between 1974 and 1978. Florida juries convicted him of three murders: two Chi Omega sorority members at Florida State University in Tallahassee (1979) and 12-year-old Kimberly Leach of Lake City (1980), with a death sentence in each case. Before his execution he confessed to 30 homicides in seven states, according to Washington investigator Robert Keppel as quoted by The Associated Press; police had attributed about 20 killings to him before those confessions. Florida executed him on January 24, 1989.

The known crimes began in Seattle. According to the chronology in his Wikipedia article, Lynda Ann Healy, abducted on February 1, 1974, is counted as his first confirmed murder victim. Through 1974 five more young women vanished in Washington, including Georgann Hawkins (June 11) and, on the same July 14 afternoon, Janice Ott and Denise Naslund; Roberta Parks disappeared in Oregon on May 6. In recorded interviews released by the Washington attorney general's office and reported by the Deseret News, Bundy told Keppel how he lured, struck, handcuffed and strangled Hawkins and left her body outside Issaquah. He typically lured women by feigning injury or posing as an authority figure, then bludgeoned them and drove them to a remote site.

After Bundy moved to Utah in the autumn of 1974, Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Smith, Laura Aime and Debra Kent were killed there between October 1 and November 8. On the evening of November 8, at Fashion Place Mall in Murray, a man posing as a police officer lured Carol DaRonch into his car; she fought free. In 1975 Caryn Campbell vanished from Snowmass Village, Colorado, on January 12, followed by further disappearances in Colorado, Idaho and Utah through June 1975.

Utah Highway Patrol officer Bob Hayward arrested Bundy after a traffic stop in Granger, Utah, on August 16, 1975. DaRonch identified him in a lineup on October 2, 1975, and in 1976 a judge found him guilty of aggravated kidnapping after a bench trial; he was sentenced in June 1976 to one to fifteen years. Colorado then charged him with the Campbell murder. On June 7, 1977, he escaped from the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, recaptured six days later. On December 30, 1977, he escaped again from the Garfield County jail in Glenwood Springs and made his way to Tallahassee.

In the early hours of January 15, 1978, an intruder attacked four women at the Chi Omega house, killing Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, and injuring Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler; Cheryl Thomas was attacked nearby the same night and survived. On February 9, 1978, Kimberly Leach, 12, was taken from Lake City Junior High School; her remains were found near Suwannee River State Park on April 7. Pensacola officer David Lee arrested him in a stolen car on February 15, 1978.

The Chi Omega trial was moved to Miami before Judge Edward Cowart. Bite-mark testimony linked him to Levy. On July 24, 1979, the jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted first-degree murder and burglary, and Cowart imposed two death sentences. The Leach case was moved from Suwannee County to Orange County, where, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit later recounted, jury selection took place in January 1980; Bundy was convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping and sentenced to death in February 1980.

The Florida Supreme Court affirmed both convictions (Bundy v. State, 1984 and 1985). The U.S. Supreme Court denied review of the Leach conviction on October 14, 1986, over dissents by Justices Brennan and Marshall. On July 7, 1988, the Eleventh Circuit in Bundy v. Dugger rejected his federal habeas petition finding that he had been competent to stand trial. In January 1989 Bundy admitted 30 homicides to Keppel and other investigators. He was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989.

Bundy was born on November 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vermont, and grew up in Tacoma, Washington. He remains an unconfirmed suspect in the 1961 disappearance of eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr in Tacoma.