Theodore Ted Bundy: A Famous Serial Killer

Theodore Robert Bundy, famous serial killer, who is more commonly known as Ted Bundy, was born November 24, 1946 in Burlington, Vermont. He died January 24, 1989 in Starke, Florida (Jenkins, 2017). Growing up, he displayed several unusual signs that most children did not have and should have been noted as red flags for his crime-filled future. He was born, his mother was only 22 years old and she was not married. Because of the shame that she and her son would be forced to face, Ted was raised as the adopted son of his grandparents to grow up believing his mother was his sister. Ted’s mother got married in 1951 and gave her son her husband’s last name to make him seem more legitimate. Just a couple years before Ted’s mother was married and

tended to prey on young and attractive college women, first near his home in Washington, then moving east to Utah, Colorado, and finally in Florida (“Ted Bundy”, 2017). Many of his later victims resembled his college girlfriend, who was an attractive student with long, dark hair (Biography.com Authors, 2017). He often wore a sling on his arm or a fake cast on his leg and walked on crutches to fake a disability to convince his victims to help him carry books and unload things from his car. Bundy was also known to impersonate authority figures, such as cops or firefighters, to get a victim’s trust before attacking her. As for the process of attacking his victims, he struck them over the head with a crowbar or pipe, immobilized them with handcuffs, and forced them into his vehicle. To fit his victims in his car without them being visible from the outside, he removed the passenger seat of his car for his victims to lie unconscious and out of sight in the floorboard. After taking his victim where he needed to, he raped her and then typically strangled or bludgeoned her to death, then continued to mutilate her after death. Bundy prolonged these events by returning to visit the corpses at their “dump sites”; he sometimes even took them home with him to gain further sexual gratification. He sometimes displayed his victims’ decapitated heads in his home and slept with their corpses until putrefaction made them unbearable (“Ted Bundy”,