Ted Bundy: 5 Fast Facts About The Campus Killer
By August 21, 2021
He Had A Weird Upbringing
Born on November 24, 1946, Ted Bundy grew up in a middle-class home in Philadelphia. According to him, he had a normal childhood filled with long days "of frog hunting and marble playing," but things were not as idyllic as they seemed. Later in life, after tracking down his birth certificate, he was shocked to learn that the people he thought were his parents were actually his grandparents, who had presented him as their son to cover up their unwed daughter's pregnancy. He later acknowledged the resentment he felt toward his mother over the lie but insisted that he wasn't abused and nothing about his upbringing could explain why he committed his gruesome crimes.
Still, the telltale signs of a disturbed mind showed up early in Bundy, who reportedly mutilated and killed neighborhood dogs and cats as a child and admitted to a later girlfriend to searching trash for pornography. He was specifically attracted to depictions of violence toward women, having grown up with the belief that "women are possessions. Beings which are subservient, more often than not, to males. Women are merchandise."
He Killed More Than 30 Women
Exactly how many people died at Bundy's hands is unknown. He confessed to 30 murders, but he was reluctant to talk about his younger victims, leading authorities to believe he may have killed as many as 100 women and girls. His first confirmed attempted kidnapping took place in 1969 in Ocean City, New Jersey, but he committed his earliest known assault in 1974, when he sneaked into the bedroom of 18-year-old Karen Sparks while she slept and mercilessly beat her with a metal rod, leaving her permanently disabled.
A month later, he committed his first confirmed murder after he kidnapped college student Lynda Healy, whose body was not found until 1975. For the next two years, he raped and killed a woman every few weeks across Oregon, Utah, Idaho, and Colorado, all while attending law school and carrying on what seemed to be a normal and healthy dating life.
He Got Away With It For A Very Long Time
In the era before DNA and forensics, connecting the same killer to different murders in different states was extremely difficult, allowing Bundy (and many others) to evade capture despite his audacious techniques. Bundy used his outwardly normal and charismatic persona to hunt for victims in broad daylight, often pretending to be injured so that women would help him load something into his car, even going so far as to wear a fake cast. The word began getting around that many missing women were last seen talking to some guy named Ted, and some witnesses even accurately described his Volkswagen.
It wasn't until November 1974, however, that Bundy finally messed up enough to get caught after 18-year-old Carol DaRonch fought him off and escaped despite being handcuffed. The police began combing through every kind of registry they could find for some connection between a Ted and a Volkswagen and eventually found 26 matches, one of which was Bundy. On August 16, 1975, he was pulled over; initial searches of his car and apartment turned up no evidence linking him to the crimes, but the FBI later found one of DaRonch's hairs in the Volkswagen after Bundy tried to get rid of it. DaRonch identified him in a lineup, and he was convicted of her abduction and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
