World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 4 - Ted Bundy - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-Florida State University, Tallahassee, January the 15th, 1978, around 2:45 a.m.,
a serial killer on the run broke into the Chi Omega sorority house and attacked four women.
-There's rape, he beats people, he knocks people's teeth out, he bites the buttock of one of the victims.
-The blistering attack on all four students lasted just 15 minutes. -He could strike like a chameleon...
Bam! ...and take his prey. -In just four years in the mid-1970's, a sadistic killer kidnapped,
raped, and murdered at least 30 young women. A few lived to tell of their terrible ordeal.
-He leaned in, I thought he was gonna kiss me. Instead, he said, "You know what?
I'm gonna kill you." -Initially convicted of only kidnap and assault, it is suspected that Bundy may have raped
and slaughtered up to 100 young women. Sentenced to death for his terrifying crimes,
Ted Bundy is undoubtedly one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Seattle, Washington.
Ted Bundy began his reign of terror in the Pacific Northwest and spread it across seven U.S. states.
He would eventually confess to the kidnap, rape, and murder of 30 young women between 1974 and 1978.
Two of his victims were just 12 years old. -This is a man who killed in the most violent,
the most terrifying way. He would -- Before death, he would break bones, he would rip parts of the body off,
he would keep parts of the body mutilated after he did it. This is a person who ravaged his victims,
intending to cause pain. -He was a monster because he just enjoyed killing. One of his interviews, the interviewer asked him,
point blank, he said, "Ted, why did you kill?" And Ted kind of raised one eyebrow and kind of smiled
and says, "'Cause I liked it." -Rhonda Stapley was a college student in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1974.
She says she survived a vicious attack by Bundy and was so traumatized, she kept her ordeal secret
for more than 30 years. -Nobody went out at night. Nobody even walked to the library alone.
There was terror and fear among women everywhere. Ted Bundy was one of the most evil people in the world.
-When Bundy was finally caught in 1978, he was incarcerated at the Leon County Jail in Florida.
Sheriff Ken Katsaris, who oversaw all the county's prisons, was charged with keeping him behind bars.
-He was evil, but you could not discern that, even if you knew he was evil. He came across as brilliant, charismatic, smart.
So, you put together the evil with all of those positive traits and you have a very dangerous person.
-This killer's story begins in 1946. Theodore Robert Bundy was born on the 24th of November
at the Elizabeth Lund Home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont. -This was the 1940's in America.
The ideal nuclear family was mom and dad, who were married -- that nice family unit
where everything is very neat and very defined. And people who were outside of that ideal
really were stigmatized. -To avoid that judgment, Ted's 22-year-old mother, Eleanor,
moved back to her parent's home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where her parents brought up Ted as their own.
-The unusual part of his childhood is how he's raised. He's adopted by his grandparents.
He's raised alongside a person who he is told is his sister. -But she wasn't. She was actually his mother.
-This arrangement went on for almost four years with Ted's grandparents as his main carers.
-His grandfather was quite a violent character, so that suggests to me that very early on in his life,
he's almost in a bit of a survival mode -- "I'm not safe within this home." -Just before his fourth birthday,
Eleanor moved to Tacoma, Washington. There she met and married Johnny Bundy in 1951.
They formally adopted Ted when he was 5 years old. The couple had four children together,
but Ted reportedly didn't form a close bond with his new family and still believed his mother was his sister.
-Ted Bundy is somebody who has always been really conscious of his social class.
He came from quite humble beginnings. The family were quite poor, and he was really quite aware of that
and really quite embarrassed and ashamed by it. -An exceptionally bright student,
Ted Bundy enrolled in the University of Washington in 1966 to study Chinese. There, age 20, he met
and fell in love with a woman called Stephanie. -This was his dream girl. This was the woman he was gonna marry.
This is the woman to which he was dedicated. It was romance in the realest sense that you could imagine it.
-But she suddenly dumped him. -One of the reasons that she cited was that he wasn't ambitious enough.
And I think this would have really hit Ted Bundy quite hard because this feeds into his anxieties
around his social class and those feelings of unease and those feelings of not being good enough.
So, what we've got happening here is this resentment brewing. -Bundy dropped out of university in 1968.
The following year, he returned to the East Coast in what he later described as a bid to understand his roots.
Whilst there, Bundy unearthed a family secret. -He discovers his true identity. He discovers that the woman that he's considered to be
his sister for his whole life is actually his mother. And he discovers his birth certificate,
and the birth certificate says he's illegitimate. -The two most important women to him,
his mother and his mother's surrogate, and the woman he wanted to marry, in essence, both deny and abandon him.
The significance to him of that is that women simply cannot be trusted. -In 1969, age 22, Bundy returned to the University of Washington,
and this time enrolled as a psychology major. There, he met and started dating a single mother
called Elizabeth. Their turbulent relationship would last into the mid-1970's. -Women serve a function for him.
They provide a roof over his head, meals on the table, sex, useful contacts with other people.
So, he has got quite a parasitic lifestyle. He will hook onto particular people and get from them what he wants,
and then he will just discard them and move on. -In 1971, Bundy got a part-time job
at Seattle's Suicide Hotline Crisis Center. -What he's doing is he's performing the role
of the respectable middle-class young man. He wants to be seen to be helping other people.
He wants to be seen to be doing socially worthy things. And this also feeds into the work
that he becomes involved in in terms of political campaigning. -When Bundy graduated university,
he joined the Republican governor's reelection campaign. Then, in September of 1973,
Bundy was accepted into law school at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, just 30 miles south of Seattle.
Before beginning the law course, he went on a trip to California. Whilst there, he rekindled
his relationship with his first love, Stephanie, despite still dating Elizabeth.
-All of a sudden, he's a different man. He's working for the governor, he's talented, he's successful,
he looks like he's good enough for her, finally. -Ted Bundy and Stephanie get engaged.
They planned to get married. And Stephanie's very excited about this, but Ted very coldly just drops her.
-What this was all about was how far this man would go for revenge to have the kind of narcissistic victory
that it would not be her that rejected him, and then rejected her summarily. -Having taken back control by ending the relationship
with Stephanie, 27-year-old Ted Bundy returned to Washington and decided he needed to show womankind who was boss.
Just after midnight on January the 4th, 1974, Bundy broke into the basement apartment
of an 18-year-old dancer and university student. -She was at home, asleep, in her house one night when Ted Bundy broke in,
and he beat her with a metal pole and he raped her and she was in a really terrible state.
Many people think this is something that just kind of came out of the blue, but I would say, absolutely not, it didn't.
I think this was an attack that was built up to. We often find with offenders, there's some behavior
before they get to the point of raping and attacking people. And in Ted Bundy's case, this was voyeurism,
so he had a history of peeping through women's windows and watching them get undressed.
And it's something that gradually builds, and it's not enough for him, and he ratchets it up to the next level.
-The violent assault left the young woman unconscious for 10 days. -She sustained injuries from the blows to the head
that will cause brain damage and brain swelling. And when he sexually assaulted her with a metal bar,
that caused damage to her internal organs, and she was left permanently altered by those injuries.
-Seattle, Washington, February 1974, it was here that 27-year-old Ted Bundy attacked again
and turned from rapist to killer. -It's no coincidence that she's a university student
who he sees as privileged, who he sees as undeserving. Whereas he's somebody who's really hard done by,
and it is that constant jealousy, that constant underlying feeling of shame, that drives a lot of his violence.
-Bundy's chosen target was a 21-year-old University of Washington student called Linda.
He broke into her room. -He very severely attacks her. He really does bash her skull
when he carries out the assault on her. She doesn't survive the attack. -That night, after he'd attacked and killed Linda,
Bundy moved her away from the campus. He dumped her body in the dense woods of Taylor Mountain Forest,
a 30-minute drive from the university. -It's very important that he maintains control
over the victims, even after he's killed them. So he doesn't just leave them where they are,
he wants to be able to know where they are. He wants to have control over them. So he chooses a local beauty spot, Taylor Mountain.
It's a place that people generally go to enjoy, but for him it really is a macabre dump site.
-Linda's body was found a year later, in 1975. Her death marked the start of a furious spate of killings.
At this time, Bundy quit law school in Tacoma after just six months. He returned to Washington, not as a student,
but as a predator. -He would lure women over to his car saying that he needed their assistance with something.
And he'd often be wearing a sling to make it appear that he'd injured himself. And he was good-looking, he was charming, he was respectable.
-Bundy's trademark VW Beetle became his favorite method for abducting women before taking them to a remote spot to attack them.
-When he hit, it was like a shark grabbing its prey. Bam! -He'd use a blunt object to bludgeon his victims,
and then he'd strangle them. -After eight aggravated murders of young women in the first half of 1974, a rate of more than one a month,
fear spread across the Pacific Northwest. -I think Ted Bundy enjoys the feelings of power.
He enjoys the feelings of control. So, you start to see the attacks get closer together
because he's having to escalate his offending to get that same feeling of power.
We know with psychopaths like Ted Bundy, they're prone to boredom, so they will start to mix it up
a bit and offend in different ways. -Then in the summer of that year, Bundy changed his M.O.
He now decided to attack in broad daylight. On July the 14th at Lake Sammamish State Park,
just over 15 miles southeast of the University of Washington, Bundy attacked two young women,
23-year-old Janice and 19-year-old Denise. Denise was last seen entering a public restroom in the park.
-There are some witnesses to these crimes. And there's one common denominator, and that seems to be a man called Ted
who drives a VW Beetle. So that begins to narrow the field a little. -Bundy later said that he kidnapped both woman
from the state park within a few hours of each other. He raped them and made one watch as he murdered the other.
Bundy disposed of their bodies in an area two miles away. -It's reported that Ted Bundy spent time
with the bodies of his victims, that he shampooed the hair of some of them, that he painted their fingernails.
-What his M.O. always consists of is taking these two facets of his personality and he used one of them --
the intelligent, the charming, the caring, the one that would help wash the hair --
he'd use that to seduce them into his private presence, and then the monster, the face --
the face of rage, would come out. And this would plunder this woman asunder. -In September of 1974, Bundy left Washington
and moved east to Salt Lake City. The 27-year-old had been accepted into law school again,
this time at the University of Utah. On the surface, he looked like an ordinary student,
but inside was a cunning serial killer. -He was not your average person. He was bright, brilliant.
He felt like he was a chameleon and that he could disguise himself. He could change his colors, and he could take advantage.
-Bundy later claimed that he first killed in Utah on October the 2nd, 1974. The victim was just 16 years old,
and her body was never found. Rhonda Stapley, a University of Utah pharmacy student,
was waiting for a bus. -I had a dental appointment downtown, and while I was downtown, I decided
I would walk over to a city park. And then, my mouth started to become un-numb from the dental surgery, and I could tell
that I needed to go home to some aspirins pretty soon. So, I went over to where the bus stop was.
-The bus did not show, but Ted Bundy did. He pulled his VW Beetle up to the bus stop and offered her a ride.
-He was nicely dressed, handsome. He told me that he was a law student, and I was feeling pretty lucky --
what college girl wouldn't want to meet a law student? -Unlike other serial killers, he did not target prostitutes,
which are easy victims. He'd target young, attractive, intelligent, often beautiful and successful women.
This he could do because of his intelligence. That made him a unique threat and danger.
-After a couple of blocks with Rhonda in the car, Bundy took a turn away from the university.
-Very politely, he says, "Oh, hope you don't mind, but I have a short errand to run."
And I said, "I thought you were taking me to the zoo." And he said, "No." I said, "Near the zoo."
And we kept driving up that canyon and then down another canyon. -Bundy drove up into Big Cottonwood Canyon,
just southeast of the city. -At this point, he stopped talking to me. He just had both hands on the steering wheel
and was just driving. -As Bundy came to a corner, he slowed down. -In my mind, I thought that he was looking for a place
to pull over and park and make out. And so, in my mind, I'm trying to figure out how do
I get out of this situation without embarrassing either of us. -Bundy pulled off the road and into a secluded picnic area
and parked the car. -And then he turned towards me and he leaned in really close to my face.
I thought he was gonna kiss me. Instead, he said, "Do you know what? I'm gonna kill you."
And he put his hands on my throat and started squeezing. -She fell unconscious. When Rhonda eventually woke up,
she was lying on the picnic table with Bundy on top of her. -He was sitting on my chest with all of his weight
on my chest and stomach. And I told him, "Get off, I can't breathe." And he says, "Stop struggling, and I'll let you breathe."
And so, I held still and he kind of rocked up onto his knees, so it took some of the pressure off.
And then he put his hand over my nose and mouth and cut off my air that way. And he would do that until I would just go unconscious,
and then he would kind of bring me back. He -- he liked watching me fade in and out of consciousness.
-Rhonda had just one chance to save herself. -The last time, when I regained consciousness,
I noticed that he wasn't standing by me anymore. The canyon was pitch-black with darkness,
and there was little light coming from the dome light of the car because he had opened the door to the Volkswagen
and was fiddling around with something in the back seat. And I used that opportunity to just run the opposite direction.
I just jumped up and ran. Fortunately, or just by pure luck, or grace of God, or intervention from above,
or something, I happened to fall into the mountain river, which wasn't very deep, but was really, really fast.
And it swept me away. There was water swirling around boulders and flowing over boulders,
and I, of course, was smashing into those. Eventually, I was able to climb out and rearrange my clothes
so I could walk home. And that's what I did, is I just walked home. -Rhonda kept her attack by Bundy a secret for more than 30 years.
-I felt embarrassed and stupid and ashamed and, plus I was religious -- LDS Mormon girl.
And the teachings at that time were that, if you have a choice of losing your life or losing your virtue,
it would be better for you eternally if you lost your life. So, I decided the best thing for me to do
was just to suck it up and pretend it never happened and go on with my life. -Rhonda's escape did not deter Bundy's murderous plans.
A few weeks later in November 1974, Bundy was prowling a mall in Murray, Utah, posed as a police officer.
Disguised, he managed to entice an 18-year-old telephone operator called Carol to get into his car.
He planned on raping and killing her. -And this goes wrong. It fails. She gets away.
-During the struggle, Carol had managed to open the car door and escape. -Ted Bundy is not the kind of guy
who just gives up and goes home. He's got his mind set on it. He wants to get what he wants that night.
-Now two of Bundy's victims had escaped death. The next would not be so fortunate.
On November the 8th, Bundy kidnaps 17-year-old Deborah as she left a theater production.
She was on her way to pick up her brother. Deborah was never seen again. -What happens with Bundy and many other serial killers,
they have to kill. They kill, they get a release, sometimes they get a little extra release
by returning to the corpse and having a small dose of the arousal, which they can live through by toying with their trophies
and toying with the corpse itself, and then they have a rest period. -All the time 27-year-old Bundy had been killing,
he was still seeing his long-term girlfriend, Elizabeth, in Seattle. In the autumn of 1974, he also got involved with Carol,
a single mother and a divorcée. -He presented as completely normal, and so many people were taken in by him.
-Ted Bundy had yet to appear on the police radar as a suspect, but thanks to eight eyewitnesses who saw him in July of 1974
at Lake Sammamish, the Washington State Police were on the lookout for a man who'd introduced himself as Ted
and was driving a tan VW Beetle. -This guy is reported to be nice-looking, in his 20's,
just an average college guy. He doesn't look like a monster. And nobody thinks that a serial killer looks like this.
-Police issued a composite sketch based on the descriptions they had. It was broadcast on national television
and was seen by Elizabeth. She called the police. She gave them Bundy's details, as well as those of his car.
But the police dismissed the tip, because reportedly Bundy was a clean-cut law student.
A year later, the 28-year-old headed cross country. He raped and killed three young women in Colorado.
In May, he assaulted a 12-year-old child. She'd been abducted from her junior high school
in Pocatello, Idaho. -She's his youngest victim. Here, we've got Ted Bundy seeing an opportunity
and actually seizing it, with not too much regard to the risk, and that's not really his previous M.O.
He's used that charm before. But this is quite disorganized, and this is something that will lead to his downfall.
-Bundy had got away with multiple murders and, despite a sketch of him in circulation,
had not been identified by police. In June, 1975, he returned to Utah and killed a 15-year-old girl in Provo.
Two months later, Bundy was driving erratically through a Salt Lake City suburb in his tan VW Beetle
when he was spotted by a Utah highway patrol officer. -Ted Bundy is pulled over by a police officer.
He notices the front passenger seat is missing, there's an ice pick, there's a crowbar,
there's a ski mask, and all of this looks incredibly suspicious, but Ted Bundy being the charming manipulator
has an explanation for all of this. -Suspicions were aroused, but the Utah police
did not have enough evidence to detain Bundy for anything to do with the murders.
Instead, three Utah detectives flew to Seattle where they met up with the Washington police.
Together, they interviewed Bundy's long-term girlfriend, Elizabeth. She told them that she'd found some strange items
in the apartment a year earlier, including a meat cleaver and a bag of women's clothing.
-What happens over the course of the lives of serial killers is the time it takes them to need another killing,
to need, if you will, another savage, evil meal, gets shorter and shorter and shorter.
Their control gets less and less and less. The way they perpetrate their crimes becomes wilder and more foolish.
-With the FBI on his trail, Bundy sold his VW, but it was found by police. Inside, they discovered strands of survivor Carol's hair
and hairs from two other women. On October the 2nd, 1975, detectives found Bundy in Utah,
arrested him, and put him in a lineup. There, Carol positively identified him as her abductor.
-This is where he's taken his eye off the ball. This is where he started making mistakes.
He's been so driven by his wants and his desires that he stopped to actually risk-assess what he's doing.
-Unable to find enough evidence to charge him with any murders, Bundy only stood trial
for Carol's aggravated kidnap and assault. On June the 30th, 1976, Bundy was sentenced to serve 1 to 15 years
and was eventually moved to the Garfield County Jail in Colorado. -I felt relieved that he was arrested
and wasn't a threat on the street anymore. -Just as police were gathering enough evidence to charge him
with the murder of a 23-year-old woman in Snowmass, Bundy pulled a major surprise.
-There's a preliminary hearing and Ted Bundy, being the incredibly arrogant individual that he is,
decides that he's going to defend himself in court. -Bundy was savvy about how the system operated.
By being his own lawyer, he had access to the law library system of the jail. And he was allowed to go there, notwithstanding that once
you got access to the law library system, you could go right out the window, which he did.
-Bundy escaped and went on the run in Colorado. He was caught six days later. A year later, he pulled another surprise.
-He's in his cell and he notices that there's a hole in the ceiling. And one day, he manages it, and he gets through the hole,
and he comes out in the apartments that belongs to the chief jailor. And he literally walks out of the front door of the prison,
and he's away again. -Free and on the loose, Bundy made his way to the peaceful college town of Tallahassee
in the sunshine state of Florida. -I suspect that when Bundy knows he's at the end of his rope --
he's been arrested enough times, had enough interactions to realize that this story is gonna come to an end.
So, it's in Florida that he goes on his rampage. -Around 2:45 a.m. on January the 15th, 1978,
Ted Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority house. -He's somebody who's familiar with college towns,
with college buildings. So I think he knew that there were many women in this house,
and that was his intention all along. -Within 15 minutes, he had attacked 4 women, brutally --
cracking their skulls, breaking their collarbones. -21-year-old Margaret was hit with a piece of firewood
and then strangled to death with her stockings. 20-year-old Lisa was beaten unconscious, raped, and killed.
-The attack is incredibly brutal. There's rape, he beats people, he knocks peoples' teeth out,
he bites the buttock of one of the victims. -The magnitude of the terror for the victim
is as intense as the magnitude of the rage by the perpetrator. -Two others were both severely beaten and assaulted.
Miraculously, they survived. Within the hour, the sheriff of Leon County, Ken Katsaris,
was called to the crime scene. -When I got there, I did check with the investigators.
They had secured the scene. We knew that we had two who were obviously dead, and two that they believed may die.
You could tell which one was first. You could tell which one was second, third, and fourth.
But you could tell how much energy that he expended. -This was not the end of Bundy's activity that night.
-As I'm standing outside of the sorority house, we get a call that there's strange noises coming from a condo next door,
and I send an investigator immediately because, I said, "Six blocks away, could it be?"
He's doing it again, which only tells you he couldn't help himself. -Bundy had broken into another apartment,
where he savagely beat another student. -She was in a pool of blood when my investigator went in the condo, or the apartment.
And Bundy was leaving out the back window, but she tended to the -- the injured first.
-Still free, a few weeks later, Bundy struck again, this time in Lake City in Northern Florida.
His victim was another little girl who was just 12 years old. -He is a prolific serial killer at this point in time.
Serial killing is his hobby. It's his vocation. It's something that he feels that he's good at.
And, more so, he's getting away with it. And when somebody's getting away with it,
they're certainly not going to stop. And, if anything, their offending is only gonna get worse.
-Bundy dumped the girl's brutalized body in woods about 30 miles west of Lake City.
He then stole a car and made his way west into the Florida Panhandle. Three days later, on February the 15th, 1978,
an alert Pensacola police officer stopped America's most notorious serial killer
near the Alabama state line for driving suspiciously. -He just had a gut feeling that something might be wrong.
And, of course, it came out over his radio after he called it in that the vehicle had been stolen.
-After a brief struggle in which the officer was forced to fire a warning shot, Bundy was arrested.
He was taken to the Leon County Jail in Tallahassee, Florida. -I had him in custody for over two years
in my detention center, my jail. I had him so locked up that he wasn't going anywhere.
He not only was in a secure jail cell, but I had him in a cell that we had lined with armor plate steel in sheets
that were welded in terms of the seams -- floor, walls, ceiling. There was no light fixture that he could remove
like he did in Colorado. And then I put extra locks on the door -- heavy, impenetrable locks --
in addition to the jail key lock. And they were in the hands of several people. -When she discovered that Bundy was arrested for murder,
his partner, Elizabeth, finally left him. At the same time, detectives in Washington state
tried to build their case against Bundy and prove that he was a serial killer. Sheriff Ken Katsaris was also doing some digging of his own.
-I went to his cell one day, talking to him through the port. I told him, I said,
"Ted, I think I know what's going on with you. You've had a problem with your mother
because you were born out of wedlock, she withheld who your father was, you've never forgiven her,
and that has a lot to do with what you're doing in terms of taking it out on other women."
He immediately opened his eyes wide with anger. He wanted to kill. He immediately started trashing his cell, throwing things about.
And he grabbed the shower rod, which was welded in place, he ripped it from its position, which meant a lot of power.
-Intellectually, Sheriff Ken Katsaris was more than a match for Bundy. He managed to goad the serial killer
into a game-changing revelation. -He would taunt me with, "Ken," as he would refer to me,
with that sarcastic twist of that name -- just three letters, but he would say, "Ken."
And then he would say, "The evidence is there, you just can't find it." And I thought then, I know what he's referring to.
He signed one of those bodies. -This was Ken's eureka moment. -He used his teeth and clamped hard twice
to leave a signature. And I realized we had a very deliberate double bite impression --
double meaning he bit down and then he came out and bit again. That was his signature.
-Ken Katsaris was convinced the bite marks left on the bodies of his victims were the smoking gun that would show,
once and for all, that Ted Bundy was indeed America's most vicious serial killer.
But to convict Bundy, the sheriff of Leon County needed to prove it. -When I viewed the two bodies of the young ladies
at the morgue on the slab, just barely 20 years of age, I had a one-month-old little girl at home
and I had a 2-year-old daughter at home, and I just kept flashing images that this could be them.
I made myself a promise in the morgue, somebody's gonna pay for this. I will find this person.
-During his regular interactions with Bundy, the sheriff realized that in the Chi Omega sorority house attack,
Bundy had left a bite mark on the left buttock of Lisa, one of the victims. -I was teaching the forensics of homicide investigation,
and I was teaching the advanced concepts, so I knew that these bites were going to be important.
-Sheriff Ken Katsaris determined that if you can get an impression of Bundy's bite,
he might be able to match it to the marks left on Lisa's body. -I needed an exemplar.
I needed his teeth marks. And that became -- I think it consumed me. How can I get them?
-The prison officers tried some novel techniques to get the clean impression they needed for a comparison.
-We gave him different kinds of fruit, 'cause we weren't sure which one the core would leave the best bite impression.
And that inmate said, "You're getting fruit? I don't get any fruit." And I think he became suspicious
that something was going on with that because he quit eating his fruit. -After their fruit tricks failed,
the sheriff and his team had a trailblazing brainwave. -Then, it struck us -- it just, it hit --
what about a search warrant for his mouth? We can just go serve it. That would get the bite impression.
-Ken decided to take Bundy to his own dentist. -I personally went to Ted Bundy's cell and I said,
"You're coming with me." I told him to put his brace on. I had a special brace developed, now called the Bundy brace.
It was spring loaded, so that when he would straighten out his leg, you could hear that spring pop into place,
that way if he tried to run, he'd be running with one stiff leg. I told him to put his brace on.
-Bundy reluctantly went with Ken to the dentist's office. -And I escorted him up the stairway because
he couldn't walk it very well with the brace. And then the door opened, and there stood three men
with little white smocks on, and the dental chair behind them. And he knew -- he knew the jig was up.
He knew. And that's when I knew that he knew that the bite marks were deliberate,
and they were put there for a purpose. -Ken told Bundy that he had a warrant and they were going to get a bite impression from him.
-And I had the judge put in there that we could use any and all force reasonably necessary.
I showed him the contraptions that they use post mortem to keep the mouth open. And he looked at me, he sat down in the dental chair, smiled,
and said, "Ken, you know I'm not a violent person. Do what you need to do." -The bite mark impression that the sheriff obtained
would prove vital in proving that Bundy was, in fact, a killer. His trial for the murder of the two students
in the Chi Omega sorority house and the assault of three more young women began in Miami on the 25th of June, 1979.
It would be the first national televised trial in America. -And I said I'm going to argue more broadly 'cause I --
I haven't had an opportunity to -- to complete my research on the status of Florida law.
-I was watching the trial on TV, and I saw how arrogant he was, and he wasn't in shackles.
He was dressed -- pretending to be his own lawyer -- dressed like a lawyer, smiling and flirting with the people in the audience,
and just being Mr. Charismatic, and that was kind of sickening. -On July the 24th, 1979, the jury convicted Ted Bundy
on two counts of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder. He was given the death sentence twice.
-The only real evidence we had was the bite impression. And, obviously, I felt good because I found it.
I was conflicted. Yes, I understood that this was congratulations, but it was no congratulations.
These women had suffered -- some suffered and lived, thank God, others died. How do you celebrate?
-Bundy would spend 10 years on death row fighting his execution. -Ted Bundy exhausted every legal avenue
he possibly could to save himself from the death penalty. So, the cost of his trial and his appeals
was around about $9 million U.S., which was a lot of money at the time. -At the sentencing for the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl
in Lake City, Florida, Bundy represented himself. Sensationally, he used the opportunity to propose to Carol.
Carol met Bundy in Seattle in 1974. She would profess his innocence until the eve of his execution.
She had a daughter in October of 1982 and claimed that Bundy was the father. -Serial killers, they are intense,
they are moving, and they are real. And I think some women are excited about that.
Some women need that terror, that terror, that excitement, especially if somehow they can be near the flame
without being burned by its touch. -Over the 10 years that Bundy was on death row,
he slowly confessed to 30 documented murders. -He has knowledge of murders that he's committed,
which the authorities don't know about, and he's gonna use that to his full advantage.
And he's gonna drip-feed some of this information out bit by bit in order to try and buy himself some time.
-As the appeals run out, and as the death sentence neared, a macabre fascination with Bundy grew.
-Just before his execution, we started to see this immense media circus around the event.
We started to see radio shows playing the sound of frying bacon on air, and they had a Bundy countdown.
People had Ted Bundy dances and barbecues. -At 7:16 a.m. on January the 24th, 1989,
age 42, Ted Bundy was finally executed. -Even when he was being walked to the electric chair,
he was shouting out names of victims. Right up until the end, he's trying to buy himself more time,
he's trying to just gradually give away some of this knowledge about his crimes.
-It's a sad thing, from a scientific point of view, that he would die without telling us or giving us any hint
about whether or not there was something in his life that we don't know about that helps explain his conduct.
-I was not really happy, but kind of relieved. Normally, I don't very often agree with the death penalty,
but with him, it was necessary. -So many people were taken in by him, despite the fact he was leaving this trail of bodies behind him.
Monsters don't always look like monsters. Sometimes they look like the guy next door.
-Arguably America's most notorious murderer, Bundy was deceptively depraved. He used his charms to kidnap, rape,
and kill by some estimates up to 100 young women and girls, making Ted Bundy one of the world's
most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

America’s most notorious serial killer Ted Bundy confessed to the murder of thirty young women across the US between 1974 and 1978. He was executed in 1989.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Ted Bundy's life and crimes are examined, highlighting his brutal attacks, psychological profile, and eventual capture and execution.

Key points

The Chi Omega Attack. In 1978, Bundy broke into a sorority house and attacked four women in just 15 minutes.
Bundy's Chilling Confession. Bundy revealed his dark motivations, saying he killed because he liked it.
The Fear in the Community. Women lived in terror as Bundy's killing spree escalated across the Pacific Northwest.
The Disguise of Evil. Bundy appeared as a charming law student, masking his true nature as a serial killer.
Rhonda Stapley's Escape. Rhonda Stapley survived a brutal attack by Bundy and kept it a secret for 30 years.
Ted Bundy's Arrest. In October 1975, Ted Bundy was arrested after being identified by a survivor.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Nobody went out at night.

The atmosphere of fear created by Bundy's actions.

2:55WatchJul 29, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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