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On the morning of February first, nineteen seventy four, a
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young woman named Linda Ann Healy disappeared from her basement
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bedroom in the University District of Seattle, Washington. She was
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twenty one years old. She was a student at the
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University of Washington. Her roommates noticed she was gone when
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she did not show up for breakfast. Her bed had
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been made, her nightgown was found neatly folded in her room,
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but her sheets, when they looked more carefully, were bloodstained.
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Linda Heely was gone, and nobody yet had any idea
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that what had just begun would not end for four
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more years and would leave at least thirty women dead
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across six states. Slow The man responsible had a name that,
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by the end of the decade would become one of
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the most recognized names in the history of American crime.
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Theodore Robert Bundy ted twenty seven years old in February
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nineteen seventy four.
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He was a law student. He was handsome in.
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A clean cut, conventionally attractive way that photographs capture well.
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He had a girlfriend who described him as kind and
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thoughtful and wonderful. He volunteered at a suicide prevention hotline.
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He worked for the Republican Party in Washington State.
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He wrote a.
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Pamphlet for the King County Crime Prevention Advisory Commission on
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the subject of rape prevention for women, and he was
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at the same time beginning to kill. Ted Bundy was
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born on November twenty fourth, nineteen forty six, in Burlington, Vermont.
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His mother was an.
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Unmarried, twenty two year old woman named eleanor Louise Cowell.
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The circumstances of his birth were complicated by the stigma
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of illegitimacy in nineteen forties America, and for the first
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years of his life, Ted was raised by his maternal
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grandparents as their son, believing his mother to be.
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His older sister.
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His biological father was never publicly identified with certainty. When
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his
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mother eventually moved them to Tacoma, Washington and married
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a man named Johnny Bundy, Ted took his stepfather's last name.
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He was a bright child, a good student outwardly by
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every measurable external indicator, a normal kid. Inwardly, something was
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wrong from very early on. He spoke in later interviews
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about an obsession beginning in adolescence with violent pornography with
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images of sexual violence with a compulsion he described as
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growing alongside him, like something he could not name but
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could not escape. By the mid nineteen seventies, the disappearances
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of young women in Washington State had begun to accumulate
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into something that could not be dismissed as coincidence. Donna Manson,
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Susan Rancourt, ROBERTA Parks, friend of Ball, Georgian Hawkins, all gone,
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all young women, all connected to university campuses in the
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Seattle and Olympia area. Investigators began to develop a composite.
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Witnesses at various locations described a young man, handsome who
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called himself Ted, who sometimes wore a sling on his
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arm or used crutches, and asked young women for help
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with things, carrying books, getting to his car. He was charming,
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he made the ask sound reasonable, and the women who
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helped him, who did the ordinary human thing of assisting
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someone who appeared to need it, did not come home.
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On July fourteenth, nineteen seventy four, Ted Bundy committed two
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abductions in a single afternoon at Lake Sammish State Park,
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a recreation area east of Seattle. Multiple witnesses reported seeing
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a young man in a white tennis outfit, his arm
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in a sling, approaching women on the beach and asking
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for help with a sailboat. Several women declined, two did not.
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Janis Ott, twenty three years old, left with him in
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the early afternoon. Denise Nasland, eighteen years old, left with
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him later the same day. Neither of them came back
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to the beach. Multiple witnesses independently described the same young man.
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They gave investigators a first name, Ted, and a partial
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vehicle description, a tan or brown Volkswagen Beetle. That summer,
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Bundy left Seattle. He enrolled in law school at the
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University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and the disappearances,
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which had been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, began to
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appear in Utah and Idaho and Colorado mobile in the
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way that investigators of that era were not yet equipped
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to track. In the nineteen seventies, there was no national
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database of missing persons, no centralized system for connecting a
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disappearance in Seattle to a disappearance in Salt Lake City
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to a disappearance in Aspen. Law enforcement agencies in different
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states were effectively investigating different crimes. They were looking at
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individual trees. Ted Bundy was the forest. In August nineteen
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seventy five, a Utah Highway Patrol officer named Bob Hayward
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pulled over a Volkswagen Beetle driving without its headlights in
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the early hours of the morning in Granger, Utah. The
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driver was Ted Bundy. When Hayward looked in the vehicle,
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he found items that seemed strange for two in the morning, handcuffs,
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a ski mask, a crowbar, rope, a bag containing an
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ice pick, and rips of cloth. Bundy was arrested for
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possession of burglary tools. He was a law student, He
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was charming, he was cooperative, and within weeks investigators had
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begun connecting him to the disappearances. A witness identified him
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in a police lineup as the man she had seen
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with Carol Darranch, a young woman who had survived an
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attempted abduction in Salt Lake City the previous year. Darrnch
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herself in a lineup pointed at Bundy. He was convicted
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of aggravated kidnapping of Deranch in March nineteen seventy six
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and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Fifteen years for
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a man who had already killed somewhere between fifteen and
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thirty people, but Bundy was not in prison for fifteen years.
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He was in prison for a far shorter time because
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Ted Bundy escaped twice. The first escape happened in June
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nineteen seventy seven in Aspen, Colorado, where he had been
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transferred to face a murder charge. He had been allowed
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to serve as his own attorney, which gave him access
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to the courthouse law library. On June seventh, he jumped
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out of a second story window during a court recess.
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He was recaptured eight days later in the mountains near Aspen,
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having spent a week at altitude in the cold without
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adequate supplies. He was thin and weak and hypothermic when
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they found him, and he escaped again. The second escape
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was more deliberate. In December nineteen seventy seven. Bundy had
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spent months quietly improving his physical condition and had cut
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a hole in the ceiling of his cell. On the
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night of December thirtieth, he crawled through the hole and
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out of the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
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By the time his absence was discovered, he had been
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gone for hours. He made his way to Chicago by
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hitchhiking and stolen vehicles, then to Atlanta, then to Tallahassee, Florida,
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where he rented a room near the Florida State University
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campus under an assumed name, and thirty seven days after
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his escape, on the night of January fourteenth, nineteen seventy eight,
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he entered the chi Omega sorority house on the FSU campus.
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What happened inside chi Omega.
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That night was so brutal, so swift, and so violent
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that the three sorority members who survived the initial attack
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were left with injuries that took months to heal. Two
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young women, Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, both twenty one
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years old, were murdered in their sleep. Bundy used a
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log from the fireplace of a nearby house and a
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pair of pantyhose.
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He was inside the house.
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For less than fifteen minutes less than fifteen minutes, and
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then he left and went to another house three blocks
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away and attacked a fifth woman. Then he walked back
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to his room and went to sleep. Forty two days
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after the chi Omega attacks, Bundy was pulled over in
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a stolen vehicle in Pensacola, Florida, by a police officer
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named David Lee. He resisted, the officer subdued him, and
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Ted Bundy, who had escaped twice and murdered at least
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two people since his second escape, was in custody for
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the last time. He was thirty one years old. He
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would never be free again. The trial, or rather the
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trials of Ted Bundy, were unlike anything American criminal proceedings
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had produced before. Bundy again represented himself, at least in part.
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He was articulate. He was composed.
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He had a following, a contingent of young women who
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attended the proceedings and wrote him letters and wore their
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hair in the same dar center parted style as many
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of his victims. Apparently unaware of the irony or perhaps
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unmoved by it, he flirted with a witness during his
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trial and proposed marriage to her.
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From the witness stand. She said yes.
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They were married in the courtroom in a legally binding
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ceremony under a Florida statute that allowed spoken declarations of
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intent before witnesses. Carol Anne Boone, who believed in his innocence,
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would eventually have his child. She later left him in
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the mid nineteen eighties, taking their daughter with her. Bundy
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was convicted of the chi Omega murders and sentenced to
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death in July nineteen seventy nine. Six months later, he
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was tried for the murder of Kimberly Leech, a twelve
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year old girl from Lake City, Florida, whom he had
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abducted from her school on February ninth, nineteen seventy eight.
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Her remains were found in a state park two months later.
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This was the case that produced the sentence that would
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ultimately be carried out. Bundy received a third death sentence.
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He sat on death row at Florida State Prison for
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a decade. In the years on death row, Bundy began
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to confess slowly, strategically using the confessions as bargaining chips,
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trading information about victims for stays of execution. He spoke
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with FBI agents and investigators in journalists and authors. He
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offered to help identify the victims of the Green River
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Killer in Washington State, who was still active in the
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nineteen eighties. In exchange for continued contact with the outside world,
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he gave interviews that became some of the most studied
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documents in the history of criminal psychology. In his final interview,
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given to James Dobson of Focus on the Family the
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day before his execution, he blamed violent pornography for his crimes.
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He said it had fueled what he was. Many people
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who had studied him for years were skeptical of this
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final explanation. It seemed too convenient, too tidy, too much
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like a man who had spent his entire life managing
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the way other people saw him, making one final attempt
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to manage it from the electric chair. On January twenty fourth,
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nineteen eighty nine, Ted Bundy was executed at Florida State Prison.
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He was forty two years old. Outside the prison, crowds
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had gathered, Some held signs, some cheered, Some brought lawn
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chairs and radios and made a morning of it. When
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the execution was announced, there were cheers from the crowd
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outside the gates. This reaction disturbed some people who observed it.
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The spectacle of celebration at the death of even the
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worst of people is not to everyone a comfortable thing
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to witness, but the scale of what Bundy had done.
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The thirty confirmed murders, the real number that experts believe
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may be significantly higher. The years of hunting and killing
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and manipulating and escaping and hunting again made the grief
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of his victims' families and the relief of a public
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that had lived with his name for a decade into
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something complicated and human and not easily judged from the outside.
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The thirty women he confessed to Linda Ann Healy, who
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disappeared from her basement bedroom in February nineteen seventy four.
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Donna Manson, Susan Raincourt, Roberta Parks, Brenda Ball, Georgian Hawkins,
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Janice Ott, and Denise Nasland, who left a beach together
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and never came back. The women in Utah and Idaho
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and Colorado whose names filled the investigative files of jurisdictions
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that did not yet know they were all chasing the
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same man, Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, who were asleep
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in their own beds, Kimberly Leech, who was twelve years old.
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And the ones who are not yet named, the ones
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whose families submitted to DNA and waited, the ones who
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disappeared and whose disappearance was filed under unsolved and stayed there.
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In April twenty twenty.
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Six, DNA testing definitively linked Bundy to the nineteen seventy
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four murder of Laura ann Ame, a seventeen year old
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Utah woman who had vanished on Halloween night nineteen seventy four.
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Investigators had suspected Bundy for decades. He verbally acknowledged his
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involvement before his execution, but the DNA confirmation twenty twenty
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six was the first scientific certainty in that case. Over
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fifty years after her death, laura Ames family finally had
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an answer that no one could dispute, and her name
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added to a list that should never have been.
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As long as it is.
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Slow, pour yourself something good, tonight ted. Bundy has been
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dead for thirty six years, and the names of the
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women he killed are still being confirmed by DNA testing
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in twenty twenty six. They deserved better than that, all
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of them. Each one of them was someone's daughter, someone's friend,
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someone's whole world, and they deserved to grow old. I
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will see you next episode