TRANSCRIÇÃO 🔗
WEBVTT
1
00:00:00.200 --> 00:00:03.680
On the morning of February first, nineteen seventy four, a
2
00:00:03.720 --> 00:00:07.400
young woman named Linda Ann Healy disappeared from her basement
3
00:00:07.440 --> 00:00:12.199
bedroom in the University District of Seattle, Washington. She was
4
00:00:12.320 --> 00:00:15.919
twenty one years old. She was a student at the
5
00:00:16.039 --> 00:00:20.600
University of Washington. Her roommates noticed she was gone when
6
00:00:20.600 --> 00:00:23.719
she did not show up for breakfast. Her bed had
7
00:00:23.760 --> 00:00:29.280
been made, her nightgown was found neatly folded in her room,
8
00:00:29.679 --> 00:00:33.079
but her sheets, when they looked more carefully, were bloodstained.
9
00:00:33.960 --> 00:00:37.640
Linda Heely was gone, and nobody yet had any idea
10
00:00:37.679 --> 00:00:40.880
that what had just begun would not end for four
11
00:00:40.880 --> 00:00:44.719
more years and would leave at least thirty women dead
12
00:00:44.759 --> 00:00:50.079
across six states. Slow The man responsible had a name that,
13
00:00:50.200 --> 00:00:52.880
by the end of the decade would become one of
14
00:00:52.920 --> 00:00:56.399
the most recognized names in the history of American crime.
15
00:00:56.759 --> 00:01:02.479
Theodore Robert Bundy ted twenty seven years old in February
16
00:01:02.600 --> 00:01:03.560
nineteen seventy four.
17
00:01:04.480 --> 00:01:07.760
He was a law student. He was handsome in.
18
00:01:07.719 --> 00:01:12.239
A clean cut, conventionally attractive way that photographs capture well.
19
00:01:13.200 --> 00:01:16.280
He had a girlfriend who described him as kind and
20
00:01:16.400 --> 00:01:21.799
thoughtful and wonderful. He volunteered at a suicide prevention hotline.
21
00:01:22.159 --> 00:01:25.200
He worked for the Republican Party in Washington State.
22
00:01:26.200 --> 00:01:26.840
He wrote a.
23
00:01:26.799 --> 00:01:31.359
Pamphlet for the King County Crime Prevention Advisory Commission on
24
00:01:31.439 --> 00:01:35.239
the subject of rape prevention for women, and he was
25
00:01:35.959 --> 00:01:39.400
at the same time beginning to kill. Ted Bundy was
26
00:01:39.400 --> 00:01:44.760
born on November twenty fourth, nineteen forty six, in Burlington, Vermont.
27
00:01:45.480 --> 00:01:46.640
His mother was an.
28
00:01:46.560 --> 00:01:50.560
Unmarried, twenty two year old woman named eleanor Louise Cowell.
29
00:01:50.840 --> 00:01:55.040
The circumstances of his birth were complicated by the stigma
30
00:01:55.079 --> 00:01:59.359
of illegitimacy in nineteen forties America, and for the first
31
00:01:59.439 --> 00:02:03.040
years of his life, Ted was raised by his maternal
32
00:02:03.120 --> 00:02:06.719
grandparents as their son, believing his mother to be.
33
00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:08.120
His older sister.
34
00:02:09.159 --> 00:02:14.280
His biological father was never publicly identified with certainty. When
35
00:02:14.319 --> 00:02:18.520
his
Load full transcript
mother eventually moved them to Tacoma, Washington and married
36
00:02:18.560 --> 00:02:22.439
a man named Johnny Bundy, Ted took his stepfather's last name.
37
00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:27.319
He was a bright child, a good student outwardly by
38
00:02:27.360 --> 00:02:32.719
every measurable external indicator, a normal kid. Inwardly, something was
39
00:02:32.800 --> 00:02:37.240
wrong from very early on. He spoke in later interviews
40
00:02:37.280 --> 00:02:42.280
about an obsession beginning in adolescence with violent pornography with
41
00:02:42.439 --> 00:02:47.319
images of sexual violence with a compulsion he described as
42
00:02:47.360 --> 00:02:51.000
growing alongside him, like something he could not name but
43
00:02:51.080 --> 00:02:56.000
could not escape. By the mid nineteen seventies, the disappearances
44
00:02:56.039 --> 00:02:59.000
of young women in Washington State had begun to accumulate
45
00:02:59.039 --> 00:03:02.719
into something that could not be dismissed as coincidence. Donna Manson,
46
00:03:03.759 --> 00:03:10.960
Susan Rancourt, ROBERTA Parks, friend of Ball, Georgian Hawkins, all gone,
47
00:03:11.479 --> 00:03:15.639
all young women, all connected to university campuses in the
48
00:03:15.719 --> 00:03:20.759
Seattle and Olympia area. Investigators began to develop a composite.
49
00:03:20.960 --> 00:03:25.560
Witnesses at various locations described a young man, handsome who
50
00:03:25.599 --> 00:03:29.159
called himself Ted, who sometimes wore a sling on his
51
00:03:29.280 --> 00:03:32.719
arm or used crutches, and asked young women for help
52
00:03:32.759 --> 00:03:38.599
with things, carrying books, getting to his car. He was charming,
53
00:03:39.919 --> 00:03:43.400
he made the ask sound reasonable, and the women who
54
00:03:43.479 --> 00:03:46.680
helped him, who did the ordinary human thing of assisting
55
00:03:46.719 --> 00:03:49.479
someone who appeared to need it, did not come home.
56
00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:54.240
On July fourteenth, nineteen seventy four, Ted Bundy committed two
57
00:03:54.280 --> 00:03:58.240
abductions in a single afternoon at Lake Sammish State Park,
58
00:03:58.879 --> 00:04:03.280
a recreation area east of Seattle. Multiple witnesses reported seeing
59
00:04:03.319 --> 00:04:06.599
a young man in a white tennis outfit, his arm
60
00:04:06.719 --> 00:04:10.240
in a sling, approaching women on the beach and asking
61
00:04:10.280 --> 00:04:15.039
for help with a sailboat. Several women declined, two did not.
62
00:04:15.759 --> 00:04:19.079
Janis Ott, twenty three years old, left with him in
63
00:04:19.160 --> 00:04:24.560
the early afternoon. Denise Nasland, eighteen years old, left with
64
00:04:24.680 --> 00:04:27.920
him later the same day. Neither of them came back
65
00:04:27.959 --> 00:04:32.399
to the beach. Multiple witnesses independently described the same young man.
66
00:04:32.879 --> 00:04:37.279
They gave investigators a first name, Ted, and a partial
67
00:04:37.399 --> 00:04:42.839
vehicle description, a tan or brown Volkswagen Beetle. That summer,
68
00:04:43.160 --> 00:04:47.439
Bundy left Seattle. He enrolled in law school at the
69
00:04:47.519 --> 00:04:51.800
University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and the disappearances,
70
00:04:51.879 --> 00:04:55.720
which had been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, began to
71
00:04:55.759 --> 00:05:01.399
appear in Utah and Idaho and Colorado mobile in the
72
00:05:01.399 --> 00:05:04.600
way that investigators of that era were not yet equipped
73
00:05:04.600 --> 00:05:08.759
to track. In the nineteen seventies, there was no national
74
00:05:08.839 --> 00:05:13.480
database of missing persons, no centralized system for connecting a
75
00:05:13.560 --> 00:05:17.720
disappearance in Seattle to a disappearance in Salt Lake City
76
00:05:18.120 --> 00:05:22.920
to a disappearance in Aspen. Law enforcement agencies in different
77
00:05:22.959 --> 00:05:28.519
states were effectively investigating different crimes. They were looking at
78
00:05:28.519 --> 00:05:33.399
individual trees. Ted Bundy was the forest. In August nineteen
79
00:05:33.480 --> 00:05:38.000
seventy five, a Utah Highway Patrol officer named Bob Hayward
80
00:05:38.519 --> 00:05:42.199
pulled over a Volkswagen Beetle driving without its headlights in
81
00:05:42.240 --> 00:05:46.000
the early hours of the morning in Granger, Utah. The
82
00:05:46.079 --> 00:05:49.079
driver was Ted Bundy. When Hayward looked in the vehicle,
83
00:05:49.439 --> 00:05:53.600
he found items that seemed strange for two in the morning, handcuffs,
84
00:05:54.040 --> 00:05:59.120
a ski mask, a crowbar, rope, a bag containing an
85
00:05:59.160 --> 00:06:02.639
ice pick, and rips of cloth. Bundy was arrested for
86
00:06:02.800 --> 00:06:07.160
possession of burglary tools. He was a law student, He
87
00:06:07.240 --> 00:06:12.319
was charming, he was cooperative, and within weeks investigators had
88
00:06:12.360 --> 00:06:17.079
begun connecting him to the disappearances. A witness identified him
89
00:06:17.120 --> 00:06:19.959
in a police lineup as the man she had seen
90
00:06:20.040 --> 00:06:24.240
with Carol Darranch, a young woman who had survived an
91
00:06:24.279 --> 00:06:28.399
attempted abduction in Salt Lake City the previous year. Darrnch
92
00:06:28.439 --> 00:06:32.600
herself in a lineup pointed at Bundy. He was convicted
93
00:06:32.600 --> 00:06:36.560
of aggravated kidnapping of Deranch in March nineteen seventy six
94
00:06:37.639 --> 00:06:41.879
and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Fifteen years for
95
00:06:41.959 --> 00:06:45.319
a man who had already killed somewhere between fifteen and
96
00:06:45.480 --> 00:06:50.079
thirty people, but Bundy was not in prison for fifteen years.
97
00:06:50.519 --> 00:06:53.519
He was in prison for a far shorter time because
98
00:06:53.560 --> 00:06:58.199
Ted Bundy escaped twice. The first escape happened in June
99
00:06:58.360 -->
00:07:02.959
nineteen seventy seven in Aspen, Colorado, where he had been
100
00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:06.680
transferred to face a murder charge. He had been allowed
101
00:07:06.720 --> 00:07:10.079
to serve as his own attorney, which gave him access
102
00:07:10.160 --> 00:07:14.480
to the courthouse law library. On June seventh, he jumped
103
00:07:14.480 --> 00:07:18.199
out of a second story window during a court recess.
104
00:07:18.560 --> 00:07:22.519
He was recaptured eight days later in the mountains near Aspen,
105
00:07:22.839 --> 00:07:25.800
having spent a week at altitude in the cold without
106
00:07:25.879 --> 00:07:30.480
adequate supplies. He was thin and weak and hypothermic when
107
00:07:30.519 --> 00:07:35.160
they found him, and he escaped again. The second escape
108
00:07:35.240 --> 00:07:39.399
was more deliberate. In December nineteen seventy seven. Bundy had
109
00:07:39.439 --> 00:07:44.399
spent months quietly improving his physical condition and had cut
110
00:07:44.399 --> 00:07:47.160
a hole in the ceiling of his cell. On the
111
00:07:47.279 --> 00:07:50.639
night of December thirtieth, he crawled through the hole and
112
00:07:50.800 --> 00:07:55.519
out of the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
113
00:07:55.800 --> 00:07:58.879
By the time his absence was discovered, he had been
114
00:07:58.920 --> 00:08:02.319
gone for hours. He made his way to Chicago by
115
00:08:02.439 --> 00:08:08.920
hitchhiking and stolen vehicles, then to Atlanta, then to Tallahassee, Florida,
116
00:08:09.480 --> 00:08:12.720
where he rented a room near the Florida State University
117
00:08:12.800 --> 00:08:16.720
campus under an assumed name, and thirty seven days after
118
00:08:16.759 --> 00:08:20.480
his escape, on the night of January fourteenth, nineteen seventy eight,
119
00:08:21.040 --> 00:08:25.439
he entered the chi Omega sorority house on the FSU campus.
120
00:08:25.879 --> 00:08:28.000
What happened inside chi Omega.
121
00:08:27.600 --> 00:08:31.720
That night was so brutal, so swift, and so violent
122
00:08:32.000 --> 00:08:35.279
that the three sorority members who survived the initial attack
123
00:08:35.480 --> 00:08:39.440
were left with injuries that took months to heal. Two
124
00:08:39.559 --> 00:08:43.799
young women, Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, both twenty one
125
00:08:43.879 --> 00:08:47.840
years old, were murdered in their sleep. Bundy used a
126
00:08:47.840 --> 00:08:50.519
log from the fireplace of a nearby house and a
127
00:08:50.559 --> 00:08:51.679
pair of pantyhose.
128
00:08:52.519 --> 00:08:54.200
He was inside the house.
129
00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:59.000
For less than fifteen minutes less than fifteen minutes, and
130
00:08:59.039 --> 00:09:01.960
then he left and went to another house three blocks
131
00:09:02.000 --> 00:09:05.480
away and attacked a fifth woman. Then he walked back
132
00:09:05.519 --> 00:09:09.759
to his room and went to sleep. Forty two days
133
00:09:09.799 --> 00:09:13.320
after the chi Omega attacks, Bundy was pulled over in
134
00:09:13.399 --> 00:09:17.039
a stolen vehicle in Pensacola, Florida, by a police officer
135
00:09:17.120 --> 00:09:22.279
named David Lee. He resisted, the officer subdued him, and
136
00:09:22.320 --> 00:09:25.919
Ted Bundy, who had escaped twice and murdered at least
137
00:09:25.960 --> 00:09:29.919
two people since his second escape, was in custody for
138
00:09:29.960 --> 00:09:33.440
the last time. He was thirty one years old. He
139
00:09:33.480 --> 00:09:37.120
would never be free again. The trial, or rather the
140
00:09:37.159 --> 00:09:41.720
trials of Ted Bundy, were unlike anything American criminal proceedings
141
00:09:41.759 --> 00:09:46.799
had produced before. Bundy again represented himself, at least in part.
142
00:09:47.720 --> 00:09:50.600
He was articulate. He was composed.
143
00:09:51.000 --> 00:09:54.159
He had a following, a contingent of young women who
144
00:09:54.240 --> 00:09:58.480
attended the proceedings and wrote him letters and wore their
145
00:09:58.799 --> 00:10:02.480
hair in the same dar center parted style as many
146
00:10:02.519 --> 00:10:06.679
of his victims. Apparently unaware of the irony or perhaps
147
00:10:06.799 --> 00:10:10.519
unmoved by it, he flirted with a witness during his
148
00:10:10.600 --> 00:10:13.080
trial and proposed marriage to her.
149
00:10:12.960 --> 00:10:15.440
From the witness stand. She said yes.
150
00:10:16.080 --> 00:10:19.000
They were married in the courtroom in a legally binding
151
00:10:19.080 --> 00:10:24.240
ceremony under a Florida statute that allowed spoken declarations of
152
00:10:24.279 --> 00:10:29.639
intent before witnesses. Carol Anne Boone, who believed in his innocence,
153
00:10:30.200 --> 00:10:34.240
would eventually have his child. She later left him in
154
00:10:34.279 --> 00:10:38.360
the mid nineteen eighties, taking their daughter with her. Bundy
155
00:10:38.480 --> 00:10:41.759
was convicted of the chi Omega murders and sentenced to
156
00:10:41.840 --> 00:10:46.440
death in July nineteen seventy nine. Six months later, he
157
00:10:46.559 --> 00:10:50.480
was tried for the murder of Kimberly Leech, a twelve
158
00:10:50.559 --> 00:10:54.159
year old girl from Lake City, Florida, whom he had
159
00:10:54.200 --> 00:10:58.080
abducted from her school on February ninth, nineteen seventy eight.
160
00:10:58.480 --> 00:11:02.240
Her remains were found in a state park two months later.
161
00:11:03.320 --> 00:11:06.080
This was the case that produced the sentence that would
162
00:11:06.240 --> 00:11:11.159
ultimately be carried out. Bundy received a third death sentence.
163
00:11:11.600 --> 00:11:14.200
He sat on death row at Florida State Prison for
164
00:11:14.240 --> 00:11:17.919
a decade. In the years on death row, Bundy began
165
00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:23.879
to confess slowly, strategically using the confessions as bargaining chips,
166
00:11:24.399 --> 00:11:29.240
trading information about victims for stays of execution. He spoke
167
00:11:29.279 --> 00:11:34.600
with FBI agents and investigators in journalists and authors. He
168
00:11:34.639 --> 00:11:37.679
offered to help identify the victims of the Green River
169
00:11:37.799 --> 00:11:41.799
Killer in Washington State, who was still active in the
170
00:11:41.879 --> 00:11:47.240
nineteen eighties. In exchange for continued contact with the outside world,
171
00:11:47.360 --> 00:11:50.720
he gave interviews that became some of the most studied
172
00:11:50.759 --> 00:11:55.639
documents in the history of criminal psychology. In his final interview,
173
00:11:55.919 --> 00:11:59.200
given to James Dobson of Focus on the Family the
174
00:11:59.279 --> 00:12:04.399
day before his execution, he blamed violent pornography for his crimes.
175
00:12:04.960 --> 00:12:08.799
He said it had fueled what he was. Many people
176
00:12:08.840 --> 00:12:11.879
who had studied him for years were skeptical of this
177
00:12:12.000 --> 00:12:17.720
final explanation. It seemed too convenient, too tidy, too much
178
00:12:17.799 --> 00:12:20.799
like a man who had spent his entire life managing
179
00:12:20.840 --> 00:12:24.320
the way other people saw him, making one final attempt
180
00:12:24.320 --> 00:12:28.360
to manage it from the electric chair. On January twenty fourth,
181
00:12:28.480 --> 00:12:32.720
nineteen eighty nine, Ted Bundy was executed at Florida State Prison.
182
00:12:33.399 --> 00:12:37.320
He was forty two years old. Outside the prison, crowds
183
00:12:37.320 --> 00:12:42.120
had gathered, Some held signs, some cheered, Some brought lawn
184
00:12:42.240 --> 00:12:45.960
chairs and radios and made a morning of it. When
185
00:12:45.960 --> 00:12:49.600
the execution was announced, there were cheers from the crowd
186
00:12:49.679 --> 00:12:54.440
outside the gates. This reaction disturbed some people who observed it.
187
00:12:54.840 --> 00:12:58.039
The spectacle of celebration at the death of even the
188
00:12:58.080 --> 00:13:02.200
worst of people is not to everyone a comfortable thing
189
00:13:02.240 --> 00:13:06.519
to witness, but the scale of what Bundy had done.
190
00:13:06.559 --> 00:13:10.720
The thirty confirmed murders, the real number that experts believe
191
00:13:10.960 --> 00:13:15.600
may be significantly higher. The years of hunting and killing
192
00:13:15.639 --> 00:13:20.720
and manipulating and escaping and hunting again made the grief
193
00:13:20.799 --> 00:13:24.120
of his victims' families and the relief of a public
194
00:13:24.559 --> 00:13:27.200
that had lived with his name for a decade into
195
00:13:27.200 --> 00:13:31.960
something complicated and human and not easily judged from the outside.
196
00:13:32.279 --> 00:13:36.039
The thirty women he confessed to Linda Ann Healy, who
197
00:13:36.080 --> 00:13:39.759
disappeared from her basement bedroom in February nineteen seventy four.
198
00:13:40.440 --> 00:13:47.120
Donna Manson, Susan Raincourt, Roberta Parks, Brenda Ball, Georgian Hawkins,
199
00:13:47.480 --> 00:13:51.639
Janice Ott, and Denise Nasland, who left a beach together
200
00:13:51.759 --> 00:13:55.200
and never came back. The women in Utah and Idaho
201
00:13:55.480 --> 00:14:00.279
and Colorado whose names filled the investigative files of jurisdictions
202
00:14:00.840 --> 00:14:02.840
that did not yet know they were all chasing the
203
00:14:02.879 --> 00:14:07.840
same man, Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, who were asleep
204
00:14:07.919 --> 00:14:12.039
in their own beds, Kimberly Leech, who was twelve years old.
205
00:14:12.559 --> 00:14:15.600
And the ones who are not yet named, the ones
206
00:14:15.639 --> 00:14:19.399
whose families submitted to DNA and waited, the ones who
207
00:14:19.480 --> 00:14:24.120
disappeared and whose disappearance was filed under unsolved and stayed there.
208
00:14:24.679 --> 00:14:26.320
In April twenty twenty.
209
00:14:26.039 --> 00:14:31.159
Six, DNA testing definitively linked Bundy to the nineteen seventy
210
00:14:31.200 --> 00:14:35.000
four murder of Laura ann Ame, a seventeen year old
211
00:14:35.120 --> 00:14:39.200
Utah woman who had vanished on Halloween night nineteen seventy four.
212
00:14:40.200 --> 00:14:45.759
Investigators had suspected Bundy for decades. He verbally acknowledged his
213
00:14:45.879 --> 00:14:50.600
involvement before his execution, but the DNA confirmation twenty twenty
214
00:14:50.639 --> 00:14:55.240
six was the first scientific certainty in that case. Over
215
00:14:55.360 --> 00:14:59.519
fifty years after her death, laura Ames family finally had
216
00:14:59.519 --> 00:15:02.799
an answer that no one could dispute, and her name
217
00:15:03.200 --> 00:15:05.440
added to a list that should never have been.
218
00:15:05.559 --> 00:15:06.639
As long as it is.
219
00:15:07.440 --> 00:15:12.080
Slow, pour yourself something good, tonight ted. Bundy has been
220
00:15:12.120 --> 00:15:15.320
dead for thirty six years, and the names of the
221
00:15:15.360 --> 00:15:19.639
women he killed are still being confirmed by DNA testing
222
00:15:19.799 --> 00:15:24.320
in twenty twenty six. They deserved better than that, all
223
00:15:24.360 --> 00:15:28.399
of them. Each one of them was someone's daughter, someone's friend,
224
00:15:28.799 --> 00:15:33.279
someone's whole world, and they deserved to grow old. I
225
00:15:33.360 --> 00:15:34.720
will see you next episode