Was there really any history of violence against Ted Bundy?...

 

        Authors, former attorneys, and criminal psychologists have posited divergent opinions regarding the origins of Ted’s homicidal tendencies. Most agree that dark spirits must have converged upon him at some point during his formative years to incite such unbridled savagery toward young women. “There had to be some history of violence against him... he didn’t get that way by reading Playboy,” said Bundy’s lead counsel, James Coleman.

         Robert Ressler, a former FBI criminal profiler who spent a large part of his law enforcement career studying the patterns of violent predators such as Bundy and Chicago serial murderer John Wayne Gacy, was Howard Teten’s colleague at the National Academy. In his book Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler wrote, “there were strong indications that Bundy was physically and sexually abused by members of his family.”

          Interviewed by a reporter for the Tacoma News-Tribune two days before Ted was executed, Louise Bundy said of her son, “He was not a violent person. Yes... he had a temper, but nothing out of the ordinary. In all the years of growing up, we never saw any sign of these violent things. ...we just cannot in any way figure out what would have caused him – if indeed, he did these things, and I still qualify that – what would have caused it... But if he did those things it’s a mental illness. A person who would do those things is mentally ill.”

       Bundy’s biographers have offered varying explanations for his pathological deviance. One popular theory suggests that his festering hatred toward women was an affliction rooted in identity deception, as his mother had tricked him into believing that she was actually his sister in an effort to save him the shame and embarrassment attendant to being conceived out of wedlock in an era when being an illegitimate child bore a shameful stigma. Though Bundy never denied he’d been raised to believe that his mother was his sister, and that his maternal grandparents, Eleanore and Samuel Cowell, were his true parents, this revelation didn’t have the lasting impact some thought it might when he learned the truth in his early teens, and up until the end of his life Bundy had always expressed unconditional devotion toward Louise.

       Author Stephen Michaud wrote of hearing stories that Ted might have been the product of an incestuous tryst between his grandfather and mother. He also suggested that Bundy harbored a class-conscious psychopathy that made him deeply resentful of the women he’d dated, their affluent families a persistent reminder of his own modest beginnings. Though Bundy admitted as much to Michaud during one of their interviews on death row, an alternate version of his formative years, offered by his relatives, veers sharply from the more commonly understood narrative.

       Although the Bundys and the Cowells were by no means affluent, they weren’t hardscrabble yokels either. Both were respected families in their Seattle and Philadelphia communities, if lacking significant social standing. While Bundy was acutely aware his mother and stepfather had little money and was openly envious of the more prosperous upbringing enjoyed by his cousins in Tacoma, in hindsight these admissions seem more a reflection of his own youthful insecurities rather than a firmly entrenched resentment.

       Though generally considered to be class-conscious, Bundy never disclosed, or perhaps never knew, that he was distantly related to a famous confederate general. A comprehensive genealogical history of the Longstreet surname, compiled by Florida historian Rubert James Longstreet through his painstaking mappings of centuries-old New Jersey courthouse records and tombstone inscriptions, provides that Ted Bundy’s maternal bloodlines trace back several generations to Dirck Stoffelse Langestraet of Holland. One of Dirck’s grandsons, Theophilius Langestraet, was the great-grandfather of Lt. General James Longstreet Jr., appointed by General Robert E. Lee as Commander of the First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, who reluctantly led his troops to fight the ill-fated Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg.

       As further documented in Rubert Longstreet’s research of his family’s East Coast origins, distant relative James Aaron Longstreet of 5034 Gr eene Street in Germantown, Pennsylvania, traced his lineage to another of Dirck’s grandsons, Dirck “Richard” Langestraet. James possessed official papers from the Monmouth County, New Jersey Orphans Court April 1834 term that corroborated his claims, recording his findings around 1913. Listed in the 1903 Philadelphia City Directory as “sec. & treas Wayne Chemical Company” in Germantown, James Aaron Longstreet was probably Eleanore Miriam Longstreet’s father and Ted Bundy’s great grandfather.

       Rubert Longstreet’s account shows to be partly verified by General Longstreet himself in his 1896 autobiography, From Manassas to Appomattox. Thus, though several generations removed, Ted Bundy was likely a distant cousin of the trusted adviser whom Robert E. Lee nicknamed “My Old War Horse”.

       At the 1987 competency hearing Dr. Lewis had also testified that Samuel Cowell, Bundy’s maternal grandfather from Philadelphia, was a temperamental alcoholic susceptible to unprovoked outbursts. Ted’s homicidal tendencies, she reasoned, were at some level attributable to the horrors he’d witnessed firsthand as a toddler in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, a community several miles outside the city, where he lived with his grandparents until age four.

       Never during the several lengthy interviews that he provided over the course of his incarceration, when offering snippets of his early boyhood in the Delaware Valley suburbs, did Bundy hint that his own derangement had originated with Cowell or was any way attributable his unorthodox upbringing. According to Dr. Lewis, her interviews with Cowell’s siblings revealed “an extremely violent and frightening” family patriarch in Samuel, a “raging alcoholic” who “swung cats by the tail” and had once flung one of Ted’s aunts down the stairs when she arrived home past curfew. Lewis was unsurprised to learn of Bundy’s filtered reflection of his childhood. “When a youngster has been horribly traumatized so that he cannot tolerate what he has witnessed... he tends to totally repress,” she said.

       Dr. Lewis’ evaluations have provided an accompanying tragic narrative held steadfast by books, movies, newspaper and magazine articles for the past twenty-five years. (Reached at her New Haven, Connecticut, residence, Dr. Lewis refused to be interviewed for this book, other than to state that she stands by the version of her courtroom testimony set forth in Michaud’s The Only Living Witness). Ted’s downfall, Lewis suggested, may have begun farther back than his early childhood, beginning with the unusual circumstances by which his mother conceived him.

     Apart from Lewis’ interviews, which introduced to America a sordid side of Bundy’s childhood that the public had never heard before, most of the general biographical information portraying Bundy’s early boyhood first gained attention in the earliest edition of Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, published in 1980. Mostly verified, the facts set forth in that edition seem to have been derived from interviews Bundy provided to a Utah prison psychiatrist subsequent to his initial arrest in 1975.

      According to Rule, in 1946 Louise Cowell was twenty-three-years old and seven months pregnant when her parents, Eleanore and Samuel, sent her off to the Elizabeth Lund Home on Shelburne Road in Burlington, Vermont. A secluded way station for shamed girls who’d found themselves in a similar predicament, the facility was once known as the “Home for Friendless Women”. Though other such facilities were nearer their home in historic Roxborough, Pennsylvania, a middle-class bedroom community located a few miles outside of Philadelphia, Louise likely decided to secret herself in a distant New England state for several months to spare her conservative Christian mother and father the shame of their unmarried daughter bearing an illegitimate child. Louise was said to have been charmed by Jack Worthington, a local man eight years her senior, with whom she worked at a local insurance company. Embellishing his past, he said that he’d attended a local prep school and served valorously in U.S. Air Force. After impregnating Cowell, the noble suitor fled.

      “I only talked to him once, when he picked her up one day for a date,” said Audrey Tilden.

 

Samuel Knecht Cowell

Samuel Knecht Cowell was born to Julia F. Cowell, a German immigrant, and William F. Cowell, a Chicago ophthalmologist, in 1898. He died in 1983.

Louise and her newborn son returned to Philadelphia two months after his birth, residing with her two sisters and their parents at the two-story, stuccoed, eighteenth-century white colonial at 7202 Ridge Avenue in Roxborough. This home provided the backdrop for the prevailing theory that Bundy inherited his murderous inclinations from Samuel Cowell, as he’d sheltered newborn Ted and his mother here after their return from Vermont. Although the notion of an abusive upbringing, first introduced through Dr. Lewis’ testimony, has held steadfast through the years and was relied upon by Rule in later editions of The Stranger Beside Me, a deeper exploration of Ted Bundy’s maternal grandfather reveals an entirely different portrait than the more commonly understood version sourced in numerous scholarly publications and myriad biographies.

A devout Presbyterian, Samuel taught Bible school class at his father-in-law’s Germantown congregation for several years. Perhaps to raise their three daughters and house the equipment for his thriving landscaping business, in 1945 he and Eleanor moved their family from Shawmont Avenue in Roxborough, after purchasing a spacious three-acre lot at the corner of Ridge Avenue and Domino Street [historic northwest Philadelphia community]. Located a short distance from the old Green Valley Country Club, and extending lengthwise down Domino Lane, with a narrow section fronting Ridge Avenue, the Cowells’ home was one of only two residences on the block at the time of its purchase. Fireplaces warmed each bedroom of the rambling two-hundred-year-old colonial, which stood alongside the Miller Funeral Home.

Though his own father had been a physician, Samuel was an outdoorsman and green thumb at heart. Thinly built, yet of wiry musculature much like his grandson, he was handsome with a full head of silver hair and deeply set blue eyes, never too busy to volunteer his time or help a neighbor dig a hole or plant a bush. A member of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Sam prospered as a local landscape architect and gardener, peddling young shrubs and planting small trees with each spring bloom. The community patronized his successful garden mart, ‘Cowell’s Hardy Gardens’, a business he operated from the grounds surrounding his hilltop residence. Each year he sponsored a display booth for his nursery at the Philadelphia Flower Show, an event held annually at the Philadelphia Civic Center.

The Cowells were a frugal, largely self-sufficient family, living within a vastly changing suburban landscape as the rural acreage behind Ridge Avenue was overtaken by suburban expansion after World War II ended. Chickens roosted in a backyard coop, and Sam’s daughters canned fruit to store for the winter and grew their own vegetables. Ted’s Aunt Audrey [Tilden, Louise’s younger sister] who still resides in Lafayette Hill, the next town over from Roxborough, recalls an idyllic youth spent along Ridge Avenue with her two teenage sisters, Louise and Julia. ‘It was a good life there’, said Tilden. "We had rabbits, we had chickens and ducks. We never locked our doors." Tilden remembers an old barn on the grounds and the detached garage where Sam housed his truck and landscaping equipment, and a small greenhouse that stood near the corner of Ridge Avenue and Domino Lane. This somewhat dilapidated structure, described by one writer as a "fragrant humid hideaway" where a pre-teen Ted Bundy was said to have perused the vast trove of pornographic magazines secreted away by his grandfather, was actually little more than a caveworn storage shed.

John Johnstone is the former president of the Roxborough-Manayunk-Wissahickon Historical Society and co-author of the book, ‘Images of America: Roxborough’. Though Johnstone didn’t know Cowell personally, during multiple interviews with local residents he learned that the old man was known about town as an industrious gardener, not a mean-spirited tyrant who served as a malevolent influence on his first grandchild. Young Ted, locals tell Johnstone, used to dote on his grandfather and followed after him around the nursery, often reciting the spelling of words as Sam quizzed him. According to Johnstone, at worst, Ted’s grandfather was thought to be a tad eccentric, at times seen muttering to himself as he hoisted shrubs outside his home while tending to his business.

Sylvia Myers, a spry ninety-four-year-old widow and vice-president of the Roxborough-Manayunk-Wissahickon Historical Society, doesn’t remember Samuel Cowell, a fellow member of the Roxborough Garden Club, as the universally condemned, sadistically cruel curmudgeon portrayed in the multiple biographies of his grandson. ‘He was a fine man’, Myers said, recalling one occasion as she stood outside Sam’s Ridge Avenue home, helping him wrap burlap around a set of young dogwoods he routinely sold at cost to his flower club for $1.19 each, as his toddler grandson stood watching them beside his doting mother. A 1949 Philadelphia Inquirer article reveals that Cowell conducted "garden quizzes" and gave talks on ‘forcing the flowering of shrubs and tree branches’ on behalf of the club. In 1964 the Inquirer "Garden News" column featured his presentation he gave on "Insects-Friends and Enemies" at the Roxborough-Manayunk Savings and Loan Association. Five years later he was still active with the club, handing out an African violet free to all new members of this club in his capacity as horticulture chairman. As the name Ted Bundy grew more notorious each year the body toll rose, Sylvia Myers and her old friends from the neighborhood remained unable to reconcile the image of a serial killer with the little boy they saw running around his grandfather’s yard. "We were surprised to hear these stories of how mean he was", said Myers.

Samuel Cowell sold the Ridge Avenue homestead for $15,000 to Fredavid Construction Company in 1961 upon learning that Philadelphia city officials planned to construct an incinerator at the foot of Domino Lane. He and Audrey moved to smaller quarters on Pulaski Avenue in Germantown after conveying title to the builder, who gave word to Samuel that he’d restore the home at 7202 Ridge Avenue consistent with its original architectural style. Instead, the builder razed the land to maximize its potential as a commercial property with prime footage along an increasingly busy route.

Collapsing behind the wheel of his truck, Samuel died of a heart attack in 1983, at the age of eighty-five, eleven years after his wife Eleanor, who passed away on April 25, 1971. Sylvia Myers and other members of the Roxborough Flower Club attended his memorial service. He was laid to rest beside his wife Eleanor at George Washington Memorial Park in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, not far from where his home once stood on Ridge Avenue. Each spring bloom Cowell’s selflessness and kind spirit are recalled by Sylvia Myers as she walks past the flowering dogwood Sam planted one season in the backyard of her former row house at the corner of Pechin and Markel Streets in Roxborough, where she lived before moving to a retirement community.

Bundy’s cousin Edna Martin, a life insurance professional who resides in Seattle, draws similarly fond memories of Sam, an uncle on her father’s side. Martin didn’t see Sam very often because she grew up in Tacoma, where her father, Dr. John C. Cowell, Samuel’s youngest brother, was a Yale-educated concert pianist and music professor at the University of Puget Sound. Ted was said to have idolized John Cowell and visited him and his children at some point in 1969, during his tenure as music department chair at the University of Arkansas.

"The characterization that [Sam] was a raging alcoholic and animal abuser was a convenient characterization used to make people justify why Ted was the way he was", Martin said. "From my limited exposure to him, nothing could be farther from the truth. His daughters loved him dearly and had nothing but fond memories of him.’ Martin vehemently disagrees with the notion that Sam ‘was some kind of monster. It’s not true and patently unfair as well as unfounded."

"The best documented evidence of psychotic disturbance was evidence regarding [Ted’s] grandmother, Eleanor, Sam’s wife", Dr. Lewis testified. "She had been hospitalized on more than one occasion for psychotic depression". Bundy’s grandmother never left her house due to agoraphobia, a characterization also derived from Dr. Lewis’ testimony, and had been administered electroshock therapy. Bundy’s aunt, Audrey Tilden, disagrees with these findings as well. She contends that her mother was an overweight diabetic rendered housebound after suffering a stroke, and never succumbed to psychotic episodes described by Lewis as "being loud and talking too much and being unable to stop".

"Ted just adored his grandfather", Audrey Tilden said, offering yet another explanation why her nephew decided to attend Temple University. Among those interviewed by Dr. Lewis at her New Haven office, Tilden insists that her infamous nephew was never physically or emotionally abused by Sam, nor were she or her two other sisters subjected to cruelty at the hands of their father. Ted couldn’t room with his grandparents in 1969, Tilden explains, because the elderly couple had moved into their small Germantown apartment by this time and simply didn’t have room for their grandson.

 

 

The above excerpts are from the book "The Garden State Parkway Murders" by Christian Barth, published in January 2020. "Audrey Tilden" was in fact Audrey Taylor, Ted Bundy's aunt. Dr. Dorothy Lewis interviewed Audrey Taylor ahead of the December 1987 evidentiary hearing intended to determine Ted Bundy's competency. Audrey Taylor died in May 2020.