The third tape Bundy made for Michaud and Aynesworth

If you wish to hear Ted Bundy’s own views on his early life and his family, I recommend you listen to this tape (micro-cassette, as he himself referred to it) which he prepared for authors Michaud and Aynesworth back in 1980, at the time of the Leach trial:

https://archive.org/details/nam_apap213_bundy_tape3

Bundy made this tape on January 27, 1980. A rough transcript of what Bundy said on the tape is also provided on my archive.org channel to accompany the audio file.

Bundy can be heard talking mainly about his family while they were living on Sheridan Street, Tacoma. He is also giving the listeners a tour of the house he was living in as a child. It’s like an immersive experience that pulls the listener into Bundy’s early world, as he remembered it.

He also mentions his feelings toward his step father in those early years when John Bundy came into their life. No harsh memories, except saying that his step father was absent a lot due to his working schedule at the hospital.

And towards the end of the tape, Bundy mentions the Leach trial and particularly the witnesses for the prosecution.

Dr. Dorothy Lewis reviewed these very tapes that Bundy made for Michaud and Aynesworth, and in fact she based her psychiatric evaluations of Bundy partly on these tapes.

Lewis along with Bundy’s lawyers (Polly Nelson and James Coleman) tried to prove that Bundy was incompetent at the time of the Leach trial by referring to these tapes as Bundy’s ramblings.

And yet these tapes show Bundy as coherent, articulate, rational, intelligent, and I can’t believe why anyone would dispute his competence... He comes across as a good conversationalist. And to me he also sounds analytical, reflexive. He also seems methodical.

And there are no changes in personality from one tape to the next. I will upload all the tapes and you can see for yourselves.

Bundy may have been trying to present a façade of normality, on these tapes he made for Michaud and Aynesworth, but it’s hard to say what exactly and how much of the things happening in his life, was normal or not. To this listener, he seemed normal.

I will be uploading on my archive.org channel all the tapes Bundy made for Michaud and Aynesworth and which have been digitized.

How were these tapes obtained, in case you were wondering?...

Rob Dielenberg got the tapes on a goodwill request to the Von Drehle archive. And because Dielenberg was the first person to request the tapes, the archivists negotiated a price, because they had to digitize the tapes for Dielenberg. And that is how Dielenberg came to be the first researcher apart from Von Drehle to have these tapes.

The originals of course came from Michaud and Aynesworth. It appears that as journalists, Von Drehle must have made a claim on the tapes to them and got a copy.

Dielenberg shared the tapes with another researcher and myself. The other researcher has been recently selling the tapes on her Patreon channel, without crediting Dielenberg specifically for sharing the tapes with her.