Episode “Fatal Compulsion” for the 1997 Discovery Channel Television show “The New Detectives”, featuring a segment about Ted Bundy

The episode “Fatal Compulsion” for the Discovery Channel Television show “The New Detectives”, aired in the US on December 2, 1997, directed by Mike Sinclair, has just been uploaded to my Youtube channel, courtesy of Julia Larina who found it and recorded it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_pqccRBvok

“The New Detectives” is an American docudrama, where world-renowned forensics experts and criminal investigators solve a wide range of cases.

Forensic psychologists delve into the minds of Ted Bundy, Paul Bernardo and Aileen Wuornos, trying to determine their motives, where their “fatal compulsions” stem from, and forensics experts and criminal investigators explain how they solved the cases. Detectives show what forensic techniques and clever investigating have done to bring Ted Bundy, Paul Bernardo and Aileen Wuornos to justice.

FBI analyst Bill Hagmaier, odontologist Richard Souviron and true crime author Ann Rule are seen in interviews talking about Bundy.

As Bundy sat on Florida’s death row and wished to postpone his execution date, he confessed to a string of murders throughout the West and provided details about how he committed them. According to this doc, he painted a graphic picture of the evolution and slow deterioration of a serial killer. Hagmaier: “To become a serial killer is to become a tennis player, a serial jogger... When you get away from it for a while, you start getting the itch to get back. He said the itch was getting tremendous, the clock was ticking... Ted Bundy felt that this victim had a choice. ‘She didn’t have to come with me’... And as he said on many occasions, ‘I didn’t go and drag them out. They came to me!’... [although Bundy himself admitted to Det. Dennis Couch that he did drag Nancy Wilcox out, snatching her off the street basically and dragging her into an orchard where he raped her]

The doc also mentions that once he was in prison, Bundy provided the FBI the ultimate case study in serial killings.

The doc also says that finding a common denominator among serial killers, is not clear-cut: their background and behavior vary and in fact they’re just like the rest of us...

Hagmaier: “Serial killers come from different backgrounds. There is no consistent factor that I’m aware of in all their development. Basically... if one were to look at Ted Bundy’s evolution as a human being, they would be shocked that he became a serial killer! Because he didn’t act any differently, didn’t appear to be maturing any differently than other children around him”.

The doc then further says that Rule believes that killers like Bundy are born and bred... Rule: “I think, to create a serial killer or any sadistic sociopath, you have to have a combination of a genetic predisposition towards violence. Just like some people can play the violin, some people can tap dance... but these people have a tendency toward violence. Now if that child is born into a loving home, where he feels safe, or she feels safe, we’ll never know. But if you have a terrible synchronicity of the genetic predisposition and abuse at home, then you have a perfect soil to grow one of these people”. And then the doc further goes on to say that Bundy showed his homicidal tendencies as a young child of 3, when his aunt Julia, then a teenager, awoke to find Ted slipping butcher knives into her bed.

And then the doc goes back to Hagmaier saying what Bundy shared with him about what it’s like to be a serial killer: “He said, ‘When you’re alone with a victim, very much alive and vibrant, and pleading for their life’, he said... ‘you become God’. He said, ‘you have the power over life and death’. And he said, ‘when you kill them, you hear the last noises that they’ll ever put out of their mouths, you can basically taste the last breath that comes out of their body’... And he said there’s a phenomenal feeling of power over that. And he said that’s what you feed off, after a while”.

In 1986, when Hagmaier interviewed Bundy in prison, it was Hagmaier himself the one who told Bundy that serial murder, from his own personal perception of the Green River case and some others like it, appeared to be a crime behavior activity almost like a power, or like a total possession. This is how Hagmaier perceived people who were serial murders back in 1986... Hagmaier then said to Bundy: “I can’t envision what goes on in their minds when they’re actually controlling and killing, and whatever else may or may not be involved, whether it be playing out their sexual fantasies or exploration or whatever, but the actual being there the moment their life is gone, to me it’s almost like a total possession: ‘that person would be mine!’, ‘no one else in the world could control that person!’, ‘nothing that person can do anymore for themselves... totally in my hands! They left this earth in my hands! They had no choice! No one could stop me’... I could only imagine that it’s almost a euphoric feeling”. And Hagmaier summed up what a serial killer might feel, in his opinion, as a tremendous drive, almost a need for the stealing and possession...

In 1986 Hagmaier was looking to get behavioral insights from Bundy, hoping that Bundy would provide a way to understand why serial killers murder people, and what fuels their criminal behavior. Hagmaier seemed inclined, even back in 1986, to believe that the desire for total control, for possession, was what fueled a serial killer... And Bundy seemed to warn him that the use of behavioral science to get inside a serial killer’s head had its shortcomings (and indeed, behavioral sciences are commonly saddled with imprecise measures, weak manipulations, and a general lack of rigor because of the complexity of the study phenomena). Bundy acknowledged Hagmaier’s desire to understand serial murder, and the fact that Hagmaier was dealing with some very important kinds of  issues and concepts... And then he said: “But don’t tell yourself, sure, you can understand, because in your own way, there are things in your own life when you experience that kind of intensity or that kind of power... Maybe you have problems, or anybody has problems they can’t control, and I don’t mean to demean or diminish the seriousness of what happens in the Green River case... obviously a very serious, tragic situation... but to that person who’s doing it, it made sense at the time, and who knows what all the emotions and the passions, the mental images that are rushing through his mind before, during and after – this is of course extremely important from a behavioral scientist’s point of view and the law enforcement’s point of view - but you can’t begin to get inside this man’s head if you try to use personal experiences as a guide to a certain extent... And I guess there’s no way to know precisely what he thought or what he did until he tells you”. And then Bundy admitted that sometimes he himself was trying to figure out what was going through the Green River Killer’s head, to the point where he was just driving himself nuts, but then he recognized that outsiders just don’t have the data to make those kinds of decisions. And Bundy then told Hagmaier that when he was talking with Bob Keppel, Keppel said: “Do you think this guy is keeping stuff he’s taking from the victims?”... He was referring to personal possessions. But Bundy’s answer to Keppel’s question was “maybe yes, maybe not... You don’t know, you don’t have any information to say for sure one way or the other, and if you have a hot suspect, and he doesn’t have anything, that doesn’t mean he’s not the person... On the other hand, if you have a hot suspect and you search his apartment and you find lockers full of stuff, all you got is that... It’s an important thing to keep in mind but don’t torture yourselves over it, ‘cos there’s no way to know, you have no information”.

Hagmaier’s 1986 conversation with Bundy can be heard on the fourth of the 1986 tapes, which I uploaded on my Internet Archive channel courtesy of Richard Duffus: https://archive.org/details/bundy-hagmaier-13-feb-1986-seg-2-6/BUNDY_HAGMAIER_13_Feb1986_seg4_6.wav

And of course, later on, in 1989, when Bundy started confessing, he may have given Hagmaier more information about what it was like to kill, for him. But without a taped conversation or a real-time transcript (or within a short time of the words being spoken), it is basically hard to determine what exactly Bundy told Hagmaier.

Towards the end of the segment on Bundy, the doc cuts off to Bundy’s interview with Dobson, showing Bundy saying: “It was like... coming out some kind of horrible trance or dream. I can only liken it to... after... I don’t want to overdramatize it but to have been possessed by something so awful and so alien, and then the next morning wake up from it, remember what happened and realize that basically, in the eyes of the law certainly, and in the eyes of God, you’re responsible...”

And interestingly, in his conversation with Dobson, Bundy seemed to play down any positive rush he might have gotten from murder, whereas Hagmaier, in the 1997 doc, portrayed Bundy as hungry for having the power over life and death, while he was having the captured women in his hands!... Bundy certainly didn’t tell Dobson that he had gotten satisfaction out of hearing the dying breath coming out of his victims’ bodies (which, according to Hagmaier, was what Bundy felt)...

The narrator of this doc (Gene Galusha) is heard at one point saying: “Experts [unnamed] suspect Bundy may have started killing in 1962, at age 15”. And it should be remembered that was not what Bundy himself told the detectives. In 1989, he told Hagmaier for instance that he started killing in 1973, when he was 27 years old.

Also, this 1997 doc listed Kaherine Devine among Bundy’s victims, whereas in a startling twist, in 2002, Thurston County authorities revealed that DNA testing had identified a different man with a history of rape and murder as the likely killer: William E. Cosden Jr.

Devine’s family, the media (including the makers of this doc), and even the police, thought Ted Bundy had killed Katherine Devine. Maybe because the Seattle girl looked like many of Bundy’s victims and had died under similar circumstances. But when there was no question at all that the DNA left by Kathy Devine's killer belonged to Cosden, when DNA match led to Cosden’s arrest in Devine's 1973 slaying, it became very clear that the use of DNA evidence in murder cases was of paramount importance and the DNA test results ultimately challenged people’s beliefs.