Ted Bundy archive

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a plethora of newspaper stories regarding real killers. Newspaper articles describing gruesome murders committed by “crazies” furthered the public’s fear of mental illness off the screen. The newspaper articles describing Ted Bundy at the beginning of his Chi Omega trial reflected how the media did not view him as a cold-blooded killer, and therefore not a man with mental illness. The stories revolving around Bundy did not explicitly reference mental illness at the time, and in fact they demonstrated the society’s reluctance to “other” Bundy precisely because he didn’t embody the stereotypical elements of a serial killer. In the 1970s Americans found it hard to fathom that a handsome, charismatic man could commit awful acts of violence, and when Bundy was first placed on trial, the media alluded to his innocence because of his persona and appearance. The newspaper articles that described Bundy when he was first placed on trial were starkly dif...

  Jack Bowman, Margaret Bowman's father, consented to be interviewed by David Finkel two hours after Bundy was executed. For 10 years, Bowman had never said anything publicly about Margaret Bowman's murder case. The interview was published in Tampa Bay Times on January 25, 1989, as part of a sidebar to the newspaper's main execution piece. It's an interesting interview and I'm sharing it on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/tampa-bay-times-wed-jan-25-1989-1 Jack Bowman, even in grief, allowed the interviewer to ask questions endlessly. The interview never did achieve the level of conversation, and yet it was ultimately successful because it did the most important thing of all: it got the details, and the details are what make a story vivid. The interviewer also described the private, pivotal scene of Bowman's reaction to the news of Bundy's execution as it was being broadcast in the media on the morning of January 24, 1989... Jack Bowman wa...

I am sharing on Internet Archive a pdf file from the Von Drehle Papers, courtesy M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University at Albany , State University of New York . This pdf file contains notes of Von Drehle’s conversation with Jerry Blair, about how Blair prosecuted the Leach case, and about his impressions after having witnessed Bundy's execution, and also a draft of Michael Mello’s essay “On Metaphors, Mirrors, and Murders: Theodore Bundy and the Rule of Law”. https://archive.org/details/jerry-blair-mello Michael Mello was a criminal and constitutional law professor, and consulted with Bundy’s lawyers and with Bundy himself, personally. When Florida Gov. Bob Martinez signed a death warrant for Bundy on Jan. 17, 1989, scheduling his death by electric chair seven days later, Bundy’s attorney James Coleman headed down to Florida to get appeals started, and he and Mello began a series of telephone discussions. Mel...

  I am sharing on my Internet Archive page some more interesting evidence photos (some of them rare) from the Ted Bundy investigation, stored in the King County Sheriff's Office archives, and made accessible to the public by Kiro 7: https://archive.org/details/ted-bundy-victim-susan-rancourt.-2 The original link on the Kiro 7 website was found by fellow Bundy researcher Julia Larina. Some photos in this collection show remains from the Issaquah dump site and the Taylor Mountain dump site, others are photos of Lynda Healy's room (the room where she was believed to have been murdered or rendered unconscious), as well as exterior shots of Lynda’s house, and there are also photos of Bundy and his victims. Denise Naslund's skull photographed in situ at the Issaquah dump site, in September 1974. 1974 police reports about the remains found at the Issaquah dump site, courtesy of King County Archives Close up view of the skull of Brenda Ball photographed in situ  at the Taylor M...

The Taylor Mountain dump site, where the power lines cross, four miles south of I-90, was the place where Ted Bundy left the remains of at least four of his victims (Donna Manson may have been the fifth victim buried in that area, according to Ted’s own confession to detective Robert Keppel). Ted would carry the bodies up and through the foliage 1,000 feet northeast of the intersection of the power line road and highway 18. Aerial view of Taylor Mountain, March 1975. The road on which Ted took his victims and dumped them, was the service road that followed powerlines and can be clearly seen in this photo. The cars at the entrance belong to members of the search team. More photos of the Taylor Mountain dumpsite can be seen on my Internet Archive site:  https://archive.org/details/untitled-01_202202/Untitled-01.jpg  Thank you to Brad Fennell and Chris Mortensen who helped me identify the Taylor Mountain photos that KCSO sent me unlabeled. A 10-28-75 police report noted that...