Ted Bundy archive

Larry Peoples was a correctional officer at Florida State Prison when Ted Bundy was a death row inmate there, and in 2019 he was a special guest of the podcast  “ Murder and Mysteries with Massnick” and talked about Ted. The podcast was uploaded on my Internet Archive site: https://archive.org/details/bonus-for-bundy Peoples can be heard saying: “Schaefer and Bundy were very similar in their intelligence, but they were different on the row. Bundy was a different person. He was a very quiet person. He kept to himself. On the outside of the cell block, we had this catwalk, we called it... where people can walk down in case we’d have to fire tear gas or whatever, or get scolded by staff or whatever... And people would come in for tours at the prison, and the very first thing they wanted to see was Bundy, of course. So they would walk down the row and every time they walked down the row, Bundy would have a sheet up over his bars, because he didn’t want to be seen. And he would get ...

On March 10, 1976, Louise Bundy,  then a secretary at University of Puget Sound,  sent a letter to Judge Stewart Hanson on behalf of her son, Ted Bundy. Judge Hanson was the one who would sentence Ted n the Carol DaRonch case. When Louise Bundy wrote this letter,  Ted was accused of attempting to murder 17-year-old Carol DaRonch at a Salt Lake City area shopping center in November 1974.  In her letter, Louise invoked Ted’s “past history”, his relationships with his girlfriends and with the women in his extended family. Louise’s letter is a rather moving one. Ted was later convicted by Judge Hanson for kidnapping Carol DaRonch .  Judge Hanson died in 2008, and his grandson, Sean Papanikolas, digitized the letters in Judge Hanson's collection which were part of the DaRonch case, and kindly shared them with me in 2019 and I shared the Hanson letters publicly on Facebook soon afterwards. Louise Bundy’s letter is part of the collection of letters pertaining to th...

Richard Gray in his paper "Psychopathy and Will to Power" published on Academia (https://www.academia.edu/17868303/PSYCHOPATHY_AND_WILL_TO_POWER_Ted_Bundy_and_Dennis_Rader) makes the claim that Ted Bundy failed the “grammar” section of the bar exam. I don’t think Ted qualified to take the bar examination, which required attendance and graduation with a first degree in law from a law school in the United States which was approved by the American Bar Association (ABA). To verify Gray’s claim, I checked the police files related to Ted’s studies, published on Internet Archive, which provide good insight about Ted’s law school studies. I have compiled here a selection of police files related to Ted’s law school studies: https://archive.org/details/he-was-to-attend-the-university-of-utah-in-the-fall-of-1973-but-didnt Ted entered Univ. of Puget Sound (Tacoma) on Sept. 1965 and left on June 1966, with no Law degree, because he never graduated (Ted’s only degree was a B.S. in P...

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...