ted bundy

M O T I V E S

Excerpts from an interview with serial killer except Dr. Robert D. Keppel, who took Ted Bundy'd confession:

Q. It is hard for the average person to understand how a person like Bundy can obtain sexual gratification from revisiting gravesites and interfering with the decomposing corpses of his victims. Can you describe the possible motivations behind such behavior?

I’ve answered that question a thousand different ways over the years but I think I finally come to the idea that nobody really knows for sure but if I had to guess, as I wrote in Signature Killers, I think it’s a choice. He chose to do what he liked to do and I don’t think that he liked the idea of killing or maiming any girl who he got to know for a while. I think he was afraid of that so that led him to cold-cocking the girls right off the bat, as quickly as he could in order to have them in a position where he had total control over them. Control was the major feature here, to be able to get to that soon enough and then the fact that he liked what he was doing. The sensation of that was the possessiveness that he talks about which is probably about as close as you’re going to get to get to having any understanding of how or why these people do that. He liked it and he chose to do it.

Q. It is hard for the average person to understand how a person like Bundy can obtain sexual gratification from revisiting gravesites and interfering with the decomposing corpses of his victims. Can you describe the possible motivations behind such behavior?

I’ve answered that question a thousand different ways over the years but I think I finally come to the idea that nobody really knows for sure but if I had to guess, as I wrote in Signature Killers, I think it’s a choice. He chose to do what he liked to do and I don’t think that he liked the idea of killing or maiming any girl who he got to know for a while. I think he was afraid of that so that led him to cold-cocking the girls right off the bat, as quickly as he could in order to have them in a position where he had total control over them. Control was the major feature here, to be able to get to that soon enough and then the fact that he liked what he was doing. The sensation of that was the possessiveness that he talks about which is probably about as close as you’re going to get to get to having any understanding of how or why these people do that. He liked it and he chose to do it.

Q. What was Bundy’s prime motivation and how did it start?

I think his prime motivation was control and possession. When you look at his earlier attempts and his first experimentations with murder, as he told Steve Michaud, he would go up behind someone and hit them on the head with a two by four just to see what it felt like.

At the time that was something he was horrified about, but when that horrification wore off he felt good about it. That’s how it started, he conditioned himself to it and he started early. In the interviews I had with him just before his death, he was talking about three other victims but after he started talking about one of them being in 1973 he caught himself and wouldn’t talk anymore. We have cases dating back to 1968 that he may be responsible for. There were two stewardesses that were attacked in Queen Ann Hill in Seattle and he used to live across the Fremont Bridge from Queen Ann Hill and used to go right by their apartment on the way to his job in the Safeway store in Queen Ann. I think he was a good suspect for those and they were also bludgeonings where one girl was murdered and the other lived through it so he may have been active as early as 1968.

Q. In Riverman, you talk about there being “four Teds,” can you tell us more about this?

I didn’t want to give the impression that this guy was a multiple personality because he’s not. I know that there are some psychiatrists out there who have construed it as that but that’s not what it is at all. It just saw it as four different people operating, four different types of people and that just stuck with me. On one hand I saw this grandiose, proud guy who was willing to deal with governors and attorney generals for his life. On the other end of the continuum, I saw a guy who was the most pitiful, low-grade piece of junk you’d ever want who couldn’t handle anything in life as far as being around a woman. He was defeated and defiled, just like he had defiled and denigrated his victims. He was just as defeated. Then, I saw a guy who was terrified of what he’d done. He described his actions with his victims as if he was terrified. He was confused and upset and didn’t know what to do. He was throwing stuff out of his vehicle on the way out of the crime scene and would have to go back later and pick it all up again. Lastly, I saw a conniving and cunning psychopath. A guy who was able to be as invisible as he wanted to be, with all the control that he could possibly have over everything around him. He could control us, he could control the guards, the prison ministry people, his attorneys and it was just incredible what I saw, but it was all the same person. Some of the more perceptive psychologists and psychiatrists have taken that to mean that he has a disassociative personality so that’s why there were different things that I saw there. Of course I wasn’t thinking about disassociative personalities at the time, I was just coming up with my own observations about what I saw but I did not see any multiple personalities. He knew where he was every time, in all of those four people. He knew who he was. --crimelibrary.com

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In December 1987, Bundy was examined for seven hours by a professor from New York University Medical Center, Dorothy Otnow Lewis. To Lewis, Bundy described his childhood, and especially his relationship with his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell. Along with the already established description of his grandfather as a tyrannical bully, Bundy described his grandfather as a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews. He further stated that his grandfather tortured animals, beating the family dog and swinging neighborhood cats by their tails. He also told Lewis that his grandfather, who was a deacon in his church, kept a large collection of pornography in his greenhouse where, according to relatives, Bundy and a cousin would sneak into the greenhouse for hours reading it. Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient wife, who was sporadically taken to hospitals to undergo shock treatment for depression.[40] Towards the end of her life, Bundy said, she became an agoraphobic.

Authors Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth allude to their suspicion that Bundy's grandfather Samuel had sexually abused his daughter, Louise, and would go into a rage when asked about his grandson's paternity. The authors also noted their belief that Bundy's grandmother, Eleanor, had psychological problems that Bundy had inherited and that she, too, had possibly abused him. The authors also noted that in 1981 they provided Dr. Louis Jolyon West, director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA and an expert on abused children, with information about Bundy and his modus operandi. After being provided with audiotapes of their interviews with Bundy, West stated, "Somewhere in that man's boyhood, a woman beat him with a stick." Crime author and former Bundy co-worker Ann Rule states that Eleanor's younger sister recalls a horrifying but telling incident with the young Ted Bundy. After laying down in the Cowell's home for a nap, Bundy's aunt woke from sleep while a three-year old Ted was lifting her bedcovers to place kitchen butcher knives around her in the bed.

Michaud and Aynesworth also noted that Bundy used stolen credit cards to purchase more than 30 pairs of socks after he had escaped from a Colorado jail. According to the authors, Bundy willingly conceded to being a foot fetishist, believing it to be, "... funny, an amusing little quirk."

Ann Rule further noted that most of Bundy's friends were women, whom she believed Bundy had learned at an early age to control and manipulate. When one of his female friends or lovers did not react in the manner Bundy expected, he was simultaneously outraged and confused. In her conversations with him, she sensed that he believed that he was the, "... progeny of royalty dumped by mistake on the doorstep of a blue-collar family. How he loved the thought of money and status, and how inadequate he felt when he found himself with women who were born to it." --Wikipedia



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