Monday, June 21, 2010

Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy (1946-1989) graduated amoung a class of 800 students from Woodrow Wilson High School in Takoma, Washington in 1965. According to Ann Rule's definitive biography, The Stranger Beside Me, academic records of Bundy's time at the school have long since vanished, but several classmates remember the future serial killer. One woman quoted by Rule said: "He was well known, popular, but not in the top crowd--but then neither was I. He was attractive, and well dressed, exceptionally well mannered...He was kind of shy--almost introverted." According to Rule, Bundy consistently earned a B + average and upon graduation was given a scholarship to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. In a friend's copy of Wilson High's yearbook, The Nova, he wrote the following creepy bit of verse: 
Dearest V.,

The sweetness of the spring time rain runs down the window pain [sic.] (I can't help it. It just flows out).

Theodore Robert Bundy
Peot [sic]
After graduating from college Bundy became more involved with the Republican Party and volunteered on the re-election campaign of Washington Governor Dan Evans, who would later write a letter of recommendation for young Ted when he applied to law school. He was accepted at the University of Utah Law School in 1973, but backed out at the last minute. Bundy wound up attending law classes at night at Pugent Sound. During the day he worked as an assistant to the chairman of the Washington State Republican Party. It was around this time that Bundy's long killing spree began--his first victim was an unknown hitchhiker in May of 1973.

Prior to his execution in Florida's "Old Sparky" electric chair in 1989, Bundy confessed to thirty murders, but he was sentenced to death for only two. Specifically, the gruesome killings of sorority sisters Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman at Florida State University in 1978. He gave his final, exclusive death row interview to Christian psychologist and radio host, Dr. James Dobson, the founder of the conservative organization Focus on the Family. Dobson soon exploited, for his own idealogical purposes, Bundy's previously undisclosed contention that his crimes were influenced by exposure to violent pornography. Dobson has video clips from his execution eve interview entitled Fatal Addiction on the Focus on the Family website.    

2 comments:

  1. Tacoma*. Also, I go to Wilson High School...creepy! Tacoma had such a bad rep at one time.

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  2. Yeah, Bundy's a great flag bearer for the Republicans! What a scrawny, creepy looking character: the girls he killed had to have been very, very naive not to have seen the creep through the 'charm'. This is something I try to educate my daughter on.

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