- Synced and corrected by mrcjnthn - ﻿1
[birds chirping]
[man] I had no idea what I was doing.
And I had no idea who I was dealing with.
But I knew it was a hell of a story.
So I went into the prison with my tape recorder.
And I asked him, "What sort of person could have done these things?"
[male reporter] Police say he was armed with a heavy oak log.
He clubbed and then strangled to death 20-Year-old Lisa Levy
and 21-year-old Margaret Bowman. At least one of them was raped.
He insisted that he was innocent.
I wanted him to tell me, who was he...
[male reporter] Diabolical genius, deceptive, manipulative.
[female reporter] He's also a former social worker
and a political campaign activist.
[man] I consider him a friend, he was a very nice person.
[woman] I felt a connection with him. A feeling of wanting to be loved.
[man] I wanted to know what went through his mind, what led up to it.
[woman] Our son is the best son in the world.
He was a very normal, active boy.
[woman #2] His mom and dad took him to church every Sunday.
[man] He wanted to be successful...
as an attorney or as a politician.
[man #2] What are the elements of the crimes?
Why the victims?
[man] This man on the FBI's 10 most-wanted list
has been captured in Florida.
[man #2] Suspected of dozens of sex killings
in Washington State, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado.
[man #3] The discovery of the skeletal remains of six women.
[woman] More than 20 young women in five states...
-[man #4] Beaten and strangled. -[woman #2] Abduction, nude body.
-[man #5] We found parts of four skulls... -[man #6] Sexually molested.
-[man #7] Bludgeoned, raped. -[man #8] These 36 sex killings...
[man] Mutilation, necrophilia.
[man #2] Sexually mutilated by mouth, by teeth.
[woman] Bite marks.
[man #3] He had sex with them after they were dead.
[man #4] Why did he do it?
[woman] It's quite a mystery.
[man] So he looked at me and grabbed my tape recorder.
Then he twisted in his chair and was cradling it like this.
And off he went.
[man] It is a little after nine o'clock in the evening.
My name is Ted Bundy.
I've never spoken to anybody about this.
But I am looking for an opportunity to tell the story as best I can.
I mean, I'm not an animal and I'm not crazy.
I don't have a split personality.
I mean, I'm just a normal individual.
[theme song playing]
[Jimmy Carter] I wanna talk to you, right now,
about a fundamental threat to American democracy.
It is a crisis of confidence.
[male reporter] The '70s, an angry era.
Inflation, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran,
demonstrations and riots, the rip-off, the scam, the hustle, the cheat.
[male reporter #2] In the '70s,
there is fear: fear of crime in the streets.
Violent crimes were up 130% in the last 10 years.
Murder, up 62%, rape 116%.
[man] In the 1970s, the phenomenon of serial murder
was brand new and absolutely frightening.
[male reporter] Motiveless, random killings
sometimes thousands of miles apart.
But at the time, the term "serial killer" didn't exist.
[male reporter] Charles Manson and three girl members
of his so-called family
were found guilty of murder in the first degree.
[male reporter #2] ...for the murders of actress Sharon Tate and eight others.
The fact, that somebody could murder, murder and murder...
[male reporter] In New York, the search continues for the "Son of Sam".
The past year, the killer has killed five people and wounded four.
...and could get away with it for a long time and be undetected.
[female reporter] 13 young women were murdered over a period of six months.
Their bodies dumped in hilly areas of Los Angeles.
...in the so-called "Hillside Strangler Murders".
It really unnerved people.
[male reporter] Police today found six more bodies
under the John Gacy house.
[female reporter] Gacy admitted killing the young men after having sex with them.
You see bodies in your sleep,
you see him in your sleep, it's just too much.
But nobody unnerved them more than Ted.
[indistinct chatter]
[man] The mysterious former law student with a charming air in court,
Bundy is on the FBI's top 10 most-wanted list.
Being sought for questioning in 36 slayings.
[Michaud] Ted stands out because he was quite an enigma.
Clean-cut, good looking, articulate,
very intelligent,
just a handsome, young, mild-mannered law student.
Yes, I intend to complete my legal education to become a lawyer,
and be a damn good lawyer.
Then I have a great model over here, so I think things are gonna work out.
That's about all I can say.
[Michaud] He didn't look like anybody's notion of somebody
who would tear apart young girls.
[Michaud] Ted and I first met face-to-face on death row
in 1980.
My agent had come to me
saying that Ted Bundy, famous serial killer,
had sent a message out that he was willing to speak
exclusively with a journalist
in exchange for a reexamination of all the cases against him,
which, he said, would prove that he was innocent.
I thought, that if Ted was telling the truth,
that he has been set up,
that it was a hell of a story.
If it wasn't the truth, then it was also a hell of a story.
At the time, I was still a reasonably young reporter
and I'd certainly never had that big a story in my lap.
I think Ted regarded me as somebody to be manipulated or used in his cause.
So I called my old mentor, Hugh Aynesworth for whom I had worked at Newsweek.
[Aynesworth] Stephen called me asking would I help him,
would I work with him? I said, "Sure."
It just seemed like a good story, either way it went.
And I knew that nobody else to that point had any access to him.
People were trying all over the world to get with Bundy.
[Michaud] We reached an agreement to cooperate with Ted on a book.
So, Hugh took off for the West Coast to re-investigate the cases.
And I went to Florida with my tape recorder.
I can't tell you how nervous I was walking to the prison the first time.
Death row's not any fun.
The guard took me down this long corridor.
And then around to the left into this room.
Then Ted was brought in.
I'd known Ted from newspaper articles, a lot of television.
The mystery, the aura of the most infamous accused
mass killer in the country.
Now, we were face-to-face, the two of us, in the same room.
And there was nothing besides his belly chain and his death row clothes
to tell you that Ted was anything other than just a regular guy in his early 30s,
who was there talking over a business deal.
And over the next six months, we'd recorded between 75 and 80 tapes,
roughly a hundred hours of recorded conversation.
[Bundy] Testing one, two, three, four, five.
[beep]
[Michaud] That going okay?
[Bundy] I'm getting a red light. Blink, blink, blink. Record.
-[Michaud] That means it's recording. -Oh.
It's blinking. It's not on permanently.
[Michaud] Yeah, well... It should blink in response to the voice.
[Bundy] Blink-blink. Oh, I see.
[Michaud] When we first sat down together, we had a little bit of small talk.
[young Michaud] May I have a cigarette, please?
-[Bundy] Oh, sure, go right ahead. -Thank you.
-[Bundy] They're good for you. -They are?
-[Bundy] Only cause mild forms of cancer. -Right.
It turned out that we had a lot superficially in common,
that we were both born in, in Burlington, Vermont,
and had moved with our mothers to Tacoma, Washington,
a working class suburb of Seattle.
We were quite young.
[Bundy] Our house was on Sheridan street, in Tacoma.
Second house from the corner
on the west side of the street.
Moved there, I would guess, about 1951.
[Michaud] We were not friends,
but we actually knew some people in common.
[Bundy] Yeah, I remember Warren Dodge
one of my childhood buddies.
We both went to football practice in the play field across from the tavern
and then we fished at the pier just across the railroad tracks from the tavern.
He was very cautious with me, businesslike.
[Bundy] I'm particularly fond of
looking at things in a chronological way.
Times, dates, places.
I understood from that meeting, that I was there to take down Ted's story.
The story that he wanted to tell.
[Bundy] People perceive me differently from how I perceive myself.
And I need to give others a chance to know
what was really going on, what it was really like for me.
[click]
[helicopter thrumming]
[police radio chatter]
[male reporter] In and around Seattle, police began investigating
a young woman who disappeared.
Lynda Ann Healy, a 21-year-old, University of Washington student,
disappeared from her Seattle apartment.
Lynda lived here in this green house in the university district
along with five other university students.
She was last seen here Thursday evening, about 12 o'clock.
[woman] I was a detective with King County police
in Seattle, Washington,
and I recall when she had gone missing
because Lynda was the...
weather person and the ski report person for a local radio station,
a very popular station that I happened to listen to everyday
to see if I wanted to go skiing that day.
According to her roommate, her alarm went off on time
Friday morning at 5:30,
but her roommate says Lynda wasn't in her room
and she never showed up for work.
[McChesney] Lynda didn't come to work on a particular day,
and some of the other people in the radio station
commented over the air
that Lynda must be sick, Lynda didn't show up.
That was very unusual because she was
a person that you relied on five days a week
to tell you what was going on in the mountains.
[girl] I was in my room studying late, probably till about almost 2:00,
and she came in at about 11:30 into my room and spoke with me then.
And she seemed in a really pretty happy mood.
And then she said she was going to bed and that was about 12:00.
[McChesney] When Lynda didn't show up the next day,
the newspapers then proceeded to tell the public
that Linda was gone.
and it was quite a mystery,
because she was a very responsible young woman.
There was a crime scene search at that point.
The room was very neat.
There was no signs of foul play in the room,
except some blood on the pillow
and head area on the sheets of Lynda's bed.
The only curious thing there is Lynda's bed was made up neatly.
[man] At that time, the disappearance of Lynda Healy was certainly unique
for the Seattle area.
Back when I first started as a patrol officer
with the King County Sheriff's Office,
I'd never seen a crime committed before.
And that's where I got my start.
We did not know anything about where she went,
nor had anyone else had any knowledge about where she went.
We have very few leads on the disappearance of Lynda Healy.
Although since the last time that we made a press release on this,
we have interviewed 65 people.
We couldn't do anything but sit and man a telephone.
It was pretty bad.
[click]
[Michaud] Ted's first victim was supposed by most people to be Lynda Ann Healy.
And my conversations with Ted began fairly innocently.
I wanted to talk about the murders.
So I asked him about the murder of Lynda Ann Healy.
[Michaud] We know that Healy went to bed and was never seen again...
I think we've got to try to think in a more narrative kind of way,
about the crimes, with which you have been connected.
-[Bundy] I don't-- I don't know. I'm... -[Michaud chuckles]
[Bundy] My initial reaction is that I don't think that I can.
It seemed to me that when he said that he was going to cooperate with us
and tell us important things
that would help prove that he was innocent,
what he really had in mind was a celebrity bio.
[Bundy] Boyhood on Sheridan Street was not an unpleasant one.
I remember those days,
of roaming and-- with my friends, the adventure, the explorations.
Those were the days of frog hunting and marble playing.
[Michaud] Ted had an idealized version of his boyhood.
[Bundy] First grade I was somewhat of a champion frog catcher.
I mean, I was a frog man.
Prided myself on my ability
to spot that pair of bulging eyes...
which would bob just above the surface of a murky pond,
[woman] Growing up in Tacoma, we had a lot of fun.
My brother was two years older and he and Ted were the same age.
We had about a four-block area of kids that played together.
And we had that whole wooded area to play in.
[Bundy] I never lacked playmates in those days.
There were always more than enough kids around to do something with.
They seemed to be everywhere.
There was a distinct difference between the haves and have-nots
in the neighborhood,
and Ted's family were in the have-not group.
But they could have not been more Beaver Cleaver if they tried.
His mom worked as a secretary.
Mr. Bundy was a really good dad.
His mom and dad took him to church every Sunday.
They were involved in Cub Scouts and Brownies
and Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and...
sent the kids to church camps.
They were very, very involved parents.
But he was just different.
He had a big problem for a long time. He had a horrible speech impediment.
So he was teased a lot.
He just didn't fit in.
Even up at Boy Scout camp,
he just couldn't quite get the hang of doing
the things the other kids were doing.
Couldn't tie the knots right.
Couldn't shoot the gun right.
Couldn't win the races.
And he had a temper.
He liked to scare people.
He liked building tiger traps out in the woods.
They built a bit pit in the ground
and put sharpened sticks down in it,
then covered the top of it up with vegetation.
And one little girl
went over the top of one of Ted's tiger traps
and got the whole side of her leg...
slit open with the sharpened point of the stick that she landed on.
In high school,
he wanted to be something he wasn't.
He was going to be president.
He was going to show the world that...
Ted was the one to be dealt with,
and it was a lot of blowhard talk.
[Bundy] I did well in academics, I ran for high school office.
Most of my close friends, we would play football
I went out for the track team, went skiing every weekend.
I was one of the boys.
[Holt] He tried to fool you and lie to you.
He wasn't athletic.
He wanted to be the number one in class, but he wasn't.
He started being more alone.
[Bundy] Some people perceived me as being shy and introverted.
I didn't go to dances, I didn't go on the beer drinking outings.
I was a pretty-- You might call me straight,
-but not a social outcast in any way. -[Michaud] Mm-hmm.
[Holt] Nobody really got to be close to Ted.
I don't remember him dating anybody,
and at the time I thought it was really terrible,
'cause he was a good-looking guy.
[Bundy] It wasn't that I disliked women or were afraid of them.
It was just that I didn't seem to...
have an inkling as to what to do about them.
[calmly] I honestly can't say why.
He just didn't seem to be all there, all present...
in some way. There was just a gap in him.
[Bundy] Everybody's fascinated
with the notion that there is cause and effect.
That we can put our finger on it and say,
"Yes, his father beat him when he was a boy.
We could see it when he was a kid."
That's bullshit.
There's nothing in my background
which would lead one to believe that I was capable
of committing murder.
-[Michaud] Absolutely nothing? -[Bundy] Absolutely nothing.
[McChesney] In June of 1974,
another young woman went missing in Seattle.
And she had lived in the University of Washington area,
very close to where Lynda Ann Healy had been abducted.
[female report] Georgann Hawkins was last seen Monday evening
shortly after midnight.
She had been visiting at the Beta House and was returning to her house
just a half block away down this alley.
Police believe she went along this route
and then, somewhere, she disappeared.
Did you ever know her as the type of person that would take off
at any time on her own and not tell anyone?
No, I didn't, she wasn't like that at all.
She always... She was really close to all of us,
and anything she was gonna do, she always told us.
Because she lived in the University of Washington area,
where you have lots and lots of young people,
and lots of lots of young women,
the community began to grow uneasy about what was going on.
It's unreal and it's a nightmare.
And nothing in anybody's manual would... [chuckles]
it-- would prepare you for something like this.
Mostly they're-- they're frightened, and I-I sense a good deal of anger.
-[reporter] Against who? -Against anyone who would feel
they had the right to walk into the middle of a young lady's life
and-- and disrupt it in this way.
[McChesney] It was very obvious to me
that there was something really horrible, really wrong going on.
There's no physical evidence, except that the two girls
were very similar type girls. They're very dependable.
They told people where they were going and when they were coming back,
and that, uh, they just didn't do things of this nature.
And they're within two blocks of each other.
Police say they will return to this alley at night
to determine the lighting of the area.
Meanwhile, they're asking the girls to stay out of the alleys
and travel in groups of twos or threes
and use only the front doors.
[Michaud] The disappearance of Georgann Hawkins
is an interesting case.
for the fact there's no evidence, at all.
She might be an interesting one to discuss, what do you think?
Well, I don't know about, uh...
the Hawkins case,
from what I know about it, it is unusual.
because she was in a neighborhood
where she would have a lot of acquaintances
but I don't know.
[Michaud] Guiding the conversations with Ted
was a challenge.
I started trying to push him into more substantive areas and...
he just kept bobbing and weaving.
He wanted to talk about everything but the cases against him.
He told me that when he graduated from high school,
he went to the University of Washington.
[Bundy] At the University of Washington, I was a nice, presentable,
affable young person.
I compensated a lot for what I consider to be my most vulnerable aspect,
my introversion,
by being seemingly aloof and arrogant and intellectual
but nice and tolerant and that kind of stuff.
I had to sit down one night and say, "This is what I want to be."
[Michaud] At the university,
he got an undergraduate degree in psychology
and also met this tall, attractive,
wealthy young woman from California...
and for a while caught her attention.
[Bundy] The relationship I had with Diane
had a lasting impact on me.
She's a beautiful dresser, beautiful girl. Very personable. Nice car, great parents.
So, you know,
for the first-time girlfriend, really that was not too bad.
We spent a lot of time driving around in her car.
You know, making out in the car.
Mumbled sweet nothings into each other's ears
and told each other how much we loved each other.
And she inspired me to look at myself and become something more.
[Michaud] He decided that he wanted to go into politics
and he was a straightforward, clean-cut, foursquare
Richard-Nixon Republican.
[crowd cheering]
[Nixon] Four years ago, crime was rising all over America.
I pledge to stop the rise in crime.
[Bundy] I've always been anti-union, anti-boycott.
I guess that kind of labels me as somewhat of a conservative.
[Michaud] The anti-war movement and the liberal agenda offended him.
[Bundy] I just wasn't too fond of criminal conduct
and using anti-war movements as a haven for...
for delinquents who liked to feel that they were immune from the law.
I did speak out against these radical socialist types
who were just all for trashing the buildings,
and destroying the university.
[man] When I first met Ted,
he was doing work for the state Republican Party at that time
in Seattle.
I got a job working for Republican governor
Dan Evans' campaign for reelection.
And Ted volunteered to come on and work with us.
Our friendship grew from there.
He was a very nice person.
He was the kind of guy you'd want your sister to marry.
[Michaud] One of the things Ted liked about politics
is that politicians are all about image.
They're about selling something to do the public.
That's perfect for him, 'cause he doesn't have to be real.
[Bundy] The reason I love politics
and was just drawn to it from the very beginning
was because here was something which allowed me
to utilize my natural talent in politics
and also my assertiveness.
[Vortman] Ted always fit in, wherever he was at.
We would go to functions
where there'd be some very influential people there.
And, uh, Ted could always strike up a dialogue.
These people accepted him.
[Bundy] And a social life. I mean, the social life came with it.
You were set, you know, you went out to dinner with people
and they invited you to dinner, this is where they were,
they took you to drinks, and they...
And there I was, a life that had been missing for me.
During that campaign I got laid for the first time.
I got laid in Walla Walla.
[Vortman] Ted's job with the governor's campaign
was to attend all of the events that Rosellini had--
the other side, a democrat running against Governor Evans--
and write down what Rosellini said to use it against him.
[Michaud] Ted saw himself as something more
than just another guy who was just working on the campaign.
[newsman] An official for the Republican gubernatorial candidate
was accused of political spying.
It's hard for me to believe that what I did is newsworthy.
My part in the campaign was so insignificant,
I'm embarrassed that I should be getting this publicity from it.
Really embarrassed.
[laughs]
[Michaud] He affected humility at it, that he was just another little cog.
But he, in fact, loved to be in the center of attention.
[Vortman] Ted had aspirations to be affluent
and recognized and looked up to.
I did meet his girlfriend from California.
She was a very classy person.
And Ted wanted to be in the upper class.
I think he looked up to me.
I was like the big brother, the older brother.
And we have the same interests.
He enjoyed cooking and eating.
I like to cook. That's sort of my hobby.
[Bundy] When I met Marlin,
I was attracted to him because his wife could cook good sushi.
And, uh, they were very nice people.
[Vortman] Ted liked my Volkswagen.
He wanted a Volkswagen just like mine.
And I remember he liked that it had a grab bar up here.
He seemed intrigued by that.
And then he got one just like mine,
I guess, same color and everything.
And I was going to law school
and Ted decided he was gonna go out to law school too.
[Michaud] After he graduated from the University of Washington,
Ted applied to a number of law schools,
but he was devastated when his LSATs came back
and he was mediocre. They weren't very good at all.
So, he was not going to get into a great law school.
And he goes to the University of Puget Sound Law School, night school.
[Bundy] I felt like I'd failed,
not only myself but even my teachers and instructors at the university.
[Michaud] And he's bitterly disappointed,
because it lacks any kind of mahogany and tweed that he had in mind.
And it was a miserable year for him.
[Bundy] I was just absolutely out of control of my life.
I didn't know what I was going to do, didn't even know where I was gonna live.
Didn't even know how I was gonna support myself.
[Michaud] And his relationship with Diane falls apart.
She was frankly more woman than he could handle.
He didn't have any money, and that kind of opened up
a lot of the old self-doubt.
[Bundy] I experienced any number of insecurities with Diane.
There were occasions when I felt that she expected a great deal more
from me than I was really capable of giving.
I was not in any position to take her out and squire her around, uh...
in the manner in which we was accustomed.
But-- Or buy her clothing or, you know...
I think I was coming apart at the seams.
Maybe she saw it and maybe didn't understand, you know,
what I was going through.
Throughout the summer, Diane and I corresponded less and less.
And then Diane stopped writing, and...
and I started to get fearful about what she was up to.
I had this overwhelming feeling of rejection
that stemmed not just her, but...
everything.
The tail end of that summer is really a blank,
I mean, it was a nightmare for me.
In there somewhere was a desire to...
have some sort of revenge on Diane.
But toward the end of the summer, I'm serious, I just-- It's blank.
I don't know what the hell I did.
[male reporter] From January to June of this year,
The King County area was engulfed in a wave of fear
as young women vanished with alarming regularity.
21-year-old Lynda Ann Healy was the first to disappear.
Georgann Hawkins also disappeared from the University of Washington campus.
[Michaud] When Lynda Healy and Georgann Hawkins disappeared
within the city of Seattle,
they were missing persons cases, they were not murders.
They just have gone. There was no region-wide panic...
until word spread that four other women
had also disappeared from other jurisdictions,
all around Western Washington and into Northern Oregon.
[male reporter] Nearly every month, in and around Seattle,
a young woman disappeared.
[male reporter #2] Gail Manson disappeared
from The Evergreen State College campus near Olympia.
Susan Rancourt disappeared from the campus
of central Washington State College in Ellensburg.
Roberta Kathleen Parks disappeared
from the Oregon State University campus at Corvallis.
22-year-old Brenda Ball of Seattle was last seen at a tavern in Burien.
There were six unsolved disappearances here
in less than six months.
[man] When the series of girls were reported missing,
terror gripped Seattle.
I was a reporter for KJR Radio
and the desperation in Seattle was crazy.
The people were frightened to death.
We had started, at KJR, numbering the women.
"Number 3, number 4, number 5 has disappeared."
"Number 6..."
Women were disappearing, and my brother had sent me
the clippings from the paper.
It just made me sick.
[Vortman] It was on the news.
There were a bunch of young women missing in the Seattle area.
I was shocked. I couldn't believe it.
They just vanish for no apparent reason.
We are pretty sure that there is probably foul play
some way or another.
And we feel that we haven't come to the end of our line here,
that there's a good possibility that this could happen again.
[Lucas] It was an emotional time.
Behavior was changed. A lot of behavior changed.
There had been young men, young women hitchhiking on every street corner.
And the hitchhiking stopped.
Just like that.
We just want to caution the young women of our community
to be overly cautious at this time.
[McChesney] As a woman, and a detective,
it was not lost on me that the victim pool was....
kind of like me...
in the sense of age, college-educated.
And for most of the women that I knew, they were very careful about...
meeting strangers and dating and who they were dating and so forth.
And I knew from my friends that there was apprehension and fear
about what was going on, because we did not have a suspect.
All the material that was coming out of the Seattle Police Department was:
"We don't know what's going on. We don't know...
where these girls are disappearing to. We have no suspect."
[man] Information is coming in, but...
it isn't anything that we can really go on right now.
[dogs barking]
[Keppel] Brenda Ball was my missing person case.
I worked very hard at trying to locate her.
Didn't find out any information from anybody that knew anything.
We were viewing the type of case it was
as a killer or maybe a couple of killers.
The term "serial killer"
was not anywhere on anybody's register in 1970s.
As far as I was concerned, it was new territory.
We didn't know what was going on at all.
[Bundy] The record-keeping operation
of the King County police agencies in general was just horrendous.
I had this connection with law enforcement there.
I worked for the Seattle Crime Commission.
I did some work on this crimes against women...
uh, issue, particularly rape...
to study this and make some suggestions
to the Seattle police on how they can prevent rape.
[Michaud] A year or so before the women started disappearing,
Ted had a brief job working for the Seattle Crime Commission.
It gave him access to a lot of crime statistics,
and he saw what the police did and what the police did not do.
And he saw all sorts of places where somebody who was smart enough
could take advantage of the chaos and the lack of consistency
from one jurisdiction to another.
[Bundy] What I discovered, the discovery I made
was that they had well-intentioned people,
but they didn't know what they should do.
[Lucas] Various police departments weren't sharing information
across jurisdictional lines.
This became blatantly obvious fairly early on in the series of murders.
I'd call the police department and say, "How many girls are you missing?"
"We have one missing here." And I said, "How many in Seattle?"
"I don't know."
There were wild investigative leads that went all over the place.
The Captain of Homicide in Seattle, Herbs Swinley,
would call me into his office sometimes to brainstorm.
One day, I walked into his office and up on the chalkboard,
he had the names of...
[exhales]
eight or ten young women.
And I said, "What's that list?"
And he said, "I was gonna ask you to look at it."
And in between each of the names, he had the numbers 23, 23,
36, 36, 23,
23, 36, 36.
I said, "I don't know, what's that all about?"
And he said, "That's the number of days between the disappearances."
He said: "You see a pattern?"
He was researching various religious cults
to try to attach it to various kinds of occult calendars, and...
witchcraft, Satanism, human sacrifices.
They had no hard evidence.
No descriptions of potential suspects.
They were desperate.
[Aynesworth] While Stephen was meeting with Ted in prison,
I was out in the Northwest
reinvestigating all the murders that he was suspected of.
Six years after these murders,
there really wasn't any real strong evidence
in any of the cases.
I met with the local police, what witnesses there were of the crimes,
their families
Well, we received a phone call from the university
that my daughter was missing. That she hadn't come home.
She was a straight-A student, the type of child who just...
wouldn't normally do those kinds of things.
Those things don't happen to you.
They happen to everybody else.
You read about in the paper. They happen in New York City.
They don't happen in Ellensburg, Washington.
It was just a hard, tiresome job
for many weeks and it was very-- very hurtful too,
because some of these families
never found their daughters.
I had two teenage daughters at the time.
And I just envisioned...
what had happened to some of these girls. It was horrible.
[Bundy] Why and how an individual would select women as victims
of a brutal crime is not entirely clear to me.
I've always preferred women to men.
Um, I probably have
60% women friends,
close to 40% men friends. It's always been divided that way.
I enjoy women.
[Michaud] Ted presented himself as just a Boy Scout.
Boyishly handsome, smooth-talking,
and people really fell for him.
He met a woman named Liz at a bar and she fell madly in love with him.
Liz became his main squeeze, and they almost got married.
[Bundy] I loved her so much it. It was destabilizing.
She was from a Mormon family. She was from a wealthy background.
She was somewhat meek.
Liz had a child that she had to raise alone for a time.
[Michaud] She had a daughter,
and they formed this kind of little family for a while.
[Bundy] She was new, and this was a whole new...
[clears throat]
...dimension to living that I had never seen before.
[Michaud] But they had issues.
[Bundy] I felt such a strong love for her.
But we didn't have a lot of interests in common--
Like, politics was something I don't think we had in common.
She liked to read a lot, I wasn't into reading.
I wasted a lot of time.
And the other problems that I would experience, like...
not being able to make my genuine feelings for her come out,
whether it's fixing a special dinner or going out
or bringing flowers or taking out the garbage,
changing the sheets, or doing the laundry.
On occasion I would experience this fit of, you know...
guilt as it were, and I would vacuum, and I would straighten up
and wash dishes or fix dinner or do something.
The area where I really failed would be
not opening up my whole life to her.
Don't know what I was hiding.
Maybe I was just trying to preserve the, uh,
Ted Bundy devil-may-care attractive bachelor image.
[gunshot]
I was terribly jealous of her.
I used to agonize about losing her.
I used to just torture myself.
And I did a lot of dumb things.
[indistinct chatter]
[band playing upbeat song]
[McChesney] It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
There were thousands of people at the park.
There were all kinds of events going on.
Lots and lots of young people.
Lots and lots of young women...
in a place where they feel safe.
And then...
at some point that day
two women, Denise Naslund and Janice Ott,
disappeared from Lake Sammamish Park.
[siren wailing]
[Lucas] I was still at the radio station in 1974
when Janice Ott and Denise Naslund
were abducted from Lake Sammamish State Park.
[inhales deeply]
[sighs] I, in fact, lived in a house just a couple miles down the road.
So when the boss called and said, "Get over-- Get over to Lake Sammamish,"
I went over and began interviewing people from there.
It was the first time that some really clear details came out.
So far we've gotten a few good leads, particularly on Janice Ott,
the missing girl from Issaquah.
As far as Denise Naslund,
we're still a little bit shaky on that yet.
[Keppel] When the girls went missing from Lake Sammamish State Park,
our homicide sergeant assigned
my partner and myself to the two cases.
At that time,
there were eight women who went missing in and around Seattle.
People were pretty frightened about it.
So we set up a task force.
Kathy McChesney was selected to come in
because we needed a female detective to interview females.
[McChesney] What came out of a call for information
was the fact that some of the witnesses at the park
had seen a suspect approach both of the women who went missing.
With the disappearance of the Ott and the Naslund girls
on the same day, from the same state park,
came the first indications that a male subject was involved.
There were 40,000 people out here on that day
and some of them had been asked by a good-looking young man
wearing an arm cast to help load his sailboat on the car
in the parking lot beyond.
These same witnesses provided information for a police sketch
and recall the man with a cast had asked several young ladies
for help that day.
[Keppel] We found out that Denise Naslund
was laying on the beach with three of her friends,
and went back to the restroom, which was about 60 feet.
[McChesney] And that's when this same suspect
with his arm in a sling
approached Denise Naslund, standing there by the restroom,
with a similar story, and she went with him,
we believe, willingly, to go help him.
And then she was never seen again.
[Keppel] Later on, Denise Naslund's mother called in.
And I remember interviewing the mother.
[woman] About nine o'clock that night,
I saw that her boyfriend came up pulling in her car,
and I knew right then there was something wrong.
And he said, "I can't find Denise."
All I can think about is...
what were her thoughts?
How long did she suffer?
And those thoughts are with me all the time.
[Keppel] The same day Denise Naslund disappeared,
a couple of women had observed Janice Ott being approached,
while she was on the beach, by the suspect.
Witnesses told us that the suspect was seen to be driving
a light brown or a tan Volkswagen bug.
[Keppel] When Janice got up from the beach
to go to the car with him,
she was wheeling along her ten-speed yello Tiger bike,
and then those girls overheard them introduce each other.
She said, "Hi, I'm Jan."
And he said, "Hi, I'm Ted."
And she was never seen again.
[Michaud] After several weeks,
I was not getting anywhere with Ted.
I was getting frustrated.
He didn't want to talk about the murders.
We had made a deal with our publisher
based on our reassurances that we were going to get
the real story from Ted Bundy.
[young Michaud] I need to be reassured
that you and I are going ahead in good faith, I guess.
Which is, you know-- Under the terms that we agreed,
that were what is known about the incidents themselves.
Can you do that?
[Bundy] I don't-- I don't want to talk about that right now.
-This is the defect of history. -[Michaud] Yes.
That historians have to deal with. I guess we're all historians.
I mean, talk about fiction.
-That's what history is. -[Michaud] Uh-uh.
[Bundy] You never know whether historians,
for one reason or another, well-intentioned or not,
are creating things that they wish had happened
or thought happened or would like to have happened.
Uh, because it satisfies their own preconception
of what they think the history should have been.
[Michaud] We were running out of time.
And then I had this epiphany one night
while I was drinking Scotch and eating cheeseburgers
at the Holiday Inn bar,
that there may be a different way to do this.
I couldn't talk to Ted person to person.
I had to give him some kind of the veil.
I had to get him to talk about himself...
in the third person.
So I contacted Hugh, who was out West.
[Aylesworth] When Stephen came up with the idea
to get him talking in the third person, he called me.
I was staying in a fleabag motel.
And I remember that night it was snowing. It was cold as-- as all get out.
The motel did not have a phone in the room.
And I'm out there on a payphone outside the motel,
talking to Stephen, and I was freezing.
I kept trying to get off the phone, and he was excited
and he kept saying, "We're oughta do it," and I thought it was a great idea.
We didn't know whether it would work.
[Michaud] Hugh and I have our conversation.
And I go back to the prison the next day
and I say, "Ted, now, we're not getting anywhere,
but I have an idea.
You know, Ted, you got a degree in psychology,
so you're trained in psychology.
You're familiar with the details of the cases.
You certainly know what's been in the newspapers.
You're intelligent and you're articulate.
I think one way to get at this,
is to turn you into an expert witness.
Why don't you tell me what you think happened?
Tell me what kind of person would have done this."
[Bundy] Well, it's not an easy question, but... [clears throat] I think we can...
speculate.
[Michaud] He looked at me.
There was a brief pause.
But then he grabbed my tape recorder...
and he pulled it to himself and kind of cradled it
and started talking into it as if I wasn't even in the room.
[Bundy] We can generally describe manifestations of this condition
of this person's being skewed toward matters of a sexual nature
-that involve violence. -Mm-hmm.
[Michaud] And he starts talking about how do you describe
what's in a river, as it flows to the sea.
[Bundy] You go to the mouth of any great river
and pull out a handful of water that's flowing from it and say,
-"Where did it come from?" -[Michaud] Mm-hmm.
[Bundy] To trace it back, okay? And this is what we're dealing with here--
We're talking about
microscopic events as it were,
and undistinguishable, undetectable events.
The melting of a single snowflake as it were, okay?
The advent of Spring and the combination of other forces perhaps
and the ultimate result that we appreciate
-which is the river itself. -Mm-hmm.
We're now talking about the development of...
like, well, behavior,
murder.
Okay, well, what...
caused what kinds of mental functions,
aberrations lay at the base of it and how did they--
Where were they given birth?
Where did they result? What were they the result of?
And it's difficult...
to trace it back and say, "This is what happened."
[Michaud] It was like I had unlocked and avenue for him
to finally tell this story
without saying anything that could ever be taken to court.
And off he went.
[Bundy] Perhaps this person hoped that through violence,
-through this violent series of acts-- -Mm-hmm.
With-- With every murder leaving a person of this type hungry.
-[Michaud] Mm-hmm. -[Bundy] Unfulfilled.
But also leave him with the obviously irrational belief
that he-- the next time he did it he would be fulfilled.
And the next time he did it he would be fulfilled.
Or the next time he did it he would be fulfilled.
- Synced and corrected by mrcjnthn -