THE MANY SIDES OF TED BUNDY

Headnote

Ted Bundy was a good chess teacher. That's what a girl who had dated him recalled. He advised that she think carefully before touching a piece, because just one careless move could lose the game.

Over the years, many people have described their interactions with Bundy and, collectively, these impressions demonstrate Bundy's ability to be different things to different people. Interviewers were frustrated to learn that he'd contradicted to someone else what he'd just told them. He hedged, deflected, and talked circuitously while sounding completely open and sincere.

Reporter Barbara Grossman nicely sums it up: "Sometimes I come away from an interview with Ted thinking I've got great stuff. But then the more you listen to what he says, the more you wonder what he's saying."

Bundy's chameleonic style presents a unique form of mental flexibility that certain predatory psychopaths possess. It would be useful to develop an objective assessment of this aspect of criminal behavior, for better comprehension and prediction. By making Bundy the "specimen for study" that he sought to be, we could turn his game plan into a tool for shrewd analysis for today's offenders.

THE FACTS

Whether Bundy's murders began in 1974, the official calculation, or earlier, (he claimed to have killed 30, but also confessed to 36 and hinted at many more), this former Boy Scout, crisis counselor, and campaign volunteer took secrets to the grave.

Investigators launched the hunt for a serial killer after several young women were assaulted or had disappeared in Oregon and Washington State. The remains of two who had vanished on the same day from Lake Sammamish, east of Seattle, were found near bones from another. Witnesses described a slender man named "Ted," who'd approached the girls.

By this time, Bundy was in law school in Utah, where several more female corpses turned up. Then a failed kidnapping attempt got him prison time. There, Bundy endured extensive testing, including brain scans, as psychologists analyzed his life story.

Born to Louise Cowell in a home for unwed mothers on November 24, 1946, Bundy was raised in Philadelphia with his mother's parents-as her brother. In 1950, Louise took him to Tacoma, Washington, where she married Johnnie Bundy. To psychologists, Bundy claimed he'd had a stable...