A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

credit cards. Shortly afterwards, he left Tallahassee in a stolen car; the car was recognised a few
days later, and he was arrested.
At his trial, Bundy remained as charming and plausible as ever, and it was generally agreed that he
was an unlikely sex killer, and that most of the evidence against him was purely circumstantial. But
the clinching evidence against him came from a dentist, who testified that the teeth marks on the
buttocks of one of the Tallahassee victims were identical with Bundy’s dental imprint. The judge
who sentenced him said: ‘Take care of yourself young man... You went the wrong way, pardner.’
The key to Bundy’s career of sex crime has been provided in a book called The Only Living
Witness by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth (Linden Press, 1983). In his interviews with
Stephen Michaud, Bundy insists that he is merely ‘speculating’ about the motives of the killer, but
the precision of his descriptions makes it clear that this is far more than guesswork. Bundy - who
was born in 1946 - was an illegitimate child, who was spoilt by his grandparents, and who was
deeply resentful when his mother married a cook in Seattle. He grew up to be a ‘loner’ with a streak
of bitterness and resentment. Like most healthy young men, he was highly sexed: ‘But this interest,
for some unknown reason, becomes geared towards matters of a sexual nature that involve
violence. I cannot emphasise enough the gradual development of this. It is not short-term.’ Sexually
shy and repressed, he indulged in fantasies of rape. One evening, walking down a street, he saw a
woman undressing in a lighted room. He became a voyeur, and prowled the neighbourhood for
hours every night. He tried disabling women’s cars by pulling out the rotor arm from the
distributor, or deflating the tyres, but there were always helpful males in the area to help the
intended victim get started. His fantasies - like those of Melvin Rees - were of kidnapping a woman
and having total control over her. After drinking heavily, the need to play the Peeping Tom became
obsessive.
One evening, after heavy drinking, he saw a woman leave a bar and experienced a compulsion to
follow her. He found a heavy piece of wood, and stalked her for several blocks. He managed to get
ahead of her and wait in a dark corner. But she arrived at her front door and went in before she
reached him.
The need to attack a woman became stronger. On another evening, he walked up behind a woman
who was fumbling for her keys, and struck her on the head with a piece of wood. When she
screamed, he ran away.
He followed one woman home regularly and watched her undressing. One evening, he got into the
house through the basement and attacked her in bed; when she screamed, he fled.
He began to feel that there was another ‘being’ inside him, which he referred to as the ‘entity’, the
‘disordered self or the ‘malignant being’.
Bundy described the first murder. He found a front door open and wandered around the house after
dark. Lynda Healy, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Washington, was strangled
into unconsciousness, and taken to a remote place where she was raped. At this point, Bundy
realised that he would have to kill her because he couldn’t let her go. Asked by the interviewer
whether there was any conversation, Bundy replied: ‘Since this girl... represented not a person,
but... the image, or something desirable, the last thing we would expect him to want to do would be
to personalise this person.’ The victims were merely depersonalised females.
After this, the need to rape became an obsession that allowed him no peace. According to Bundy’s
account, on the day the two girls were abducted separately from Lake Sammanish, the first girl was