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World's Most Evil Killers S03E01
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CreativityTranscript
00:00Florida State University, Tallahassee, January the 15th, 1978.
00:15Around 2.45am, a serial killer on the run broke into the Chi Omega sorority house and attacked four women.
00:24There's rape, he beats people, he knocks people's teeth out, he bites the buttock of one of the victims.
00:32The blistering attack on all four students lasted just 15 minutes.
00:37He could strike like a chameleon, bam, and take his prey.
00:43In just four years in the mid-1970s, a sadistic killer kidnapped, raped and murdered at least 30 young women.
00:52A few live to tell of their terrible ordeal.
00:56He leaned in, I thought he was gonna kiss me. Instead he said, do you know what, I'm gonna kill you.
01:03Initially convicted of only kidnap and assault, it is suspected that Bundy may have raped and slaughtered up to a hundred young women.
01:12Sentenced to death for his terrifying crimes, Ted Bundy is undoubtedly one of the world's most evil killers.
01:20One of the most evil killers.
01:23Two of the most evil killers...
01:29Seattle, Washington.
01:43Ted Bundy began his reign of terror in the Pacific Northwest
01:47and spread it across seven U.S. states.
01:51He would eventually confess to the kidnap, rape and murder
01:55of 30 young women between 1974 and 1978.
02:01Two of his victims were just 12 years old.
02:05This is a man who killed in the most violent,
02:09the most terrifying way.
02:13Before death, he would break bones,
02:15he would rip parts of the body off,
02:17he would keep parts of the body mutilated after he did it.
02:21This is a person who ravaged his victims intending to cause pain.
02:26He was a monster because he just enjoyed killing.
02:30One of his interviews, the interviewer asked him point blank,
02:34he said, Ted, why did you kill?
02:36And Ted kind of raised one eyebrow and kind of smiled
02:40and says, because I liked it.
02:42Rhonda Stapley was a college student in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1974.
02:48She says she survived a vicious attack by Bundy
02:52and was so traumatized she kept her ordeal secret
02:55for more than 30 years.
02:57Nobody went out at night.
02:59Nobody even walked to the library alone.
03:01There was terror and fear among women everywhere.
03:04Ted Bundy was one of the most evil people in the world.
03:09When Bundy was finally caught in 1978,
03:12he was incarcerated at the Leon County Jail in Florida.
03:16Sheriff Ken Katsaris, who oversaw all the county's prisons,
03:20was charged with keeping him behind bars.
03:23He was evil, but you could not discern that.
03:28Even if you knew he was evil, he came across as brilliant, charismatic, smart.
03:37So you put together the evil with all of those positive traits,
03:44and you have a very dangerous person.
03:47This killer story begins in 1946.
03:52Theodore Robert Bundy was born on the 24th of November
03:56at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont.
04:02This was the 1940s in America.
04:05The ideal nuclear family was mum and dad who were married,
04:09that nice family unit where everything is very neat and very defined.
04:14And people who were outside of that ideal really were stigmatized.
04:19To avoid that judgment, Ted's 22-year-old mother, Eleanor,
04:24moved back to her parents' home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
04:28where her parents brought up Ted as their own.
04:32The unusual part of his childhood is how he's raised.
04:36He's adopted by his grandparents.
04:38He's raised alongside a person who he is told is his sister.
04:43But she wasn't. She was actually his mother.
04:46This arrangement went on for almost four years,
04:49with Ted's grandparents as his main carers.
04:52His grandfather was quite a violent character.
04:54So that suggests to me that very early on in his life,
04:58he's almost in a bit of a survival mode.
05:01I'm not safe within this home.
05:03Just before his fourth birthday, Eleanor moved to Tacoma, Washington.
05:08There she met and married Johnny Bundy in 1951.
05:12They formally adopted Ted when he was five years old.
05:15The couple had four children together,
05:18but Ted reportedly didn't form a close bond with his new family
05:22and still believed his mother was his sister.
05:25Ted Bundy is somebody who has always been really conscious
05:27of his social class.
05:29He came from quite humble beginnings,
05:31that the family were quite poor.
05:33And he was really quite aware of that
05:35and really quite embarrassed and ashamed by it.
05:37An exceptionally bright student, Ted Bundy enrolled in the University of Washington in 1966
05:44to study Chinese.
05:46There, aged 20, he met and fell in love with a woman called Stephanie.
05:51This was his dream girl. This was the woman he was going to marry.
05:55This is the woman to which he was dedicated.
05:57It was romance in the realest sense that you could imagine it.
06:00But she suddenly dumped him.
06:02One of the reasons that she cited was that he wasn't ambitious enough.
06:06And I think this would have really hit Ted Bundy quite hard
06:09because this feeds into his anxieties around his social class
06:13and those feelings of unease and those feelings of not being good enough.
06:18So what we've got happening here is this resentment brewing.
06:22Bundy dropped out of university in 1968.
06:26The following year, he returned to the East Coast
06:28in what he later described as a bid to understand his roots.
06:32Whilst there, Bundy unearthed the family secret.
06:37He discovers his true identity.
06:39He discovers that the woman that he's considered to be his sister
06:42for his whole life is actually his mother.
06:46And he discovers his birth certificate
06:48and the birth certificate says he's illegitimate.
06:51The two most important women to him,
06:53his mother and his mother's surrogate,
06:55and the woman he wanted to marry,
06:57in essence both deny and abandon him.
07:00The significance to him of that
07:03is that women simply cannot be trusted.
07:07In 1969, aged 22, Bundy returned to the university
07:11of Washington and this time enrolled as a psychology major.
07:16There he met and started dating a single mother called Elizabeth.
07:21Their turbulent relationship would last into the mid-1970s.
07:26Women serve a function for him.
07:28They provide a roof over his head, meals on the table,
07:31sex, useful contacts with other people.
07:34So he has got quite a parasitic lifestyle.
07:37He will hook on to particular people
07:39and get from them what he wants
07:41and then he will just discard them and move on.
07:44In 1971, Bundy got a part-time job
07:47at Seattle's suicide hotline crisis centre.
07:51What he's doing is he's performing the role
07:54of the respectable middle-class young man.
07:57He wants to be seen to be helping other people.
08:00He wants to be seen to be doing socially worthy things.
08:04And this also feeds into the work that he becomes involved in
08:07in terms of political campaigning.
08:09When Bundy graduated university,
08:13he joined the Republican governor's re-election campaign.
08:17Then in September of 1973, Bundy was accepted into law school
08:23at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma,
08:26just 30 miles south of Seattle.
08:29Before beginning the law course,
08:31he went on a trip to California.
08:33Whilst there, he rekindled his relationship
08:36with his first love, Stephanie,
08:39despite still dating Elizabeth.
08:42All of a sudden, he's a different man.
08:45He's working for the governor, he's talented, he's successful.
08:48He looks like he's good enough for her, finally.
08:51Ted Bundy and Stephanie get engaged
08:53and they plan to get married
08:55and Stephanie's very excited about this.
08:57But Ted, very coldly, just drops her.
09:00What this was all about
09:02was how far this man would go for revenge.
09:05To have the kind of narcissistic victory
09:08that it would not be her that rejected him
09:11and then rejected her summarily.
09:14Having taken back control
09:16by ending the relationship with Stephanie,
09:1927-year-old Ted Bundy returned to Washington
09:22and decided he needed to show womankind who was boss.
09:26Just after midnight on January the 4th, 1974,
09:31Bundy broke into the basement apartment
09:34of an 18-year-old dancer and university student.
09:38She was at home asleep in her house one night
09:41when Ted Bundy broke in and he beat her with a metal pole
09:45and he raped her and she was in a really terrible state.
09:49Many people think this is something that just kind of came out of the blue,
09:53but I would say absolutely not, it didn't.
09:56I think this was an attack that was built up to.
09:59We often find with offenders there's some behaviour
10:02before they get to the point of raping and attacking people.
10:06And in Ted Bundy's case this was voyeurism,
10:09so he had a history of peeping through women's windows
10:12and watching them get undressed.
10:14It's something that gradually builds and it's not enough for him
10:17and he ratchets it up to the next level.
10:20The violent assault left the young woman unconscious for ten days.
10:25She sustained injuries from the blows to the head.
10:28That will cause brain damage and brain swelling.
10:32And when he sexually assaulted her with a metal bar,
10:35that caused damage to her internal organs
10:38and she was left permanently altered by those injuries.
10:45Seattle, Washington, February 1974.
10:49It was here that 27-year-old Ted Bundy attacked again
10:53and turned from rapist to killer.
10:57It's no coincidence that she's a university student,
11:00who he sees as privileged, who he sees as undeserving,
11:04whereas he's somebody who's really hard done by,
11:07and it is that constant jealousy,
11:09that constant underlying feeling of shame
11:11that drives a lot of his violence.
11:14Bundy's chosen target was a 21-year-old
11:17University of Washington student called Linda.
11:20He broke into her room.
11:22He very severely attacks her.
11:24He really does bash her skull
11:26when he carries out the assault on her.
11:29She doesn't survive the attack.
11:32That night, after he'd attacked and killed Linda,
11:36Bundy moved her away from the campus.
11:39He dumped her body in the dense woods of Taylor Mountain Forest,
11:43a 30-minute drive from the university.
11:46It's very important that he maintains control over the victims,
11:50even after he's killed them.
11:52So he doesn't just leave them where they are.
11:54He wants to be able to know where they are.
11:56He wants to have control over them.
11:58So he chooses a local beauty spot, Taylor Mountain.
12:02It's a place that people generally go to enjoy.
12:05But for him, it really is a macabre dump site.
12:09Linda's body was found a year later in 1975.
12:14Her death marked the start of a furious spate of killings.
12:18At this time, Bundy quit law school in Tacoma after just six months.
12:23He returned to Washington, not as a student, but as a predator.
12:28He would lure women over to his car,
12:30saying that he needed their assistance with something.
12:33And he'd often be wearing a sling to make it appear
12:36that he'd injured himself.
12:38And he was good-looking, he was charming, he was respectable.
12:42Bundy's trademark VW Beetle became his favourite method
12:46for abducting women before taking them to a remote spot to attack them.
12:51When he hit, it was like a shark grabbing its prey.
12:56Bam!
12:57He'd use a blunt object to bludgeon his victims
13:01and then he'd strangle them.
13:03After eight aggravated murders of young women
13:07in the first half of 1974, a rate of more than one a month,
13:11fear spread across the Pacific Northwest.
13:15I think Ted Bundy enjoys the feelings of power.
13:18He enjoys the feelings of control.
13:20So you start to see the attacks get closer together
13:24because he's having to escalate his offending
13:27to get that same feeling of power.
13:29We know with psychopaths like Ted Bundy,
13:32they're prone to boredom, so they will start to mix it up a bit
13:35and offend in different ways.
13:37Then in the summer of that year,
13:39Bundy changed his M.O.
13:41He now decided to attack in broad daylight.
13:44On July the 14th at Lake Samomish State Park,
13:47just over 15 miles southeast of the University of Washington,
13:51Bundy attacked two young women, 23-year-old Janice
13:55and 19-year-old Denise.
13:57Denise was last seen entering a public restroom in the park.
14:01There are some witnesses to these crimes
14:03and that there's one common denominator
14:06and that seems to be a man called Ted who drives a BW Beetle.
14:11So that begins to narrow the field a little.
14:16Bundy later said that he kidnapped both women from the state park
14:21within a few hours of each other.
14:23He raped them and made one watch as he murdered the other.
14:27Bundy disposed of their bodies in an area two miles away.
14:36It's reported that Ted Bundy spent time with the bodies of his victims,
14:40that he shampooed the hair of some of them,
14:42that he painted their fingernails.
14:44What his ammo always consists of is taking these two facets of his personality
14:50and he used one of them, the intelligent, the charming, the caring,
14:54the one that would help wash the hair.
14:56He'd use that to seduce them into his private presence.
15:01And then the monster, the face, the face of rage would come out
15:07and this would plunder this woman asunder.
15:13In September of 1974, Bundy left Washington
15:17and moved east to Salt Lake City.
15:20The 27-year-old had been accepted into law school again,
15:23this time at the University of Utah.
15:26On the surface, he looked like an ordinary student.
15:30But inside was a cunning serial killer.
15:34He was not your average person.
15:39He was bright, brilliant.
15:42He felt like he was a chameleon,
15:45in that he could disguise himself,
15:48he could change his colors and he could take advantage.
15:52Bundy later claimed that he first killed in Utah on October the 2nd, 1974.
16:00The victim was just 16 years old and her body was never found.
16:05Rhonda Stapley, a University of Utah pharmacy student,
16:09was waiting for a bus.
16:13I had a dental appointment downtown
16:15and while I was downtown I decided I would walk over to a city park.
16:18And then my mouth started to become a numb from the dental surgery
16:21and I could tell that I needed to go home to some aspirins pretty soon.
16:25So I went over to where the bus stop was.
16:28The bus did not show, but Ted Bundy did.
16:31He pulled his VW Beetle up to the bus stop and offered her a ride.
16:36He was nicely dressed, handsome.
16:38He told me that he was a law student
16:41and I was feeling pretty lucky
16:44what college girl wouldn't want to meet a law student.
16:50Unlike other serial killers, he did not target prostitutes,
16:54which are easy victims.
16:56He targeted young, attractive, intelligent,
16:59often beautiful and successful women.
17:02This he could do because of his intelligence.
17:04That made him a unique threat and danger.
17:07After a couple of blocks with Rhonda in the car,
17:10Bundy took a turn away from the university.
17:13Very politely he says, I hope you don't mind,
17:16but I have a short errand to run.
17:17And I said, I thought you were taking me to the zoo.
17:19And he said, no.
17:21I said, near the zoo.
17:22And we kept driving up that canyon and then down another canyon.
17:27Bundy drove up into Big Cottonwood Canyon,
17:30just southeast of the city.
17:32At this point, he stopped talking to me.
17:34He just had both hands on the steering wheel
17:36and was just driving.
17:38As Bundy came to a corner, he slowed down.
17:41In my mind, I thought that he is looking for a place
17:44to pull over and park and make out.
17:46And so, in my mind, I'm trying to figure out
17:48how do I get out of this situation
17:50without embarrassing either of us.
17:52Bundy pulled off the road
17:54and into a secluded picnic area and parked the car.
17:57And then he turned towards me
17:59and he leaned in really close to my face.
18:03I thought he was going to kiss me.
18:05Instead, he said, do you know what?
18:07I'm going to kill you.
18:09And he put his hands on my throat and started squeezing.
18:12She fell unconscious.
18:14When Rhonda eventually woke up,
18:16she was lying on the picnic table
18:18with Bundy on top of her.
18:20He was sitting on my chest
18:22with all of his weight on my chest and stomach.
18:25And I told him, get off, I can't breathe.
18:28And he says, stop struggling and I'll let you breathe.
18:31And so I held still and he kind of rocked up onto his knees
18:34so he took some of the pressure off.
18:36And then he put his hand over my nose and mouth
18:38and cut off my air that way.
18:40And he would do that until I would just go unconscious
18:43and then he would kind of bring me back.
18:45He liked watching me fade in and out of consciousness.
18:50Rhonda had just one chance to save herself.
18:53The last time when I regained consciousness,
18:56I noticed that he wasn't standing by me anymore.
18:59Kenny was pitch black with darkness.
19:01And there was little light coming from the dome light of the car
19:04because he had opened the door to the Volkswagen
19:06and was fiddling around with something in the back seat.
19:08And I used that opportunity to just run the opposite direction.
19:12I just jumped up and ran fortunately or just by pure luck or grace of God
19:19or intervention from above or something.
19:22I happened to fall into the mountain river, which wasn't very deep,
19:26but it was really, really fast.
19:27And it swept me away.
19:29There was water swirling around boulders and flowing over boulders.
19:33And I, of course, was smashing into those.
19:36And eventually I was able to climb out and rearrange my clothes so I could walk home.
19:43And that's what I did, is I just walked home.
19:47Rhonda kept her attack by Bundy a secret for more than 30 years.
19:52I felt embarrassed and stupid and ashamed.
19:55And plus I was religious LDS Mormon girl.
19:59And the teachings at that time were that if you have a choice of losing your life
20:04or losing your virtue, it would be better for you eternally if you lost your life.
20:11So I decided the best thing for me to do was just to suck it up
20:14and pretend it never happened and go on with my life.
20:18Rhonda's escape did not deter Bundy's murderous plans.
20:22A few weeks later, in November 1974, Bundy was prowling a mall in Murray, Utah,
20:29posed as a police officer.
20:31Disguised, he managed to entice an 18-year-old telephone operator
20:35called Carol to get into his car.
20:38He planned on raping and killing her.
20:41And this goes wrong. It fails. She gets away.
20:45During the struggle, Carol had managed to open the car door and escape.
20:49Ted Bundy is not the kind of guy who just gives up and goes home.
20:53He's got his mind set on it. He wants to get what he wants that night.
20:58Now, two of Bundy's victims had escaped death.
21:02The next would not be so fortunate.
21:05On November the 8th, Bundy kidnapped 17-year-old Deborah
21:08as she left a theater production.
21:11She was on her way to pick up her brother.
21:14Deborah was never seen again.
21:17What happens with Bundy and many other serial killers,
21:20they have to kill.
21:22They kill, they get a release.
21:25Sometimes they get a little extra release by returning to the corpse
21:29and having a small dose of the arousal, which they can live through
21:34by toying with their trophies and toying with the corpse itself.
21:39And then they have a rest period.
21:41All the time 27-year-old Bundy had been killing,
21:45he was still seeing his long-term girlfriend, Elizabeth, in Seattle.
21:49In the autumn of 1974, he also got involved with Carol,
21:54a single mother and a divorcee.
21:57He presented as completely normal
21:59and so many people were taken in by him.
22:02Ted Bundy had yet to appear on the police radar as a suspect,
22:07but thanks to eight eyewitnesses who saw him in July of 1974
22:12at Lake Samomish, the Washington State Police were on the lookout
22:17for a man who'd introduced himself as Ted
22:20and was driving a tan VW Beetle.
22:24This guy is reported to be nice-looking, in his 20s,
22:28just an average college guy.
22:31He doesn't look like a monster,
22:33and nobody thinks that a serial killer looks like this.
22:36Police issued a composite sketch based on the descriptions they had.
22:41It was broadcast on national television
22:43and was seen by Elizabeth.
22:45She called the police.
22:47She gave them Bundy's details as well as those of his car.
22:51But the police dismissed the tip
22:53because reportedly Bundy was a clean-cut law student.
22:58A year later, the 28-year-old headed cross-country.
23:03He raped and killed three young women in Colorado.
23:06In May, he assaulted a 12-year-old child.
23:09She'd been abducted from her junior high school in Pocatello, Idaho.
23:17Here, we've got Ted Bundy seeing an opportunity and actually seizing it,
23:22with not too much regard to the risk.
23:25And that's not really his previous MO.
23:28He's used that charm before.
23:29But this is quite disorganized, and this is something that will lead to his downfall.
23:34Bundy had got away with multiple murders and, despite a sketch of him in circulation,
23:39had not been identified by police.
23:41In June 1975, he returned to Utah and killed a 15-year-old girl in Provo.
23:47Two months later, Bundy was driving erratically through a Salt Lake City suburb
23:52in his tan VW Beetle when he was spotted by a Utah Highway Patrol officer.
23:57Ted Bundy is pulled over by a police officer who notices that the front passenger seat is missing.
24:04There's an ice pick, there's a crowbar, there's a ski mask.
24:08And all of this looks incredibly suspicious.
24:11But Ted Bundy, being the charming manipulator, has an explanation for all of this.
24:16Suspicions were aroused, but the Utah police did not have enough evidence
24:21to detain Bundy for anything to do with the murders.
24:25Instead, three Utah detectives flew to Seattle, where they met up with the Washington police.
24:31Together, they interviewed Bundy's long-term girlfriend, Elizabeth.
24:35She told them that she'd found some strange items in the apartment a year earlier,
24:40including a meat cleaver and a bag of women's clothing.
24:44What happens over the course of the lives of serial killers is the time it takes them to need another killing,
24:53to need, if you will, another savage evil meal gets shorter and shorter and shorter.
24:59Their control gets less and less and less.
25:02The way they perpetrate their crimes becomes wilder and more foolish.
25:07With the FBI on his trail, Bundy sold his VW, but it was found by police.
25:13Inside, they discovered strands of survivor Carol's hair and hairs from two other women.
25:19On October the 2nd, 1975, detectives found Bundy in Utah, arrested him and put him in a line-up.
25:28There, Carol positively identified him as her abductor.
25:34This is where he's taken his eye off the ball.
25:37This is where he's started making mistakes.
25:39He's been so driven by his wants and his desires that he stopped to actually risk assess what he's doing.
25:46Unable to find enough evidence to charge him with any murders,
25:50Bundy only stood trial for Carol's aggravated kidnap and assault.
25:55On June the 30th, 1976, Bundy was sentenced to serve one to 15 years
26:01and was eventually moved to the Garfield County Jail in Colorado.
26:07I felt relieved that he was arrested and wasn't a threat on the street anymore.
26:12Just as police were gathering enough evidence to charge him with the murder
26:16of a 23-year-old woman in Snowmass, Bundy pulled a major surprise.
26:21There's a preliminary hearing, and Ted Bundy, being the incredibly arrogant individual that he is,
26:27decides that he's going to defend himself in court.
26:30Bundy was savvy about how the system operated.
26:35By being his own lawyer, he had access to the law library system of the jail,
26:40and he was allowed to go there notwithstanding that once you got access to the law library system,
26:45you could go right out the window, which he did.
26:47Bundy escaped and went on the run in Colorado.
26:50He was caught six days later.
26:53A year later, he pulled another surprise.
26:56He's in his cell and he notices that there's a hole in the ceiling,
27:00and one day he manages it and he gets through the hole
27:03and he comes out in the apartment that belongs to the chief jailer,
27:07and he literally walks out of the front door of the prison and he's away again.
27:12Free and on the loose, Bundy made his way to the peaceful college town of Tallahassee
27:17in the sunshine state of Florida.
27:20I suspect that when Bundy knows he's at the end of his rope,
27:23he's been arrested enough times, had enough interactions to realise
27:28that this story is going to come to an end.
27:31So it's in Florida that he goes on his rampage.
27:34Around 2.45 a.m. on January the 15th, 1978,
27:39Ted Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority house.
27:43He's somebody who's familiar with college towns, with college buildings,
27:47so I think he knew that there were many women in this house
27:50and that was his intention all along.
27:52Within 15 minutes, he'd attacked four women brutally cracking their skulls,
27:58breaking their collarbones.
28:0021-year-old Margaret was hit with a piece of firewood
28:04and then strangled to death with her stockings.
28:0620-year-old Lisa was beaten unconscious, raped and killed.
28:11The attack is incredibly brutal.
28:14There's rape. He beats people.
28:16He knocks people's teeth out.
28:18He bites the buttock of one of the victims.
28:21The magnitude of the terror for the victim
28:25is as intense as the magnitude of the rage by the perpetrator.
28:29Two others were both severely beaten and assaulted.
28:33Miraculously, they survived.
28:35Within the hour, the sheriff of Leon County, Ken Katsaris,
28:40was called to the crime scene.
28:42When I got there, I did check with the investigators.
28:46They had secured the scene.
28:49We knew that we had two who were obviously dead
28:54and two that they believed may die.
28:59You could tell which one was first.
29:01You could tell which one was second, third and fourth.
29:05But you could tell how much energy that he expended.
29:14This was not the end of Bundy's activity that night.
29:18As I'm standing outside of the sorority house,
29:23we get a call that there's strange noises coming from a condo next door.
29:29And I sent an investigator immediately because I said,
29:33six blocks away? Could it be?
29:36He's doing it again.
29:38Which only tells you he couldn't help himself.
29:42Bundy had broken into another apartment
29:45where he savagely beat another student.
29:48She was in a pool of blood when my investigator went in the condo or the apartment.
29:54And Bundy was leaving out the back window.
29:57But she tended to the injured first.
30:00Still free, a few weeks later, Bundy struck again.
30:04This time in Lake City in northern Florida.
30:07His victim was another little girl who was just 12 years old.
30:12He is a prolific serial killer at this point in time.
30:15Serial killing is his hobby. It's his vocation.
30:18It's something that he feels that he's good at.
30:21And more so, he's getting away with it.
30:24And when somebody's getting away with it,
30:26they're certainly not going to stop.
30:28And if anything, their offending is only going to get worse.
30:31Bundy dumped the girl's brutalised body
30:34in woods about 30 miles west of Lake City.
30:37He then stole a car and made his way west into the Florida Panhandle.
30:42Three days later, on February the 15th, 1978,
30:47an alert Pensacola police officer stopped America's most notorious serial killer
30:53near the Alabama state line for driving suspiciously.
30:57He just had a gut feeling that something might be wrong.
31:02And, of course, it came out over his radio after he called it in
31:07that the vehicle had been stolen.
31:09After a brief struggle in which the officer was forced to fire a warning shot,
31:14Bundy was arrested.
31:16He was taken to the Leon County Jail in Tallahassee, Florida.
31:20I had him in custody for over two years in my detention center, my jail.
31:27I had him so locked up that he wasn't going anywhere.
31:31He not only was in a secure jail cell,
31:34but I had him in a cell that we had lined with armor plate steel
31:41in sheets that were welded in terms of the seams, floor, walls, ceiling.
31:52There was no light fixture that he could remove like he did in Colorado.
31:57And then I put extra locks on the door, heavy impenetrable locks
32:04in addition to the jail key law.
32:07And they were in the hands of several people.
32:10When she discovered that Bundy was arrested for murder,
32:15his partner Elizabeth finally left him.
32:18At the same time, detectives in Washington State
32:21tried to build their case against Bundy
32:23and prove that he was a serial killer.
32:26Sheriff Ken Katsaris was also doing some digging of his own.
32:31I went to his cell one day, talking to him through the port.
32:36I told him, I said, Ted, I think I know what's going on with you.
32:43You've had a problem with your mother because you were born out of wedlock.
32:49She withheld who your father was.
32:53You've never forgiven her.
32:55And that has a lot to do with what you're doing in terms of taking it out on other women.
33:02He immediately opened his eyes wide with anger.
33:08He wanted to kill.
33:10He immediately started trashing his cell, throwing things about,
33:15and he grabbed the shower rod, which was welded in place.
33:19He ripped it from its position, which meant a lot of power.
33:25Intellectually, Sheriff Ken Katsaris was more than a match for Bundy.
33:30He managed to goad the serial killer into a game-changing revelation.
33:35He would taunt me with Ken, as he would refer to me,
33:40with that sarcastic twist of that name.
33:43Just three letters, but he would say, Ken.
33:46And then he would say, the evidence is there.
33:50You just can't find it.
33:52And I thought then, I know what he's referring to.
33:57He signed one of those bodies.
33:59This was Ken's eureka moment.
34:02He used his teeth and clamped hard twice to leave a signature.
34:10And I realized we had a very deliberate double bite impression.
34:17Double meaning he bit down and then he came out and bit again.
34:23That was his signature.
34:25Ken Katsaris was convinced that bite marks left on the bodies of his victims
34:29were the smoking gun that would show once and for all
34:33that Ted Bundy was indeed America's most vicious serial killer.
34:38But to convict Bundy, the sheriff of Leon County needed to prove it.
34:43When I viewed the two bodies of the young ladies at the morgue,
34:50on the slab, just barely 20 years of age,
34:56I had a one-month-old little girl at home
35:00and I had a two-year-old daughter at home.
35:03And I just kept flashing images that this could be them.
35:09I made myself a promise in the morgue.
35:14Somebody's gonna pay for this.
35:16I will find this person.
35:19During his regular interactions with Bundy,
35:22the sheriff realized that in the Chi Omega sorority house attack,
35:26Bundy had left a bite mark on the left buttock of Lisa,
35:30one of the victims.
35:32I was teaching the forensics of homicide investigation,
35:37and I was teaching the advanced concepts.
35:40So I knew that these bites were going to be important.
35:44Sheriff Ken Katsaris determined that if he could get an impression
35:48of Bundy's bite, he might be able to match it
35:51to the marks left on Lisa's body.
35:54I needed an exemplar.
35:57I needed his teeth marks.
36:02And that became, I think, it consumed me.
36:07How can I get them?
36:08The prison officers tried some novel techniques
36:11to get the clean impression they needed for a comparison.
36:15We gave him different kinds of fruit
36:17because we weren't sure which one the core
36:19would leave the best bite impression.
36:21And that inmate said, you're getting fruit?
36:25I don't get any fruit.
36:28And I think he became suspicious
36:31that something was going on with that
36:34because he quit eating his fruit.
36:36After their fruit tricks failed,
36:38the sheriff and his team had a trailblazing brainwave.
36:41Then it struck us.
36:44It just, it hit.
36:47What about a search warrant for his mouth?
36:50We can just go serve it.
36:52That would get the bite impression.
36:54Ken decided to take Bundy to his own dentist.
36:58I personally went to Ted Bundy's cell and I said,
37:02you're coming with me.
37:04I told him to put his brace on.
37:06I had a special brace developed now called the Bundy brace.
37:10It was spring loaded so that when he would straighten out his leg,
37:14you could hear that spring pop into place.
37:17That way he, if he tried to run,
37:19he'd be running with one stiff leg.
37:21I told him to put his brace on.
37:23Bundy reluctantly went with Ken to the dentist's office.
37:27And I escorted him up the stairway
37:30because he couldn't walk it very well with the brace.
37:33And then the door opened and there stood three men with little white schmocks on
37:43and the dental chair behind them.
37:45And he knew, he knew the jig was up.
37:50He knew.
37:52And that's when I knew that he knew that the bite marks were deliberate
37:56and they were put there for a purpose.
37:59Ken told Bundy that he had a warrant
38:01and they were going to get a bite impression from him.
38:04And I had the judge put in there
38:06that we could use any and all force reasonably necessary.
38:11I showed him the contraptions that they use post-mortem
38:15to keep the mouth open.
38:17And he looked at me.
38:20He sat down in the dental chair, smiled and said,
38:25Ken, you know I'm not a violent person.
38:30Do what you need to do.
38:33The bite mark impression that the sheriff obtained
38:36would prove vital in proving that Bundy was in fact a killer.
38:40His trial for the murder of the two students
38:43in the Chi Omega sorority house
38:45and the assault of three more young women
38:48began in Miami on the 25th of June, 1979.
38:52It would be the first national televised trial in America.
38:57As I said, I'm going to argue the law broadly
39:00because I haven't had an opportunity to complete my research
39:05on the status of Florida law.
39:07I was watching the trial on TV and I saw how arrogant he was
39:12and he wasn't in shackles.
39:13He was dressed, pretending to be his own lawyer,
39:16dressed like a liar,
39:17smiling and flirting with the people in the audience
39:20and just being Mr. Charismatic.
39:25And that was kind of sickening.
39:27On July the 24th, 1979, the jury convicted Ted Bundy
39:32on two counts of first-degree murder
39:35and three counts of attempted murder.
39:37He was given the death sentence twice.
39:40The only real evidence we had was the bite impression.
39:44And obviously, I felt good because I found it.
39:48I was conflicted.
39:50Yes, I understood that this was congratulations,
39:55but it was no congratulations.
39:58These women had suffered.
40:00Some suffered and lived, thank God.
40:03Others died.
40:05How do you celebrate?
40:07Bundy would spend 10 years on death row fighting his execution.
40:11Ted Bundy exhausted every legal avenue he possibly could
40:15to save himself from the death penalty.
40:18So the cost of his trial and his appeals was around
40:21about 9 million US dollars,
40:23which was a lot of money at the time.
40:25At the sentencing for the rape and murder
40:28of a 12-year-old girl in Lake City, Florida,
40:31Bundy represented himself.
40:33Sensationally, he used the opportunity to propose to Carol.
40:38Carol met Bundy in Seattle in 1974.
40:42She would profess his innocence until the eve of his execution.
40:47She had a daughter in October of 1982
40:50and claimed that Bundy was the father.
40:53Serial killers, they are intense, they are moving, and they are real.
40:58And I think some women are excited about that.
41:01Some women need that terror, that terror, that excitement,
41:05especially if somehow they could be near the flame
41:10without being burned by its touch.
41:12Over the ten years that Bundy was on death row,
41:15he slowly confessed to 30 documented murders.
41:19He has knowledge of murders that he's committed,
41:22which the authorities don't know about,
41:24and he's going to use that to his full advantage.
41:27And he's going to drip-feed some of this information out,
41:30bit by bit, in order to try and buy himself some time.
41:34As the appeals ran out and as the death sentence neared,
41:38a macabre fascination with Bundy grew.
41:41Just before his execution,
41:43we started to see this immense media circus around the event.
41:47We started to see radio shows playing the sound of frying bacon on air,
41:52and they had a Bundy countdown.
41:54People had Ted Bundy dances and barbecues.
41:58At 7.16 a.m. on January the 24th, 1989,
42:03aged 42, Ted Bundy was finally executed.
42:08Even when he was being walked to the electric chair,
42:11he was shouting out names of victims.
42:14And right up until the end, he's trying to buy himself more time.
42:17He's trying to just gradually give away some of this knowledge about his crimes.
42:22It's a sad thing from a scientific point of view that he would die
42:26without telling us or giving us any hint about whether or not
42:31there was something in his life that we don't know about
42:35that helps explain his conduct.
42:38I was not really happy, but kind of relieved.
42:41Normally I don't very often agree with the death penalty,
42:44but with him it was necessary.
42:46So many people were taken in by him.
42:48Despite the fact he was leaving this trail of bodies behind him,
42:51monsters don't always look like monsters.
42:54Sometimes they look like the guy next door.
42:57Arguably America's most notorious murderer,
43:00Bundy was deceptively depraved.
43:02He used his charms to kidnap, rape and kill,
43:05by some estimates up to 100 young women and girls,
43:09making Ted Bundy one of the world's most evil killers.
43:14beautiful emptiness and a dark o'clock.
43:15By giving away this.
43:16I have been a 걸로.
43:17Thank you for listening to us.
43:18Let's see you prior to this.
43:19What you want to see.
43:20The world's most relentless.
43:21I've been a great mayor of the world,
43:22the world's most meaningful.
43:24We'll see you next time.
43:25What we want.
43:27By giving up.
43:30Transcription by CastingWords