Birth- November 24, 1946 Burlington Vermont
Childhood & Family Life- Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home For Unwed Mothers (now the Lund Family Center) in Burlington, Vermont on November 24, 1946 to Eleanor Louise Cowell. For the first three years of his life Bundy lived in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, who raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied illegitimate birth at the time. Family, friends, and even young Ted were told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister.
Education- After graduating from high school in 1965 Bundy spent a year at the University of Puget Sound (UPS) before transferring to the University of Washington (UW) in 1966 to study Chinese. In 1967 he became romantically involved with a UW classmate who is identified in Bundy biographies by several pseudonyms, most commonly Stephanie Brooks. In early 1968 he dropped out of college and worked at a series of minimum-wage jobs.
Love life- At the beginning of the 1966 school year he transferred to the University of Washington. There he met Stephanie Brooks, a beautiful young woman who wore her long, dark hair parted in the middle. Her resemblance to Bundy's later victims is striking. Their relationship was a rocky road lasting quite a few years, until, due to Bundy's social inadequacies, Brooks broke it off. Latter on, when Bundy had his social skills down pact, he went on a date with Brooks and asked her to marry him. She said yes, and the next day he broke it off getting his revenge. This is one of the suspected dates that set off his killing sprees. Back in Washington in the fall of 1969, he met Elizabeth Kloepfer. She worked as a secretary at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Their stormy relationship would continue well past his initial incarceration in Utah in 1976. In mid-1970, now focused and goal-oriented, he re-enrolled at UW, this time as a psychology major. He became an honour student, well-regarded by his professors. In 1971 he took a job at Seattle's Suicide Hotline crisis centre. There he met and worked alongside Rule, a former Seattle police officer and aspiring crime writer who would later write one of the definitive Bundy biographies, The Stranger Beside Me. Rule saw nothing disturbing in Bundy's personality at the time, describing him as "kind, solicitous, and empathetic.
Capture and death- Ted Bundy wasn't caught until 16 August 1975. Bundy was picked up, after a short chase, in Salt Lake County, after a local policeman recognised his VW Beetle. A vehicle search revealed evidence, and Bundy was arrested. His trial was the 23 of February 1976,and despite a relaxed and confident manner, he was found guilty and sentenced to a one to fifteen year jail sentence in Utah State Prison. He decided that he would represent himself at the next trial, and was granted library access. He managed to jump out of a window during a library visit. Bundy was captured eight days later when he tried to leave town. He managed to escape again though, on 30 December 1977, by climbing through a suspended ceiling panel in the Garfield County Jail. Nobody noticed until the next day, by which time he had travelled on to Florida. Bundy struck again on 9 February 1978, taking 12-year-old Kimberly Leach from her school. She was to prove his last victim; on 15 February, in a manner very similar to his 1975 arrest, Bundy was apprehended after a scuffle with a policeman, when the VW Beetle he was driving was stopped for having stolen licence plates. Multiple appeals over the next decade resulted in stays of execution that kept him from the electric chair. He confessed to an investigator that he had committed various acts of butchery and necrophilia, and various accounts cite his victim count anywhere between 26 and 40, the total may have been much higher. On 24 January 1989, and he was executed at 7 am, taking the secret of his actual victim count with him. His body was cremated and his ashes were spread over the same Washington State mountain area that had served as his favourite dumping ground for the bodies of his victims.
Childhood & Family Life- Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home For Unwed Mothers (now the Lund Family Center) in Burlington, Vermont on November 24, 1946 to Eleanor Louise Cowell. For the first three years of his life Bundy lived in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, who raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied illegitimate birth at the time. Family, friends, and even young Ted were told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister.
Education- After graduating from high school in 1965 Bundy spent a year at the University of Puget Sound (UPS) before transferring to the University of Washington (UW) in 1966 to study Chinese. In 1967 he became romantically involved with a UW classmate who is identified in Bundy biographies by several pseudonyms, most commonly Stephanie Brooks. In early 1968 he dropped out of college and worked at a series of minimum-wage jobs.
Love life- At the beginning of the 1966 school year he transferred to the University of Washington. There he met Stephanie Brooks, a beautiful young woman who wore her long, dark hair parted in the middle. Her resemblance to Bundy's later victims is striking. Their relationship was a rocky road lasting quite a few years, until, due to Bundy's social inadequacies, Brooks broke it off. Latter on, when Bundy had his social skills down pact, he went on a date with Brooks and asked her to marry him. She said yes, and the next day he broke it off getting his revenge. This is one of the suspected dates that set off his killing sprees. Back in Washington in the fall of 1969, he met Elizabeth Kloepfer. She worked as a secretary at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Their stormy relationship would continue well past his initial incarceration in Utah in 1976. In mid-1970, now focused and goal-oriented, he re-enrolled at UW, this time as a psychology major. He became an honour student, well-regarded by his professors. In 1971 he took a job at Seattle's Suicide Hotline crisis centre. There he met and worked alongside Rule, a former Seattle police officer and aspiring crime writer who would later write one of the definitive Bundy biographies, The Stranger Beside Me. Rule saw nothing disturbing in Bundy's personality at the time, describing him as "kind, solicitous, and empathetic.
Capture and death- Ted Bundy wasn't caught until 16 August 1975. Bundy was picked up, after a short chase, in Salt Lake County, after a local policeman recognised his VW Beetle. A vehicle search revealed evidence, and Bundy was arrested. His trial was the 23 of February 1976,and despite a relaxed and confident manner, he was found guilty and sentenced to a one to fifteen year jail sentence in Utah State Prison. He decided that he would represent himself at the next trial, and was granted library access. He managed to jump out of a window during a library visit. Bundy was captured eight days later when he tried to leave town. He managed to escape again though, on 30 December 1977, by climbing through a suspended ceiling panel in the Garfield County Jail. Nobody noticed until the next day, by which time he had travelled on to Florida. Bundy struck again on 9 February 1978, taking 12-year-old Kimberly Leach from her school. She was to prove his last victim; on 15 February, in a manner very similar to his 1975 arrest, Bundy was apprehended after a scuffle with a policeman, when the VW Beetle he was driving was stopped for having stolen licence plates. Multiple appeals over the next decade resulted in stays of execution that kept him from the electric chair. He confessed to an investigator that he had committed various acts of butchery and necrophilia, and various accounts cite his victim count anywhere between 26 and 40, the total may have been much higher. On 24 January 1989, and he was executed at 7 am, taking the secret of his actual victim count with him. His body was cremated and his ashes were spread over the same Washington State mountain area that had served as his favourite dumping ground for the bodies of his victims.