5 Myths about Serial Killer Ted Bundy: Why They Persist

Ted Bundy

Supply: Drawing by Katherine Ramsland/ Utilised with authorization

Ted Bundy has been the matter of far more media focus than any other modern-working day serial killer. Specific notions show up in many accounts, like some confirmed to be fake.

What is the deal? Why do we retain such promises? There may well be a personal investment that feeds resistance, but some persons just acknowledge details that seems to address a secret. Consequently, misconceptions persist.

I’ve invited Kevin Sullivan, the creator of 6 textbooks about Bundy, to aid with this list. It is not exhaustive, but these five myths exhibit up frequently.

1: Sam Cowell, Bundy’s grandfather, was really his father by means of incest: This was conclusively disproven in 2020 when psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow-Lewis experienced a duplicate of Ted Bundy’s DNA sequence tested for a crucial genetic indicator of incest. She’d received the DNA details from Mike McCann, who’d tested a licked stamp from Bundy’s letter to his girlfriend. Cowell was not his father.

2: Bundy’s target kind is a feminine with extended, dim hair parted in the center since that was the hairstyle of a faculty girlfriend who’d turned down him: I see this a single just about every time I read through or check out an account about Bundy. However when Bundy read about this “subconscious advanced,” he scoffed.

“They [his victims] just suit the typical category of being youthful and eye-catching,” Bundy advised investigator Hugh Aynesworth. Youth and elegance had been “absolutely indispensable,” and Bundy most popular higher education girls. At any price, he acquired direct revenge on the girl who’d rejected him, so why goal symbolic victims? In addition, all through the 1970s, prolonged hair parted in the middle was the manner for young females, so it’s most likely that his victims would have this design and style. Even so, not all of them did.

3: Bundy was a teenager ahead of he discovered that Louise was his mom, not his sister: In point, suggests Bundy pro Kevin Sullivan, Bundy discovered the reality really youthful.

“There evidently was some confusion in the child’s head for a short time,” Sullivan claims. “However, this happened when Bundy was either three or 4 yrs aged. By the time he and his mom Louise remaining Philadelphia for Washington Condition when Teddy was all over five, he comprehended that Louise was his mother. When Louise satisfied Johnnie Bundy, he was properly aware that Ted was her son. Instead of boosting him as a stepson, Johnnie adopted him and gave him the identify Bundy. Johnnie and Louise had 4 youngsters, and all the young children grew up understanding that Ted was their brother.”

Sullivan provides other proof: “I requested Mike McCann if, in his decades of dealing with Bill Hagmaier [an FBI Bundy interviewer], did he at any time request him if Bundy talked about this fantasy, and Mike claimed that Hagmaier advised him Bundy referred to it as ‘BS.’”

4: Bundy was buddies with his sufferer, Laura Ann Aime: This 17-year-old crossed paths with him immediately after leaving a party on Halloween, 1971. Quite a few folks who realized Aime claimed that Bundy had hung out with her at Brown’s Café in Lehi, Utah, had known as Aime his girlfriend, experienced mentioned he was likely to rape her (maybe jokingly), and experienced been released by her to her buddies.

In Ted Bundy: The Annually Journal, Sullivan disputes these accounts: “Those people who claimed he [Bundy] was paying out a excellent offer of time in a minor city 30 miles south of Salt Lake City in September 1974, making friends, and acquiring to know Laura, are in mistake.”

Sullivan reveals, day by working day, what saved Bundy occupied as soon as he arrived in Salt Lake Metropolis. There was no time for him to have been casually hanging out, specifically not in this town.

“We have a quite chaotic Bundy the very first half of the month with his original move, his return home, his obtaining his condominium in the shape he required it, as well as interactions he had with the regulation university,” Sullivan states. “Are we to consider Bundy arrived in the metropolis and virtually straight away began wandering down to a really little city in which he made the decision that he should really commence spending a good deal of time there generating ‘friends’? If we’re to hire standard deductive reasoning and look at the allegations with all those matters we now know about Ted’s comings and goings, then we ought to conclude that this tale is not legitimate it [the person they saw] could not have been Bundy.”

5: Bundy picked up singer Debbie Harry (of Blondie fame) in New York in a car ready for abduction: Harry has claimed that she encountered Bundy in Manhattan all through the early 1970s. She searched for a taxi one particular morning when a male driving a white motor vehicle pulled over to present her a lift. She received in, then found out the car or truck had no window crank or doorway cope with to permit her out. (But, she did get out, and in a method that Bundy would have thwarted.) When she noticed Bundy’s photograph many years later on, she “knew” he was the dude.

However, Bundy did not have a automobile like this and he was not close to Manhattan for the duration of this time period. Harry appreciates her story has been debunked, but she suggests, “I imagine they’re genuinely completely wrong mainly because he had escaped and was touring down the East Coastline. I assume that nobody has ever actually investigated that.”

Essentially, his escape was in late 1977, not through the early 1970s.

Psychologist Martin Davies at the College of London examined belief persistence in the deal with of discrediting evidence. In a single experiment, individuals who’d produced explanations for an function persisted a lot more robustly in their beliefs immediately after becoming discredited than these who’d read through supplied explanations. Even when the high-quality of the delivered explanations was much better than the created kinds, Team One’s beliefs persisted. Therefore, when some thing private is at stake, these kinds of as ego investment in one’s stance, discrediting with facts has tiny effects.

In addition, Davies uncovered, people topics who rated high in a inclination toward dogmatism showed better belief persistence, in particular when the false perception added consistency or completeness to a narrative. Topics had been asked to appraise the outcomes of psychological experiments. They were then instructed the results had been fabricated. Individuals superior in dogmatism generated extra explanations to aid the outcomes. They couldn’t imagine how an substitute to their perception about the results could even arise. They’d previously made up their minds.

Dogmatic cognitive variations could account for the persistence of well-known myths about Bundy, much more so if a man or woman has publicly stated them as accurate. A own stake, these as social or economic support, can infuse myths with more than enough force to disregard the points. If the fantasy helps make feeling, it can really feel like truth of the matter.