The following 10 somewhat bizarre yet prophetically fatal facts about Ted Bundy (Monster Smooth) during his youth and young adulthood come to us courtesy of Bukisa.com and Wikipedia. Bukisa’s interpretations of these facts have, in some cases, been augmented and/or altered by Patrick H. Moore.
1) Ted Bundy was not his birth name.
The man the world would come to know as Ted Bundy 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. His mother Eleanor Louise Cowell (known for most of her life as Louise) moved to Tacoma when Ted was four and changed his last name to Nelson. Within a year, his mother met Johnnie Culpepper Bundy. When they married, Johnnie Bundy legally adopted Theodore and changed his last name to Bundy.
2) Ted Bundy thought his mother was his sister for many years.
To avoid the social stigma of having an illegitimate grandchild born to a young mother, his grandparents claimed him as their own. They told Ted that Louise was his sister and not his mother. Although Ted likely suspected that something didn’t quite add up, he did not definitively discover the truth of his maternal parentage until the end of high school or early in college.
3) No one is really sure who his biological father was.
Louise gives us two different stories. The name affixed in the father slot on Ted’s birth certificate was Lloyd Marshall. However, she later spoke of being seduced by a war veteran named Jack Worthington. There’s still another option, however, though it may be mere speculation. Some members of Bundy’s family think that his grandfather Samuel Cowell may also be his biological father. Samuel Cowell was a tyrannical bully and a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews, beat his wife and the family dog, and swung neighborhood cats by their tails. He once threw Louise’s younger sister Julia down a flight of stairs for oversleeping. He sometimes spoke aloud to unseen presences, and at least once he flew into a violent rage when the question of Ted’s paternity was raised. Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient woman who periodically underwent electroconvulsive therapy for depression and feared leaving their house toward the end of her life.
i don’t want to belabor the obvious but it sounds a bit dysfunctional to me.
4) He showed violent tendencies as young as three years old.
Ted showed an unsettling predilection for violence from a very early age. His maternal aunt Julia recalls lying down for a nap and waking up surrounded by knives with a smiling 3-year-old Bundy at her side. If this is true, it is totally freakish and as Bukisa says, paints an eerie, strange picture of an eccentric (in the worst sense of the word) toddler arranging knives around his sleeping aunt.
5) Bundy’s grandfather (who he thought was his father and indeed may have been) tortured animals.
AND, Bundy describes incidents of his grandfather Samuel abusing the family dog. Samuel would also swing neighbourhood cats around by their tails, and Ted himself reportedly mutilated animals with the ubiquitous knives that seemed to fascinate him so much. Ouch!
6) Young Ted was active in the Methodist Church and even served as Vice President of the Methodist Youth Fellowship.
Oddly enough, despite his anti-social and no doubt sociopathic tendencies, Ted, like John Wayne Gacy, was a joiner. In addition to the Methodist Church (Note: Patrick H’s family went to the Methodist Church in Campbellsport, Wisc for several years when he was a kid and he narrowly escaped becoming a serial killer), Ted joined the Boy Scouts of America club. It all seems like somewhat of a charade, however, a fact Bundy seemed to intimate when he later stated: “I didn’t know what made people want to be friends. I didn’t know what made people attractive to one another. I didn’t know what underlay social interactions.” you get the sense that Ted may have been thinking all the wrong thoughts both in Church and at Scout meetings. He was often described as shy and introverted at this age.
7) His criminal activities began before he finished high school.
Ted tendency to be dangerously different, which manifested early with his penchant for knife arranging, was always apaprent in one way or another. According to some reports, he was a habitual liar. and a compulsive shoplifter. Although Bundy’s later claims must be met with some skepticism, he did say that he had gone the voyeuristic route at a young age and was a “peeper”. Bundy was arrested twice as a juvenile but the records were later expunged.
8) He majored in Psychology in University and graduated with a degree in 1972.
Despite what might be called demonstratively anti-social tendencies, Bundy also had a confoundedly conforming side. Just like any up and coming lad, he was off to college after graduating high school in 1965. He went through a period when he was engrossed in Oriental Studies and later seems to have settled on Psychology. He was a desultory student at first, though, which he believed cost him the love of his life, a well-appointed and well-off California girl, possibly from the San Francisco Bay Area, who for reasons of decorum, shall remain nameless. After his first and perhaps only love broke up with him for his lack of ambition, he rededicated himself to Psychology and earned his degree in 1972. He was well-liked by his professors and graduated with honors. He started dating a young mother (a relationship that lasted six years) while covertly re-establishing his relationship with his former girlfriend who dumped him. Ted ultimately proposed to the first woman and she accepted. Then two weeks later, he dumped her and began his killing spree. Nonetheless, he did not end his six year relationship to the woman with child until he was arrested for kidnapping in 1976. The general consensus is that most of his victims looked like his original girlfriend who dumped him (long dark hair parted in the middle).
9) He volunteered at a suicide crisis center alongside a now famous crime author, Ann Rule.
In conjunction with his psychology classes, he volunteered at a suicide crisis center where, it is believed, he quite effectively talked people out of killing themselves. At this point, Bukisa can only state: “Completely bizarre.” At the crisis center, Ted worked closely with Ann Rule who is now a well known crime writer. Ironically, at a certain point, she began researching the crimes Ted was committing, not knowing it was her friend who committed them. She later published a very readable book called : The Stranger Beside Me detailing her relationship with Ted, his numerous crimes and his trials.
10) Ted was heavily involved with the Republican Party.
Whatever his faults and they were legion, Ted was an activist. In 1968, he managed the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign and attended the Republican Convention in Miami. After his graduation in 1972, he went to work for the state Republican Party. He was later involved in a minor scandal when the Democrats discovered that stealthy Ted had been following one of them around posing as a college student, taping their speeches and pirating the information back to his home office.
So where do we go from here? Hopefully, as time permits, we will have the chance to take a close look at various phases in Monster Smooth’s life.