My Fascination with Ted Bundy
And the fear that people are not as they seem.
If you know me well, then you know I’m fascinated by true crime, particularly as a window into the extremes of the human experience. But you may not know that I also peer through this window in the hope that whatever I see and learn may be of use at some critical moment in the future.
Although as much as that’s the underlying hope, I’m not confident that it really works that way.
You’ve probably heard of Ted Bundy, the apparently charming serial killer who murdered at least thirty women in the 1970s. He’s one of the true-crime figures whose story I continue to tune into.
Now, I believe the reason you’ve heard of him — and one of the reasons I maintain interest is that by most appearances he wasn’t anything special. There are plenty of historical killers who were smarter, weirder, or had more interesting backstories. Bundy wasn’t an evil genius, a killer clown (John Wayne Gacy), or a lonely alcoholic sort of trying to make sex zombies (Jeffrey Dahmer).
The reason anyone gives a sh*t about Bundy so many decades after his execution is that he was a relatively attractive, apparently normal dude who was eventually discovered to be a vicious killer.
