Books like The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy

The world according to Ted Bundy :People disappear every day. It happens all the time. .. I mean, there are so many people. It shouldn’t be a problem. What’s one less person on the face of the earth, anyway?Or, say, in his case, 30 less? What he is saying here is – get over it, so people like me like to kill women now and then. Why make such a big deal about it? He was kind of irritable. He thought the rest of humanity was being ridiculously sensitive about a few girls. But he did acknowledge that he saw things differently to the rest of us. Guilt. It’s this mechanism we use to control people. It’s an illusion. It’s very unhealthy. I’m in the enviable position of not having to deal with guilt.Ted is suddenly the Bad Person of the Month, what with Zac Ephron in the new movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and the documentary Conversations with a Killer - that one is based on the book of the same name, also written by the authors of The Only Living Witness and the taped conversations with Ted are the basis of this book too.HIERARCHY OF VICTIMSWhy is Bundy so famous? It’s because of three things :1. His crimes really were revolting.2. His victims were young white women3. He wasn’t a lowclass scumbag, he was a nicely spoken middleclass educated charming scumbag.Regarding point 2, if the victims had all been non-white prostitutes, we would have heard a lot less about Ted Bundy. The names of let’s say Gary Ridgway and Randy Kraft don’t ring out like Ted’s. They killed twice as many victims, at least, but Gary merely killed prostitutes, and Randy killed young men. The press just aren’t that interested in that stuff. The press loves young white women, the younger the better. But lest I sound too contemptuous, there was also the business of the charming. He seemed to be able to charm the young women of America right off the street and into his car. It was eerie how he did it. A lot of that was down to wearing a fake cast and pretending to have a broken arm and needing help to carry stuff to his car and then having a crowbar placed just right under the driver’s seat. THE HUNCHBACK INSIDE MEAccording to Ted, he was a normal sane person but he had what he called an “entity” inside him. The authors rather horribly call this “the hunchback”. As in “we caught a glimpse of the hunchback that day”. They probably wouldn’t use that term nowadays. You probably know this, but the authors were journalists who got to interview him for hours and hours and couldn’t get him to talk about the crimes because he was afraid of incriminating himself & was saying he was totally innocent of everything but car theft; so the authors had a lightbulb moment and said to Ted we know you have thought about these crimes deeply, so to help us understand, could you please speculate on the individual who might have committed them? So with this device, this thinnest of subterfuges, he was off and running. He speculated every which way. He described the murderer always in the third person :What really fascinated him was the hunt, the adventure of searching out his victims. And, to a degree, possessing them physically, as one would possess a potted plant, a painting or a Porsche.The authors asked him was there ever an occasions when he – sorry, when the murderer – might have decided NOT to kill a woman he was with. Yes, Ted said, he remembered – sorry, he imagined this person once picked up a girl in a bar, say, and brought her back to his apartment :Throughout the evening they engaged in voluntary sexual activity, and throughout the evening he felt himself being tested, debating with himself whether to kill her or just to let the situation run its course normally…. At certain parts of the evening he felt himself on the edge of taking her life. But the justifications were not there.DON’T LEAVE YOUR CAR KEYS IN THE IGNITIONBundy was on the run twice and found that if he kept looking, he was bound to find a parked car or a van with the keys still in the ignition. Who does that??Answer : Americans in the 1970s. A WRY WITThere was a horrendous brutal night when he had escaped prison for the second (!) time when he broke into a sorority house, attacked 5 girls sleeping in their beds and killed two of them. He would never talk about that, even in the third person. That one was even a bit much for Ted Bundy. But he did jovially suggest to one of the authors that If you want your book to really sell, maybe I should write the first chapter – about Chi Omega. I’m the only one that can do it. The only one.ANYWAYThis is a very straightforward telling of a very tangled tale. Recommended for true crime junkies and criminal psychology students and anyone wishing to find an example of misogyny in its purest form.