After more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 murders. The total number of his victims is likely to be higher. Bundy's modus operandi typically consisted of simulating having a physical impairment to convince his target that he was in need of assistance or duping her into believing he was an authority figure.
He would then lure his victim to a vehicle parked in a more secluded area, at which point he would bludgeon her unconscious, then restrain her with handcuffs before driving his victim to a remote location to be sexually assaulted and killed. Bundy frequently revisited the bodies of those he abducted, grooming and performing sex acts on the corpses until decomposition and destruction by wild animals made further interactions impossible. He decapitated at least twelve of his victims, keeping their severed heads as mementos in his apartment.
On a few occasions, Bundy broke into homes at night and bludgeoned, maimed, strangled and sexually assaulted his victims in their sleep. In , Bundy was arrested and jailed in Utah for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault. He then became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in several states. Facing murder charges in Colorado , Bundy engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults in Florida , including three murders, before being recaptured in For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two trials, and was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, Biographer Ann Rule characterized Bundy as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death and even after.
She wrote that "Ted was the very definition of heartless evil. His biological father's identity has never been confirmed; his original birth certificate apparently assigns paternity to a salesman and United States Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, [ 10 ] though a copy of it listed his father as unknown. For the first three years of his life, Bundy lived in the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia with his maternal grandparents, Samuel Knecht Cowell β and Eleanor Miriam Longstreet β The couple raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied birth outside of wedlock at that time.
Family, friends and even young Ted were told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister. Bundy eventually discovered the truth about his family, although his recollections of the circumstances varied; he told a girlfriend that a cousin showed him a copy of his birth certificate after calling him a "bastard," [ 17 ] but he told biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth that he had found the certificate himself.
