Ted Bundy's crime scene photos

#Warning GRAPHIC CONTENT# In December 1987, Bundy was examined for seven hours by Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a professor from New York University Medical Center. Lewis diagnosed Bundy as a manic depressive whose crimes usually occurred during his depressive episodes. To Lewis, Bundy described his childhood, especially his relationship with his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell.


According to Bundy, grandfather Samuel Cowell was a deacon in his church. Along with the already established description of his grandfather as a tyrannical bully, Bundy described him as a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews. He further stated that his grandfather tortured animals, beating the family dog and swinging neighborhood cats by their tails. He also told Lewis how his grandfather kept a large collection of pornography in his greenhouse where, according to relatives, Bundy and a cousin would sneak to look at it for hours.

Family members expressed skepticism over Louise's "Jack Worthington" story of Bundy's parentage and noted that Samuel Cowell once flew into a violent rage when the subject of the boy's father came up. Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient wife, who was sporadically taken to hospitals to undergo shock treatment for depression. Toward the end of her life, Bundy said, she became agoraphobic.

Louise Bundy's younger sister Julia recalled a disturbing incident with her young nephew. After lying down in the Cowells' home for a nap, Julia woke to find herself surrounded by knives from the Cowell kitchen. Three-year-old Ted was standing by the bed, smiling at her.

Bundy used stolen credit cards to purchase more than 30 pairs of socks while on the run in Florida; he was a self-described foot fetishist.

In the Dobson interview before his execution, Bundy said that violent pornography played a major role in his sex crimes. According to Bundy, as a young boy he found "outside the home again, in the local grocery store, in a local drug store, the soft core pornography that people called soft core...And from time to time we would come across pornographic books of a harder nature...."

Bundy said, "It happened in stages, gradually. My experience with pornography generally, but with pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality, is once you become addicted to it — and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction — I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far, you reach that jumping off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give that which is beyond just reading it or looking at it."

In a letter written shortly before his escape from the Glenwood Springs jail, Bundy said "I have known people who...radiate vulnerability. Their facial expressions say 'I am afraid of you.' These people invite abuse... By expecting to be hurt, do they subtly encourage it?"

In a 1980 interview, speaking of a serial killer's justification of his actions, Bundy said "So what's one less? What's one less person on the face of the planet?" When Florida detectives asked Bundy to tell them where he had left Kimberly Leach's body for her family's solace, Bundy allegedly said, "But I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet."