On the evening of January 23, 1989, Ted Bundy sat with an FBI agent and agreed that the number of women and girls he had killed was about thirty. "A fairly close figure," he called it. He had been convicted of three murders, all in Florida. By then the families of victims in five other states had waited fourteen years for him to say what he had done, and he had only hours left to say it. He died the next morning with much of it unsaid, and the counting has gone on ever since. In April 2026, Utah investigators announced that DNA had confirmed one more name.
He was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont. His mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell, known as Louise, was twenty-two and unmarried, and his birth certificate listed the father as "unknown." Who the father was has never been settled. Louise said little beyond that he had been a sailor; the journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth were given the name of a war veteran, and Ann Rule later named a different man, an Air Force veteran and salesman. Rule also recorded the suspicion, never tested, held by some that Louise's own father was responsible.
Louise first went home to her parents without the baby and went back for him, according to Michaud, at her father's insistence. For his first years the boy lived in Philadelphia with his grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, his mother and her sisters. He was raised to believe that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister. Michaud described the grandfather as a man with a violent streak who may have abused the child. Bundy, as an adult, insisted otherwise and spoke of a wonderful home with two loving parents.
In 1950 Louise moved with her son across the country to Tacoma, Washington. The next year she married Johnnie Bundy, who adopted the boy and gave him his surname; by most accounts the stepson resented him. Ted grew up in Tacoma, went to Wilson High School and did well in class but struggled socially. Later investigators and writers collected a different set of memories: an early fascination with knives, cruelty to small animals, peering into windows, and a juvenile record for burglary and car theft that was later expunged. According to the psychologist Al Carlisle, he was about fourteen when he found his birth certificate in an old trunk and saw the word "unknown" where a father's name should be. In a taped interview years later he brushed the subject aside, saying people often learned such things late in life and that it was normal.
In 1961, when he was fourteen, eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr disappeared from her home several blocks from the Bundy house in Tacoma. No one thought of him at the time. Her case has never been solved, and he always denied any part in it.
He studied at the University of Washington and graduated in psychology in 1972. There he fell hard for a young woman from a wealthy California family, called Stephanie Brooks in some books and Diane Edwards in others, and was devastated when she ended it; writers have since noted how many of his later victims resembled her. In 1969, in a Seattle bar, he met Elizabeth Kloepfer, a single mother with a young daughter, and began a relationship that lasted about six years. Kloepfer later wrote about it under the name Elizabeth Kendall in The Phantom Prince (1981). Her daughter, Molly, later described indecent exposure, sexual touching and violence by Bundy during those years.
To the people around him he looked like a young man on his way up. He volunteered on a suicide crisis line in Seattle, where one of the other volunteers was Ann Rule, a former police officer who later wrote The Stranger Beside Me (1980) about the man she had sat beside. He worked on Republican campaigns and came away with a letter of recommendation from Washington's governor. In 1973 he began law classes at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, and stopped going within a year. He then worked for the state's emergency services department in Olympia, leaving on August 30, 1974, to begin law school at the University of Utah. In his last days he told investigators that he had begun killing before 1974, but none of those claims led to a case that could be proved.
The first attack later connected to him happened on January 4, 1974. Karen Sparks, eighteen, was beaten while she slept in her Seattle home and left with permanent brain damage. For decades she was known in books by a pseudonym, Joni Lenz.
Four weeks later, during the night of January 31 to February 1, Lynda Ann Healy disappeared from the house she shared near the University of Washington. She was twenty-one, a senior in psychology, and she worked part-time for Western Ski Promotions, broadcasting ski condition reports that went out over about twenty radio stations in Washington and Oregon, each one ending, "This has been Lynda with your Cascade ski report." When detectives looked at her room, her bed had been made neatly, something she never did. There were small bloodstains on the sheets and pillow, and her pink satin pillowcase was gone. Her remains were found about a year later on Taylor Mountain, east of Issaquah.
The spring brought one disappearance after another. Donna Gail Manson, nineteen, a freshman at Evergreen State College from Auburn, a better-than-average student who played the flute and always carried a camera, waved goodbye to her roommates on March 12 and set off for a campus jazz concert in Olympia. She was never found. Susan Elaine Rancourt, eighteen, a straight-A biology student, disappeared from Central Washington State College in Ellensburg on April 17. Her father said she "always knew what she wanted," a logical and predictable girl, and he and his wife believed from the first that she had been taken. Roberta Kathleen Parks, known as Kathy, disappeared from Oregon State University in Corvallis on May 6, far to the south in another state. Brenda Carol Ball, twenty-two, who had graduated from Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines and taken classes at Highline Community College, was last seen leaving a tavern in Burien on June 1. Georgann Hawkins, eighteen, a graduate of Lakes High School and a former princess of the Puyallup Daffodil Festival, left a party in the University District on the night of June 11 to walk back to the Kappa Alpha Theta house and study for a Spanish final. She never arrived. Her parents sat by the phone at home in Lakewood. "It doesn't look very good," her father said.
The remains of Rancourt, Parks and Ball, like Healy's, were later recovered on Taylor Mountain. Brenda Ball's sister, remembering the news, said: "We thought we were prepared for it, but we weren't."
On Sunday, July 14, 1974, two young women disappeared within hours of each other from Lake Sammamish State Park east of Seattle, on a summer day when the park was crowded. Janice Ann Ott, twenty-three, lived in Issaquah and worked as a caseworker at the Youth Services Center; her husband, James, was away at medical school in California. Before she rode off on her yellow bicycle she left her roommate a note saying she had gone sunbathing, with a little drawing of the sun. Denise Marie Naslund, eighteen, from Seattle, was studying to become a computer programmer. She had come to the park with her boyfriend and another couple, and in the afternoon she walked off to use the restroom and did not come back. Her mother said later that Denise's helpful nature was exactly the sort that could put her in danger.
The witnesses that day gave the police more than they had ever had. Several women described a friendly young man with his arm in a sling who said his name was Ted and asked for help loading a sailboat onto his car, a Volkswagen. Detectives interviewed women who said he had tried the same approach on them. Two people said they saw Janice Ott with him.
The case landed with Robert Keppel, a rookie in the King County Sheriff's Office homicide unit who had just closed his first murder. Within days the police had a composite sketch, a first name and a car, and the public responded with a flood; Keppel later wrote that at times they were receiving as many as two hundred calls a day about men who looked like the Lake Sammamish Ted. Among the thousands of tips, five pointed to Theodore Bundy, a clean-cut law student with no criminal record. Elizabeth Kloepfer was one of the people who recognized his car and the sketch; a professor of his was another. He did not fit what detectives expected of such a killer, and among so many calls naming young men called Ted, he was not pursued.
On September 7, 1974, hunters on a wooded hillside near Issaquah, about a mile from Lake Sammamish, came upon bones. Keppel went to the scene. Over a week, with help from Explorer Scouts, searchers combed the slope and collected more than four hundred items of evidence. A skull was identified as Denise Naslund's. Janice Ott's remains were found there as well, along with a thigh bone from a third person who could not then be named. In his last interviews Bundy told Keppel that Georgann Hawkins had been left on that hillside.
On March 2, 1975, forestry students working on Taylor Mountain found a skull. Keppel recognized it from dental records he had memorized. Over the following days the search team recovered the partial remains of four of the missing women: Lynda Healy, Susan Rancourt, Kathy Parks and Brenda Ball. Keppel became convinced that one man was responsible for the Washington and Oregon cases: the same type of victim, the same kind of ruse, the same injuries, and almost no physical evidence. The killer, he said, was being "extremely cautious about leaving evidence."
By then Keppel and his colleagues were trying something new. They listed the traits the killer seemed to have, among them the name Ted, a Volkswagen Beetle and ties to the Seattle area, and had the names from their files keypunched onto computer cards and cross-matched. The run took more than a month. It narrowed the field to about a hundred men and then to twenty-five. Theodore Robert Bundy was seventh on the short list. The detectives had not yet moved on it when, in August 1975, a call came from Salt Lake City.
The disappearances had followed him to Salt Lake City. Investigators also suspect that on the drive from Washington to Utah he picked up a young female hitchhiker in Idaho and killed her; she has never been identified or found.
Nancy Wilcox, a teenager from Holladay, disappeared on October 2, 1974; she was last seen in a Volkswagen Beetle. Her body was never found. Melissa Anne Smith, seventeen, the daughter of Midvale's police chief, left a pizza parlor on October 18 and failed to come home. A hunter found her body on October 27 near Toll Canyon in the Summit Park area above Parley's Canyon. For half a century her case stayed open with the Summit County Sheriff's Office, which recorded her only as believed to be a Bundy victim. Laura Ann Aime, seventeen, left a Halloween party in Lehi on October 31, saying she was going to buy cigarettes. She had grown up on her family's farm, where she rode a horse named Arab and fed him red licorice as a treat, and looked after her younger brothers and sisters, buying them candy with her own money; her sister Michelle shared her bedroom. Hikers found Laura's body on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, down an embankment beside American Fork Canyon Road.
On the evening of November 8, 1974, a man approached Carol DaRonch at Fashion Place Mall in Murray. He introduced himself as Officer Roseland of the Murray police, said someone had tried to break into her car, and told her she would need to come and file a report. She went with him to his Volkswagen. Miles from the mall he stopped, snapped a handcuff onto one of her wrists and swung a crowbar at her. She blocked it with her hand, got the door open and threw herself out.
That same evening, seventeen-year-old Debra Jean Kent was at a play at Viewmont High School in Bountiful with her parents. She left during the intermission to pick up her brother from an ice rink and never returned. "After she left, she never returned," a Bountiful police sergeant, Shane Alexander, said years later. In the school parking lot police later found a small key; it opened the handcuffs that had been locked on Carol DaRonch's wrist. About thirty-six hours before his execution, Bundy told police where he had left Debra. A search of Fairview Canyon in the spring of 1989 turned up hundreds of bones, only one of them human, a kneecap, which police gave to her family. Around 2015 a laboratory at the University of North Texas matched it to the family's DNA. "That was probably one of the biggest moments in my career," Alexander said.
Susan Curtis, fifteen, disappeared during a youth conference at Brigham Young University in Provo on June 28, 1975. Before his execution Bundy said he had buried her near Price; she has never been found. Utah police came to tie five Utah killings directly to Bundy: Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, Debra Kent and Susan Curtis. Only Smith's and Aime's bodies were recovered at the time. Three other cases, those of Sandra Weaver, Nancy Baird and Debbie Smith, have been raised as possibly his but never confirmed.
On January 12, 1975, Caryn Campbell, twenty-three, a nurse from Michigan, was staying at the Wildwood Inn in Snowmass Village with her fiancé. She stepped off an elevator to fetch something from her room and was not seen alive again. About a month later her body was found in a snowbank near the top of Owl Creek Road. Hair matched to her was later found in a car Bundy had used, and investigators also had records of his gasoline credit card being used in the area and witnesses who placed him nearby. On that evidence Colorado charged him with her murder on October 21, 1976.
He later described other Colorado killings. Julie Cunningham, twenty-six, a ski instructor, disappeared in Vail on March 15, 1975; he said he had approached her on crutches, posing as an injured skier, and had driven her about eighty miles from Vail. Her body was never found. Denise Lynn Oliverson, twenty-four, disappeared while riding her bicycle in Grand Junction on April 6, 1975. Her bicycle was found beneath the Fifth Street Bridge, and he later said he had thrown her into the Colorado River. He was never charged in either case. In Idaho he described abducting Lynette Dawn Culver, twelve, from her junior high school in Pocatello on May 6, 1975, and leaving her body in the Snake River.
He was caught by accident. At about three in the morning on August 16, 1975, Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward was finishing his shift log in his cruiser outside his home in Granger when a tan Volkswagen went by. Minutes later, answering a call for help and taking a wrong turn out of his subdivision, he found the car parked in front of a neighbor's house where the parents were on vacation and the teenage daughters were home alone. The Volkswagen took off when his headlights hit it, ran through the neighborhood to a main road and turned into an abandoned gas station. Hayward followed it in with his gun drawn. The driver put up his hands and said, "I'm lost." He said he had been at the drive-in watching The Towering Inferno, but Hayward knew it was not showing there. The car held a crowbar, an ice pick, handcuffs, a ski mask and pantyhose with eyeholes cut in it. "I didn't want to shoot the guy," Hayward said years later. "I wish I had."
Bundy was arrested for evading an officer and soon released. But Hayward's brother, Pete Hayward, was the Salt Lake County sheriff, and the arrest report reached the detectives Jerry Thompson and Ben Forbes, who knew what a tan Volkswagen, handcuffs and a crowbar might mean. Investigators searched his apartment and put him under surveillance, and a call to Washington found that his name was already on the King County list of twenty-five. Keppel remembered the feeling as "euphoric"; the computer result, he wrote, gave him "a shudder of excitement." On October 2, 1975, Carol DaRonch and two other women picked him out of a lineup, and he was charged with attempted kidnapping. Detectives from Washington, Utah and Colorado later met in Aspen to pool what they had, a gathering remembered as the Aspen summit.
He waived a jury and was tried before Judge Stewart Hanson. After a five-day trial he was convicted of aggravated kidnapping on March 1, 1976, and sentenced to one to fifteen years. Without the handcuff that DaRonch fought her way out of, there might have been no case against him in the West at all. It was the only crime for which any state other than Florida ever convicted him, and it would later count against him as an aggravating factor when Florida decided whether he should die.
Extradited to Colorado in early 1977 to face trial for Caryn Campbell's murder, he chose to represent himself, which gave him access to the law library of the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, where he was allowed to work without handcuffs or leg irons. A deputy guarded the courtroom door, which was thought to be the only way out. On June 7, 1977, Bundy raised a second-floor window and jumped, spraining an ankle, and made for Aspen Mountain. About ten minutes passed before anyone noticed. For six days the town searched every car leaving Aspen while residents were told to lock their doors. About forty women lined up at a drugstore to buy pistols until the police chief halted sales, residents of Woody Creek formed a posse, and a deputy was flown over the passes by helicopter looking for tracks. Bundy took a rifle from a cabin above town and, the deputy believed, got close enough to see the lights of Crested Butte before turning back. Six days after the escape he was stopped driving a stolen car, and he was moved to the more secure Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs.
On December 30, 1977, he escaped again. He had lost more than thirty pounds, enough to squeeze through an opening cut in the ceiling of his cell. He crawled through the space above to the empty living quarters of a jailer, changed clothes and walked out. It was the holiday week, and his absence was not discovered for about fifteen hours. By January 7, 1978, he had rented a room at a rooming house called The Oak near the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee. The FBI added him to its Ten Most Wanted list.
On the evening of January 14, 1978, witnesses saw him at Sherrod's, a bar next door to the Chi Omega sorority house. Several young women there later described a strange-looking man with an unnerving stare; one, Connie Hastings, testified, "He was scanning all the girls." Lisa Levy, a Chi Omega sister, was in the bar that night.
At about three the next morning a member of the sorority, Nita Neary, came home and saw a man crouched in the front hall, holding a club, on his way out the door. She described him to her roommate and then to the police: young, white, with a protruding nose, wearing a dark cap and jacket and light trousers. Inside, Margaret Bowman, twenty-one, and Lisa Levy, twenty, had been beaten with a length of tree branch and strangled; Levy had been bitten. Down the hall, roommates Kathy Kleiner, twenty, and Karen Chandler had been beaten in their beds and survived. Kleiner's jaw was broken in three places. Chandler suffered a skull fracture, broken facial bones, a broken jaw, a broken arm and crushed fingers. "My jaw was hanging and then the pain was unimaginable," Kleiner said in 2019; she believes the headlights of a car pulling into the lot frightened him away. Authorities estimate that the attacks inside the house took about fifteen minutes. The house mother, Mary Crenshaw, said years later that she had tried to forget that night and could not. "All those pretty young girls," she said, "ruined."
About an hour later, nearby, Cheryl Thomas, a dance student from Virginia, was beaten in her bed in a duplex on Dunwoody Street. Neighbors heard the attack and called for help. She was found in a coma with five skull fractures, a jaw broken in two places and a dislocated shoulder, and she was left permanently deaf in her left ear. In her room police found a knotted pair of pantyhose that did not belong to her, with holes that suggested it had been used as a mask. That morning two acquaintances at The Oak saw Bundy standing outside, looking toward the campus; he did not answer when they greeted him. At midday, as residents talked over the news, the Florida Supreme Court later recorded, he described the attacks as "a professional job" and said the killer had probably left the area already.
He did not leave. On January 13 a license plate had been stolen from a house near the Chi Omega house. On February 8, in a Jacksonville shopping center parking lot, a man in a white van approached a fourteen-year-old girl and drove off when her brother arrived; the two teenagers wrote down the van's tag, and it was the plate stolen in Tallahassee. That night a man registered at the Holiday Inn in Lake City under a name that was not his own; two employees and a handwriting expert later established that it was Bundy. A white van belonging to Florida State University's media center had gone missing in Tallahassee.
On the morning of February 9, 1978, Kimberly Diane Leach, twelve, a straight-A student and the only daughter of Tom and Freda Leach, was reported missing from Lake City Junior High School. A school crossing guard, Chuck Edenfield, said he saw a man he identified as Bundy driving a white van past the school that morning. Two days later, back in Tallahassee, a Leon County deputy found a man without identification at a car door, with the stolen Jacksonville tag on the floorboard; when the deputy went to his radio, the man ran.
Early on February 15, in Pensacola, Officer David Lee saw a Volkswagen pulling out of the empty lot behind a restaurant on Cervantes Street, ran its plate and found it was stolen. The driver struck him and ran, and was caught after a chase and a struggle. On the way to jail he asked, "If I run at the jail, will you shoot me then?" He gave his name as Kenneth Misner and kept up the pretense for almost two days before telling Detective Norman Chapman, "My name is Theodore Robert Bundy." Chapman, who spent about forty hours talking with him, said he had no idea at the time who Bundy was. He was wanted in Colorado for escape and murder, was a suspect in thirty-six killings in the Northwest, and was the leading suspect in the Chi Omega attacks.
After a large search, Kimberly Leach's body was found on April 7, 1978, under a collapsed shed in a hog pen near the Suwannee River, about forty-five miles from her school. The medical examiner could not fix the exact cause of death; the trial court found she had died of "homicidal violence to the neck region."
Bundy was charged with the Chi Omega murders in 1978. The trial was moved to Miami because an impartial jury could not be found in Leon County, and it opened on June 25, 1979, before Judge Edward Cowart, with television cameras in the courtroom; it was among the first trials in the country to be televised nationally. Bundy acted as one of his own lawyers. He questioned witnesses and raised objections himself, often to the frustration of the lawyers assigned to him, and at one point spoke of himself in the third person.
Neary had been hypnotized by a police hypnotist eight days after the attack, and in April 1978 she picked Bundy's picture from a photo lineup. The defense argued that her memory had been shaped by the hypnosis; the trial court found her description had not materially changed, and on appeal the Florida Supreme Court held that the hypnosis went to the weight of her testimony, not whether it could be heard. Kathy Kleiner, on the stand, could not say he was the man who attacked her. "I can't tell you. I don't know," she testified. Karen Chandler testified as well.
The physical evidence came down to two things. A hair analyst testified that hairs in the pantyhose mask found in Cheryl Thomas's room had the same characteristics as Bundy's and could have come from him. The bite mark on Lisa Levy's body had been photographed by police technicians, and on July 18 the forensic dentist Richard Souviron testified that Bundy's teeth matched it. He and a second forensic dentist told the jury, with photographs and models of Bundy's teeth, that his teeth had made the marks. After less than seven hours of deliberation, on July 24, 1979, the jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, three of attempted murder and two of burglary.
Sentencing him to death, Cowart called the crimes "extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile." He told Bundy he was "a bright young man," adding, "But you went another way, partner." As deputies led him away, the judge said, "Take care of yourself," and Bundy thanked him.
He had been indicted for the murder and kidnapping of Kimberly Leach on July 21, 1978. The case was moved from Suwannee County to Orange County, and the trial began in Orlando on January 7, 1980; Victor Africano was among his counsel. Of the twelve jurors, three had not known about the Chi Omega murders.
There was no eyewitness to the killing. The prosecution built its case piece by piece. The Jacksonville teenagers, who had also been hypnotized, picked out his photograph as the man in the van, and the stolen tag tied the van to Tallahassee. The Lake City motel register put him in Kimberly's town the night before she vanished. The crossing guard put him outside her school. The FSU van, recovered days after it went missing, had a bloodstain on its carpet of group B, a type Kimberly had and about fifteen percent of people share, and an analyst, Mary Hinson, testified that the fibers made it extremely probable that Bundy's clothing, Kimberly's clothing and the van's carpet had all been in contact.
The witness who said he saw a girl led to the van, Clarence Anderson, a firefighter, had come forward only on July 18, 1978, after seeing a newscast about Bundy, and had been hypnotized twice at the prosecutor's request before he identified Bundy and Kimberly. About a month into the trial the jury convicted Bundy of kidnapping and first-degree murder. He received life in prison for the kidnapping.
On February 9, 1980, during the penalty phase, he called a single witness, Carole Ann Boone, a mother of two whom he had known and dated before his arrest. While she was on the stand he used a Florida law that recognized a declaration of marriage made in court, with a notary present, to marry her. The jury recommended death, and the judge imposed it. Their daughter was born in 1982, and the couple divorced in 1986; Boone took the child back to Washington. At a later hearing a lawyer who had assisted at the trial called the courtroom wedding a "pitiful display," and an investigator for the defense testified that Boone had smuggled him juice spiked with alcohol.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the Chi Omega convictions on June 21, 1984. It rejected his challenges to the bite-mark evidence, Nita Neary's identification, the joining of the charges and the refusal to close pretrial hearings to the public, and it held that by asking for a change of venue he had given up his right to be tried in Leon County. One justice, while agreeing, warned that hypnosis can create false memories.
The court affirmed the Leach conviction on May 9, 1985, and used that case to rule that hypnotically refreshed testimony would no longer be admissible in Florida criminal trials, but only for future cases. In Bundy's case the justices found that only three details had come from Anderson's hypnosis, a blue jersey with the number 63 or 68 and a pullover sweater and shirt, excluded them, and found the error harmless. They also rejected the trial judge's finding that the killing had been especially cruel, one of the statutory aggravating factors, but upheld the death sentence on other grounds: he had been under a Utah sentence at the time and had prior violent convictions.
The United States Supreme Court declined to hear his direct appeal on October 14, 1986. A week later Florida's governor signed a death warrant for November 18. On November 17, after the state courts turned him down, his lawyers filed a 183-page federal petition in Orlando at about half past two in the afternoon. The district court dismissed it the same day as abusive. The federal appeals court in Atlanta granted a stay about seven hours before he was due to die, and later ordered a hearing on whether he had been competent at his 1980 trial.
That hearing took place in Orlando before U.S. District Judge G. Kendall Sharp in October and December 1987. Dorothy Lewis, a psychiatrist from New York University who had interviewed him at length, testified that he suffered from a bipolar mood disorder and had not been competent to assist his lawyers. The court preferred the opposite view of two other psychiatrists, and Judge Sharp found that Bundy "was at all times competent to stand trial." He called him a "diabolical genius" and, as UPI reported, "probably the most competent serial killer in the country." In 1988 the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, rejecting every claim in the petition, from ineffective counsel and the hypnosis of Anderson to the racial statistics of Florida's death sentences.
For almost a decade he denied all of it. He spent hours with Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth in 1980, agreeing to speculate only about what a hypothetical killer might have done. "I don't care what you say, as long as it sells," he told Michaud. "I was so damn sick of his lies and his denials," Aynesworth said later. In 1986, in letters to a cousin, Edna Cowell Martin, he wrote, "I have not killed anyone." His mother, Louise, refused for years to believe the charges.
In 1984 he wrote to a judge in Washington offering to help with the Green River murders, a series of killings of young women around Seattle that police had been unable to solve. Keppel, by then advising the Green River investigation, was stunned, but went to Florida in hopes that Bundy would also talk about his own cases. It was the first of three meetings, in 1984, 1988 and 1989. Bundy predicted that the killer would go back to his dump sites and urged police to stake them out before announcing any new discovery. When Gary Ridgway was finally arrested and pleaded guilty to forty-eight of the murders, Keppel found that Bundy's analysis had been close to the mark. He also wrote that much of what Bundy called his "Riverman" theory was "a projection of himself." Keppel told the story in The Riverman (1995). After the 1988 meeting he believed that Bundy wanted to confess but was being advised not to.
The FBI agent Bill Hagmaier, who interviewed him for the bureau's research on murderers, found him informative on how such killers think, including their habit of returning to their crime scenes, but Bundy admitted nothing to Hagmaier either until the end.
John Henry Browne, a Seattle lawyer who visited him in a Florida jail before one of his trials, said decades later that Bundy told him he had killed more than a hundred people, and that the first was a boy he killed when he himself was about twelve to fourteen. Nothing has ever matched that claim to a case.
On January 17, 1989, Governor Bob Martinez signed his last death warrant. With his appeals almost exhausted, he began to talk. He confessed to Hagmaier, to Keppel and to detectives from the Western states. His lawyer, Polly Nelson, said he saw what he knew as his "ace in the hole," something to trade for time. "I am the only one in possession of this information," he said. Florida's governor refused to wait. Hagmaier later said it "all felt like a ploy to extend his life."
With Keppel, Bundy at last gave details. He described where he had left Georgann Hawkins's remains. "For a moment I was breathless and hardly able to believe my ears," Keppel wrote. Bundy admitted to eleven murders in Washington, though he could name only eight of the victims.
On January 22 he spent about ninety minutes with Dennis Couch of the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office. The meeting almost did not happen, because he was upset that Utah officials had not tried to halt the execution. He said he had killed more people in Utah than police knew, but gave few details. Pressed on one case, he said, "my mind isn't as nimble as it used to be right now." Asked about a possible burial site south of Thistle, he said, "you could spend several lifetimes looking for something there," and added, "What I'm talking about here, in all likelihood, are remains that can't be found." Couch said he seemed "defeated" and "fatigued, exhausted, almost to the point of falling asleep at times." He later told Washington investigators that he had killed eight people in Utah; Utah police concluded that three of the eight could not be connected to him. Ann Rule, speaking at Utah State University later that year, suggested that some of the burial sites he described were false, "a scheme to send police out slopping through the mud in vain, something Ted would enjoy."
On January 23 he gave a final interview to the broadcaster James Dobson and blamed violent pornography for his crimes. Dobson said he wept several times and expressed regret and remorse for the families he had hurt. That night, as Hagmaier put the total at about thirty, Bundy agreed: "It's late at night like you said, but I think that's a fairly close figure." "The truth is terrible," Hagmaier said later. The courts rejected a final claim that he was mentally incompetent, and the United States Supreme Court refused a last stay by five votes to four.
He spent his last night with a Methodist minister from Gainesville, Fred Lawrence, and part of it in prayer. He called his mother twice. He refused a final breakfast of steak and eggs. Before dawn his head was shaved, and he was led into the death chamber at Florida State Prison in Starke in a light blue shirt and dark blue trousers and strapped into the electric chair. Asked by the prison superintendent for his last words, he said, "I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends." The current was applied in two surges, and he was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. on January 24, 1989. He was forty-two.
Outside, several hundred people had gathered in the dark with sparklers and signs reading "Burn, Bundy, burn." They cheered when the signal came and jeered at the opponents of the death penalty holding candles nearby, and they cheered again as a white hearse carried his body away toward Gainesville. His brain was examined, and no physical abnormality was found. His body was cremated in Gainesville; he had asked that his ashes be scattered in the Cascade Mountains of Washington.
His confessions settled some cases and left others open, and science has kept working on both sides of the ledger. Katherine Devine, fourteen, who disappeared while hitchhiking in Seattle in November 1973 and was long counted as an early Bundy victim, was in fact killed by William Cosden Jr., convicted on DNA evidence in 2002. Bundy was never convicted in Washington, so no full DNA profile of him existed in the national database until 2011, when a Tacoma detective working the Ann Marie Burr case traced an original vial of his blood to a Florida county clerk's office. The blood had been drawn when he was arrested in 1978, and it had survived an order to destroy much of the biological evidence. "We were really surprised," said David Coffman, chief of forensic services at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, whose laboratory developed a complete profile from it. Burr's case remains unsolved. Seattle police said in 2018 that they were re-examining the 1966 attack that killed a flight attendant, Lonnie Trumbull, because it resembled Chi Omega, though fingerprints at the scene did not match him.
That Florida profile made the next confirmation possible. Detective Sergeant Mike Reynolds and Detective Jacob Hall of the Utah County Sheriff's Office went back to the evidence preserved from Laura Aime's case, including biological traces left on her body, and took it to the Utah State Forensic Bureau. Equipment the state had acquired in 2023 could pull a profile from small, mixed or degraded samples. Analysts chose the items most likely to yield DNA, developed a single male profile and entered it into CODIS, the national database. The hit came back from Florida. "Bundy's DNA was a match," said Beau Mason, Utah's public safety commissioner.
On April 1, 2026, at a news conference in Spanish Fork, the Utah County Sheriff's Office announced the result, fifty-one years after her death. "We can now say, without a doubt, Ted Bundy did kill Laura Ann Aime," Sheriff Mike Smith said. A confession alone, he explained, had never been enough to close the case or rule out other suspects. Her sister, Michelle Impala, who was twelve when Laura died, said she had not known the case was still open. "I know that (Laura) would be happy to know that it's been closed," she said. "It's really quite amazing that people are even still interested in Laura's case." She remembered that after Laura died, the horse would no longer eat the licorice she used to bring him.
Melissa Smith's case followed. In May 2025 Utah County investigators had contacted Summit County about similarities between the two killings, and from the remaining Aime evidence the state crime lab developed a Y-STR profile, DNA that passes down the father's line, which it found consistent with a Y-STR profile from evidence recovered from Melissa's body. Male relatives share that kind of DNA, so it cannot point to one man by itself; investigators said it established Bundy's responsibility when taken together with "pattern, motive, means, and opportunity." On October 27, 2026, fifty-two years to the day after hunters found her, Sheriff Kacey Bates closed the case at the Summit County Justice Center, after County Attorney Margaret Olson's office reviewed the findings. Lt. Alan Siddoway, who began the review, had died earlier that month. A member of her family was "very, very gratified," the Sheriff's Office said, but chose not to speak publicly.
Five people are known to have survived him: Karen Sparks, Carol DaRonch, Kathy Kleiner, Karen Chandler and Cheryl Thomas. Their lives went on. Kleiner married, had a son, and took a job in a lumber yard to face her fear of men; she now speaks publicly about the attack. Chandler moved back into the Chi Omega house when she recovered and has been married for forty years. "I was a victim until I walked out of that hospital," she said. "I was a survivor until he was executed." Thomas kept dancing, earned her degree, went on to a master's degree at Gallaudet University and worked with hearing-impaired dancers. Kleiner, who could not identify him in court, has said that when he was executed she cried, "But I wasn't crying for me." She was crying for Margaret Bowman, Lisa Levy and their families.
Other families waited in public. In 1986, after more than half of Lake City's ten thousand residents had signed petitions asking the governor to sign a death warrant in Kimberly's case, her father, Tom Leach, who ran a towing service, told a Florida newspaper, "I just want to see him well-done."
Bundy's crimes have been told and retold in books by people who knew him or hunted him, among them Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, Kloepfer's The Phantom Prince, Michaud and Aynesworth's interviews and Keppel's The Riverman, which became a television film; in the 2019 Netflix series built on the Michaud and Aynesworth tapes; and in a 2019 feature film whose title borrowed Judge Cowart's words. Authorities believe he may be responsible for more than a dozen unsolved killings and disappearances in Washington, Utah and Colorado.
The total. Bundy's own count, offered on his last night, was about thirty. UPI reported at the time that he had confessed to twenty-eight killings, and listed Michigan, Pennsylvania and Vermont among the states alongside Washington, Utah, Colorado, Idaho and California; other accounts give the states as Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, California and Florida. He was convicted of three murders. Some investigators and writers believe the true number could be far higher, possibly more than a hundred, but no evidence has established such a figure.
Before 1974. He told investigators in his last days that he had killed before 1974, and the lawyer John Henry Browne said he spoke of killing a boy in his early teens. Neither claim has been tied to a known victim. The 1961 disappearance of Ann Marie Burr is suspected by some, was denied by him, and is unsolved; a criminal justice professor, Ronald Holmes, said in 1986 that Bundy had confessed it in a jailhouse interview, which Bundy denied.
Utah. He described eight Utah killings; police accept five and have ruled out three. His account of a burial site near Thistle has never been confirmed, and Ann Rule thought some of his directions were meant to mislead.
Cases ruled out. Katherine Devine was killed by another man, as DNA proved. The Trumbull case in Seattle remains open, with fingerprints that did not match him.
November 24, 1946: born Theodore Robert Cowell in Burlington, Vermont.
1950: moves with his mother from Philadelphia to Tacoma; she marries Johnnie Bundy the next year.
1961: Ann Marie Burr, eight, disappears in Tacoma (unsolved).
1972: graduates from the University of Washington in psychology.
January 4, 1974: Karen Sparks attacked in Seattle; she survives.
January 31 to February 1, 1974: Lynda Ann Healy disappears.
March 12 to June 11, 1974: Donna Manson, Susan Rancourt, Kathy Parks, Brenda Ball and Georgann Hawkins disappear.
July 14, 1974: Janice Ott and Denise Naslund disappear from Lake Sammamish State Park.
September 7, 1974: remains found near Issaquah.
October 2 to 31, 1974: Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Smith and Laura Aime disappear in Utah.
November 8, 1974: Carol DaRonch escapes; Debra Kent disappears.
January 12, 1975: Caryn Campbell disappears in Snowmass Village, Colorado.
March 2, 1975: remains found on Taylor Mountain.
March 15 to June 28, 1975: Julie Cunningham, Denise Oliverson, Lynette Culver and Susan Curtis disappear.
August 16, 1975: Sgt. Bob Hayward arrests him in Granger, Utah.
October 2, 1975: DaRonch identifies him in a lineup.
March 1, 1976: convicted of aggravated kidnapping in Utah.
October 21, 1976: charged in Colorado with Caryn Campbell's murder.
June 7, 1977: escapes from the Pitkin County Courthouse; recaptured six days later.
December 30, 1977: escapes from the Garfield County Jail.
January 15, 1978: Chi Omega attacks; Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy killed; Cheryl Thomas attacked nearby.
February 9, 1978: Kimberly Leach disappears in Lake City.
February 15, 1978: arrested in Pensacola.
April 7, 1978: Kimberly Leach's body found.
July 24, 1979: convicted in Miami of the Chi Omega crimes; sentenced to death that month.
February 1980: convicted in Orlando of Kimberly Leach's murder; marries Carole Ann Boone in court on February 9; sentenced to death.
June 21, 1984, and May 9, 1985: Florida Supreme Court affirms both convictions.
November 17, 1986: stay of execution granted hours before the scheduled time.
December 1987: a federal judge finds he was competent at the 1980 trial.
January 22 and 23, 1989: confessions to Utah, Washington and FBI investigators; Dobson interview.
January 24, 1989: executed at Florida State Prison, Starke.
2002: DNA shows Katherine Devine was killed by another man.
2011: his full DNA profile enters the national database.
About 2015: a kneecap found in 1989 is identified as Debra Kent's.
April 1, 2026: DNA confirms he killed Laura Ann Aime.
October 27, 2026: Summit County closes Melissa Smith's murder and names him as her killer.