Chapter 1-- for all of you armchair pychiatrists ...........
Thursday, January 8, 2004 10:35 PM
The Early Years
After spending the last remaining months of her pregnancy at a home for unwed mothers Bundy's mother gave birth to Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946. Ted's father, who was an Air Force veteran, was unknown to his son throughout his life. Shortly after Ted's birth, mother and son moved back to Philadelphia to live with his grandparents, who he would later refer to as his mother and father. This charade allowed his mother to escape any harsh criticism and prejudice for being an unwed mother. Ted grew up referring to his own mother as his older sister.
At the age of four Ted and his mother moved to Tacoma, Washington, to live with relatives. A year after the move to Washington, his mother married Johnnie Culpepper Bundy, whose last name Ted would assume for the rest of his life.
The Bundy family added four other siblings who Ted spent much of his time baby-sitting after school. Ted never really took to his new father who tried unsuccessfully to raise him as his own son, including him in camping trips and other father-son activities. Ted had his own ideas and thought of himself as special. Ann Rule reports that Ted's grandfather was the only man Ted respected and Ted was unhappy to leave him to move to a strange new place on the other side of the country.
As a youth, Ted was terribly shy and was often teased and made the butt of pranks by bullies in his junior high school. Regardless of the sometimes humiliating experiences he suffered, he was able to maintain a high grade average that would continue throughout high school and later into college. Friends from high school would later remember Ted as being a more popular figure than he was in junior high. Although he was very shy, Ted was thought of as "well dressed and exceptionally well mannered." Yet no one recalled him dating anyone during that period. His interests lay elsewhere such as in skiing and politics. In fact, it was in high school that Ted's interest in politics began to bloom.
Ted told Michaud and Aynesworth that his mother was the most directly involved in raising her kids:
"'We didn't talk a lot about real personal matters," says Ted. 'Certainly never about sex or any of those things. My mom has trouble talking on intimate, personal terms.'"
Michaud took a close analytical look at Bundy's youth and came up with some insightful conclusions:
"No one noticed that he was different, not like other children. He looked and acted like them...But he was haunted by something else: a fear, a doubt --sometimes only a vague uneasiness -- that inhabited his mind with the subtlety of a cat. He felt it for years, but he didn't recognize it for what it was until much later. By then, the rip in his psyche, had become the locus of a cold homicidal rage."
Even though he was popular, good-looking and friendly, Bundy had very few dates during his high school years. This social awkwardness and fear of social situations haunted him into his college years at the University of Puget Sound and the University of Washington.
Ted told Michaud and Aynesworth, "My social life was a big zero. I spent a great deal of time with myself. It was lonely for me...I didn't feel socially adept enough. I didn't feel I knew how to function with those people. I felt terribly uncomfortable."
He worked his way through the university by taking on low-level jobs such as a bus boy and shoe clerk. Yet, he never stayed with any one position for very long. He was thought of by some employers to be unreliable. Although he was inconsistent with his work outside of school, he was more focused on his work in school and was able to maintain a high grade point average. But his focus changed during the spring of 1967 when he began a relationship that would change his life forever.
He met a girl that was everything Ted had ever dreamed of in a woman. She was a beautiful and highly sophisticated woman from a wealthy Californian family. Ted couldn't believe someone from her "class" would have an interest in someone like him. Although they had many differences, they both loved to ski and it was during their many ski trips together that he fell in love. She was really Ted's first love, and, according to Ann Rule, possibly the first woman with whom he became involved with sexually. However, she was not as infatuated with Ted as he was with her. In fact, she liked Ted a lot but believed he had no real direction or future goals. Ted tried too hard to impress her, even if that meant lying, something that she didn't like at all.
Michaud writes that Ted won a summer scholarship to the prestigious Stanford University in California just to impress her, but at Stanford, his immaturity was exposed. He writes, "Ted did not understand...why the mask he had been using had failed him. This first tentative foray into the sophisticated world had ended in disaster."
In 1968, after she graduated from the University of Washington, she broke off relations with Ted. She was a practical young woman and seemed to realize that Ted had some serious character flaws that took him out of the running as "husband material."
Ted never recovered from the break-up. Nothing, including school, seemed to hold any interest for him and he eventually dropped out, dumb-founded and depressed over the break-up. He managed to stay in touch with her by writing after she returned to California, yet she seemed uninterested in getting back together. But, Ted was obsessed with this young woman and he couldn't get her out of his mind. It was an obsession that would span his lifetime and lead to a series of events that would shock the world. (cont.)
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