Ted Bundy was born at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers which is now known as the Lund Family Center in Burlington, Vermont on November 24th 1946 to Eleanor Louise Cowell. His father’s identity was never fully determined but his birth certificate says his dad is was a salesman and an Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, but Elizabeth later claimed that she was seduced by a sailor who she says she thinks his name was Jack Worthington.
Years later they would come to discover that there was no named that in the Navy or Merchant Marine archives. For Ted’s first three years of life he lived with his mom’s grandparents in Philadelphia Samuel and Eleanor Cowell who raised him as their son so the mom would not be judged for having a kid when she was not married. For years Ted and all their friends and family were told that his grandparents were his actual parents and his mom was his older sister.
Ted eventually found out the truth but no one really knows how he found out because he told so many stories about it such as he told his girlfriend that his cousin had shown him his birth certificate after calling him a bastard or when asked by biographers he told them that he had found the certificate himself. Biographers seem to believe that Ted did not find our till 1969 when he located his original birth certificate in Vermont and he had lifelong resentment towards his mother for not telling him about his father and leaving him to discover his own true parentage.
Bundy seemed to like is grandparents in some interviews and told Rule that “identified with”, “respected”, and “clung to” his grandfather, but he and other family members told attorneys in 1987 that Sam Cowell was a tyrannical bully and a zealot who hated Italians, Catholics, Blacks, and Jews. He beat his wife and the family dog and swung neighborhood cats by their tails back into their yards or at passersbyers on the street. He once threw Louise’s little sister for oversleeping through the day when she was supposed to be doing chores.
Sam would sometime speak allowed to unseen presences and would fly into a violent rage anytime Teds paternity was brought up around him. Ted described his grandmother as a timid and obedient woman who had electroshock therapy to help rid her of her depression and feared leaving her house toward the end of her life. Ted exhibited many weird behaviors as a kid but one really stood out to the family and that was when they all woke up surrounded by knives and Ted standing in the corner smiling.
His mother ended up changing her name and abruptly moving to Philadelphia with Ted at the urging of her friends and family. When they got there Ted remembers roaming his neighborhood looking through windows at naked women, and looking for detective videos especially ones with rape and people mutilating women. Everyone tried to include Bundy in school but he never really liked friendships and did not understand why anybody would wanna get that close to someone else. In school he was well liked by his classmates and was described as a medium fish in a large pond by his peers at the time.
Bundy was never really into sport other than snow skiing which he used stolen ski equipment and forged lift tickets so he could ski during the winter months, Bundy was knowingly arrested twice on suspicion of burglary and auto theft but it was expunged from his record after he turned 18 as customary in Washington like most states. After graduating high school in 1965 he went to University of Puget Sound for only a year before transferring to the University of Washington in 1966 to study the Chinese culture and language.
In 1967 he became romantically involved with a UW student who is identified in the books written about bundy in many different pseudonyms, but most commonly referred to as Stephanie Brooks. In early 1968 Bundy dropped out for no apparent reason and started working minimum wage jobs all around UW but ended up volunteering his time at one of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign office in Seattle and in August attended the 1968 Republican National Convention as one of Rockefeller’s delegates.
Brooks then broke up with Bundy and moved back to her family in California. This is considered the pivoting time in Bundy’s life and when all hell broke loose. Bundy would shortly thereafter the break up move back to Washington to find out his true parentage and meet his next girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer who was a secretary at the UW school of medicine, their relationship will continue way past his incarceration.
Now focused and goal oriented Bundy re-enrolled at UW wanting to major in psychology which he then became an honor student and well regarded by all of his professors. With this new degree Bundy took a job at a suicide hotline crisis center in seattle where he would meet and work with Anne Rule a former officer with the Seattle Police department. When he was working with anybody such as Rule with a trained eye for criminals said she never noticed a bad thing about him and describe as “kind, empathic, and solicitous”.
He then tried to transfer to the law school of the University of Utah (UPS) on mediocre admission test scores but what got him accepted was his recommendation letter from his professors and contacts he made when working with the republican party. During a trip to California with the republican party Bundy rekindled his relationship with Brooks who admired at how much he had changed towards a much more serious lifestyle with his degree in law and psychology.
He was now in a relationship with 2 women Kloepfer and Brooks who had no idea about each other. Bundy enrolled at UPS in the fall of 1973 and continued to date both girls, Brooks flew up to see him many times, they talked about and having a family together until all the sudden Bundy stopped returning Brooks phone calls and letters for a month until finally he answered one of her phone calls and as she demanded to know why he had not been replying to her he said, “Stephanie, i have no idea what you mean and hung up”.
Brooks thinks it was revenge on her since she broke up with him earlier but Bundy claims that he just wanted to prove to himself that he could have married her. That same month Bundy had started skipping classes and then finally not going to them at all. That was when the girls started to disappear. There was no exact time when they know for sure that Bundy had committed his first murder but there claims that he started as early as 1961 at only 14 years old.
Bu the first case on record was in 1974, shortly after ending it with Brooks he went into a basement of dancer at UW named Karen Spark who was only 18 and took a metal rod off of her bed frame and beat the woman senseless and then sexually assaulted her with the rod causing extremely life threatening internal injuries, she woke up 10 days later out of a coma and recovered with permanent damage. Less than a month later on February 1st 1974 he broke into Lynda Ann Healy basement who did the morning broadcast show for skiers, and beat her unconscious then dressed her in blue jeans, a white blouse, and boots then carried her away.
