DNA proves Ted Bundy killed Debra so did he murder scores more?

Writer Stephen Michaud, who recorded 120 hours of interviews with the monster on death row, spoke out days after police finally closed the file on one of his victims. More than 40 years after schoolgirl Debra Kent, 17, went missing near Salt Lake City, Utah, detectives announced last week that DNA evidence has at last confirmed she died at the hands of Bundy. Almost miraculously, a forensic team found their microscopic proof on a bone fragment – the only part of her body found at the time – that her distraught parents had kept in the hope it would one day lead to closure.

Bundy confessed to Debra’s murder, along with 29 others, before he was sent to the electric chair in January 1989. But Michaud, who co-wrote Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, on which the blockbuster Netflix series of the same name is based, said yesterday: “I think there could be many, many more.

“A lot of DNA was collected that has still not been tested.

And there are other murders I believe he carried out that will never be discovered.

“He was a psychopath and a predator and I think he committed murders he didn’t even remember at the end.

Number crunching..Ted Bundy didn’t simply hate women, he wanted to tear them apart. This was a man who tortured his victims, dismembered their corpses and performed unspeakable acts on their dead bodies.

“And he told me, ‘I don’t feel any guilt. I never feel guilt. I don’t try to touch the past’. He bore women a deep hatred but his boyish looks, articulacy and seeming ‘normalness’ could make him attractive.

“I think that’s where the fascination in him lies. You could look at him, talk to him and think, ‘How could this be a serial killer?’ 

But when you talked to him in any depth, you came to realise that anything or anyone that Ted touched was permanently tainted – and that includes me.”

Michaud and co-author Hugh Aynesworth did, however, manage to outsmart the psychopath, who became addicted to soft porn and violence at an early age and at just four terrified an aunt by placing every knife in her house in a circle at the foot of her bed as she slept.

They proposed that he talk in the third person singular, thus avoiding “the incriminatory word ‘I’.”

It worked. Michaud said: “He grabbed my tape recorder, nestled it in his lap, and off he went. I was more of a stenographer than a journalist through much of this. I just had to keep the tapes going and take notes.

This technique was notoriously copied by OJ Simpson, sensationally acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife and her friend, when he co-operated in a book called If I Did It.

And FBI agents interviewing Bundy adopted the “third person” style after seeing his response. He confessed to 30 killings in seven states from 1974 to 1978. Some estimates put the true number as high as 100, although Michaud says: “I don’t think he kept count.

“Like other serial killers he would, on occasions, get confused about the details of a specific murder or merge details of two or three murders together. I genuinely believe he couldn’t remember how many women he slayed.”

Though Bundy never showed remorse, Michaud said the killer did admit to keeping “terrible secrets” from him and Aynesworth. 

“This almost beggars belief,” said the author. “It was as if he kept inside him a vault of things he had done that were even more terrible, more horrific than the things he was prepared to talk about. 

“I dread to think what they were and the likelihood is we will never know.”

source: express.co.uk