Ted Bundy, the notorious American serial killer, was put to death in Florida in 1989 after he was convicted of three murders. However, Bundy confessed to at least 30 killings when he was being interviewed by police, as brought to light in recent Netflix documentary “The Ted Bundy Tapes”. This month, new film “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,” from the same director Joe Berlinger, delves into the psychology of the notorious killer and his relationship with girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer.
Kloepfer, who met Bundy in 1969, was instrumental in the killer’s capture as she reported him to police on three separate occasions.
The true number of Bundy’s slayings has puzzled researchers since his 1978 arrest.
After his conviction in 1979, he bought time while waiting on death row by talking to investigators and confessing to 30 murders, although he never revealed the true number.
True crime author Ann Rule, who actually knew Bundy personally and was initially fooled by the manipulative killer into not suspecting him as a murderer, talked about Bundy’s reply when Florida investigators asked him if it was true that he had killed 36 women.
ted Bundy was executed in 1989, but is still suspected in a number of cold cases (Image: Getty)
She said: “He reportedly replied, ‘Add one digit to that and you’ll have it.’
“Was he being sarcastic? Did he mean 37 murders, or did he mean 136 murders, or did he mean 360 murders?”
As recently as 2018, detectives in the US state of Washington said that they were still pursuing leads related to Bundy in a number of cold cases.
Washington investigator Cloyd Steiger told local news station KIRO 7 in 2018: “Ted Bundy was an animal that destroyed lives and left a wake of destruction everywhere he went.”
Ted Bundy pictured in court at his 1979 trail, which was televised naitonwide (Image: Getty)
The station reported that Steiger said he knows that one or two police agencies in Washington are currently working suspected Bundy cases.
Detectives are re-examining evidence from 1966, when two flight attendants were bludgeoned in their home in Seattle with a piece of lumber.
Louise Trumbull died in the attack, and her housemate survived with permanent memory loss.
At the time, Bundy worked in a nearby Safeway supermarket.
Ted Bundy confers with his defence team on theopening day of his 1979 trial (Image: Getty)
Although fingerprints from the 1966 crime scene do not match Bundy’s, investigators say that at the time it was common for many people including press photographers to be allowed onto scenes which nowadays would be kept intact.
Eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr disappeared in 1961, and could have been one of Bundy’s first victims, when he was just 14.
However, Bundy always vehemently denied having anything to do with the killing of Ann Marie, who lived close to his childhood home in Tacoma.
Investigators in 2011 ordered tests on a vial of Bundy’s blood in the hopes of linking him to the 50-year-old unsolved case, however this line of enquiry came to a dead end when not enough DNA was recoverable from the crime-scene evidence.
Bundy escaped from prison twice before he finally faced justice (Image: Getty)
Her case is still unsolved, and her body has never been found, with Bundy and one other man remaining prime suspects.
Many believe Burr to have been Bundy’s first murder, and despite the efforts of detectives to pry out the information, he never talked about about his first kill.
A good deal of cold cases linked to Bundy are from his home state of Washington, although he is also known to have killed in Colorado, Utah and Florida.
These include Joyce Lepage, a student at Washington State University who was murdered in 1971.
18-year-old Carol Valenzuela and an unidentified female skeleton were found together in Vancouver, Washington, in 1974, and were long suspected as victims of Bundy.
However, in 2015, DNA testing revealed the identity of the body as 17-year-old Martha Morrison.
This breakthrough led to the identification of a bloodstain on a pistol owned by suspect Warren Leslie Forrest, discounting Bundy as the killer.
Of the killings that Bundy did confess to, a shocking number are of women whose bodies have never been found.
He confessed to killing an unknown hitchhiker in 1973, which has never been confirmed, and a second unidentified hitchhiker in 1974, whose body was never found.
Four young women’s bodies, who Bundy said he killed in 1975, have never been recovered, including a 13-year-old who was snatched from a playground.
Bundy confessed to the murder of 17-year-old Debra Kent, however it was only last month that detectives finally confirmed that he was in fact the killer.
Irrefutable DNA evidence was taken from a fragment of bone that Debra’s parents had kept in the hopes of one day proving the link.