Ted Bundy’s time in Washington:
In 1950, Louise took her young son and moved to Tacoma, Washington. At church she met a man named John Culpepper Bundy, and in May of 1951 they were married, and soon Ted was surrounded by siblings. As a child he was active in church and the Boy Scouts, and did well in school. He stepfather attempted to include the boy in father-son outings such as camping, but Ted pushed the man away, seeming to prefer isolation from others. In an interview shortly before his execution, Bundy said, “I didn’t know what made people want to be friends. I didn’t know what made people attractive to one another. I didn’t know what underlay social interactions.”
By his teens, Ted was committing acts of petty thievery and shoplifting, a pastime that would remain with him his entire life, as well as peeping into windows to watch women. Ted may also have began killing in his teens: a twelve year old girl mysteriously disappeared from her home not far from where the then-fifteen year old Bundy lived. Despite his nocturnal activities, Bundy graduated high school in 1965 with a scholarship to the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma.
While enrolled in college Bundy worked for the local chapter of the Republican party, displaying a natural affinity for politics. He also performed charity work, and was awarded a write-ups in a local newspaper for running down a purse snatcher and saving a child from drowning. Bundy also worked at a crisis hotline, handling calls from distraught, often terrorized people. The woman at the telephone next to his was former police officer and budding crime writer Ann Rule. The two befriended one another, meeting for casual lunches and dinners, with Bundy insisting on walking Rule to her car afterward. While working alongside Ted at the crisis center, Rule was commissioned to write several articles, and later a book, about the ongoing disappearances and murders of young college co-eds. Years would pass before Rule would discover she had been writing about her close friend Ted Bundy all along.
It was in college that Bundy met the woman who would become his first serious girlfriend, Stephanie Brooks. The two dated seriously until Stephanie graduated and left Ted bereft, blaming his lack of ambition for the break up. It was not long afterward that Ted learned of his true parentage, and the spark was set for the horrors to come. Shattered by the knowledge of his illegitimacy and the loss of his girlfriend, Ted threw himself into activities with the Republican party, kick-started his performance in school by delving into psychology, and went through what appeared to be a total personality and lifestyle overhaul. During this time he met Elizabeth (not her real name,) who was swept off her feet by the handsome, vivacious young upstart. The two shared a passion for skiing and Ted seemed to dote on Elizabeth’s young daughter. However, Bundy was secretly seeing Stephanie at the same time and eventually won her over. The two even went so far as to plan marriage. Ted grew distant, and in February of 1974, they broke up for the last time. Later, Stephanie would say, “I escaped by the skin of my teeth. When I think of his cold and calculating manner, I shudder.”
Neither Stephanie Brooks nor Elizabeth knew that on January fourth, Ted had sneaked into the bedroom of eighteen year old Joni Lenz, a University of Washington student, and bludgeoned her with a crowbar. He then tore an iron bedpost from the girl’s bed and used it to sexually assault her. Lenz was found comatose the next morning, the bedpost still inserted in her vagina. She sustained permanent brain damage from the attack.
Barely three weeks later, Bundy broke into the bedroom of Lynda Ann Healy, also a University of Washington student. Her empty bed was found the next morning, with the covers pulled up neatly, hiding a large pool of blood that had soaked into the mattress. Healy’s decapitated, dismembered body was found a year later.
Bundy killed in earnest over the next year, often using the ruse of wearing a cast or a sling on his arm, or appearing to struggle with an armload of books while using crutches. He even snatched two women in one day from Lake Sammamish state park in Washington. Both Janice Ott and Denis Naslund were taken by a man asking for help moving his sailboat, a move that was incredibly bold considering that it was a crowded summer day at the lake. It is not know if Ott, who was taken first, was alive when Bundy kidnapped Naslund, although in Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer, Bundy surmised to author Stephen Michaud about the nature of the girls’ killer, “…Had he been cautious, he would’ve probably killed the first individual before leaving to get the second girl, but in this instance since we’ve agreed he wasn’t acting cautiously, he hadn’t killed the first girl when he abducted the second.” Michaud walked Bundy through a third-person account of the kidnapping, asking Bundy (who never confessed to Ott and Naslund’s murders,) thought the killer might do. Following a sexual assault on the two bound women, Bundy said, “Well, by this time, his frenzied compulsive activity of that day has run its course. Then he realized the jeopardy he was in. Then the normal self would begin to reemerge and, realizing the greater danger involved, would suffer panic and begin to think of ways to conceal the acts - or at least his part of them. So he’d kill the two girls, place them in the car, and take them to a secluded area and leave them.”
Both Naslund and Ott were belived to have been decapitated. Naslund’s remains were found in a wooded area, along with other women Bundy had murdered. Janice Ott’s lower jawbone was found nearby. The rest of her body has yet to be discovered.
Along with Healy, Ott and Naslund, Carol Valenzuela, Donna Manson, Susan Rancourt, Brenda Baker, Brenda Ball, and Georgann Hawkins, along with Kathy Parks in Oregon, were killed before Ted decided to head for Utah.
Kaspars Petrovs (born 1978) is a Latvian national, and a convicted serial killer. He was convicted of the murder of thirteen elderly women by the Riga Regional Court on May 12, 2005 and sentenced to life in prison.
Petrovs, the son of a prominent medical doctor, had been homeless for several years. Initially held in connection with the murders of five women in February 2003, he later confessed to killing more than thirty women. He was initially charged with 38 murders, 8 attempted murders, and a number of theft and robberies, mostly involving elderly female residents of Riga, Latvia between 2000 and 2003. However, authorities only pursued charges in the deaths of 13 of the victims due to a lack of forensic evidence in the other cases.
Petrovs, who had a previous conviction for theft in 1998, maintained after his arrest and during his 2005 trial that he had not “intended to kill his victims, but only to rob them.” Petrovs strangled the women after following them home and forcibly entering their apartments or posing as a Latvijas gāze (state gas company) employee. Petrovs stole an estimated 18,000 lats (26,000euros) in goods and money from his victims.
After his conviction, Petrovs apologized to his victims’ families in court and asked for their forgiveness. “I cannot return the victims to life by words, but I wish they were still alive, that nothing had happened…”
