50 Fun Facts About Ted Bundy

By which method was Ted Bundy executed at Florida State Prison on the morning of January 24, 1989?

The electric chair at Florida State Prison ended a nine-year wait: the sentence carried out was Bundy's third, passed in 1980, and he declined a last meal.

Ted Bundy used an obscure Florida law to carry out which ceremony in court while questioning a witness?

A marriage declared in court before a judge was legally binding in Florida, so when witness Carole Ann Boone accepted his proposal on the stand, Bundy announced they were wed.

To hide an unwed birth, Ted Bundy's family told him as a child that his mother was which relative?

His sister was the cover story because his grandparents were raising him as their own son. Accounts differ on when Bundy found his birth certificate and learned the truth.

Which tan car, later put on show in a Tennessee crime museum, did witnesses in several states link to Ted Bundy?

The Volkswagen Beetle, a 1968 model, proved hard to pin down: witnesses called it tan or bronze, light brown or dark brown, metallic or not.

Ted Bundy worked in 1971 at which kind of Seattle telephone service, beside a future crime writer?

A suicide crisis hotline in Seattle hired Bundy while he was a university honor student, and his co-worker there later described him as kind, solicitous and empathetic.

Which prop did Ted Bundy often wear to look harmless when asking women to carry things to his car?

An arm sling, or sometimes a plaster leg cast and crutches, made Bundy seem helpless as he asked for a hand with books, a briefcase or a sailboat.

Ted Bundy leapt from a second-floor courthouse window in June 1977 in which Rocky Mountain resort town?

Aspen saw Bundy again six days later: lost, cold and limping on a sprained ankle, he drove a stolen car back into town and was pulled over for weaving across the road.

Ted Bundy posed as which kind of official when approaching Carol DaRonch at a Utah mall in 1974?

A police officer named Roseland was his cover story, but DaRonch fought her way out of his car and later picked him out of a lineup, which led to his first conviction.

Which actor played Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, a film based on his girlfriend's memoir?

Zac Efron starred opposite Lily Collins as Liz Kendall, in a drama that documentary maker Joe Berlinger premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

From death row in 1984, Ted Bundy offered detectives advice on catching which then-unidentified murderer?

The Green River Killer stayed free for a further seventeen years after detectives took up the offer and interviewed Bundy, until Gary Ridgway was finally identified.

Ted Bundy graduated in 1972, as an honor student in psychology, from which Pacific Northwest school?

The University of Washington first enrolled him to study a foreign language. He dropped out in 1968, came back two years later and won over his professors.

Through which part of his jail cell did Ted Bundy escape in December 1977 after losing 35 pounds?

The ceiling had a hole about one foot square that Bundy cut between its steel bars, and an informant's reports of movement overhead at night were never investigated.

Which true-crime author knew Ted Bundy as a friend and co-worker before writing The Stranger Beside Me in 1980?

Ann Rule had been writing for True Detective magazine under the pen name Andy Stack, and the Bundy book was the first she published under her own name.

Which physical evidence, matched to casts by experts, helped convict Ted Bundy at his televised 1979 Miami trial?

Bite marks on one victim were matched to castings of Bundy's teeth, vital proof against a man whose fingerprints were never found at any crime scene.

Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes premiered in January 2019 on which streaming service?

Netflix released the four-part series on the 30th anniversary of Bundy's execution, drawing on more than 100 hours of interviews and archive footage.

Most experts who examined Ted Bundy rejected an early bipolar diagnosis in favor of which condition?

Antisocial personality disorder fit his outward charm, his grasp of right and wrong that never changed his behavior, and his absence of guilt or remorse.

Ted Bundy grew up in which Pacific Northwest port city, where his mother settled with relatives in 1950?

Tacoma is where his mother met hospital cook Johnny Bundy at a church singles night in 1951. They wed that year and Johnny adopted the boy, giving him his surname.

Which actor, People's Sexiest Man Alive that year, played Ted Bundy in the 1986 miniseries The Deliberate Stranger?

Mark Harmon starred in the two-part NBC drama, based on a book by a Seattle Times reporter who had interviewed Bundy in 1972, when he was a campaign volunteer.

Ted Bundy was disciplined on death row for exchanging letters with which would-be presidential assassin?

John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan in 1981, was a pen pal the prison had not approved. Shortly before, guards had moved Bundy to a new cell after finding an unauthorized mirror.

Which sorority's house at Florida State University did Ted Bundy enter before dawn on January 15, 1978?

Chi Omega's house held more than thirty people who heard nothing, though detectives judged that the attacks on four women took less than fifteen minutes in all.

What had Ted Bundy removed from his car, a detail a Utah patrolman noticed at the 1975 traffic stop?

The passenger seat had been taken out and laid across the back, and a search turned up handcuffs, rope, a crowbar and a mask made from pantyhose.

While working for a Seattle crime advisory committee, Ted Bundy wrote a pamphlet for women on which subject?

Rape prevention was his topic as the committee's assistant director, and he later worked at a state agency that was helping to search for the missing women.

Which room of the Pitkin County Courthouse did Ted Bundy ask to visit just before his 1977 window escape?

The law library was open to him because he was acting as his own attorney, a role that also excused him from handcuffs and leg shackles in court.

Ted Bundy was baptized in August 1975 into which denomination, which excommunicated him after a kidnapping conviction?

Latter-day Saints baptized Bundy while he lived in Salt Lake City, though he was never an active member. Asked his religion after his arrest, he answered Methodist.

To avoid the stigma of confession, Ted Bundy described his crimes to two journalists in 1980 in which way?

In the third person, Bundy could speculate about what the murderer might have done without admitting anything, and the tapes later fed two books and a documentary series.

In which Florida Panhandle city near the Alabama line was fugitive Ted Bundy finally arrested in February 1978?

Pensacola patrolman David Lee stopped a stolen car in the small hours and had to chase and tackle its driver, unaware the man was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.

Ted Bundy waived which right, on his attorney's advice, when he faced a Utah kidnapping charge in 1976?

A jury trial seemed too risky after so much hostile publicity, so Judge Stewart Hanson alone heard four days of evidence and found Bundy guilty.

Which evangelical broadcaster taped a final interview with Ted Bundy on the afternoon before his 1989 execution?

James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, heard Bundy blame violent pornography for his crimes, though he had told other interviewers it played a negligible role.

Ted Bundy's will asked for his ashes to be scattered in which mountain range of his home state?

The Cascades received his ashes at an undisclosed spot after a cremation in Gainesville, Florida, the state where his three death sentences were handed down.

Ted Bundy spent his first three years with his grandparents in the Roxborough neighborhood of which city?

Philadelphia drew him back in 1969, when he enrolled for a semester at Temple University to be near his grandfather after a painful breakup.

Ted Bundy was born in 1946 at a home for unwed mothers in a city called Burlington in which state?

Vermont is where, by one biographer's account, he tracked down his original birth record in 1969 and learned the truth about his parentage.

Which language did Ted Bundy study on a summer scholarship to Stanford before he switched to psychology?

Chinese was the subject he had changed colleges to study, but he dropped out in early 1968 and only went back to his degree two years later.

Ted Bundy posed as a college student in 1972 to record the speeches of which Republican governor's election rival?

Daniel J. Evans won re-election, and his letter of recommendation later helped Bundy into two law schools despite mediocre admission test scores.

Which 1981 memoir did Ted Bundy's longtime girlfriend publish under the pen name Elizabeth Kendall?

The Phantom Prince came from the woman who reported him to detectives three times while still planning a future with him, and it was dramatized on film in 2019.

Which actor played FBI agent Bill Hagmaier, Ted Bundy's death-row confidant, in the 2021 film No Man of God?

Elijah Wood starred opposite Luke Kirby's Bundy in a script built from real transcripts of the conversations the two men had between 1984 and 1989.

Ted Bundy's second Florida murder trial, six months after the first in Miami, took place in which city?

Orlando is where an eyewitness described seeing him lead a girl from her schoolyard to a stolen van, and where he received his third death sentence.

In his final confessions, Ted Bundy admitted two murders in which state bordering Utah?

Idaho investigators had not connected him to either case until he spoke in his last days, and one of the two victims, a hitchhiker, has never been identified.

Ted Bundy often wore turtleneck sweaters to hide which mark on his neck, his one distinctive identifying feature?

A dark mole was the one fixed point on a face that seemed to change in every photograph, and the judge at his first trial called him a changeling.

Which item found in an evidence vault in 2011 let Ted Bundy's full DNA profile be added to the FBI database?

A vial of his blood gave investigators a way to test Bundy against unsolved cases, although evidence from a 1961 disappearance near his boyhood home proved too degraded.

Whose street clothes did Ted Bundy take before walking out the front door of a county jail in December 1977?

The chief jailer's apartment stood empty while he was out for the evening, and staff did not discover the escape until noon the next day, seventeen hours later.

Ted Bundy used his real first name at which state park near Seattle, where two women vanished in July 1974?

Lake Sammamish gave detectives their first detailed description of the suspect and his car, and the composite sketch led four people who knew him to report his name.

Which surname was Ted Bundy given at birth in 1946, years before his stepfather Johnny adopted him?

Cowell was his mother's maiden name. She changed it to Nelson in 1950, the year she moved west, then became a Bundy when she wed the following year.

Which Florida judge's remarks while sentencing Ted Bundy in 1979 gave a 2019 film about him its title?

Edward Cowart went on to wish the condemned man well and tell him he would have made a good lawyer. John Malkovich played the judge on screen.

Detectives hunting Ted Bundy in 1975 cross-checked suspect lists on a King County computer normally used for what?

Payroll was the day job of the huge, primitive machine, yet out of thousands of names it found 26 that appeared on four lists, and one of them was Bundy.

Which Seattle-area detective, later author of The Riverman, heard Ted Bundy's final confessions in January 1989?

Robert Keppel had begun his career as a detective on the case in 1974, and he later helped create a computer system for tracking homicide investigations.

On which peak near Issaquah, where Ted Bundy often hiked, did forestry students find four victims' remains in 1975?

Taylor Mountain yielded the remains six months after two grouse hunters found other victims near Issaquah, and Bundy later admitted returning to both sites.

Which trace evidence, distinctive because of a manufacturing error, helped convict Ted Bundy at his 1980 murder trial?

Clothing fibers found in a stolen van matched the jacket Bundy was wearing when he was arrested, undoing a man who took great care to leave no traces behind.

Ted Bundy began college in 1965, and law school in 1973, at which private school in his home town?

The University of Puget Sound lost him twice: he transferred away after one year as an undergraduate, then stopped attending its law classes by April 1974.

After escaping jail on December 30, 1977, Ted Bundy caught a morning flight from Denver to which city?

Chicago already had him by the time jail staff found the pile of books under his blanket, and from there he traveled on to Michigan by train.

Which smuggled tool did Ted Bundy use to cut out of a jail cell in 1977, and hide again on death row?

A hacksaw blade reached him through fellow inmates in 1977, and in 1984 guards found two more in his Florida cell, where a window bar had been cut and glued back with soap.