After more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 murders committed in seven states between and His true victim total is unknown. Bundy often employed charm to disguise his murderous intent when kidnapping victims, and extended this tactic vis-a-vis law enforcement, the media and the criminal justice system to maintain his claims of innocence. His usual technique involved approaching a female in public and luring her to a vehicle parked in a more secluded area, at which point she would be beaten unconscious, restrained with handcuffs and taken elsewhere to be sexually assaulted and killed.
To this end, Bundy typically simulated having a physical impairment such as an injury in order to convince his target that he was in need of assistance with something, or would dupe her into believing he was an authority figure. He frequently revisited the bodies of those he abducted, grooming and performing sex acts on the corpses until decomposition and destruction by wild animals made further interactions impossible. He decapitated at least 12 of his victims, keeping their severed heads as mementos in his apartment.
In , Bundy was arrested and jailed in Utah for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault. He then became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in several states. Facing murder charges in Colorado , Bundy engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults in Florida , including three murders, before his ultimate recapture in For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two trials, and was executed at Florida State Prison in Raiford on January 24, Biographer Ann Rule characterized him as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death and even after.
His biological father's identity has never been confirmed; his original birth certificate apparently assigns paternity to a salesman and United States Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, [12] though a copy of it listed his father as unknown. Census records reveal that several men by the name of John Worthington and Lloyd Marshall lived near Louise when Bundy was conceived. For the first three years of his life, Bundy lived in the Philadelphia neighborhood Roxborough, Pennsylvania , with his maternal grandparents, Samuel Knecht Cowell September 23, — December 4, and Eleanor Miriam Longstreet February 16, — April 25, who raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied birth outside of wedlock at that time.
Family, friends, and even young Ted were told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister. Bundy eventually discovered the truth, although his recollections of the circumstances varied; he told a girlfriend that a cousin showed him a copy of his birth certificate after calling him a "bastard," [19] but he told biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth that he had found the certificate himself.
