Below you will find a video of the last interview that the serial killer Ted Bundy ever gave on January 23rd 1989, just a few short hours before his execution. In it he speaks about his positive upbringing and how his murderous impulses cannot have stemmed from his environment. He traces the origins of his desires to kill back to his experiences as a user of pornography. Bundy states, very calmly, that he wants to speak "as honestly he can" about how "this kind of literature fueled my violent desires". He talks about how his taste in violent pornography escalated until the pornography alone could not slake his appetite for sexual violence. It's a fascinating interview and I strongly suggest you watch it before reading further.
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What makes it fascinating is that almost nothing that Bundy says is true. This is not the final confession of a repentant man, it the final attempt of a psychopath to achieve one more stay of execution. Bundy, a man who had previously refused all requests for interview finally granted access to James Dobson, a conservative psychologist and right wing Christian with pronounced anti-pornography views. Rather than opening up to Dobson Bundy is simply telling him what he wants to hear, that his conservative world view is right, that pornography, along with alcohol and violence in the media, is a menace to society that can corrupt people from otherwise good backgrounds into becoming monsters. At one point Dobson says "there is a percentage of people affected by hardcore pornography in a very violent way and you're obviously one of them". At this moment, twelve and a half minutes into a half hour interview, Bundy has already manipulated Dobson into seeing him as a victim. That's the chilling power of a psychopath in action. As someone with a background in discursive psychology it's fascinating to look at how Bundy deploys language to accomplish his goal. He states that there are many people who are not affected by pornography but then describes its effects on his own psyche in such a way as to make it central to his development as a killer. By doing so he minimizes and calls into question his original statement that many people are not affected by pornography. He has created the illusion of giving a balanced appraisal but in practice he is inviting his audience to focus only on the negative power of pornography.
Bundy talks early on the interview about his upbringing, which he describes as very ordinary and crucially very Christian. This is again, something deployed to create a particular effect upon Dobson, knowing that he is a right wing Christian who will likely respond positively to Bundy's claim to come from a similar background. In fact Bundy is simply lying about his upbringing. He was born to a single mother and raised by his grandparents to avoid the stigma of being born out of wedlock. For a time he believed that his mother was his older sister. This is a far cry from the average American childhood that Bundy describes to Dobson. There were allegations that Bundy's grandfather was a violent drunk and a vicious racist who enjoyed tormenting animals. A few hours before his death Bundy is able to calmly lie about his upbringing in order to create a sense of intimacy, a sense of connection with a man who he feels may be able to help him.
This is not a confession, this is a power play. By 23rd of January 1989 Bundy had run out of options. He resisted confessing to his crimes for many years but as execution started to loom he began sharing the true nature of his crimes with the authorities. This was likely an attempt to raise doubts of his mental competence, the details of the necrophiliac acts he had undertaken with the corpses of his victims were shocking enough to raise all sorts of questions about his sanity. This had bought time but by this point his time had run out. On his last day on Earth Bundy may have hoped that an intervention from someone like Dobson might have been enough to buy him another stay of execution.
When I watched the video of the interview I already knew enough about Bundy to suspect that he was not being honest with Dobson but what struck me was how plausible the interaction was despite this foreknowledge. The presence of the cameras, the polite, intimate terms of the interview all have a role to play in making this conversation appear genuine. Indeed the very fact of the interview being filmed at all makes it feel more genuine because the mere act of choosing to record something inflates its importance. There's a lesson there about politicians becoming newsworthy through our collective media hallucinations and the way the camera lends legitimacy to a good liar.
For me the illusion does start to break down as the interview progresses, the manipulation becomes more obvious. Bundy doesn't care about that, the cameras are not important to him. He may be trying to convince the viewers at home to some extent but that's a secondary concern. It's all about Dobson and what getting him on side might do for him. When Dobson asks him if he deserves to die Bundy dodges the question and carefully brings the conversation back round to the various social ills that he claims are responsible. Dobson allows him to do this, probably because the whole interview has been set up to flatter his ego.
"Basically I was a normal person, I led a normal life." If there's one truly enormous lie Bundy tells then this is it. Serial killers are nothing if not obsessives and if there's one truism about being obsessive is that it infects every part of your life. When I'm working on a new project I become distracted from almost every other part of my life, the story, the music, the art, whatever it is takes over my thought processes. That's to say nothing of the many times per day I get distracted by thinking about sex. For Bundy murder was both his project and his sex.
In the end it availed Bundy nothing to do the interview. Dobson did not intervene, there was no great public outcry and Bundy was executed by electric chair the following morning. What we are left with is a strange document that reminds us that truth is often determined by context. What would people think five hundred years from now if they were to watch that interview divorced from the context of history and the facts of the case? Will psychology have advanced to the point where they can detect the self-serving psychopath from thirty minutes of conversation or will they take Bundy's words and Dobson's acquiesence at face value?
