Featured Image Credit: Dr James Dobson Family Institute
Topics: True Crime, Ted Bundy
Joe Harker
In the final interview he gave before he was executed, notorious serial killer Ted Bundy blamed his abhorrent crimes on two things.
Bundy kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of women, eventually confessing to 30 cases after being arrested while investigators believe that he was likely responsible for many more than he said.
He would often pretend to be injured or have some kind of impairment to lure his victims in close when they came to help him, he'd then beat them unconscious and kidnap them before taking them to a remote location.
The serial killer would often make visits back to the decomposing corpses of his victims and kept the severed heads of a number of people in his home as trophies.
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Bundy was executed on the morning of 24 January, 1989, having rejected his last meal.
In the hours before he was executed he had one final interview in which he claimed there were two things that caused his crimes.
Bear in mind that the interview was conducted by a pastor making a documentary called Pornography: Addictive, Progressive and Deadly in which he tried to make the case that people looking at porn would either become serial killers or die themselves.
If this guy had been correct in his ideas then there'd be a lot more serial killers in the world, so perhaps it's a good idea not to put too much stock in the words of a serial killer spoken for the benefit of someone trying to push a particular theory.
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Bundy claimed that the adult film industry and depictions of violence in the media were to blame for his crimes, rather than him being a dangerous serial killer.
"This kind of literature contributed, and helped mould and shape the kinds of violent behaviour," the serial killer with dozens of victims claimed in his final interview.
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"In the beginning, it fuels this kind of thought process. These barriers I had learned as a child and had been instilled in me were not enough to hold me back with respect to seeking out and harming someone."
Of course, countless others went through the same sort of environment without becoming a serial killer, so perhaps the correlating factor is not the adult film industry and depictions of violence but Bundy himself.
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A woman who escaped from Bundy's clutches explained that he'd offered her a ride in his car, but after driving past where he'd promised to take her he pulled the car over and said: "You know what, I am going to kill you."
Rhonda Stapley said she remembered him strangling her, and after she escaped she didn't tell anyone about it as she felt like she needed to 'pretend' that it had 'never happened'.
An ex of Bundy's said she saw that something was off about his behaviour and thought he might be seeing someone else as he would often choose to go home at night instead of staying with her, but now she knows he was out stalking and murdering his victims.