Fatal Addiction
Ted Bundy's Final Interview
Ted Bundy, an infamous serial killer, granted an interview to psychologist
James Dobson just before he was executed on January 24, 1989. In that
interview, he described the agony of his addiction to pornography. Bundy
goes back to his roots, explaining the development of his compulsive
behavior. He reveals his addiction to hard-core pornography and how it
fueled the terrible crimes he committed.
A road that leads to nowhere
When Ted Bundy was thirteen years old, he discovered "dirty magazines"
in a dump near his home. He was instantly captivated by them. In time,
Bundy became more and more addicted to violent images in magazines and
videos. He got his kicks from seeing women being tortured and murdered.
When he tired of that, there was only one place his addiction could go -
from fantasy to reality.
Bundy, a good-looking, intelligent law student, learned to lure women
into his car by various forms of deception. He would put a cast on his
arm or leg, then walk across a university campus carrying several books.
When he saw an interesting coed standing or walking alone, he'd "accidentally" drop the books near her. The girl would help him gather
them and take them to his car. Then he would entice her or push her into
the vehicle where she was taken captive. After he had molested the girl
and the rage of passion had passed, she would be killed and Bundy would
dump her body in a region where it would not be found for months. This
went on for years.
By the time he was apprehended, Bundy had killed at least twenty-eight
young women and girls in acts too horrible to contemplate. He was
finally convicted and sentenced to death for killing a twelve-year-old
girl and dumping her body in a pigsty. After more than ten years of
appeals and legal maneuvering, a judge gave the order for Bundy's
execution. That week, he asked an attorney to call me and request that I
come to Florida State Prison for a final interview.
When I arrived, I discovered a circus-like atmosphere outside the
prison. Teenagers carried signs saying "Burn, Bundy, Burn," and "You're
Dead, Ted." Also in the crowd were more than 300 reporters who had come
to get a story on the killer's last hours, but Bundy wouldn't talk to
them. He had something important to say, and he believed the media
couldn't be trusted to report it accurately. Therefore, I was invited to
bring a camera crew to record his last comments from death.
I'll never forget that experience. I went through seven steel doors and
metal detectors so sensitive that my tie tack and the nails in my shoes
were enough to set off an alarm. Finally, I reached an inner chamber
where Bundy and I were to meet. He was brought in, strip-searched, and
then surrounded by six prison guards while he talked to me. Midway
through our conversation, the lights suddenly went dim.
Ted said, "Just wait a moment, and they will come back on."
I didn't realize until later what had happened. The prisoner knew that
his executioners were testing the electric chair that would take his
life the next morning.
Ted Bundy wanted to tell the world about pornography
What was it that Ted Bundy was so anxious to say? He felt he owed it to
society to warn of the dangers of hard-core pornography and to explain
how it had led him to murder so many innocent women and girls. With
tears in his eyes, he described the monster that took possession of him
when he had been drinking. His craze to kill was always inflamed by
violent pornography. Quoted below is an edited transcript of the
conversation that occurred just seventeen hours before Ted was led to
the electric chair.
Dr. Dobson: Ted, it is about two-thirty in the afternoon. You are
scheduled to be executed tomorrow morning at seven o'clock if you don't
receive another stay. What is going through your mind? What thoughts
have you had in these last few days?
Ted Bundy: Well, I won't kid you today that it's something that I feel
that I'm in control of or something that I've come to terms with,
because I haven't. It's a moment-by-moment thing.
Dobson: Let's go back, then, to [your] roots. You, as I understand it,
were raised in what you consider to have been a healthy home.
Bundy: Absolutely.
Dobson: You were not physically abused. You were not sexually abused.
You were not emotionally abused.
Bundy: No. No way. That's part of the tragedy of this whole situation,
because I grew up in a wonderful home with two dedicated and loving
parents. It was a fine, solid Christian home. But as a young boy--and I
mean a boy of twelve or thirteen certainly--I encountered outside the
home soft-core pornography. From time to time we'd come across
pornographic books of a harder nature, more graphic you might say. And
this also included such things as detective magazines...
Dobson: And those that involved violence, then.
Bundy: Yes, the most damaging kinds of pornography are those that
involve sexual violence. Because the wedding of those two forces, as I
know only too well, brings about behavior that is just too terrible to
describe.
Dobson: Now I really want to understand that. You had gone about as far
as you could go in your own fantasy life with printed material, and then
there was the urge to take that little step or big step over to a
physical event.
Bundy: My experience with pornography that deals on a violent level with
sexuality is that once you become addicted to it--and I look at this as
a kind of addiction--like other kinds of addiction...I would keep
looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of materials.
Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder, harder.
Something which gives you a greater sense of excitement. Until you reach
the point where the pornography only goes so far. You reach that
jumping-off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it
will give you that which is beyond just reading about it or looking at
it.
Dobson: Do you remember what pushed you over that edge?
Bundy: I knew that I couldn't control it anymore, that these barriers
that I had learned as a child, that had been instilled in me, were not
enough to hold me back with respect to seeking out and harming somebody.
Dobson: Would it be accurate to call that a frenzy, a sexual frenzy?
Bundy: Well, yes. That's one way to describe it. A compulsion, a
building up of destructive energy. But I think that what alcohol did in
conjunction with, let's say, my exposure to pornography [is that]
alcohol reduced my inhibitions, at the same time. The fantasy life that
was fueled by pornography eroded them further, you see.
Dobson: In the early days, you were nearly always about half-drunk when
you did these things. Is that right?
Bundy: Yes. Yes.
Dobson: All right, if I can understand it now, there's this battle going
on within. There are the conventions that you've been taught. And then
there is this unbridled passion fueled by your plunge into hard-core,
violent pornography.
Bundy: Well, yes. That is a major component, and I don't know why I was
vulnerable to it. All I know is that it had an impact on me that was
just so central to the development of the violent behavior that I
engaged in.
Dobson: Ted, after you committed your first murder, what was the
emotional effect on you? What happened in the days after that?
Bundy: Again, please understand that even all these years later, it's
very difficult to talk about it, and reliving it through talking about
it. It was like coming out of some kind of horrible trance or dream. I
can only liken it to, and I don't want to overdramatize it, but to have
been possessed by something so awful and so alien, and then the next
morning wake up from it, remember what happened, and realize that
basically, you're responsible. To wake up in the morning and realize
what I had done, with a clear mind and all my essential moral and
ethical feelings intact at that moment, [I was] absolutely horrified
that I was capable of doing something like that.
Dobson: You really hadn't known that before?
Bundy: I want people to understand this. Basically, I was a normal
person. I wasn't some guy hanging out at bars, or a bum. Or I wasn't a
pervert in the sense that people look at somebody and say, "I know
there's something wrong with him; I can just tell." But I was
essentially a normal person. I had good friends. I lived a normal life,
except for this one small, but very potent, very destructive segment of
it that I kept very secret, very close to myself, and didn't let anybody
know about. And part of the shock and horror for my dear friends and
family, years ago when I was first arrested, was that there was no clue.
They looked at me, and they looked at the All-American boy. I think
people need to recognize that those of us who have been so much
influenced by violence in the media--in particular pornographic
violence--are not some kinds of inherent monsters. We are your sons, and
we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families. And
pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house today. It
snatched me out of my home twenty, thirty years ago, as diligent as my
parents were, and they were diligent in protecting their children. And
as good a Christian home as we had--and we had a wonderful Christian
home--there is no protection against the kinds of influences that there
are loose in a society that tolerates. [Bundy is in tears.]
Dobson: Ted, outside these walls right now there are several hundred
reporters that wanted to talk to you.
Bundy: Yeah.
Dobson: And you asked me to come here from California because you had
something you wanted to say. You really feel that hard-core pornography
and the doorway to it, soft-core pornography, is doing untold damage to
other people and causing other women to be abused and killed the way you
did it.
Bundy: Listen. I'm no social scientist, and I haven't done a survey. I
mean, I don't pretend that I know what John Q. Citizen thinks about
this. But I've lived in prison for a long time now. And I've met a lot
of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me. And without
exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography--without
question, without exception--deeply influenced and consumed by an
addiction to pornography. There's no question about it. The FBI's own
study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among
serial killers is pornography.
Dobson: That's true.
Bundy: And it's real.
Dobson: Ted, what would your life have been like without that influence?
You can only speculate.
Bundy: I'm absolutely certain [it] would not have involved this kind of
violence that I have committed.
Dobson: One of the most important questions as you come down to perhaps
your final hours: Are you thinking about all those victims out there and
their families who are so wounded?
Bundy: Absolutely. I can only hope that those who I have harmed and
those who I have caused so much grief--even if they don't believe my
expression of sorrow and remorse--will believe what I'm saying now, that
there is loose in their towns, in their communities, people like me
today whose dangerous impulses are being fueled day in and day out by
violence in the media in its various forms, particularly sexualized
violence. And what scares me--and let's come into the present now
because what I'm talking about happened twenty, thirty years ago, that
is, in my formative stages. And what scares and appalls me, Dr. Dobson,
is when I see what's on cable TV, some of the movies, some of the
violence in the movies that come into homes today was stuff that they
wouldn't show in x-rated adult theaters thirty years ago.
Dobson: The slasher movies that you're talking about.
Bundy: The stuff is--I'm telling you from personal experience--the most
graphic violence on the screen. Particularly as it gets into the home to
the children who may be unattended or unaware that they may be a Ted
Bundy who has that vulnerability to that kind of behavior, by that kind
of movie and that kind of violence.
Dobson: Can you help me understand this desensitization process that
took place? What was going on in your mind?
Bundy: Each time I harmed someone, each time I killed someone, there
would be an enormous amount of horror, guilt, remorse afterward. But
then that impulse to do it again would come back even stronger. The
unique thing about how this worked, Dr. Dobson, is that I still felt, in
my regular life, the full range of guilt and remorse about other things.
Regret and...
Dobson: You had this compartmentalized...
Bundy: ...compartmentalized, very well focused, very sharply focused
area where it was like a black hole. It was like a crack. And everything
that fell into that crack just disappeared. Does that make sense?
Dobson: It does. One of the final murders that you committed, of course,
was apparently little Kimberly Leach, twelve years of age. I think the
public outcry is greater there because an innocent child was taken from
a playground. What did you feel after that? Were there the normal
emotions three days later? Where were you, Ted?
Bundy: [Struggling for words] I can't really talk about that right now.
Dobson: That's too painful.
Bundy: I would like to convey to you what that experience is like, but I
can't. I won't be able to talk about that...
[continuing] I can't begin to understand--well, I can try, but I'm aware
that I can't begin to understand the pain that the parents of these
children--that I have, and these young women that I have harmed--feel.
And I can't restore really much to them, if anything, and I won't
pretend to. I don't even expect them to forgive me, and I'm not asking
for it. That kind of forgiveness is of God. And if they have it, they
have it, and if they don't, well, maybe they'll find it someday.
Dobson: Do you deserve the punishment the state has inflicted upon you?
Bundy: That's a very good question, and I'll answer it very honestly. I
don't want to die. I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment
society has, and I think society deserves to be protected from me and
from others like me. That's the irony. What I'm talking about is going
beyond retribution because there is no way in the world that killing me
is going to restore those beautiful children to their parents and
correct and soothe the pain. But I'll tell you, there are lots of other
kids playing in streets around this country today who are going to be
dead tomorrow and the next day and the next day and next month, because
other young people are reading the kinds of things and seeing the kinds
of things that are available in the media today.
Dobson: And yet, you told me last night, and I have heard that you have
accepted the forgiveness of Jesus Christ, and are a follower and a
believer in Him. Do you draw strength from that as you approach these
final hours?
Bundy: I do. I can't say that being in the valley of the shadow of death
is something that I've become all that accustomed to, and that I'm
strong and nothing's bothering me. Listen, it's no fun. It gets kind of
lonely, and yet, I have to remind myself that every one of us will go
through this someday in one way or another...and countless millions who
have walked this earth before us have, so this is just an experience
which we all share. Here I am.
With that, Ted Bundy was led away with his arms cuffed behind his back.
At seven o'clock the following morning, he was buckled into the electric
chair, and his soul went into eternity. If anyone ever deserved to be
executed, it was this man. He brutally killed without mercy and
inflicted incredible pain on the families and friends of his victims.
What a tragedy! There is a possibility, at least, that it would not have
occurred if that thirteen-year-old boy had never stumbled onto
pornographic magazines in a garbage dump. He was one of those people who
was terribly vulnerable to depictions of sexualized violence.
Bundy was correct in saying that most serial murderers are addicted to
hard-core pornography. FBI records validate that point. Not every person
exposed to obscenity will become a killer, of course, but too many will!
If only five or ten people in a nation become serial murderers per year,
each killing twenty-eight people, it is too many!
Unfortunately, the willingness of men in our culture to harm women is
far more widespread than that. Two researchers at UCLA studied this
impulse among "normal" university men. They asked hundreds of male
sophomores, "Would you rape a woman if you knew you would never get
caught?" More than 50 percent said "Yes."
Pornography Often Leads to Violent Crime
Common sense tells us that providing potentially violent men with highly
erotic depictions of rape, murder, and torture is dangerous and stupid.
Yet there is very little restraint on what the pornographers are able to
produce and sell in this country. And remember this: Hunters read
hunting magazines, fishermen read fishing magazines, computer
specialists read computer magazines, and you can be sure that men who
find it exciting to assault women sexually read magazines and watch
videos that depict that terrible abuse.
What does this discussion mean for you? Just this: Remember that
pornography is dangerous. It can warp the mind and destroy sexual
intimacy in marriage. Stay away from it. A monster is crouched behind
that door.
Life on the Edge, Dr. James Dobson, Copyright 1995 Word
Publishing, Nashville, Tennessee. All rights reserved
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