Ted Bundy is a name synonymous with evil, murder and destruction, but interest in the character has been reignited with Netflix’s recent announcement that they’re going to release a new four part docuseries on the serial killer that will feature several never before heard interviews with him from his days on Death Row.
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One interview that has been in the public sphere for a long time though is his final one with campaigner James Dobson, just hours before he was due to be sentenced to death. In it, Bundy talks about what drove him to become a serial killer and just how normal he seemed to everyone else in his life on the outset.
It’s pretty haunting stuff – you can watch it below or just read some of the relevant sections underneath that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlk_sRU49TI
As a young boy – and I mean a boy of 12 or 13 certainly – I encountered outside the home softcore 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.
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 behaviour that is just too terrible to describe.
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.
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 recognise 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.
I mean I don’t know what to say about that? I guess it’s what he thought and you can’t deny it, but is pornography really the root of all evil? Good question and one I’m not really prepared to answer in a couple of sentences. Hopefully the Netflix series will do a better job of it than me.
For more of the same, check out five of the twisted and most disturbed serial killers out there – who would probably do a good job of being a politician too. Seriously.
