#yet I’ve heard no hulabaloo about it

[luckthebard]

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[burning-waters]

Ted Bundy Tapes review: review of a serial killer

Hey, followers! I’m starting this thing that I’m not sure what to call yet, but it’s me reviewing things I watch or read. (My cousin Lucas suggested I start it, so if you like it, you can thank him. I'll put up his phone number soon so you can give him the congratulations on my job well done.) Here’s the first! This isn’t the ideal first thing to review, since it’s a documentary and most of this is me reviewing the man himself, but this series made me think, and so I’m writing about it. It’s long, and I promise you not all I review will be this long (Can I truly promise that? Who knows.)!

It was the 70s, and the United States was not ready for its first recorded serial killer.

I know it came out a while ago, and there was a whole hulabaloo about it then, but Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes has been on my watch list on Netflix for a while and I’ve only just found the courage to watch it.  It is the telling of the story of a serial killer, encompassing my twin passions: stories and psychology.

It was truly a rollercoaster from start to finish, as I did not entirely know what to expect from it. Certainly it was going to be a documentary, but I haven’t been in contact with many of those, so I wasn’t prepared for how moved I would be by its source material and witnesses. This was different from what I had watched and read before: fiction. This was real, with real news and court footage, real friends and family, real tape recordings of conversations with him on death row. And you can’t get more haunting than reality.

From a storytelling standpoint, it was well executed. You wouldn’t think that, from the start. The timeline jumps in between Bundy’s earlier life (told by himself) and his first killings (told by people who worked the case). At first it annoyed me that they wouldn’t stick to one period of time. But then I realized what they were doing: Ted Bundy didn’t care about anyone but himself. What mattered to him was his story, not the people he killed. Once the story got to him finally becoming a suspect, the timelines of conversation and retelling of the events converged and the story became one. It was as if now he couldn’t help but be involved. By that point in the taped interview, they managed to get him to talk about what he had done, even though only in the third person. He wouldn’t confess to any of it until his final days on death row.

You can’t talk about the documentary without talking about the man himself and his troubled psychology. I’ve worked with people in a psychiatric ward (none of them convicted serial killers, but troubled people all the same), and now I appreciate all the paperwork we had to do about the people in it, and appreciate even more the guidelines put in place to keep everyone safe.  

The man wasn’t deranged, but smart in his own way. He went through college, and was getting his law degree when he was caught. He escaped from custody twice, and planned both escapes with precision. When he fled the second time, he was on the run for months, using stolen credit cards and cars. But what got to me was how I doubted his guilt, just like his friends and family had done. He seemed to be a charming man, who wouldn’t do any harm. He made people laugh and feel at ease. That is how he convinced his victims to come without a fuss.

When he was caught and in the courtroom, he was a frightening man, and his pride was more important than being smart. He wasn’t necessarily frightening in an alarming sense, at least not from the start. When he wasn’t allowed to talk to the press after having been officially caught as the serial killer he was, he became erratic and unsettled. He needed the attention, needed to be heard, as if he were being wronged and framed. His defense lawyer wanted him to plead guilty because he didn’t see a good outcome with all the evidence against Bundy. The man agreed to do so, but when it came to it, he pled innocent and wanted to be his own defense. Therefore, in court, he was allowed to interrogate witnesses. This didn’t do him much good. He asked for the crime scenes to be described in detail, more than once. This showed more than an interest in them, but a sick awe of them, of what he had done. He relished in the outcome of his monstrosity.

When asked if he did any of what he was convicted of, he smiled and said he didn’t do it. It makes you wonder if he considered himself to be two people: the Ted who killed young women, and the Ted who was innocent. He was in complete denial of what he had done and only confessed to his 30 crimes when he thought it would postpone his scheduled death by electric chair. This was a man with no empathy, no guilt, and no remorse. And yet his friends and family couldn’t see it.

Was he a monster since birth, with no empathy inside him? Or did he become one when he wouldn’t fight against the voice in his head that told him to kill? Did an initial lack of empathy only facilitate this? People can be born with that screw loose. People can be influenced by pornography like he said he and the other inmates were, but does that make them all susceptible to kill? A professional who analyzed him said he was bipolar, but does all that put together excuse what he did? What about the curious people who gathered to see his court proceedings, who gathered around the prison he was being kept at and cheered on the day of his death, with posters telling him to burn? Isn’t all life sacred? Should one cheer for another’s death, even if it were to be the death of a man such as Ted Bundy? Or can that also be considered a monstrosity? Would you have cheered along with them?