Heh. I ended up digging out my copy of Ann Rule's 'The Stranger Beside Me' and rereading it. Rule's account of Ted Bundy, the trials, the publicity, the groupies, is fascinating. My copy is one that was updated in 2000. Reading the final chapter, "Update: 20 Years Later" Rule was still struggling to understand wtf is up with murder groupies. She'd spent decades amongst some of the worst monsters imaginable and the people who hunted them, but she remained flummoxed by the groupies. When she wrote the update in 2000, she was still getting letters from women who were mourning Bundy and were convinced that he was just misunderstood. Underneath he was a good person with a terrible illness, and that nearly every one of them was convinced that if they'd just been able to meet him he'd have fallen in love with them and be redeemed, and that they
wouldn't get their brains bashed out of their skulls (literally) with a crowbar and raped while their corpse was still twitching. And raped again after their corpse stopped twitching. And again and again until the corpse was too decomposed to rape.
The worst example of this was
Carole Ann Boone. Rule never corresponded with the woman, but she does give a good account of the way Boone and Bundy managed to exploit a strange loophole in the law, that allowed them to be
legally married after a bizarre little line of 'questioning', with Boone as a witness on the stand. Bundy acted as his own lawyer (as he did often) during his murder trial. Rule explained how it worked but it all went over my little brain. The extent of my ability to read legal documents is legislation specific to my job, so if anyone's familiar with this, it'd be great if you could explain it slowly and with small words for me. Boone went on to have Bundy's whelp which she also proudly showed off to the world. Popular belief is that she was knocked up behind the soft drink machines during visiting hours to Death Row. Rule repeats this in her book as such, however,
this article from an anonymous correctional officer says that she Bundy passed a condom full of his semen from his mouth to hers as they kissed. I dunno which is true, but given the way Boone would drag her teenage son (no relation to Bundy, she'd had the son to an ex before all this happened) to all of the trials and visits in jail and all that shit, smearing the kid's face all over the news and making certain that the whole world knew that the boy's stepfather was/is one of the most notorious murderers in the English speaking world, I think it's easy to conclude that Boone was
absolutely a classy and very intelligent lady who loved and cared deeply for her children. As opposed to being a brainless gold digger who was convinced that she was going to make a mint on payments for interviews after Bundy was finally knocked off. Towards the end she appeared to finally grasp how high up she was on the list of most hated women in America, so by the time Bundy was executed she was nowhere to be seen. A very quick search suggests that neither Boone nor her and Bundy's daughter have had much to do with the media since. It can only be hoped that Boone finally realised what a shit awful mother and general human being she was, and that her daughter would always be hunted and harassed all of her life, because of her biological father. I feel for both Boone's son and her and Bundy's daughter, but Boone herself is a fucking eight day old, shit smeared sanitary napkin, soaked with urine.
It must be stated that Bundy himself had all the hallmarks of a shit awful childhood. There's a belief held very strongly by those close to him, including Ann Rule and his own near relatives, that his biological father was his own grandfather, the product of incest with his mother and her own father. Accounts state that Bundy's father/grandfather was violent, abusive, vicious and psychotic, and tortured both animals and people with abandon. All the while he was pulling off a Jekyll and Hyde act as a respectable Christian minister. Rule relates how an aunt of Bundy woke up in the middle of the night to find herself surrounded by knives. They'd been taken from the kitchen drawer and arranged very carefully and quietly all around her on the mattress so that she didn't wake up until the arrangement was finished. The culprit was her nephew, Theodore, who she saw was standing very close to her and grinning.
Who was three years old. When you've a monster who has all the signs of being
born with this brand of insanity, I think that the only thing you really can do is lock them up to protect society.
Bundy is suspected of kidnapping and murdering an eight year old child,
Ann Marie Burr, while he was just fourteen years old. He denied it but frankly, anyone who'd have heard him say that the sky was blue would have been compelled to go outside and check. At the end of her book, Rule says that she believes that Bundy's real victim count was over a hundred. Others concurred, including one of
his own lawyers. (And there were many of those lawyers; he kept firing them.) What a delightfully charming scamp he was!
According to Rule, during all of Bundy's trials and appeals there were always groupies packed into the courtroom, all attractive young women that he'd be
delighted to be alone with in other circumstances, oohing and ahhing as he posed for the camera and played his own lawyer, and in general did a very charming and attractive impression of batshit insanity.
Unfortunately, even in these so called enlightened times times, people tend to attribute admirable traits to monsters, even with so much information about anything and anyone only a few key taps and a phone line away.
Take
Malcom Nagen for example; while he was on the run he'd attained a mythic status, became a folk hero and a larrikin, sort of a modern day Ned Kelly, leading the bumbling policemen around and around. People left food out for him and quietly cheered him on... and it never crossed their minds to look him up. If they'd had, they'd have realised that he was not on the run for knocking over a bank or two.
He was on the run because he was a rapist and a murderer, and when he was finally caught he cheerfully admitted that he'd loved every single second of his crimes and given opportunity he'd have made a habit of it.
Humans are weird.