Finally, His Side

Ted Bundy talks in the doc Conversations With a Killer.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

TED BUNDY, who was executed 30 years ago after confessing to the murder of 30 women, loved attention but didn’t want to be caught and punished for his crimes—a common conundrum among serial killers. Bundy was one of the most prolific and, if a new documentary is to be believed, one of the slipperiest, hiding in plain sight as the bodies piled up. Introverted and physically awkward as a child, and insecure about his family’s relative poverty in Tacoma, Washington, in an area full of well-off neighbors, he aged into a moderately good-looking young man and created a good-natured, awshucks persona that helped him insinuate himself among the random young women that he’d ultimately murder and sometimes rape, before or after their deaths. Other times, he simply invaded their homes and murdered them while they slept; his first documented victim, student and dancer Karen Sparks, was beaten in her own bed with a metal rod that Bundy used to violate her.