Case file 0055
Ted Bundy: The Manhunt and the Crimes Behind the Infamy
A multistate investigation and separate prosecutions should not be collapsed into a single victim count.
Ted Bundy's crimes crossed several states and produced more than one prosecution. The FBI's history describes women disappearing in Washington in 1974, a later Utah arrest and conviction, and two escapes from Colorado custody in 1977. [S1]
A fugitive investigation
After the second escape, the FBI circulated identifying material, processed fingerprints and added Bundy to its Ten Most Wanted list in February 1978. A Pensacola officer stopped him in a stolen vehicle later that month, and the identification material helped establish who had been arrested. [S1]
The manhunt is one part of the history. It should not displace the individual crimes or suggest that a wanted poster itself established guilt.
The Florida victims
The Florida Supreme Court's account of the Chi Omega prosecution names Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy as the women killed in the January 1978 attacks. Kathy Kleiner, Karen Chandler and Cheryl Thomas survived assaults considered in the same proceeding. The judgment included two murder convictions and three attempted-murder convictions. [S2]
Those names and offense counts describe a specific case. They are more informative than an undifferentiated total assembled from confessions, suspicions and convictions across jurisdictions.
The limit of the total
The FBI records that Bundy was eventually convicted and executed and had admitted more than two dozen killings. It also states uncertainty about the beginning and full extent of his crimes. [S1]
An admission is not the same record as a recovered victim or a separately adjudicated count. The uncertainty should remain visible without becoming an invitation to attach every unsolved disappearance to him.
The notoriety can make the offender seem like the whole story. The court record restores the people attacked and the particular judgments entered for what happened to them.