Denise Oliverson

For the first three years of his life, Bundy lived in the Philadelphia suburb of Roxborough, Pennsylvania, with his maternal grandparents, Samuel Knecht Cowell (1898–1983) and Eleanor Miriam Longstreet (1895–1971) who raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied birth outside of wedlock at that time.

Family, friends, and even young Ted were told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister.

Bundy eventually discovered the truth about his family, although his recollections of the circumstances varied; he told a girlfriend that a cousin showed him a copy of his birth certificate after calling him a "bastard," but he told biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth that he had found the certificate himself.

Theodore Robert Bundy (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier.

Ted Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, to Eleanor Louise Cowell (1924–2012) at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont.

His biological father's identity has never been confirmed; his original birth certificate apparently assigns paternity to a salesman and United States Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, though a copy of it listed his father as unknown.

Louise claimed she met a war veteran named Jack Worthington, who abandoned her soon after she became pregnant.

Census records reveal that several men by the name of John Worthington and Lloyd Marshall lived near Louise when Bundy was conceived.

Some family members expressed suspicions that Bundy was sired by Louise's own father.

In 1950, Louise changed her surname from Cowell to Nelson and, at the urging of multiple family members, left Philadelphia with Ted to live with cousins Alan and Jane Scott in Tacoma, Washington.

Biographer and true crime writer Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally, wrote that he did not find out until 1969, when he located his original birth record in Vermont.

Bundy expressed a lifelong resentment toward his mother for never telling him about his real father, and for leaving him to discover his true parentage for himself.

Bundy occasionally exhibited disturbing behavior at an early age.

Louise's younger sister, Julia Cowell, recalled awakening from a nap to find herself surrounded by knives from the kitchen, and her 3-year-old nephew standing by the bed, smiling.

In some interviews, Bundy spoke warmly of his grandparents and told Rule that he "identified with," "respected," and "clung to" his grandfather.

After more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 murders committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978.

His true victim total is unknown.

Bundy often employed charm to disguise his murderous intent when kidnapping victims, and extended this tactic vis-à-vis law enforcement, the media and the criminal justice system to maintain his claims of innocence.

His usual technique involved approaching a female in public and luring her to a vehicle parked in a more secluded area, at which point she would be beaten unconscious, restrained with handcuffs and taken elsewhere to be sexually assaulted and killed.

To this end, Bundy typically simulated having a physical impairment such as an injury in order to convince his target that he was in need of assistance with something, or would dupe her into believing he was an authority figure.

He frequently revisited the bodies of those he abducted, grooming and performing sex acts on the corpses until decomposition and destruction by wild animals made further interactions impossible.

He decapitated at least 12 of his victims, keeping their severed heads as mementos in his apartment.

On a few occasions, he broke into homes at night and bludgeoned, maimed, strangled and/or sexually assaulted his victims in their sleep.

In 1975, Bundy was arrested and jailed in Utah for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault.

He then became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in several states.

Facing murder charges in Colorado, Bundy engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults in Florida, including three murders, before his ultimate recapture in 1978.

In 1987, however, he and other family members told attorneys that Samuel was a tyrannical bully who beat his wife and dog, swung neighborhood cats by their tails, and expressed racist and xenophobic attitudes.

In one instance, Samuel reportedly threw Julia down a flight of stairs for oversleeping.

He would sometimes speak aloud to unseen presences, and at least once flew into a violent rage when the question of Bundy's paternity was raised.

Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient woman who periodically underwent electroconvulsive therapy for depression and feared to leave their house toward the end of her life.

These descriptions of Bundy's grandparents have been questioned in more recent investigations.

Some locals remembered Samuel as a "fine man" and expressed bewilderment at the reports of him being violent.

"The characterization that [Sam] was a raging alcoholic and animal abuser was a convenient characterization used to make people justify why Ted was the way he was," said one of Bundy's cousins.

"From my limited exposure to him, nothing could be farther from the truth. His daughters loved him dearly and had nothing but fond memories of him."

In addition, Louise's sister, Audrey Cowell, stated that their mother could not leave her home because she suffered a stroke due to being overweight and was not mentally ill.

For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two trials, and was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Raiford on January 24, 1989.

Biographer Ann Rule characterized him as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death and even after."

Bundy once described himself as "the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet", a statement with which attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, agreed.

"Ted", she wrote, "was the very definition of heartless evil."

However, in the 2020 documentary film Crazy, Not Insane, psychiatrist Dorothy Otnow Lewis claimed she received a sample of Bundy's blood and that a DNA test had confirmed that Bundy was not the product of incest.