It’s exactly what he would have wanted, surely? Ted Bundy would have loved to be played by an ex-Disney heart-throb. In a new film, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Zac Efron takes his shirt off, and winks to the camera, as he wins over Liz, his longtime partner – and all the other women in the film. This charming man. He won over a lot of women who continued to support him even though he confessed to murdering at least 30 women and may have been responsible for up to 100 deaths. Women flocked to the courtroom while he was being tried, slipping him love notes. They were fascinated.
Bundy, who turned women into pieces of meat, killed at a time when the young were freeing themselves from being simply meat – hitchhiking, and getting educated. Bundy would bludgeon or strangle attractive young women to death, he would rape them, often returning to their dead bodies, dressing and undressing their corpses, sometimes decapitating them, in order to bring their skulls home.
“His eyes went from blue to black” when he talked about his crimes, said a detective in the new Netflix series based on Bundy’s self-aggrandising tapes. Did they really?
Bundy once again resurfaces as the unlikely serial killer on the basis of his looks and apparent cleverness. Hang on. In the same way that juries won’t convict young men of rape because they don’t “need to” rape, isn’t there something perverse here in turning Bundy into a compelling anti-hero? Would anyone romanticise Fred West or Jeffrey Dahmer like this?
To listen to Bundy’s tapes is to strive for meaning, something beyond good and evil, and yet that “something” is entirely missing. He likes to talk of himself in the third person – of course he does. He feels somehow cheated and insecure around women. His answer to this is deeply ordinary: violence, control and possession. Towards the end of his life, this Republican would blame his evil deeds on pornography.
There is no deep and complex pathology here. His mediocrity is sociopathic. Women are the collateral damage. His killing is all that made him special. Yet serial killers are compelling to us, as if somehow this is a primal breaking of a taboo. But it’s the same old taboo, the killing and dismemberment of women and gay men. Each of them says the same thing as Bundy: “I thought I would be fulfilled.” But they are not. Until the next murder.
What can we say about the women who flock to these killers? Carole Ann Boone brought in drugs for Bundy and conceived a chid with him. Hybristophilia is the name given to the sexual arousal that comes from a partner who has committed a crime: the fantasy that you are special enough to give the love that would stop such a man doing the things he does. Your own narcissism works as long as the man is incarcerated, I guess. Lately, we have seen women kill in the TV series Killing Eve and Luther as a kind of sexual release. Is this a step forward? God knows.
I abhor this worshipping at the shrine of a mediocre rapist that much true crime and fiction consists of. No one is making these men heroes, some bright spark will argue. Really? Bundy is long gone, executed in 1989, and here he is again alive in our minds, immortal and sexualised. No longer ordinary. It is still all about him. Again. Can you name me one, just one of the young women whose lives he took?
