Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes

More of a conventional documentary than advertised, but it provides a good overview, and is a nice companion to the film

Everybody's fascinated with the notion that there is cause and effect. That we can put our finger on it and say, "Yes, his father beat him when he was a boy, we could see it when he was a kid." That's bullshit. There's nothing in my background which would lead one to believe that I was capable of committing murder.

• Ted Bundy

There are was a gap in him.

• Sandi Holt (Bundy's childhood friend)

I don't feel guilty for any of it. I feel less guilt__y now than I've felt at any time in my whole life. About anything. I mean really. And it's not that I've forgotten anything or I've closed down part of my mind or compartmentalised. I believe I understand everything that I've done. I am in the enviable position of not having to feel any guilt. And that's it. Guilt is this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's this kind of social control mechanism and it's very unhealthy.

• Ted Bundy

_When Bundy first became active in the early 1970s, there was a lot of pushback from veteran detectives, who said, "we know who kills people; people kill people that they know, and if not, they kill for a really obvious reason - anger, money, to hide their identity, and these either blood or familial connections, or the obvious motive, are what you have to follow when you're trying to solve the crime." And Ted came along and showed the world, "no. In fact, that's the last thing that I would do, I kill strangers, and I kill them for no reason." And so there was an institutional group think that prevented the cops from even considering a guy like Ted, because he didn't meet any of their expectations, and they refused to even look at it. So that was a huge advantage for him, and it was true in every jurisdiction that the problem in stopping him had a lot to do with the fact that no one could conceive of somebody just...