Ted Bundy

http://looneybooks79.blog/2025/11/28/mijn-vriend-de-seriemoordenaar/

I think hardly anyone hasn’t at least once heard the name Ted Bundy. The name is synonymous with horrific murders, with one of the most notorious serial killers ever active in the United States (and that list is very long), and the name is also inextricably linked with Ann Rule—much to her own dismay.

Ann Rule (1931–2015) was once a police officer, but she had to give up that job and began writing true-crime articles for a magazine called True Detective. She once also volunteered at a crisis hotline that people in distress could call for advice or simply for someone to talk to… And that is where Ann met a charismatic, handsome young man with whom she would become good friends: Theodore Robert Bundy, aka Ted Bundy. During their volunteer work they functioned as a true team, and even outside the job they got along very well. Ann never would have expected that this man would one day be labeled one of the most infamous murderers in history.

After she gave up the volunteer work to fully commit herself to writing for the magazine, she got a book deal to write about the murders of young girls being committed in Seattle. In a very short time, these women were brutally murdered, and some were never found. The only information witnesses or the lucky ones who escaped the man could give the police was that he drove a Volkswagen Beetle, that he often had an arm or leg in a cast and asked for help that way, and that one person had been able to pass on the name “Ted” to the police. At a certain point the murders in Washington state stopped, but it soon became clear that similar murders were being committed in other American states: Utah, Colorado, and eventually Florida.

Although Ann didn’t want to believe it, and although Ted himself denied it—even after he was arrested when he came under suspicion—doubt began to creep into her conviction that the man she saw as a friend might not be as innocent as he claimed. But as long as there was no proof, he remained innocent until proven guilty.

Ted Bundy was someone who could easily wrap the people around him around his finger; he was extremely charismatic. But he was also very self-important, difficult to work with (especially with lawyers—he preferred to defend himself in court), and he was an escape artist. Twice he managed to break out of jail. But Bundy made a mistake when he fled to Florida and resurfaced there, because in that state the death penalty was (and is?) still in force. After being stopped by highway patrol, Bundy was captured—almost stupidly—and this time for good. There would be no more escapes.

What followed was a trial unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Ann followed everything closely, still not completely convinced of Bundy’s guilt. But the evidence was overwhelming and undeniable: Ted Bundy had brutally murdered, raped, and mutilated multiple women in several states. (To this day, a few of them have never been found.)

This book also shows very clearly how conflicted Ann Rule herself felt, as she slowly distanced herself from the friendship while realizing that her friend was a manipulative serial killer, yet still managed to describe the case objectively and follow the search for the perpetrator. The book was originally published in 1980, a year after Bundy was sentenced to death. Over the years, it was republished with new afterwords by the author and new information that emerged over time—and of course Bundy’s own efforts to avoid the electric chair. The afterword from 1989 is the most intense, because in it Ann Rule describes how Bundy eventually admitted that he was the murderer of the already-known victims (and even some children) but also confessed to several murders no one knew about. Shortly afterward, he did in fact end up in the electric chair.

Ann Rule died in 2015. Her daughter, Leslie Rule, added one last afterword to the book in 2021.

I have been fascinated by the man for a very long time—ever since, as a young teenager in the 1990s, I saw the film The Deliberate Stranger. In that movie, Mark Harmon (chosen as “Sexiest Man Alive” in the mid-eighties) portrays Ted Bundy with the necessary charisma. Since then, I’ve been searching for this film on DVD, but I haven’t yet had the luck of finding it at a reasonable price. A lot has been written about Bundy already, and plenty of movies and TV series mention his name, but this book follows the case at the moment Bundy was actively committing his horrific crimes, and was written by someone who stood very close to him. So for anyone who loves true crime, or who wants to try to gain insight into “why someone would do something like this,” I highly recommend this book. (Not that you will get real answers, but the book paints a picture that you cannot always trust the people closest to you.)