Fox News is reporting that cross country serial killer Ted Bundy’s former defense attorney contended that his client was “absolutely born evil,” which may help explain the trail of bodies he left from the Pacific Northwest to Florida in the 1970s.
The attorney, famed criminal defense lawyer John Henry Browne, appears in a Bundy documentary on the Oxygen channel’s “In Defense Of” series that focuses on relationships between “notorious defendants and their attorneys,” the story explains. According to Fox, the report airs this Sunday evening, July 15 at 8 p.m. on Oxygen.
It’s been almost 30 years since Bundy was executed in Florida on Jan. 24, 1989 at the age of 42. It is believed he killed at least 30 young women, and according to the Fox report, authorities suspect he may have been responsible for more…a lot more.
Ironically, tomorrow – July 14 – is the 34th anniversary of Bundy’s last and most notorious known offense in Washington State, the double-abduction and slayings of two victims from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah. Janice Ott and Denise Naslund both disappeared that day a few hours apart. Their remains, along with the remains of a third Bundy victim, Georgann Hawkins, who had disappeared from an alley along Greek Row just north of the University of Washington campus in Seattle on June 11, were discovered in early September 1974 by two hunters.
Bundy had one significant thing in common with many other serial killers, including Gary Ridgway, the infamous “Green River Killer,” another Evergreen State murderer. None of them used guns. In a fairly detailed biographical account found on Wikipedia, it is revealed that Bundy even once volunteered to help the Green River investigation.
The constant campaign to restrict firearms avoids stepping into the morass of serial murder. Perhaps that’s because they don’t traditionally use guns, even though they are responsible for body counts that rival, or exceed, most mass shooters. In the cases of Bundy and Ridgway, it would be a real race that exceeds even the Las Vegas massacre by Stephen Paddock that claimed 58 lives.
Bundy was executed, Paddock committed suicide at the scene and Ridgway remains incarcerated for life. Another mass shooter, Omar Mateen, the Pulse Nightclub perpetrator, was killed by police following a standoff.
Bundy, possibly the walking definition of pure sociopath, was born in Vermont but grew up in Tacoma, Washington, graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in 1965.
While some theorize he started killing as a teenager, Bundy’s real murder spree began in 1974 when women began disappearing in Washington and Oregon. Remains of several victims were found east of Issaquah, a Seattle suburb, in two locations.
The Fox story quotes attorney Browne: “Ted was the only person in my 40 years of being a lawyer that I would say that he was absolutely born evil.”
Bundy continued killing in Utah, Colorado and finally in Florida. His criminal career included two jail escapes in Colorado, auto theft, credit card theft, assault, kidnapping and, of course, multiple homicides. How many homicides will probably never be known for sure.
Mass murder and serial murder are two different things. What may set them apart more than any other detail is that after a mass murder committed by someone using a firearm, anti-gunners try to penalize every honest gun owner in the country.
But serial killers are singularly held responsible.
