Ted Bundy Case

Theodore Robert Bundy was an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of young women and girls between 1974 and 1978, beginning in Washington state and extending his crimes to Oregon, Colorado, Utah, Idaho and Florida. The multi-state span of his crimes forced investigators in different jurisdictions to compare notes: in November 1975 the three principal Bundy investigators, from Utah, Washington and Colorado, met in Aspen, Colorado, and exchanged information with thirty detectives and prosecutors from five states. After escaping custody twice in Colorado in 1977, Bundy was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on February 10, 1978, and was arrested five days later in Pensacola, Florida, following a further attack at a Florida State University sorority house. Forensic odontologist testimony matching Bundy's distinctively crooked teeth to a bite mark left on the body of victim Lisa Levy was decisive at his 1979 trial, one of the first major American murder convictions secured substantially on bite-mark evidence, a forensic discipline that later came under sustained scientific criticism. Bundy was convicted, sentenced to death and executed in Florida's electric chair on January 24, 1989. The true scope of his crimes remains disputed: he was confirmed to have murdered at least twenty women and girls, confessed to about thirty killings shortly before his execution, and investigators have long suspected the true total exceeds thirty-six.