This week, we’re getting into Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. This four-part docuseries follows the crimes of one of America’s most notorious killers, Ted Bundy. From 1974-1978, Bundy committed a multitude of crimes, including murdering over 30 women in 7 states. The series is based on the book of the same name, written by journalist and author Stephen Michaud. Stephen recorded over 100 hours of his interviews with Ted Bundy, which the series features heavily. We brought in journalist Taylor Crumpton, who has written about Ted Bundy for Teen Vogue and covers social justice in publications like Paper Mag and Glamour, to interview Stephen.
This week, we’re getting into Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. This four-part docuseries follows the crimes of one of America’s most notorious killers, Ted Bundy. From 1974-1978, Bundy committed a multitude of crimes, including murdering over 30 women in 7 states.
The series is based on the book of the same name, written by journalist and author Stephen Michaud. Stephen recorded over 100 hours of his interviews with Ted Bundy, which the series features heavily. We brought in journalist Taylor Crumpton, who has written about Ted Bundy for Teen Vogue and covers social justice in publications like Paper Mag and Glamour, to interview Stephen.
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Rae: Welcome to You Can’t Make This Up, a companion podcast from Netflix. I’m Rae Votta and I’m hosting this week’s episode. Here on You Can’t Make This Up, we go behind the scenes of Netflix original true crimes stories with special guests. This week we’re getting into the Ted Bundy case. This four-part docuseries follows the crimes of one of America’s most notorious killers, Ted Bundy. From 1974 to 1978, Bundy committed a multitude of crimes, including murdering over 30 women in seven states. The series is based on the book of the same name, written by journalist and author Stephen Michaud. Stephen recorded over 100 hours of his interviews with Ted Bundy, which the series features heavily. While previously you could read transcripts of the interviews in Stephen’s book, this is the first time we’re able to hear them and listen to Ted Bundy in his own words. We brought in journalist Taylor Crumpton, who has written about Ted Bundy for Teen Vogue and covers social justice in publications like Paper Mag and Glamour. So let’s get to that interview.
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Taylor: Stephen, thank you so much for talking to me this morning. How are you?
Stephen: I’m just fine. We’re getting ready to get frozen to death here. But right now is just great.
Taylor: Oh no, that’s terrible. So for listeners who don’t know you, could you briefly explain your connection to the docuseries?
Stephen: I’m Stephen Michaud. And back in the early 1980s I conducted a series of journalistic interviews with Ted Bundy at the Florida State Prison over a period of about six months. And those conversations became the basis of the docuseries Conversations with a Killer. There are tapes as well that my partner Hugh Aynesworth recorded with Bundy in the same period of time.
Taylor: And I know, as someone who has watched this series, you spoke about how you recorded over 100 hours of tape with him. And you were very personal. Y’all had similar shared lived experiences of growing up in the Vermont and Seattle area. So could you kind of speak about how it was even being in that room with him consistently?
Stephen: Well, these interviews were done for the most part in a small office right in the center of the prison. It had windows on three sides. And Ted and I would sit together at a table with two chairs and an ashtray. It was very claustrophobic and it was also—There were lots of things to make you nervous. In my case, I had misrepresented myself when I went into the prison. I said that I was an investigator for the appeals attorneys, and that wasn’t true. I had a private investigator’s license. But I just knew that if I said I was a journalist, they weren’t going to let me walk in and out of the prison for six months to interview their most famous serial killer. So all the way through that, the back of my head was, God, are they listening to this and at what point are they going to come in and grab me by the scruff of my neck and march me out or march me into my own cell. So that was one level of nervousness. There was also the constant stress of basically sparring with a sociopath. I didn’t know what a sociopath was when I first went in there. I mean, I think I probably could’ve told you that it’s a person who lacks any remorse for anything that they’ve ever done and they can’t feel any guilt. Never having consciously encountered a sociopath, I didn’t know how their minds worked. I got a lesson. I got really schooled by time I was through with Ted. And then there was on top of that the problem that Ted was claiming still at that time that he was totally innocent, which was patently untrue. So I had to figure out a way to coax him into talking about what I wanted to discuss with him, that is the murders. And that required in the end just taking a guess that the way into Ted’s head was to treat him basically like a 12 year old. Because in a lot of ways that’s all that he was. He had, he was a case of arrested development. And I said to Ted, you know more about these cases, all of these cases all over the country than anybody. Tell me from your expert point of view what led to these killings, what motivated the person to do them, what went on inside his head, what was the objective, why were these women killed, and anything else you can add to help me understand this person. And Ted grabbed the tape recorder out of my hand and kind of curled himself around it and lit a cigarette and off we went. And for the next six months, most of it was Ted conducting a monologue with me prompting him from time to time and lighting his cigarettes and changing the tapes.
Taylor: Yeah, I’ve noticed that in the past several years there’s been this spike in content regarding true crime. The movie that’s coming out starring Zac Efron. There’s new documentaries coming out every day about serial killers and kind of like this history. So how do you feel about the uprise in this current phenomenon?
Stephen: Well, in some ways I guess it’s just a new generation discovering these guys. I mean, the original interest in serial killers came in the 1970s. The term wasn’t even known. And when I first met Ted, nobody had ever used the term serial killer. But he and a lot of other guys just sort of seemed to come out of the woodwork at the same time. There were maybe 10 or 15 of them that everybody knew their names. They were kind of a select circle of aberrant offenders. I think that people who, you know, didn’t live through all of that are sort of newly aware of what went on and what is probably still going on. I think, you know, instead of driving around the way Ted did and other guys did, I think most of them are probably operating on the internet.
Taylor: I’ve been thinking a lot about Ted Bundy and the kind of context of this new generation that you’ve spoken of. When we’re in the eras of Me Too and awareness around sexual assault and violence for folks with marginalized identity, and especially in Ted’s case I was curious about how much of his kind of anonymous being able to walk into a crowd and not be seen is tied a lot to his white male privilege and his identity. Because several times throughout the documentary series, we kind of witness this very positive treatment of Ted by law enforcement officials. And even in the Florida trial, you know, at the end of it, the judge kind of compliments him for his actions in the courtroom, for defending himself, even making a statement that “I wish you were a lawyer so you could practice in front of me.” So I saw several times throughout this series about a lot of this confusion because Ted, in my opinion, kind of weaponized his white male identity to hide in plain sight. And I was curious if you kind of saw any of that in your reporting or maybe thinking of it now as we’re talking about, you know, these intersectional social justice movements, if you think that Ted’s whiteness had anything to play in his anonymous factor.
Stephen: Those are all good points. My consciousness was not nearly raised enough back in 1980 to think of this in those terms. But there’s truth in what you say. Ted’s whiteness and his blandness worked very much in his favor. As a sociopath, he worked very hard at making himself appear friendly, appear, you know, kind of concerned, mild. One of the things that was important in his story in understanding Ted is the number of people who knew him who were absolutely persuaded he could not have done any of these crimes. But to help put a little more focus on your points, not only was he a white male but he was a Republican and a four-square Republican. And you could go further. His victims were all white women. I don’t think he attacked a single woman of color. Most serial killers tend to have a kind of profile victim. And many of them focus, for instance, on prostitutes. Some of them focus on old people. Ted took what he liked to think of as high-value targets. These were for the most part college coeds, attractive young women, all white, all going to large respectable institutions. And to give you, you know, to give you something more to think about, part of what he was doing was getting his revenge because he felt that he had been passed over.
Taylor: Yeah, I think his anger was so rooted in his whiteness. And if we look at whiteness, it’s this kind of power structure and dynamic of very much ownership and control, which even is kind of reminiscent of how he committed acts of sexual assaults against his victims. And I was thinking about in the context of a lot of sexual assault movements, whether it be Me Too, whether it be Harvey Weinstein, whether it be some other charges, there’s always kind of like this feeling of ownership and control. Like this is mine. I can exact control upon it. And I saw that a lot throughout the series with Ted and how his relations with women or those who identified as female always came from this like aggressive defiant standpoint.
Stephen: Well, yes. Again, Ted notably said to me one time that the object of what this person was doing was possession. The word was possession. And he said “as you might possess a potted plant or a painting or a Porsche.” But objectification taken to a malignant level, I think that those, that his victims were in some ways completely abstract to him. It was important, I know, not to have conversations with them. He said that he would, you know, he would only talk to them enough to get them in a compromised position where he could immobilize them or kill them. You know, he did not chat with them over a long period of time. And he said that there was always a problem if he did, that they would start emerging as a human, as a real person and would screw up his fantasy. I find it troubling to talk to other men of any age and the conversations tend to run towards wonderment about, wow, how did he do that? One of the things that we try to do in the books and I think, again, that the series also does is point out that Ted was a coward. There was nothing difficult about what he did. And he and I spoke about this a great deal, that in those days you probably could get away with kidnapping and killing young women much easier than you could stealing stuff from a supermarket. And I know it sounds bizarre, but I think it’s functionally true that serial murder is actually one of the simpler crimes to get away with and one that to a certain set of men—and serial killers are overwhelmingly males—the rewards, the potential rewards in their value system are wonderful. You get to possess what you want to possess, a dead woman.
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Man: Women are possessions, beings which are subservient, more often than not to males. Women are merchandise. From the pornographic through Playboy right on up to the evening news.
Taylor: But I think Ted, you know, he spoke a lot about wanting to be an attorney and wanting to be a political activist and wanting to kind of garner this [unintelligible 00:12:49] of fame. And it seemed like almost as if he was entitled to be the center of attention. He always wanted to be in charge of his narrative and story, whether that was first with you and he kind of just wanted to speak about his childhood and not pay attention to the murders that he committed or, whenever he was arrested, trying to talk to the press or as far as being co-counsel when he had no law degree. He always tried to place himself in the center. And for me, I think it’s because all the values that he grew up with told him that he could be the center of attention as a white male.
Stephen: There’s something else that you have to bear in mind with him is that he, as is typical of these guys, was a narcissist and he was paranoid. And those two personality flaws or personality disorders interplay very closely across his life. For example, when Ted was in court, the paranoia reveals itself in his distrust for his attorneys, that he thought they were plotting against him. And the narcissism drove him to make a spectacle of himself. So he’s—You know, I’m not arguing with any of your insights. But I sometimes think of Ted as this big ball of energy, malignant energy, being guided by these—you know, what they say in meteorology—the steering winds of his other, of his paraphilias and of his other personality disorders. I guess, again I’m being really circuitous here, but I think that Ted, well, I know that Ted was not particularly self-aware. When we started talking about him in the third person, he had really no clue—I mean, I really honestly believe this—he had no clue as to how it happened that he started doing what he started to do. He told me details how it grew, I mean, the stages of it and all the rest of it. I remember him saying to me one time he faulted what he became, he faulted society. And what he faulted society for was giving people such as him too many choices. And his way of illustrating that was to say that perhaps if this individual, as he often referred to himself, was raised in a really highly restrictive hierarchical society that all of this evil plasma inside of him would’ve expressed himself in demon stamp collecting. This then gets us back to the fascination with Ted is that he was brilliant at exploiting the structure of society, I guess is a way to say it, the presuppositions, the kind of undigested assumptions about how things are. So, yeah, I think all of what you say is true.
Taylor: I was thinking about how you brought up how Ted represented himself during the trial. And it was very similar to me to how the Charleston shooter Dylann Roof also represented himself during the trial. And if you look at their case, even Dylann’s legal team attempted to utilize the competency test to kind of make sure that he didn’t have this grasp of the responsibility on his actions. And if, even if you look at his case, it’s so similar to Ted, how he proclaimed that he was innocent, how he represented himself and, then if we want to get very eerily, how the police department treated Dylann Roof in a verily similar manner to how Ted Bundy was treated. I mean, there was meals given to him. There was like this very kind of assumptions of like he’s a good guy, it’s all good. Even though both of them had committed these very violent acts. So if we’re kind of looking at like this archetype that Ted Bundy has laid down, it has really kind of like budded into these other white male serial killers who are utilizing the same kind of foundation that he built decades before that we’re still seeing now.
Stephen: My filter tells me that what I’m hearing is that these societal structures are still very much in place and they still encourage the development of the kind of behavior that we saw with Ted. Maybe not so artful as Ted was. And maybe that, you know, that as we, you know, we learn more about these guys, maybe the law enforcement officials are further up the learning curve. I mean, I’ll give you an example. When Bundy first became active in the early 1970s, there was a lot of pushback from veteran detectives who said, you know, we know who kills people, we know who—People kill people that they know and they kill them—And if not, they kill them for a really obvious reason: anger, money, to, you know, to hide, you know, hide their identity. And these, either blood or familial connections or the obvious motive, is what you have to follow when you’re trying to solve the crime. And Ted came along and showed the world, no, no, no, no, in fact, that’s the last thing that I would do. I mean, I killed strangers and I killed them for a 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 feature somebody just going around killing people because he wanted to kill them. There was no rational motive for anything that the did. He was an aberrant killer. It was outside of their ken. And it really was outside their ken.
Taylor: And Ted had such a knowledge on how police departments work. I know in the series it talked about how he had an internship or some type of position within the Seattle police department and kind of figured out how these departments worked in siloes, never being in communication with each other. And it seems that in a sense he may have had a fondness for law enforcement. Because even when the escaped survivor went and identified him, he changed his appearance to match the law enforcement officers because he knew that he could easily blend in and to assimilate. So I always saw continuous during the series that he knew whenever he was in trouble or was going to get caught, to assimilate into this kind of position of power and privilege in which he could hypothetically walk through a wall.
Stephen: Well, let me give you some other little tidbits that are consistent with that. Ted used various guises when he was prowling, stalking for victims. One of them was the victim himself. He would, he had worked as a driver for a medical supply company and boosted stuff like plaster of Paris and slings and all this medical gear from the company. And then he would get himself up with a limp and with a sling and maybe some kind of thing on his hand or whatever and then go kind of hobbling down a street, usually at night, usually around a campus with his books or his, whatever, his briefcase, knowing that a young woman, if they saw him in extremis, would probably come along and say, “Can I carry your books for you? Can I do this? Can I do that?” And of course he would lead them to his car, where he would hit them over the head and off he went. That was one. Another one was authority figure. The one girl that we know that escaped him said that he had approached her as a rent-a-cop at a mall, telling her that somebody had broken into her car and she had to come out and identify it. Another time he posed as a fireman in the afternoon for a, to a teenage girl and said that, something to do with where her car was or something like that. So you’re right. He understood how these relationships work and exploited that. He did have some instincts of just a pure animal predator. But I think that, you know, that must have grown out of something he either intuited or worked very hard to understand. And I think I would tend towards the latter because I remember talking to him about his work in that study in Seattle. And it had to do with recidivism rates and that sort of thing. But what he did is he looked at a whole bunch of rap sheets from all these jurisdictions in the Northwest. And he figured out that, you know, a guy would get arrested for something and his name would go on a rap sheet. But you could not figure out from the rap sheet whatever happened to him. Did he get convicted? Did he, you know, what—They were always were incomplete. And so you, the recordkeeping was subpar and then the communication among these police departments was also nonexistent. So a dedicated predator such as Bundy with this maybe preconscious but nevertheless real anger in him would go to work to take advantage of those exact things that he was studying. He read detective magazines. He was a great fan of them, studying them for what kind of criminal advantage he could get from them. So he was a very active student of his psychopathology.
Taylor: And since you’ve been contributing so much to the Netflix documentary series, is there anything that you felt the series didn’t include or kind of profile in a right way?
Stephen: I’m very happy with the series. I was very eager to work with Joe Berlinger because I admired his material. We shared a determination to make this as honest and straightforward a series as possible. And the idea, which I think we achieved, was to get into Ted’s head. And that, I think that is the major contribution that this series is going to make.
Taylor: And I’m curious, since you are a journalist who has been reporting on true crimes for several decades, about what areas you’re focusing on now in 2019.
Stephen: Well, I’m sort of a reluctant serial killer criminal reporter. When I finished the Ted book, I thought I was going to go back to work and be a magazine journalist and I couldn’t get anybody to hire me. So I sort of became a book writer with a specialty in crime because of market forces. I had, you know, I had to eat. And I do do other things. It’s not a, you know, it’s not my exclusive interest. So I’ve got some stories that are more conventional, more, you know, people with real motives—greed, anger—more of a sort of a mainstream good old American killing. But they tend to be more multileveled than, you know, following around one serial killer. These are, you know, there’s a lot of participants in the plot or whatever the story is that makes them complex and interesting to me.
Taylor: Well, Stephen, I want to thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to me.
Stephen: I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. I think you taught me some things or you encouraged me to think in different ways. And so I owe you a thank you for that. I believe there’s a lot of substance to your analysis. And it would probably help for a lot of people in authority to learn how to think that way or at least be open to that possibility. Because the inability to think, to use the cliché, outside the box was one of the major reasons they had trouble catching Ted. Right?
Taylor: True. And any time. It was a pleasure talking to you.
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Rae: That was Taylor and Stephen. And now let’s hear from you. It’s time for a dramatic reading of your most dramatic social media reactions.
Female: This tweet is from @suzymeister. Ted Bundy is evidence that a white guy can be mediocre in every way and a psychopath and people still think he’s exceptional.
Man: This tweet is from director Edgar Wright. Finished Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. Though I was pretty familiar with the story, I still found this confounding, compelling case study that made me profoundly sad and chilled me to the bone. I don’t know how numb you have to be to not be affected by it.
Female: Here’s a thread that Billy Jenson started. As we all binge The Bundy Tapes on Netflix and share the trailer for the Zac Efron movie, please remember the victims. These women all had hopes and dreams. They should all have movies made about them. I always try to remember what these monsters took away. #tedbundytapes. The rest of the thread memorializes each victim.
Rae: If you want to share your thoughts on any upcoming episode, make sure to find us on social media. Just search for You Can’t Make This Up Netflix. We’re the ones with the shiny blue check mark.
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Rae: Before we let you go, we’ve got one more treat for you. It’s time for watch you watching? It’s where we find out what the people on this episode are watching on Netflix.
Stephen: I have just finished watching Roma twice. And it just knocked my socks off. What a wonderful movie. I saw all these huge ads in the New York Times and I said I got to go see that thing. And then I said, no, it’s on Netflix. You know? It was wonderful. Great. That’s my latest thrill.
Taylor: I’ve been watching Sex Education on Netflix, which I really think is this beautiful series that allows Generation Z to honestly talk about their sex lives and their reproductive health. So I know for me as kind of like the last age of the millennials, I wish that I grew up with accessible content in which people like me were talking about their sex lives in a healthy, positive fashion instead of relying on the internet or urban legends or myths. So I think it’s been a really beautiful and accessible content in which youth now, who are so multifaceted and have different intersecting identities, are able to watch something like that and it relates completely to their lived experience as someone who is growing into their sexuality and gender identity. So I think it’s a really beautiful content.
Rae: And that’s it for this week’s episode. We’ll be back next month with a new true crime series for you to add to your watchlist.
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Rae: You can find this show on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Google Play, Spotify, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review the show. It helps other people find it and also makes us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. You Can’t Make This Up is a production of Pineapple Street Media and Netflix. Our music is by Hansdale Hsu. I’m Rae Votta and thank you for listening.
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