PROFILE: Ted Bundy Part 1 - The Childhood, Ann Marie Burr & Stephanie Brooks

Ted Bundy was three years old when his aunt woke from a nap to find him standing over her, smiling, having arranged every knife from the kitchen drawer on her pillow with the points aimed at her face. The more frightened she got, the more he seemed to enjoy it.

Part one of three. Before the killings, before the courtroom. The childhood, the teenage years and the college years, and how a boy raised to believe his mother was his sister became the man nobody suspected.

Dr. Cathy Barrett, forensic psychologist, takes the case history. Shannon asks the questions.

CHAPTERS

(00:00) Why Ted Bundy still fascinates

(03:05) The case, in brief

(05:55) Born a secret in Burlington

(06:44) Samuel Cowell's house in Philadelphia

(09:56) The lie: his mother was his sister

(10:28) The knives, at three years old

(12:35) Tacoma, Uncle Jack and John Bundy

(15:23) Fifteen: shoplifting and peeping

(16:12) Ann Marie Burr

(18:59) How he learned about sex

(21:14) The mask he built at school

(23:20) College, and Stephanie Brooks

(27:40) Finding out his sister was his mother

(28:55) Ann Rule and the crisis hotline

(30:31) Law school, and 1974

(34:44) What's coming in Part 2

IN THIS EPISODE

Samuel Cowell, the grandfather who threw his daughters down the stairs and kicked the family dog until it howled, and whom Bundy later named as the man he admired most.

Ann Marie Burr, eight years old, a piano student of Bundy's great uncle, who vanished from her Tacoma home in 1961 with no sign of a struggle. Nobody looked at a fourteen year old boy with a paper round.

Stephanie Brooks, who dated him under the name Diane Edwards, ended it after a year, and whose long dark hair parted in the middle would describe nearly every victim who followed.

Ann Rule, who worked the graveyard shift with him on a suicide crisis hotline, thought he was a friend, wrote The Stranger Beside Me, and stood at his execution.

Plus why psychopaths are not treated in therapy, and what forensic psychologists mean by rehearsal.

Contains discussion of child abuse, sexual violence, incest allegations and the disappearance of a child.

CORRECTIONS

Bundy's grandfather was Samuel Cowell. The name is hard to make out in this old audio and is corrected in the captions.

Ann Marie Burr disappeared 31 August 1961, when Bundy was fourteen. The episode says fifteen.

His confession is most often recorded as thirty homicides, though higher counts appear in some sources.

THE SERIES

Part 1: Childhood, teenage years, college

Part 2: The killings, the patterns, the victims

Part 3: The final trial, the interviews, the execution

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

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