Ted Bundy | Abyss

1. The Boy Who Was Told His Mother Was His Sister
1 min. 6 sec.
Burlington, 1946: an unmarried woman gives birth to Ted at a Catholic home and raises him inside a family lie — grandparents as parents, mother as sister. He idolizes his violent grandfather Samuel. As a teenager he finds his own birth certificate and learns the truth, and the polite honour student stops trusting anyone, including himself.
1. The Boy Who Was Told His Mother Was His Sister
2. The Paperboy
1 min. 2 sec.
Tacoma, 1961: 8-year-old Ann Marie Burr vanishes from her bed, a small footprint left outside the window. Fourteen-year-old Ted is the family's paperboy, already prowling neighbourhood windows at night. He denies involvement to the day he dies — yet most criminologists believe Ann Marie was his first murder.
2. The Paperboy
3. Stephanie
1 min. 1 sec.
University of Washington, 1967: Ted falls completely for Stephanie Brooks — wealthy, sophisticated, long brown hair parted down the middle. She tolerates him a year, then graduates and ends it. The rejection fixes his lethal 'type'; every future victim will, in some way, be her. He spends six years rebuilding himself to win her back.
3. Stephanie
4. The Revenge
1 min. 3 sec.
Three weeks after he discarded Stephanie Brooks, in the early morning of January 4, 1974, Ted Bundy broke into the basement apartment of a UW student named Karen Sparks and beat her into a coma with a metal bedframe. Karen survived. The next girl did not.
4. The Revenge
5. The Spree Begins
1 min. 3 sec.
February 1974: Lynda Ann Healy vanishes from her bed, the room carefully cleaned after. Over six months eight more young women disappear across the Pacific Northwest — all white, late teens to early twenties, long brown hair parted in the middle. Witnesses describe a handsome man with an arm sling asking for help. His name is Ted.
5. The Spree Begins
6. Lake Sammamish
1 min. 2 sec.
July 14, 1974: on the hottest day of the year, before forty thousand beachgoers, Bundy works the crowd in tennis whites and a fake sling, asking women to help unload a sailboat. Janice Ott and Denise Naslund both say yes; neither returns. Tips flood in — four callers, including Liz Kloepfer, name Ted Bundy. Detectives dismiss all four.
6. Lake Sammamish
7. Taylor Mountain
1 min. 4 sec.
Throughout 1974 Bundy returns again and again to his Taylor Mountain dump site, grooming and posing the bodies, keeping some — and several heads — in his apartment. In March 1975 forestry students find four skulls: Healy, Rancourt, Parks, Ball. But Bundy is already gone, accepted to law school in Utah, where women begin to vanish.
7. Taylor Mountain
8. Utah
1 min. 2 sec.
He tries to put the handcuffs on her wrong. Both cuffs go on the same wrist. Carol DaRonch jumps from the moving car. She runs into the night. She is the first victim in 30 attacks who lived to give a description.
8. Utah
9. Carol DaRonch
1 min. 9 sec.
The bungled abduction in full: posing as Officer Roseland, Bundy gets DaRonch into his Beetle, then drives the wrong way and clamps both cuffs on one wrist. She fights free, rolls onto the pavement, and flags down a passing couple. Her description of the man, the car, and a torn vinyl seat becomes the case that finally catches him.
9. Carol DaRonch
10. The Traffic Stop
1 min. 9 sec.
August 1975: a Utah patrolman stops a Volkswagen cruising a dark suburb. The driver — polite law student Ted Bundy — consents to a trunk search revealing a ski mask, a pantyhose mask, a taped crowbar, handcuffs, rope, an ice pick, and torn sheets. Arrested for evading, his name now sits in the state file as a suspicious person.
10. The Traffic Stop

1. The Boy Who Was Told His Mother Was His Sister

2. The Paperboy

3. Stephanie

4. The Revenge

5. The Spree Begins

6. Lake Sammamish

7. Taylor Mountain

8. Utah

9. Carol DaRonch

10. The Traffic Stop