Happy Birthday, Ted Bundy: Were You the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murderer?

Part of my ongoing series about serial killers and cold cases state by state. Current state: California.

On what would have been his seventy-fourth birthday, I ask if Ted Bundy was the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murderer.

Theodore Robert Bundy was born on this day (24 November) in 1946 at the Elizabeth Lund home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington Vermont.  Louise Cowell was sent to Burlington to give birth, far away from her home in Philadelphia.  Years later, she would insist that the father was a man named Jack Worthington of a Main Line Philadelphia family, despite listing a man named Lloyd Marshall as the father on her son’s birth certificate; none of this makes sense, certainly not Louise, a product of a very ordinary family, meeting someone like Jack Worthington, let alone being seduced by him.  And if Worthington was indeed the father, why did Louise not put his name on the birth certificate?  She may have lied to prevent herself from thinking of what may very well have been true, that her own father impregnated her.

Ted was was whisked back to Philadelphia to be brought up by his maternal grandparents as theirson.  He would remember them fondly, particularly grandfather Samuel Cowell, going so far as to say he ‘identified’ with him.  This says a lot about Bundy.  Cowell was a bigot who hated everyone, whether Black or Italian, Catholic or Jewish who beat his wife (she ended up in electroshock therapy more than once for severe depression) and children, once tossing daughter Julia down a flight of stairs.  Cowell inflicted violence on animals as well, beating the family dog and amusing himself by swinging cats around by their tails.  The neighbours hated him and his family did too, with the exception of grandson Ted Bundy.

It was Aunt Julia who first saw that Ted was not quite right.

Julia decided to take a nap one afternoon. While she slept, Ted – just three at the time – carefully arranged kitchen knives around her.  Julia awakened and saw Ted at end of the bed, his light blonde hair gleaming in the dim light. He was smiling.

Then she saw the knives.

In 1950, for reasons that are not clear, Louise was encouraged by her parents to go and stay with relatives in Brownspoint, Washington.  The following year, she married Johnny Culpeper Bundy, who adopted Ted. Ted had little use for his adopted father, a cook in a hospital who not only ‘wasn’t very bright’, but ‘didn’t make much money’.

By his early teens, Ted was a handsome young man with dark hair and piercing blue eyes who had overcome a terrible speech impediment.  No one could have imagined the bizarre sexual fantasies he harboured.  By his own admission, he found any sexual scenario involving violence towards women highly arousing.  He soon escalated, fantasising about maiming women, then killing women before fantasising about killing women and copulating with the dead bodies. 

His classmates would have been horrified: Ted was well-liked in high school.  (Years later, he would lie to interviewers, saying he was a ‘loner’ in adolescence.) But Ted was not the All-American boy he pretended to be.  A downhill skiing fan, he took whatever struck his fancy before moving on to the challenge of forging ski lift tickets.  Then he started breaking into houses.  Then came auto theft.  Arrested twice before his eighteenth birthday (once on suspicion of burglary, once on suspicion of grand theft auto), Ted was exceptionally lucky:  nothing was proved and as a minor, his record would expunged after attaining his majority.

Ted graduated from high school in spring of 1965, attending the University of Puget Sound the following autumn.  He transferred to the University of Washington in 1966 to study ‘Chinese’ (presumably Mandarin), but dropped out in early 1968, three semesters shy of his degree. Aimless, he took one badly paid job after another; none lasted long. 

Interested in politics and of a conservative mindset, he volunteered in Seattle, working (in vain, as it turned out) to get Republican Nelson Rockefeller elected president of the United States before being hired by Arthur Fletcher ‘the father of affirmative action’, becoming his driver and bodyguard.

Meanwhile, his girlfriend Stephanie Brooks decided that she could take no more having had enough of Bundy’s aimlessness and immaturity.  Devastated Bundy went to California, then Denver before going to ski in Aspen, on his way to visit relatives in Arkansas and Philadelphia.  Once in Philadelphia, he decided to attend Temple University but lasted just one semester.  More meaningful was the side trip he took to Burlington Vermont to satisfy his curiosity as to whether Johnny Bundy was his father.

It was while living in Philadelphia that Bundy may have killed for the first time, during a visit to Atlantic City. 

Bundy was back in Washington by late 1969 and back on track within six months, studying once again at the University of Washington.  Psychology major, he quickly became an honor student and volunteered at the Seattle Suicide Hotline Crisis Centre, working with former Seattle police officer Ann Rule.  Rule saw nothing odd about Bundy; on the contrary, she liked him.  (As it so happened, Rule would write about true crime; her best-known book is about Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me.)

It was at this time he may have murdered a woman in Seattle.

Bundy was graduated from the University of Washington in 1972, with a degree in psychology and planning to attend law school, even considering a future political career.  He worked on the campaign to re-elect Republican governor Daniel J. Evans, who rewarded him with an appointment to – of all things – the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Committee.  If only Evans had known that the handsome, ambitious young man he would help get into law school may have murdered three women.

Bundy found it amusing to tell different people different stories, making it impossible to know when he became a murderer.  Did he really kill a hitchhiker in Tumwater, Washington in 1973, as he claimed?  Bundy enjoyed playing head games with law enforcement and psychologists alike, changing the narrative as it suited him.

Did he kill thirty women or one hundred?  For reasons best known to himself, Bundy started cutting class in law school before dropping out in April 1974, when young women were disappearing from college campuses in the Pacific Northwest at an alarming rate, one every month.

Bundy is known to have murdered ‘at least thirty women’ (according to the United States Department of Justice) between 1973 and 1978; one in California, three in Colorado, three in Florida, two in Idaho, two in Oregon, eight in Utah and eleven in Washington.  And he is believed to have killed many more.

Whom did he kill in California?  According to the Department of Justice, the victim was ‘never identified ‘.  Bundy certainly knew northern California, having lived there briefly in 1967 while attending summer school at Stanford University.  He returned to California in January 1968 after dropping out of the University of Washington while en route to Denver and Aspen, taking time out to ski before visiting relatives in Arkansas and Pennsylvania.  And he would return to California May 1969, staying with friends in San Francisco for two or three weeks. 

Santa Rosa is an hour’s drive from San Francisco.

Could Bundy have been the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murderer, responsible for the death of seven young women between 1972 and 1973?  The DOJ thought not, looking at when and where he bought petrol.  But the receipts reveal no definite pattern of petrol consumption, a gap of three days in one instance but ten in another.  And they correspond to the number plate of his car.   But what if Bundy drove someone else’s car and paid for the petrol with cash?

The Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders took place between 1972 and 1973.  On 30 March 1973, Bundy had his Volkswagen repaired and a key made, as well as a key for his girlfriend’s car on the very same day.  The next day, her car was stolen.  Or was reported as stolen, anyway.

As it so happened, Bundy was arrested as a minor on suspicion of grand theft auto.

What if Bundy stole the car and drove it to California, offering to let his girlfriend use his car in Washington?  Was she the one filling up the tank, using his credit card while Bundy was doing God-knows-what behind her back? 

If he stole the car, it would make sense to drive it far away.  If this is what happened, he was taking a chance driving it at all unless Bundy, like his exact contemporary Peter Sutcliffe, had false number plates.  And if you think this sounds far-fetched, British serial killer Sutcliffe would have killed the night he was stopped police, having just picked up a sex worker.  (Most of Sutcliffe’s victims were sex workers.)  The police weren’t concerned about yet another kerb crawler, they were concerned about a kerb crawler with false number plates, the upshot of which was that Sutcliffe, once arrested, was never at liberty again.  

If the Department of Justice discounted Bundy as a suspect for the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murderer simply because of those petrol station receipts, it might make sense to look at the  murders again.  Every victim was a young woman (or a very young woman) with long hair parted in the middle.  Several were known to hitchhike, reminiscent of California serial killer Thor Christiansen, who, like Bundy, preyed on hitchhiking college students and defiled their bodies after death.  Bundy admitted to killing thirty women, but the actual count is certainly higher, possibly much higher.  Could any of these be the girls who lost their lives in Santa Rosa?