I was thirteen years old when Ted Bundy was electrocuted on Friday, January 24, 1989. It was the middle of my eighth grade year and I was completely oblivious to the media circus taking place over 500 miles south of me in Starke, Florida. Such was the hysteria surrounding the event that shock-jock Howard Stern even asked Floridians to turn off their electricity so 2000 volts would be available to execute America’s most hated killer. My life had never intersected with the man who had been accused of murdering at least thirty-six women throughout the United States. I was in no way connected to his crime spree or his self-directed demise.
Despite the distance between us, on the day Ted Bundy died, I was just one year older than two of his victims. Both Lynette Culver of Pocatello, Idaho and Kimberly Leach of Lake City, Florida were twelve when they were kidnapped and brutally murdered. Their lives had not truly begun nor had they even started to discover themselves. Both girls were abducted near their middle schools, places where they should have been safe. At such a young age, it’s truly impossible to imagine danger lurking in such an unexpected place. Lynette’s body was never found, but Kimberly was located in an abandoned pig shed 35 miles from where she was abducted. She had been brutally assaulted and strangled. The medical examiner posited that she was strangled to death while being assaulted.
Though such young victims weren’t necessarily Bundy’s preferred “type” of victim, most having been in their late teens or early twenties, he was clearly not adverse to taking advantage of any young female who crossed his path. That is truly something to consider when recognizing that anyone could have been susceptible to the murderous rage of a psychopathic personality. As Bundy so succinctly said, “We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere. And there will be more of your children dead tomorrow.”
Confessions of a Bundyphile 
While he awaited execution… after all trials and appeals, Bundy should have been forced by whatever means necessary to reveal ALL THE FACTS. Does that include waterboarding? Absolutely. Not as a punishment to him, but a means to learn everything about his actions.
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I don’t know how much good waterboarding Bundy would have done for the families of his victims. I’m going to quote the prosecutor of Bundy’s Miami trial (for murder of Kimberly Leach) in relation to torture. This was his response to a question about torturing a prisoner on Quora: “No information received from an uncooperative witness should be credited unless and until it can be corroborated. The more uncooperative the witness, the more wary you should be of the information. A witness who is so uncooperative as to be tortured should be considered highly unreliable.”
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We’re not talking about getting factual evidence for a trial. That’s an entirely different goal than forcing him to reveal anything he knows about the known or unknown victims. I could care less if it’s completely reliable.
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We have come a long way since the mid-1960s, when I was a child, and fewer than half of Americans polled declared they were in favor of the death penalty. More than 50% were against it. What happened to those 50%+ of Americans who were against it? I am one of their descendants, you might say. Shame on anyone who calls themselves American advocating torture. It is immoral and deals a violent blow to the foundation to our Constitution. It is machiavellian and speaks of a people that has lost its conscience and of the loss of a moral compass, without which our country, no more a republic, but now an empire, is destined to fall. Hearing a fellow American advocating torture tells me that you are not my peer, but the peer of some flunky in a Soviet gulag. I am the member of the fb group Denying a fair trial: the case of Ted Bundy, and I invite you to express and share your views there with us. The dehumanization of one person is the dehumanization of us all and I’d rather stand with a mentally disturbed man like Ted Bundy (he was diagnosed with bipoar disorder by one psychiatrist in 1988), than with you and what you advocate.
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