Episode 9: Ted Bundy Confession

Five days before his execution for the murders of two sorority girls and a 12 year old girl, Ted Bundy said he wanted to speak with detectives from Washington, Colorado, and Utah to talk about the women he had killed there in those states. This is the confession he made to the officer from Utah.     Bundy sounds exhausted, possibly even drugged. He’s been through two previous two confessions and has had very little sleep. He will be executed in five days. The officer has “five missing girls” he’s especially interested in talking about. Bundy asks for a map of Utah to direct the detective to the girls’ remains because, “it’s so much easier for me to try to locate the bodies than it is to talk about the actual thing,” he says. They begin by discussing 17-year-old Debby Kent, whom Bundy admits to abducting from her high school parking lot. He admits he killed her between leaving the school and arriving at the burial site, but answers only “yes” or “no” to questions about the murder itself.      On the other hand, he goes into great detail about the topography of the state, its small towns, the territory, details of the highways, and even the people. One of the places on the map in Utah is where Brigham Young had his summer home, the cop tells Bundy, which leads to a light exchange about Mormons. “They’re always at your door,” laughs Ted. “Knock knock knock. Freshly scrubbed faces. Good people, though. No question that they’re wonderful people. Absolutely the best. That’s what makes the place so nice. Even if you’re not of that persuasion.”    “How about Nancy Wilcox?” asks the detective. “Are they all down in the same area?”  “Let’s do one at a time,” says Bundy. “Let’s focus on this one.” He says he’s “just about ready to collapse” and “this is the one that I have the clearest recollection of.” He speaks about the murder very passively. “She was restrained and placed in the car then taken to my apartment,” he says, claiming he was “not very conscious of what was going on.” He complains that he finds the murders difficult to think about:    “What’s hard to appreciate is that the reality is that when I talk about kind of this stuff, it just drains me in a way that’s hard to disguise. I have not thought of these kinds of things for years. To attempt to re-live them vividly and to have to describe them, especially to the point if locating remains, my mind is just tied in knots right now, and I’m having a hard time. I’m having a hard time.”

Using Bundy’s directions searchers later found one small kneecap bone belonging to a young woman believed to be Debby Kent.

Listen to the confession here.