That Time My Mom Met Ted Bundy
She lived.
Last summer, I was stunned when my mother, master of the casual bomb-drop, mentioned “that time I met Ted Bundy.”
How had she not revealed this lore to me sooner?
“I honestly forgot,” she replied, as she peeled a seasonable mango.
Don’t worry. She met him in prison, on death row.
My parents became public defenders in the chaotic, cocaine-fueled world of 1970s Miami. In courthouse corridors, drug cartel lawyers strode past, one-hundred dollar bills spilling from their pockets.
My mom started her career working on death penalty cases, at the age of 23. This meant defending the “worst of the worst,” or, more accurately, the worst of the worst who could not afford their own representation. Her clients frequently voiced concern that she looked like a teenager.
Bundy, who sexually assaulted and murdered dozens of women and girls, (allegedly, according to Mom), would qualify as the worst-est. But my mom wasn’t visiting him “on the row” to dig into his horrific crimes. She was simply discussing whether he could argue that his trial had not been “speedy,” constitutionally-speaking. As an appellate lawyer, she typically wasn’t trying to prove her clients’ innocence, merely that their day in court had been bullshit.
“But what was he like?!” I insisted. The facts of Bundy’s case, which I know far too well, vividly swirled through my head. I shivered as I pictured my mother, then the same age as some of his victims, sharing oxygen with one of contemporary America’s most “iconic” monsters.
“He didn’t leave much of an impression,” my mom replied, with a shrug.
“I met him too!” my father interjected.
“What?!”
“You were there?” my mom asked, surprised. Then, she considered. “Maybe. Not the whole time, though.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right.”
Parents, the most maddening and unreliable of narrators. And that was just the beginning.
My fondness for true crime is like my relationship with wine or Twitter: I know it’s not great for me, I try to limit my consumption, and sometimes I fail. I’ve listened to countless hours of airy podcasts narrating horrific crimes, and viewed more tawdry TV specials about serial killers than I’d care to admit.
But for my parents, violent crime isn’t scintillating, nor is it easy listening fare, meant to be enjoyed while dishwashing. No matter how many times I explain to them just how massive the true crime industrial complex is (84% of Americans imbibe), they remain baffled. How could normal people consume the brutal facts they learned at work … for leisure?
One frank, if crude, truism about the crime-centric media my parents deplore: If you want to be famous, whether as victim or perpetrator, it helps to be hot.
When Ted Bundy went on trial in 1978, the New York Times couldn’t help but leer that the serial killer was “looking rather Kennedyesque” with a “smile turning the corners of his lean all-American face.” Incidentally, as I talked with my parents about the man behind the horrors, my mother did call him handsome no fewer than three times. This commentary did not escape my father’s attention.
But most of the conversation consisted of me desperately attempting to jog their memory. My dad assumed that he had must have walked into the sickly-green, echoey lawyer visitation room, at some point, on the way to meet a different client, and offered a polite “Hello.” To serial killer Ted Bundy!
“It’s not our job to judge him,” my dad explains. “Everyone else is already doing that.”
In adorable auto-contradiction, my dad also noted: “The guy was self-obsessed and had nothing of substance to say.” As casually as he might critique a narcissistic politician.
“But he was smart,” my mom added. This also did not escape my father’s attention.
“He went to law school!” I exclaimed, a fact I had learned from a true crime podcast. My parents were surprised. They forgot about that.
Apparently, Bundy had requested to speak with my mother about one of his appeal attempts, quite possibly because she was one of very few female public defenders in that era, and thus one of very few women he could spend time with in person. Of course, Bundy had no trouble attracting the fairer sex’s attention during his incarceration. Groupies crowded outside his trial and lovestruck penpals flooded his mailbox. He even made death row work for the “long haul,” concocting a successful plot to marry his longtime female friend under an obscure Florida law. He later got her pregnant during a prison visit.
But meeting him barely left an impression on my parents. I asked my dad if he worried about my mom, alone, talking to a notorious convicted serial killer, and with limited prison staff readily on hand. Did he intrude on this meeting to “protect” my mom from Bundy? “If I acted that way she woulda socked me in the face,” he replied. Both of them had conversations in small rooms with convicted murderers all the time. It’s boring. Violence, to them, is sad and banal.
“His eyes didn’t seem to belong to his body,” my mother recalled. There was something off about that man. But, ever the faithful attorney, my mom noted that his lawyers hadn’t done much to unpack his humanity. They hadn’t dug through childhood trauma, like my parents faithfully explored for every death-penalty case they were assigned. (My family, you might guess, is staunchly opposed to all state-sanctioned killing. These folks can explain why better than me.)
As my mother reflected, she, for the first time, became truly animated:
“The real headline for your … what’s it called?”
“Substack.”
“Yeah, Substack. It should be: ‘How was the case against Ted Bundy so thin that the state offered him a plea deal of life in prison, instead of the death penalty? In Florida?’”
Despite knowing that the legal implications of this might fail to register with those not immersed in Florida death penalty appeals work, I included it. She birthed me, after all.
The whole thing still blows my mind a little. But I think Ted Bundy being kinda boring is probably a good thing.
When we sensationalize serial killers, we make them both less human and more powerful. They become the monstrous and engrossing amalgamation of all our fears about the violence that permeates our society. Putting them to death “proves” that the enemy can be identified and pruned out like an errant weed. (Also, he prefers brunettes between the ages of 18-24, so watch your back, if that’s relevant.)
Of course, the sad reality is that the people most human to us, those we know and love, are statistically those most likely to actually do us harm. This is especially true about violence against women.
But that doesn’t make for scintillating headlines, most of the time. That’s boring. Then again, so is Ted Bundy. Just ask my mom.
"master of the casual bomb-drop" 😂
I love it!