Addiction
Addiction
The atmosphere surrounding the prison could only be described as a circus. Signs reading “You're Dead, Ted” and “Burn, Bundy, Burn” waved in the air, giving visible proof to the prevailing sentiment of the public. They tired of this man evading his punishment for the crimes he had committed. However, these were not the only people present in the crowd. No, hundreds of reporters also waited outside the prison in hopes that somehow Ted Bundy would change his mind—that he would allow them access to his final words. As a convicted criminal condemned to death by the electric chair, Bundy possessed the right to choose the individual who would conduct his last interview; he could decide who would hear and distribute (if desired, of course) his last words.
That privilege—if it could be called such a thing—belonged solely to James Dobson, founder of evangelical organization Focus on the Family. Doctor James Dobson, if one wanted to address him formally.
So here he was, ready to record Bundy's final statements. Only after passage through seven steel doors and several extremely sensitive metal detectors—his tie tack and the nails in his shoes set off alarms—did Dobson reach the room designated for the final interview. Upon Bundy's entrance, he was strip-searched and six guards arrived to surround him during the course of the interview.
And then it began.
“It is about 2:30 in the afternoon. You are scheduled to be executed tomorrow morning at 7:00, if you don’t receive another stay. What is going through your mind? What thoughts have you had in these last few days?” Dobson opened.
Across the table, Bundy sat, his body leaning forward, his head tilted as he listened intently. Before responding, the criminal took a quick breath. “I won’t kid you to say it is something I feel I’m in control of or have come to terms with. It’s a moment-by-moment thing. Sometimes I feel very tranquil and other times I don’t feel tranquil at all.” He spoke carefully, softly, with brief pauses occasionally fragmenting his sentences. “What’s going through my mind right now is to use the minutes and hours I have left as fruitfully as possible. It helps to live in the moment, in the essence that we use it productively. Right now I’m feeling calm, in large part because I’m here with you.”
Dobson's next statement served only to establish truths any future viewers of this interview might not be entirely aware of. “For the record, you are guilty of killing many women and girls."
“Yes, that’s true,” he responded quickly, barely allowing the psychologist time to finish his sentence.
As the interview progressed, the questions slowly rose in intensity of subject. “How did it happen? Take me back. What are the antecedents of the behavior that we’ve seen? You were raised in what you consider to be a healthy home. You were not physically, sexually or emotionally abused.”
“No. And that’s part of the tragedy of this whole situation.” Bundy went on to explain that the home of his youth had been “wonderful.” He and four other children remained always the focus of his parents' lives; the family attended church regularly. No home could be considered perfect, but he felt that his was a close as reality might permit. His family, his home life had not been the cause of his fallen path—no, Bundy felt another force shaped him into a vicious rapist and serial killer.
“As a young boy of twelve or thirteen, I encountered, outside the home,” he made certain to emphasize that part, “in the local grocery and drug stores, softcore pornography. As young boys do we explored the back roads, the sideways and byways of the neighborhoods, and oftentimes, people would dump the garbage and whatever they were cleaning out of their house and from time to time, we would come across books of a harder nature—more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography—and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience—is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces—as I know only too well—brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.”
Continuing the conversation revealed that Bundy felt as if his exposure to pornography fueled his dark fantasies until finally, his addiction demanded a more potent dose. His thought process had been affected so strongly by pornographic material that after an approximate two year period of allowing ingrained morals and inner desires battle for predominance. Eventually, fantasy violently collided with reality. Alcohol too, he charged, further limited his inhibitors. However, Bundy also wanted to make certain that people were aware that he took full responsibility for his actions.
“After you committed your first murder, what was the emotional effect on you? What happened in the days after that?”
The condemned killer did not respond immediately. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and remained still for several moments before replying, “Even all these years later, it is difficult to talk about. Reliving it through talking about it is difficult to say the least, but I want you to understand what happened. It was like coming out of some horrible trance or dream.” He spoke slowly and softly, and kept his gaze on the table. “I can only liken it to—and I don’t want to overdramatize it—being possessed by something so awful and alien, and the next morning waking up and remembering what happened and realizing that in the eyes of the law, and certainly in the eyes of God, you’re responsible. To wake up in the morning and realize what I had done with a clear mind, with all my essential moral and ethical feelings intact, absolutely horrified me.”
“You hadn’t known you were capable of that before?” Certainly, the question was something for which skeptics and critics would demand a condemning answer. Unlike the likely tone of such a person, however, very little doubt pierced Dobson's tone.
Clear pain displayed on his face, Bundy shook his head as he began his response. “There is just absolutely no way to describe the brutal urge to do that, and once it has been satisfied, or spent, and that energy level recedes, I became myself again. Basically, I was a normal person.” He continued to say that he wasn't one of those guys who spent a vast amount of time in bars, that he wasn't a bum. Again, he claimed to be a normal person, aside from a small but potent destructive part of himself that he simply hid from the eyes of the world. “Those of us who have been so influenced by violence in the media, particularly pornographic violence, are not some kind of inherent monsters,” Bundy declared steadily. “We are your sons and we are your husbands. We grew up in regular families. Pornography can reach in and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home twenty or thirty years ago. As diligent as my parents were, and they were diligent in protecting their children, and as good a Christian home as we had, there is no protection against the kinds of influences that are loose in a society that tolerates...” The killer could not continue his sentence, strong emotion choking his words. Was it only just an act, another mendacious ploy from the man who had deceived nearly every one of his victims? Yet, he was a man with seventeen hours to live. Was there a need to lie until the end?
Although allowing a moment for Bundy to recompose himself, Dobson soon launched into the next portion of the interview. “Outside these walls, there are several hundred reporters that wanted to talk to you, and you asked me to come because you had something you wanted to say. This hour that we have together is not just an interview with a man who's scheduled to die tomorrow morning. I am here, and you are here because of this message. You feel that hardcore pornography, and the door to it, softcore pornography, is doing untold damage to other people and causing other women to be abused and killed the way you did.”
Taking the cue to further assert his sentiments regarding pornography's effect on society, Bundy maintained, “I’m no social scientist, and I don’t pretend to know what John Q. Citizen thinks about this, but I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography—deeply consumed by the addiction. The F.B.I.’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornographers. It’s true.”
Perhaps the next question was one without a real answer, but that hardly prevented Dobson from inquiring anyway. “What would your life have been like without that influence?”
“I know it would have been far better, not just for me, but for a lot of other people—victims and families.” Despite the fact that only speculation could arise from this particular subject, Bundy spoke his next words with utmost confidence. “There’s no question that it would have been a fuller life. I’m absolutely certain it would not have involved this kind of violence that I have committed.”
“If I were able to ask the kind of questions that are being asked by the majority of the people out there, one would be, 'Are you thinking about all those victims and their families that are so wounded?'” As Dobson spoke, his voice nearly broke with sympathy for those people, the ones who had lost so much. “Years later, their lives have not returned to normal. They will never return to normal. Is there remorse?”
This was a question he must have known was coming for Bundy did not pause, he did not wait several moments to begin his response. “I know people will accuse me of being self-serving, but through God’s help, I have been able to come to the point, much too late, where I can feel the hurt and the pain I am responsible for. Yes. Absolutely. During the past few days, myself and a number of investigators have been talking about unsolved cases—murders I was involved in. It’s hard to talk about all these years later, because it revives all the terrible feelings and thoughts that I have steadfastly and diligently dealt with—I think successfully. It has been reopened and I have felt the pain and the horror of that.
“I can only hope that those who I have harm, those who I have caused so much grief, even if they don’t believe my expression of sorrow, will believe what I’m saying now; there are people loose in their towns and communities, like me, whose dangerous impulses are being fueled, day in and day out, by violence in the media in its various forms—particularly sexualized violence. What scares and appalls me is when I see what’s on cable T.V. Some of the violence in the movies that come into homes today is stuff they wouldn’t show in X-rated adult theaters thirty years ago.”
“The slasher movies?”
“That stuff is the most graphic violence on screen, especially when children are unattended or unaware that they could be a Ted Bundy; that they could have a predisposition to that kind of behavior.” Bundy continued by attempting to explain the desensitization that occurred to him with each murder. The emotions he felt were compartmentalized, he revealed, and as time went on that black hole that was his darker side eroded away at his normalcy.
Again, the subject changed, at least to some degree. This too was a more difficult question, but one that needed to be asked, Dobson felt. “One of the final murders you committed was 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. I think the public outcry is greater there because an innocent child was taken from a playground. What did you feel after that? Were they the normal emotions after that?”
Bundy visibly squirmed as Dobson strung the words together. Leaning his face against his intertwined fingers, the handcuffed murderer opened his mouth to respond, only to croak out a single syllable before pausing briefly. “I—I can’t really talk about that right now. It’s too painful. I would like to be able to convey to you what that experience is like, but I won’t be able to talk about that.” Scattered pauses littered his speech. Again, was he simply acting, or was there genuine regret and pain regarding his actions? “I can’t begin to understand the pain that the parents of these children and young women that I have harmed feel. And I can’t restore much to them, if anything. I won’t pretend to, and I don’t even expect them to forgive me. I’m not asking for it. That kind of forgiveness is of God; if they have it, they have it, and if they don’t, maybe they’ll find it someday.”
“Do you deserve the punishment the state has inflicted upon you?”
He almost laughed at that question, the quiet, nervous type of laugh that a frightened man gives. “That’s a very good question. I don’t want to die; I won’t kid you.” He paused, perhaps to determine the best way to phrase his next words. “I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment society has. And I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me. That’s for sure. What I hope will come of our discussion is that I think society deserves to be protected from itself. As we have been talking, there are forces at loose in this country, especially this kind of violent pornography, where, on one hand, well-meaning people will condemn the behavior of a Ted Bundy while they’re walking past a magazine rack full of the very kinds of things that send young kids down the road to being Ted Bundys. That’s the irony.
“I’m talking about going beyond retribution, which is what people want with me. There is no way in the world that killing me is going to restore those beautiful children to their parents and correct and soothe the pain. But there are lots of other kids playing in streets around the country today who are going to be dead tomorrow, and the next day, because other young people are reading and seeing the kinds of things that are available in the media today.”
With the time allotted for the interview soon to run out, Dobson proposed one last question, this one perhaps related to the most controversial bit of information associated with the condemned man. “There is tremendous cynicism about you on the outside, I suppose, for good reason. I’m not sure there’s anything you could say that people would believe, yet you told me last night—and I have heard this through our mutual friend, John Tanner—that you have accepted the forgiveness of Jesus Christ and are a follower and believer in Him. Do you draw strength from that as you approach these final hours?”
“I do,” Bundy responded with a swift nod. His next words continued in a fashion similar to the majority of the interview, with brief pauses interspersed throughout. “I can’t say that being in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is something I’ve become all that accustomed to, and that I’m strong and nothing’s bothering me. It’s no fun. It gets kind of lonely, yet I have to remind myself that every one of us will go through this someday in one way or another.”
“It’s appointed unto man,” interjected Dobson.
“Countless millions who have walked this earth before us have gone through this, so this is just an experience we all share. So...here I am.”
That privilege—if it could be called such a thing—belonged solely to James Dobson, founder of evangelical organization Focus on the Family. Doctor James Dobson, if one wanted to address him formally.
So here he was, ready to record Bundy's final statements. Only after passage through seven steel doors and several extremely sensitive metal detectors—his tie tack and the nails in his shoes set off alarms—did Dobson reach the room designated for the final interview. Upon Bundy's entrance, he was strip-searched and six guards arrived to surround him during the course of the interview.
And then it began.
“It is about 2:30 in the afternoon. You are scheduled to be executed tomorrow morning at 7:00, if you don’t receive another stay. What is going through your mind? What thoughts have you had in these last few days?” Dobson opened.
Across the table, Bundy sat, his body leaning forward, his head tilted as he listened intently. Before responding, the criminal took a quick breath. “I won’t kid you to say it is something I feel I’m in control of or have come to terms with. It’s a moment-by-moment thing. Sometimes I feel very tranquil and other times I don’t feel tranquil at all.” He spoke carefully, softly, with brief pauses occasionally fragmenting his sentences. “What’s going through my mind right now is to use the minutes and hours I have left as fruitfully as possible. It helps to live in the moment, in the essence that we use it productively. Right now I’m feeling calm, in large part because I’m here with you.”
Dobson's next statement served only to establish truths any future viewers of this interview might not be entirely aware of. “For the record, you are guilty of killing many women and girls."
“Yes, that’s true,” he responded quickly, barely allowing the psychologist time to finish his sentence.
As the interview progressed, the questions slowly rose in intensity of subject. “How did it happen? Take me back. What are the antecedents of the behavior that we’ve seen? You were raised in what you consider to be a healthy home. You were not physically, sexually or emotionally abused.”
“No. And that’s part of the tragedy of this whole situation.” Bundy went on to explain that the home of his youth had been “wonderful.” He and four other children remained always the focus of his parents' lives; the family attended church regularly. No home could be considered perfect, but he felt that his was a close as reality might permit. His family, his home life had not been the cause of his fallen path—no, Bundy felt another force shaped him into a vicious rapist and serial killer.
“As a young boy of twelve or thirteen, I encountered, outside the home,” he made certain to emphasize that part, “in the local grocery and drug stores, softcore pornography. As young boys do we explored the back roads, the sideways and byways of the neighborhoods, and oftentimes, people would dump the garbage and whatever they were cleaning out of their house and from time to time, we would come across books of a harder nature—more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography—and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience—is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces—as I know only too well—brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.”
Continuing the conversation revealed that Bundy felt as if his exposure to pornography fueled his dark fantasies until finally, his addiction demanded a more potent dose. His thought process had been affected so strongly by pornographic material that after an approximate two year period of allowing ingrained morals and inner desires battle for predominance. Eventually, fantasy violently collided with reality. Alcohol too, he charged, further limited his inhibitors. However, Bundy also wanted to make certain that people were aware that he took full responsibility for his actions.
“After you committed your first murder, what was the emotional effect on you? What happened in the days after that?”
The condemned killer did not respond immediately. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and remained still for several moments before replying, “Even all these years later, it is difficult to talk about. Reliving it through talking about it is difficult to say the least, but I want you to understand what happened. It was like coming out of some horrible trance or dream.” He spoke slowly and softly, and kept his gaze on the table. “I can only liken it to—and I don’t want to overdramatize it—being possessed by something so awful and alien, and the next morning waking up and remembering what happened and realizing that in the eyes of the law, and certainly in the eyes of God, you’re responsible. To wake up in the morning and realize what I had done with a clear mind, with all my essential moral and ethical feelings intact, absolutely horrified me.”
“You hadn’t known you were capable of that before?” Certainly, the question was something for which skeptics and critics would demand a condemning answer. Unlike the likely tone of such a person, however, very little doubt pierced Dobson's tone.
Clear pain displayed on his face, Bundy shook his head as he began his response. “There is just absolutely no way to describe the brutal urge to do that, and once it has been satisfied, or spent, and that energy level recedes, I became myself again. Basically, I was a normal person.” He continued to say that he wasn't one of those guys who spent a vast amount of time in bars, that he wasn't a bum. Again, he claimed to be a normal person, aside from a small but potent destructive part of himself that he simply hid from the eyes of the world. “Those of us who have been so influenced by violence in the media, particularly pornographic violence, are not some kind of inherent monsters,” Bundy declared steadily. “We are your sons and we are your husbands. We grew up in regular families. Pornography can reach in and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home twenty or thirty years ago. As diligent as my parents were, and they were diligent in protecting their children, and as good a Christian home as we had, there is no protection against the kinds of influences that are loose in a society that tolerates...” The killer could not continue his sentence, strong emotion choking his words. Was it only just an act, another mendacious ploy from the man who had deceived nearly every one of his victims? Yet, he was a man with seventeen hours to live. Was there a need to lie until the end?
Although allowing a moment for Bundy to recompose himself, Dobson soon launched into the next portion of the interview. “Outside these walls, there are several hundred reporters that wanted to talk to you, and you asked me to come because you had something you wanted to say. This hour that we have together is not just an interview with a man who's scheduled to die tomorrow morning. I am here, and you are here because of this message. You feel that hardcore pornography, and the door to it, softcore pornography, is doing untold damage to other people and causing other women to be abused and killed the way you did.”
Taking the cue to further assert his sentiments regarding pornography's effect on society, Bundy maintained, “I’m no social scientist, and I don’t pretend to know what John Q. Citizen thinks about this, but I’ve lived in prison for a long time now, and I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence. Without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography—deeply consumed by the addiction. The F.B.I.’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornographers. It’s true.”
Perhaps the next question was one without a real answer, but that hardly prevented Dobson from inquiring anyway. “What would your life have been like without that influence?”
“I know it would have been far better, not just for me, but for a lot of other people—victims and families.” Despite the fact that only speculation could arise from this particular subject, Bundy spoke his next words with utmost confidence. “There’s no question that it would have been a fuller life. I’m absolutely certain it would not have involved this kind of violence that I have committed.”
“If I were able to ask the kind of questions that are being asked by the majority of the people out there, one would be, 'Are you thinking about all those victims and their families that are so wounded?'” As Dobson spoke, his voice nearly broke with sympathy for those people, the ones who had lost so much. “Years later, their lives have not returned to normal. They will never return to normal. Is there remorse?”
This was a question he must have known was coming for Bundy did not pause, he did not wait several moments to begin his response. “I know people will accuse me of being self-serving, but through God’s help, I have been able to come to the point, much too late, where I can feel the hurt and the pain I am responsible for. Yes. Absolutely. During the past few days, myself and a number of investigators have been talking about unsolved cases—murders I was involved in. It’s hard to talk about all these years later, because it revives all the terrible feelings and thoughts that I have steadfastly and diligently dealt with—I think successfully. It has been reopened and I have felt the pain and the horror of that.
“I can only hope that those who I have harm, those who I have caused so much grief, even if they don’t believe my expression of sorrow, will believe what I’m saying now; there are people loose in their towns and communities, like me, whose dangerous impulses are being fueled, day in and day out, by violence in the media in its various forms—particularly sexualized violence. What scares and appalls me is when I see what’s on cable T.V. Some of the violence in the movies that come into homes today is stuff they wouldn’t show in X-rated adult theaters thirty years ago.”
“The slasher movies?”
“That stuff is the most graphic violence on screen, especially when children are unattended or unaware that they could be a Ted Bundy; that they could have a predisposition to that kind of behavior.” Bundy continued by attempting to explain the desensitization that occurred to him with each murder. The emotions he felt were compartmentalized, he revealed, and as time went on that black hole that was his darker side eroded away at his normalcy.
Again, the subject changed, at least to some degree. This too was a more difficult question, but one that needed to be asked, Dobson felt. “One of the final murders you committed was 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. I think the public outcry is greater there because an innocent child was taken from a playground. What did you feel after that? Were they the normal emotions after that?”
Bundy visibly squirmed as Dobson strung the words together. Leaning his face against his intertwined fingers, the handcuffed murderer opened his mouth to respond, only to croak out a single syllable before pausing briefly. “I—I can’t really talk about that right now. It’s too painful. I would like to be able to convey to you what that experience is like, but I won’t be able to talk about that.” Scattered pauses littered his speech. Again, was he simply acting, or was there genuine regret and pain regarding his actions? “I can’t begin to understand the pain that the parents of these children and young women that I have harmed feel. And I can’t restore much to them, if anything. I won’t pretend to, and I don’t even expect them to forgive me. I’m not asking for it. That kind of forgiveness is of God; if they have it, they have it, and if they don’t, maybe they’ll find it someday.”
“Do you deserve the punishment the state has inflicted upon you?”
He almost laughed at that question, the quiet, nervous type of laugh that a frightened man gives. “That’s a very good question. I don’t want to die; I won’t kid you.” He paused, perhaps to determine the best way to phrase his next words. “I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment society has. And I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me. That’s for sure. What I hope will come of our discussion is that I think society deserves to be protected from itself. As we have been talking, there are forces at loose in this country, especially this kind of violent pornography, where, on one hand, well-meaning people will condemn the behavior of a Ted Bundy while they’re walking past a magazine rack full of the very kinds of things that send young kids down the road to being Ted Bundys. That’s the irony.
“I’m talking about going beyond retribution, which is what people want with me. There is no way in the world that killing me is going to restore those beautiful children to their parents and correct and soothe the pain. But there are lots of other kids playing in streets around the country today who are going to be dead tomorrow, and the next day, because other young people are reading and seeing the kinds of things that are available in the media today.”
With the time allotted for the interview soon to run out, Dobson proposed one last question, this one perhaps related to the most controversial bit of information associated with the condemned man. “There is tremendous cynicism about you on the outside, I suppose, for good reason. I’m not sure there’s anything you could say that people would believe, yet you told me last night—and I have heard this through our mutual friend, John Tanner—that you have accepted the forgiveness of Jesus Christ and are a follower and believer in Him. Do you draw strength from that as you approach these final hours?”
“I do,” Bundy responded with a swift nod. His next words continued in a fashion similar to the majority of the interview, with brief pauses interspersed throughout. “I can’t say that being in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is something I’ve become all that accustomed to, and that I’m strong and nothing’s bothering me. It’s no fun. It gets kind of lonely, yet I have to remind myself that every one of us will go through this someday in one way or another.”
“It’s appointed unto man,” interjected Dobson.
“Countless millions who have walked this earth before us have gone through this, so this is just an experience we all share. So...here I am.”