Serial Killers

Why is Ted Bundy so mesmerizing a media figure? The sensation surrounding this most deadly of killers stems from his repeated and almost gleefully enthusiastic transgression of the most precious and sacred of human shibboleths, the taking of human life. But perhaps also later in his career he became enamored of his profile as a deadly serial killer, obtaining for once in his life that “specialness”, celebrity, and recognition he felt denied him elsewhere. He was executed in 1989, a Death Row “star”.

Bundy managed his media exposure and heightened his celebrity throughout his incarceration, giving manipulative interviews and only rarely revealing the real ego driving the cruelty and killing lust that drove him. In the act, Ted Bundy’s compulsion to kill was hardly a welcome one. He had to drink alcohol to prep for the murderous cruising of women, and became addicted to conducting sexual activities with the dead corpses of his prey. Bundy pursued an alien track of life at a right angle to the course of normal people.

Much has been made of Ted Bundy’s love of the good life and his theft habits as a lifeline to luxury and status. But whereas a smarter man might have used his brutal temperament to leverage a fortune from killing for profit, Ted Bundy succumbed again and again to his lust to kill to substantiate participation in his necrophiliac sexual exploits. Bundy studied law in college and put a lot of effort into fooling the people he met about who he really was. In the 1970’s, American social attitudes and class barriers still existed enough to make Ted Bundy look like a great “catch” to the newcomer to his orbit.
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The Green River Killer is a serial murderer whose spree of crime terrorized the area of the nation known as the Pacific Northwest. A quiet region of the United States, in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, the area was a mix of new urban metropolises like Seattle and traditional rural areas like the mountain, river, and shore country. Later identified as truck painter Gary Leon Ridgway, the Green River Killer killed so many women, the entire population of Washington State was forever shadowed by the very real threat he posed.

Over 90 women comprised a serial killer career so numerous even the Green River Killer, Gary Leon Ridgway, couldn’t keep track of the body count. Some experts say around 50 women at the very least can be attributed to the Green River Killer. The verdant rural area of Washington was pervaded by fear as a growing number of bodies replenished the Green River with startling and terrifying regularity. A jittery awareness of a murderer in their midst created an unwelcome and foreign atmosphere of doubt and suspicion in this formerly peaceful area.

These brutal, sexually oriented killings came to light when bodies were discovered submerged in Seattle’s Green River. Dead young women of mixed nationalities, and generally attractive, were asphyxiated and left with spiky objects lodged in their vaginal cavity. The discoveries of so many bodies disturbed the local population and unnerved people going about their daily lives. The locals began to scan roadsides for bodies and watched for police protection on roads and byways.
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