His never-ending timeline

The Case: Theodore ‘Ted’ Robert Bundy 

The Crime: the abducting, beating, raping and murdering of young women

Brought into the world on 24^th November 1946 by Eleanor ‘Louise’ Cowell, Ted Bundy was abandoned at birth at the ‘Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers’ (Burlington, Vermont). Here he remained for the first three months of his life.

Before he could even remember, Ted had been led to believe that his grandfather – Sam Cowell, a known bully obsessed with pornography – was his adoptive father and his biological mother was his older sister. Such a ruse had manifested when Louise returned to her religious town without her new born son. It wasn’t long lived.

There is no concrete explanation regarding how Ted discovered the true identity of his ‘parents’. Many rumours point the finger at a cousin who had taunted a young Ted with the truth. With his true father never confirmed, Ted remained a Cowell until his mother married Johnnie Bundy on the 19^th May 1951 and they moved away from his grandparents.

A Timeline of Murders

- May 1973: an unidentified hitchhiker was murdered in Tumwater

- 4th January to 8th November 1974: 12 murders and 2 survivors 

(suspected to be behind the murder of Carol Valenzuela on 2nd August 1974 as well as an unidentified woman)

- 12th January to 28th June 1975: 5 murders

(suspected to be behind the murder of Melanie Suzanne Cooley on 15th April 1975)

- 15th January to 9th February 1978: 3 murders and 3 survivors

Even now, 26 years after Bundy’s execution, the starting point of his murderous timeline remains unknown. Detectives continue to hunt for the bodies left discarded by Bundy in hopes of finding both the start and the end of the killing spree.

Some speculations have the first victim being Ann Marie Burr, an eight-year-old girl who has been linked back to a teenage Ted Bundy in 1961. Others suspect that Bundy started off killing men. Both possibilities only make it possible that there are still unidentified bodies that could be linked to Bundy.

Despite the murderer being free of this world, the world might not yet be free of him.