In 1950, his mother/sister took him to Tacoma, Washington, to live in the home of relatives. One afternoon, his aunt woke after a nap to find herself surrounded by knives, Ted standing beside her smiling.
While in Tacoma, Louise met and married Johnnie Culpepper Bundy, an army cook, and Ted took the man’s surname. Despite babysitting for his younger siblings, Ted felt distanced from his new family and spent most of his time alone. Like Gein and Christie, Ted was bullied and teased at school, making him feel like an outsider—‘the laughter of exclusion; sobbing (which in general has death as its object)’—inadequate in some way, social stigmatism and sexual doubt combining to create resentment and increased isolation. Despite this social and sexual exclusion, Ted was a straight-A student. This aptitude for learning made him more confident and, at high school, he began to socialize and was considered neat, tidy, and polite but rarely did this translate to having a steady girlfriend. Ted was learning to wear masks. Although his schools and colleges thought him diligent, hard-working, and intelligent, the jobs he held to pay his way through education were short-lived and many—like Christie and West, Bundy was a thief. He spent his free time getting involved in politics, skiing in the local mountains—maybe unconsciously mapping his locus. In an interview with Detective Bob Keppel, Bundy stated, ‘It all began in Washington State. That’s where I was living, that’s where I grew up as a kid… and those kinds of images, impulses, and behaviours which ultimately led to the violent behaviour occurred if you will, in Washington State.’[162]
It was during one of his ski weekends that he met and fell in love with a Californian woman. It is probable that Ted lost his virginity to the woman and became obsessed with her. The feelings were not reciprocated, the young woman thinking Ted rootless and unambitious. To add to his masks, Ted began to lie, invent stories, show off—‘gems and gleaming jewels; gambling, heedless expenditure, and certain fanciful uses of money, etc. together present a common character in that the object of the activity (excrement, shameful parts, cadavers, etc.) is found each time treated as a foreign body.’ The gambling, gems, and gleaming jewels came in the shape of a scholarship to Stanford, but these turned to excrement and shame as he found himself out of his depths socially, intellectually, and economically at the elite institution.
In his obsession with the young woman’s ‘(heterogeneous) foreign body,’ Ted saw ‘everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvellous’; however, in 1968, she ended the relationship, leaving Ted devastated, and reliving feelings of inadequacy and doubt, his identity lost in a morass of ‘excrement (menstrual blood, urine, fecal matter),’ retreating to the elementary subjective identity of his childhood, his loneliness, inauthenticity, abandonment, and socio-sexual alienation. Ted would spend the rest of his life attempting to relive the relationship (they continued to write and meet), to get back with her as well as at her, her rejection of him, an expulsion ‘following a brutal rupture as reabsorbed through the desire to put one’s body and mind entirely in a more or less violent state of expulsion (or projection)’. The expulsion, reabsorbed through his innate (and repressed) violence, created the need to project his desires on women who resembled the original foreign body—to overcome the exclusion and sobbing, he would begin a simulated ‘ritual cannibalism; the sacrifice of animal-gods; omophagia.’ He would consume her, burn her, and have sex with her as raw meat in the shape of dead bodies—and then attempt to re-member her, make her new, destruction and reconstruction.
Around this time, Ted also discovered the truth that his sister was his mother, and his parents really his grandparents. His ‘heedless expenditure, and certain fanciful uses of money’ manifested itself in shoplifting, burglary, and theft for which he felt no remorse, believing he was entitled to whatever he stole using these ‘gems and gleaming jewels’ to bankroll his perversions. The thrill of thievery, again, made him more confident—like West and Christie, he revelled in getting one over on authority, taking the power, controlling (or so he thought) his life through controlling others.
As part of his mask, his adoption of roles, he studied—and excelled at—psychology at the University of Washington. ‘Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations, out of such daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up—fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear”—a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess—no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory ghostly glimmer.’[163]
Ted met a woman (usually pseudonymized as Elizabeth Kendall). The relationship was the reverse of Ted’s love affair with the Californian woman. Elizabeth wanted to get married, for Ted to be a father figure for her daughter from a previous marriage. Aware that Ted did not have the same feelings—and that he was seeing other women—she waited. In this relatively stable period, Ted became ambitious, applying to law schools and furthering his interest in politics. A Republican, he worked on the Washington governor Daniel J. Evans’ re-election campaign, volunteered for a local suicide hotline call centre, and enrolled at the University of Puget Sound law school. This could all have been an elaborate mask, a narrativization of his obsession and jealousy. ‘Bataille occasionally discusses more commonplace, though by no means less disturbing, associations of sex and death, for example the association of sexual jealousy or possession with the destructive impulse.’[164]
On a visit to California through the autumn and winter of 1973 with the Washington Republican Party, he went out several times with his ex-girlfriend and successfully rekindled their romance—he had become what she wanted—confident, ambitious, driven. For Ted, this had nothing to do with love and marriage; this had everything to do with power and revenge. This was when the excremental turned sacred, when violence became marvellous, when he could cannibalize and consume the object of his rejection and alienation. In February 1974, he finished the relationship, when the woman called to ask why, he denied knowing her. ‘The theory of the unconscious, as is well known, presupposes a repression of contents (affects and presentations) that, thereby, do not have access to consciousness but effect within the subject modifications, either of speech (parapraxes, etc.), or of the body (symptoms), or both (hallucinations, etc.). As correlative to the notion of repression, Freud put forward that of denial as a means of figuring out neurosis, that of rejection (repudiation) as a means of situating psychosis. The asymmetry of the two repressions becomes more marked owing to denial’s bearing on the object whereas repudiation affects desire itself (Lacan, in perfect keeping with Freud’s thought, interprets that as “repudiation of the Name of the Father”).’[165]
Bundy always rejected being his own absent father. He rejected others as his father had rejected him, he repudiated his relationship—he as absent father, she as present/absent mother. He repressed his affections for the female—females reject, they lie, they repudiate relationships. Like Christie, this manifested in symptoms—Christie’s hypochondria, Bundy’s affectation of plaster casts. Parapraxes—West’s asymmetry, assignment and dis-location of personal and impersonal pronouns, Bundy’s legalese. Hallucinations—West, Christie, Gein, and Bundy all describe hallucinatory experiences prior, during, or after their necro-erotic events.
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Interview transcribed by author—clip 1 audiotape available: http://www.kirotv.com/news/4182402/detail.html