Did Bundy start killing after he gained revenge? Was it the only way he could relive that feeling, that intensity of power? He may have killed as early as 1971, when he was 14. He boasted of killing two women in Atlantic City in 1969 but no bodies were found. It is certain that he practised violence and kidnapping as early as 1969 as a prelude to his homicidal lust murders that began in 1972 and went on (re-hearsing) until his first substantiated murder in 1974. The rapes, kidnappings, and murders had gone undetected, he had exacted revenge on the woman who rejected him. Why would he need a girlfriend/wife when there were women out there who would not argue, would do whatever he wanted, and would not, eventually, reject him? Bundy’s sadism and necrophiliac tendencies were evident, as he actualizes Bataillean moments of necro-erotics. ‘… the association of sexuality with the desire to kill the ‘partner’ (the victim, in fact); the ‘inauthenticity’ and inferiority of shared erotic pleasure; the reduction of the other (invariably a woman) to the level of inert object—Bataille is quite correct in reading Sade as advocating much the same doctrine (Juliette: 268-269).… Like Sade, Bataille tends to conflate the living with the dead—an ‘erotics’ that denies the presence of the other person. It is, essentially, masturbatory or even necrophiliac, as neither Sade nor Bataille can distinguish between sex with another person from merely penetrating a cadaver.’[166]
On the 4th of January 1974, a month before he concluded his revenge, Bundy broke into the basement bedroom of a University of Washington student in Seattle. He knocked Joni Lenz (18) unconscious, stripped her and raped her with a speculum. The young woman went into a coma for ten days and suffered internal injuries and permanent brain damage from the attack but survived. This would become only a part of Bundy’s modus operandi, to break into apartments—the first rape, the penetration of another’s locus, the other’s topos—and he would do so late at night, usually after midnight. At about the same time as he denied knowing the woman who rejected him, abjected him, made him abject—from reject, to deject, to abject—he returned to the University of Washington campus, entered the room of 21-year-old psychology major Lynda Anne Healy—a weather announcer for local radio ski information shows—bludgeoned her with a crowbar until she lost consciousness and kidnapped her. The young woman who shared the apartment with Lynda heard nothing until woken by her alarm clock. But Lynda wasn’t there, nor was she at work—the radio station had called asking for her. The bedroom looked normal; maybe Lynda had gone for a walk. But when Lynda’s parents called to see why she was late for dinner, friends, relatives, and colleagues started to worry and called the police. ‘A young girl, a freshman, I met in a bar in Cambridge my junior year at Harvard told me early one fall that “Life is full of endless possibilities.” I tried valiantly not to choke on the beer nuts I was chewing while she gushed this kidney stone of wisdom, and I calmly washed them down with the rest of a Heineken, smiled and concentrated on the dart game that was going on in the corner. Needless to say, she did not live to see her sophomore year. That winter, her body was found floating in the Charles River, decapitated, her head hung from a tree on the bank, her hair knotted around a low-hanging branch, three miles away.’[167]
When they arrived, police discovered a small trace of blood on a pillow and on a nightgown. Clothes were missing—a white blouse, jeans, and boots. Police also found an unlocked door but were not certain that any foul play had occurred. ‘Instead of sounding himself as to his “being,” he does so concerning his place: “Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?” For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic.’[168]
Bundy used places he knew intimately—the Cascades, the university campus, and university housing to infiltrate his victims’ home before raping and/or kidnapping them. He rendered them unconscious, disabling their senses, his senses taking over the locus, being in control of place without being in control. At these points, he did not want to ask “Who am I”—he was the reject, the deject, the abject—but he knew where he was, where he would go, what places were safe for him. ‘Where am I’ was always the place of his revenge, of his lust murders—not the place of his rejection, the homogenous dream of a married couple, the totalizable event of man and wife—but the catastrophic division, the place within which he enfolded his rejection and turned it into revenge. After raping Healy, he strangled and then decapitated her, keeping the head as a trophy. ‘Sade, in The 120 Days of Sodom, Juliette and La Nouvelle Justine in particular, insists that the taste for cruelty is shared by all with the strength to express it, and typically describes heterosexual intercourse as ideally involving rape, sadism and murder (writes Sade: “[m]urder is a branch of erotic activity, one of its extravagances.”’[169]
Reports started to come into university security and police from female students that a man with a light brown Volkswagen and wearing an arm sling had asked them to help him with various things around the campus. Three women went missing and police had no clues as to their whereabouts. On the 11th of June 1974, student Georgeann Hawkins, went missing from the campus. Police could find no evidence of abduction but the increase in disappearances brought forth witnesses who reported seeing a man in a full-leg plaster cast (common in a ski area) who had asked a number of women to help him carry things to his Volkswagen. Infiltration and inauthenticty—the key elements of Bundy’s necro-erotic events. ‘A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines—for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject—constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding.’[170]
Bundy created his own locus, devised the arena of his abductions; a smooth-talker schooled in politics and law, good-looking, he extemporised, creating situations in which trust folded into violence, a woman became an object of disgust in order that the non-object (Bundy) could reject his abjection. Bundy, a tireless builder of scenarios, stories, lies, and myths—re-enacted his kills in order to constantly regain the original rush, the ‘one’ time he felt whole. He worked at night, he worked at twilight, the liminal hours—and he carried away the bodies, on the road, into the mountains.
Police and media had one clue—all the women had long hair parted in the middle, were wearing jeans or trousers, were thin, and were white. In September 1974, two bodies matching this description were found by grouse hunters in Lake Samamnish State Park—Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, both of whom had gone missing on the 14th of July. Not much remained of their bodies—vertebrae, a skull, a jaw, hair, and femurs (one extra femur from an as-yet unidentified victim). ‘Disintegration—I’m taking it in stride.’[171] During the investigation, police questioned people who were on the lake the day of the women’s disappearance and discovered that both Janice Ott and Denise Naslund had helped a man called ‘Ted’ load a boat on to his car, the man was wearing a plaster cast on his arm. ‘He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.’[172]