Bundy’s confidence/arrogance/desire placed him in danger of apprehension, but the power of his compulsion drove him on, the fear of again losing the ‘pseudo-object’ that attracted and repelled him forced him to take the risk. As he did so, he became ‘Ted’—a self apart, a psychological dislocation. He reinforced his power and his dislocated voyeurism by raping and killing one of the women while the other watched. For Bundy as for Sade and Bataille: ‘violence [is] essential to sexual activity. Bataille holds that “[p]hysical erotism has in any case a heavy, sinister quality,” … sexuality, when taken to its natural limit, leads to murder, and [that] Sade was the great pioneer who affirmed this “truth.”’[173]
On October 27 and Thanksgiving Day 28 November 1974, the bodies of Melissa Anne Smith and Laura Aime, both 17, were discovered—they had been beaten on the head, strangled, raped, and sodomized. Both girls were abducted, taken to another place, and killed. Bundy had moved his lust murders to Utah after enrolling at the University of Utah law school—‘the more he strays, the more he is saved.’ Between the sexual assault of Joni Lenz in January and the Thanksgiving Day discovery, Bundy had abducted, raped, and killed Lynda Ann Healy (21), Donna Gail Manson (19), Susan Elaine Rancourt (18), Roberta Kathleen Parks (22), Brenda Carol Ball, Georgeann Hawkins (18), Janice Ann Ott (23), Denise Marie Naslund (19), Nancy Wilcox (16), and Debra Kent (17), and attempted to abduct Carol DaRonch (18) who escaped from his car. ‘For it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he draws his jouissance. The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered. Once upon blotted-out time, the abject must have been a magnetized pole of covetousness. But the ashes of oblivion now serve as a screen and reflect aversion, repugnance. The clean and proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame. Then, forgotten time crops up suddenly and condenses into a flash of lightning an operation that, if it were thought out, would involve bringing together the two opposite terms but, on account of that flash, is discharged like thunder. The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth.’[174]
Within the states of Washington and Utah, Bundy had created a ‘land of oblivion.’ His blotted-out time, the dislocation of grandmother/mother/sister, absent father/present father/present grandfather/absent father, the rejection by and rejection of his would-be wife (sister/mother) forced a covetousness of nothing, of the sister/mother/wife made oblivious. By raping, killing, and dis(re)memebering the victims, he made them filthy and allowed himself to feel—‘A sudden impulse and an impossible need—these annihilate the heaviness of the world.’[175] The murders—the flash of light he feels when the need is upon him—brings together the two poles of loved sister/mother/wife with the reject/abject mother/sister/wife. The lust murders are discharged in the thunder of the crowbar, the flames of the fires in which he incinerated the skulls. For Ted Bundy, these were moments of revelation freeing himself from repression, rejection, and reduplication. ‘But what is primal repression? Let us call it the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject, repeat. Without one division, one separation, one subject/object having been constituted (not yet, or no longer yet). Why? Perhaps because of maternal anguish, unable to be satiated within the encompassing symbolic.’[176]
The encompassing symbolic, ruled by language, the name of the father—Bundy struggled within its order. He used language—manipulation/trust—as part of his MO. He also used force—power—to incapacitate the Other, so that it could no longer haunt him, no longer cause him ‘maternal anguish.’
Elizabeth Kendall read reports of the murders and disappearances and suspected Ted of being involved. In August 1974, she contacted police and told them of her suspicions, even providing photographs of Ted for witness identification, but nothing came of it and detectives never questioned Bundy. Because of his ability to evade capture, like West and Christie, Bundy became God in his own symbolic order. As perilous as his assistance/confrontation actions were, Bundy evolved even riskier practices to secure a victim.
To embed his new symbolic order, Bundy became his own big Other, reified as an agent of law. On the 8th of November 1974, Bundy told Carol DaRonch (18) that someone had attempted to steal things from her car and that she should accompany him to the mall’s parking area. Bundy identified himself as Officer Roseland. Although suspicious, DaRonch agreed to go with him to identify the supposed suspect. In the VW, Bundy tried to subdue her with handcuffs and pulled a gun on her when she screamed. She fought back and somehow got free, flagging down a passing motorist and escaping. Although outwardly calm, Bundy began approaching more women in an attempt to kidnap them. Thinking the Utah state police may have witness reports, Bundy moved his lust murders to different states.
On January 12 1975, he kidnapped, raped and bludgeoned to death Caryn Campbell (23) in Snowmass, Colorado. When discovered, animals had torn apart the body, so police found little direct evidence. Bundy kidnapped and killed Julie Cunningham (26) in Vail, Colorado on the 15th of March. He moved on to Grand Rapids, Colorado where he abducted Denise Oliverson (25) and then to Idaho where he raped and killed 12-year-old Lynette Culver in May. On 28 June, back in Utah, he kidnapped, raped, and killed Susan Curtis (15). None of the bodies were ever discovered. Bundy hid them in the mountains, in the national parks, in a wilderness of fantasy, and he would return to the bodies, rape them, spend the night with them until the decomposition became too much even for him, and he would leave them to nature, bury them in shallow graves, or throw them in a river.
Bundy depersonalized the women by knocking them unconscious, making them the thing. His actions became a murder of the thing, the death of the suppressed-interiorized other. Žižek, writing on Hegel and Lacan states: ‘“Death drive” thus stands for the annihilation of the thing in its immediate, corporal reality upon its symbolization: the thing is more present in its symbol than in its immediate reality. The unity of the thing, the trait that makes a thing a thing, is decentred in relation to the reality of the thing itself: the thing must “die” in its reality in order to arrive, by traversing its symbol, at its conceptual unity.[177]
Bundy annihilated the women, he dislocated them from their ‘there’—college campus, shopping mall, apartment, concert, meeting—as he did so, they became the symbolic representation of his mother, the woman/women who rejected him and therefore thwarted his claim to the name of the father. Bundy never felt guilt because the women were more present as symbols than they were (bodily) existing in the immediate reality of murder, rape, and dismemberment. ‘I tried to make meat loaf out of the girl but it becomes too frustrating a task and instead I spend the afternoon smearing her meat all over the walls, chewing on strips of skin I ripped from her body.’[178] He decentred them by de-articulating them, making them silent, making his symbolic all-encompassing. He killed them in order to become whole, to close—for however long it took to split again—that rent between signifier (the 30-40 victims) and signified—the mother, the name of the father.
Bundy had been killing at a rate of one victim a month since January 1974. During July 1975, he may have killed Shelley K. Robertson (24), who went missing on the 1st of July, and whose naked body students found in a mineshaft near Vail in August. He never admitted to the killing and denied any knowledge of the death of Nancy Baird (21), who went missing in Utah in early July, her body has never been recovered. Both bear the hallmarks of a Bundy kidnap, rape, sodomy, and murder. He may have denied involvement because he did not have the opportunity to revisit the bodies, they had not yet traversed the symbolic, had not caused the sense of unity.