Before Bundy could find his next victim, Sergeant Bob Hayward of the Utah police arrested him after a car chase on the 16th of August. When Bundy’s VW finally pulled over, Hayward and two other officers searched the vehicle and discovered handcuffs, a ski mask, a crowbar, rope, wire, and an ice pick—Bundy like Gein, Christie and West was a tool-being, beyond, before and besides the human, residing in the interstitial realm between being and nothing. ‘I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning.’[179] The police immediately arrested Bundy on suspicion of kidnapping, rape, and murder. After weeks of questioning, police needed more evidence. Carol DaRonch and another woman picked out Bundy from a line-up on the 2nd of October and police felt certain they had the killer. Two weeks before this, Bundy’s partner Elizabeth Kendall told police all she knew about him, his movements, quirks, and interests. With this information, police put together a psychological profile of Ted. The woman who rejected him/was rejected by him in turn, Elizabeth Kendall, told police about Bundy’s sadomasochistic bondage fantasies and role-playing, his absences on the nights of the murders, the plaster of paris and crutches in his room, and his trips into the lakes and mountains. Not only Kendall betrayed Bundy; his friends came forward with accounts of strange objects seen—pantyhose, handcuffs, plaster casts. Police felt they had enough evidence and, on the 23rd of February, Bundy went to court to face charges of abducting Carol DaRonch.
Aggrawal categorizes Bundy as ‘a class IXf necrophile,’[180] one who tortures, mutilates, and rapes both the living body and the dead corpse. Like West, he kept his victims alive to torture them; like Christie and Gein, he had sex with them after death until the decomposition disgusted him. Bundy actualized his incestuous homicidal necrophilia through transference—the victims becoming his mother/sister his mother/sister/wife. Aggrawal speculates as to why Bundy became a necrophile. ‘When he was a student at the University of Washington, he began a relationship with Stephanie Brooks [the woman has various pseudonyms in Bundy literature], a fellow university student whom he met in 1967. She was a beautiful and highly sophisticated woman from a wealthy Californian family. Ted initially could not believe someone from her “class” would have an interest in an ordinary person like him, but they did have common interests. They both loved to ski and it was during their many ski trips together that he fell in love with her. She was possibly the first woman with whom he became involved with sexually. However, she dumped him later, and Bundy seemed to have been deeply hurt. All his victims looked like her, and it is possible that he was trying to get even with her vicariously by murdering and sexually assaulting women who had her appearance.’[181]
Aggrawal fails to consider that the woman reminded Bundy of his sister/mother, that he hoped the affair would eventuate in a marriage in which he could be the absent husband/father/for his sister/mother. Bundy had—in his own mind—committed two different and destructive acts of incest. ‘Incest with the sister and incest with the mother are very different things. The sister is not a substitute for the mother: the one belongs to the connective category of alliance, the other to the disjunctive category of filiation. Incest with the sister if prohibited insofar as the conditions of territorial coding require that alliance not be confounded with filiation; and incest with the mother, insofar as descent within filiation must not be allowed to interfere with ascending lines. That is why the despot’s incest is twofold, by virtue of the new alliance and direct filiation. He begins by marrying the sister. But he enters into this endogamous marriage outside the tribe, inasmuch as he is himself outside his tribe, on the outside or at the outer limits of the territory.’[182]
Carol DaRonch testified against Bundy on the 23rd of February 1976, telling the court about her horrific experience. She identified Bundy as ‘Officer Roseland.’ Bundy denied all knowledge of the woman. After four days, the judge found Bundy guilty of aggravated assault and the court later sentenced Bundy to one to fifteen years in Utah State Prison. Psychologists found no evidence of psychoses, neuroses, drug addiction, or sexual deviancy. They concluded that Bundy feared being humiliated by women. Police, however, believed Bundy had killed numerous times. Searching the VW he had sold just before arrest, they found hair matching that of Caryn Campbell and Melissa Smith, and a crowbar with an edge matching indentations in Campbell’s skull. On the 22nd of October, the authorities charged Bundy with murder and extradited him to Garfield County Jail, near Aspen, Colorado. Bundy dismissed his legal team, and prepared to defend himself—that meant access to the court library, without any physical restraints—for the six months leading to the trial.
Behind a bookcase shielded from guards, Bundy managed to open a second-floor window and jump from it onto the courtyard below. On the 7th of June, Bundy escaped into the streets of Aspen, limping from a sprained ankle, he made his way into the mountains, the wilderness graveyard of his desires. Police used bloodhounds and volunteers to search the area, set up roadblocks, and arranged helicopter flyovers. With maps he had secreted in files, Bundy roamed the area looking for a way to escape, and stole food and clothes from cabins and vehicles. Once again, he felt invincible. Now, he had not only eluded capture, he had escaped from the machinery of the law (of the father). However, despite having a map and knowing the mountains, Bundy became lost until he stole a car and drove back into Aspen for supplies. Police spotted the stolen vehicle and re-arrested him. The court allowed him to continue his defence but he had to wear leg-irons while conducting his research. A flight from the Symbolic into the Imaginary in search of the Real only to be returned to the Symbolic. But then Lacan would argue that ‘when law is truly present, desire does not stand up, but that it is because law and repressed desire are one and the same thing.’[183]
Bundy simultaneously worked on his defence while plotting another escape. Other inmates supplied him with a hacksaw blade and Carole Ann Boone smuggled in $500 on various visits. Bundy spent months sawing a hole in his cell’s ceiling and losing enough weight to fit through; once he had achieved this, he had access to a space above his cell and from there into the guard areas of the prison. On the 30th of December, the day before the guards were supposed to transfer him to Colorado Springs for the trial, Bundy made a figure of his sleeping self out of books, towels, and files, covered it with a sheet and escaped through his bolt hole, crawled along the space to the guards’ quarters, down into a cupboard and through that to freedom. ‘There is an idea of a [Ted Bundy], some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.’[184] After the car he stole broke down, he hitched a ride through the mountains to Vail where he bussed to Denver and then flew to Chicago. Under the alias of Chris Hagen, Bundy made his way to Tallahassee, Florida and rented a single apartment close to the Florida State University campus.