Searching for the Humanity...of a Ted Bundy?
Thoughts on Male Violence and the Death Penalty
Many years ago, I read Sister Helen Prejean’s 1993 book, Dead Man Walking, as part of one of my college classes. Is is a nun’s story of spiritually advising a couple death row inmates and then functionally serves as a case against the death penalty. It was a story that moved me emotionally and an argument that persuaded me, perhaps one of the first times a book challenged my own worldview enough to shift it.
All of that, it’s worth noticing, was before my older brother murdered someone.
“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done,” writes Bryan Stevenson—founder of the Equal Justice Initiative—in his 2014 book, Just Mercy. I think he’s right about that, though it’s worth pointing out that the book is largely about the black and wrongly-convicted Walter McMillian in a case that centers the hometown of Harper Lee, author of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which possesses a comparative plot. And the possibility of our own biases and human error in general is one valid reason to be humble in our sentencing of convicted criminals.
But everyone believes in free speech when they agree with the speech that is being put forward. The true test of one’s belief in whether or not speech and expression ought to be free is in the worst of cases, the most awful of opinions that have been put forward. Just as in the case of capital punishment, it is easiest to question it when we can show that someone on death row is innocent of the crime he (and it’s almost always a he) is accused of committing. It is slightly more difficult, but still on the easier realm when the person in question has murdered one or two people and maybe came out of, say, circumstances of poverty and abuse.
What about someone more like Lee Boyd Malvo? Malvo is half the duo—his older “mentor,” John Allen Muhammad, was executed by lethal injection in 2009—who initiated the 2002 “D.C. sniper” attacks. Malvo was 17 years old at the time of the killings and was not sentenced to death, a decision I agree with.
I was captivated while living in Northern Ireland several years ago—another place with its own recent history of (mostly-male) violence—by Malvo’s 2012 Washington Post interview in which he demonstrated not only his own thoughtfulness and intelligence, but also plenty of remorse and some self-awareness of how he’d been so willingly exploited into the kind-of replacement father relationship with Muhammad in the first place. It was, in my view, a demonstration if there ever was one, of the human potential that lies behind bars. I haven’t followed Malvo’s situation closely since that interview, but my sense at the time was not only that Malvo should be allowed to live, but also we need him, that he has a contribution to make. And he participated in the killing of 17 people! We do well to hold those two things together, as uncomfortable as it is.
But there are worse or at least comparative horrors than Malvo and Muhammad, aren’t there? While I still oppose the death penalty (without finding it all that difficult to understand some of those who support it), I am not really a pacifist, which is to say that I think self-defense is valid-if-not-exactly-optimal at times, and the same with war, which I would not go quite as far as to use the descriptor “just,” so much as power struggles that result in inter-country violence is part of the world we live in. As is the violence among, say, animals, which I’ll get to later in this essay. American citizens commit about 20,000-25,000 murders a year (that’s in a country of about 330 million), we’re getting close to 50,000 suicides during that same time period, our police kill another thousand, and God knows how many people’s lives our military and intelligence agencies are responsible for ending on a somewhat annual basis. The morality of various killings deserve to be parsed more than equated—and of course we often put the most violent men among us together for long many years in prison—but our state-sponsored record in a number of not-so-wise wars ought to also be reason to question our government’s standing as one to determine which violent offenders should be executed.
Guns are the instrument of choice for most of what we consider to be “murder” in the U.S., so we’re right to grapple some with how to make laws that encourage responsible or minimal use and access, though this fight often serves more as a proxy for culture war battling than a true desire to save lives, and so we ought to grapple, too, with the number of occurrences even in recent years when it was an armed civilian of some sort who stopped the violence of a mass shooting. These instances ought to remind us that guns are simply a tool that do not fire themselves, and that it’s human beings who are the acting agents. The more interesting question, and the question we seem so terrified of posing because it would demand so much of and from us, is why do so many people reach the point in their lives where they wish to take their own life or the life or lives of other people around them? When we become as interested in that as we are in gun policy maneuvering I suspect we’ll be a lot closer to the vicinity of progress.
Let’s make our turn, then, to someone like Ted Bundy, who is, in my view, more of the true test as to whether or not someone really opposes the death penalty. Can you look straight into the awfulness of the man’s manipulativeness in abducting young women—most murders are committed by men and against men, but that serial killers often target women seems notable and somehow worse —and sending law enforcement and the American public on various wild goose chaises after his unrepentant skull-bashing and by the way he escaped from incarceration twice and was caught plotting at least one more and still think he didn’t earn the electric chair that killed him? We ought to at least pause.
As told in the 1980 account, The Stranger Beside Me, of her decades-long friendship with Bundy—which originated while the two of them volunteered for a crisis center—true crime writer Ann Rule ultimately decides that Bundy needed to die, that the condition of his heart was beyond any capacity for positive treatment. Which is not the same as saying that she believed (she explicitly did not) he should have met some sort of legal definition of “insane” that would have exonerated him from the legal culpability of his crimes. But Rule did wrestle for years with what she believed about the man’s guilt or innocence, and I would say that she loved him even beyond her acceptance of his guilt. Not romantic love (she was quite older than him)—though the book does make it clear that even while becoming a national sensation for the awful things he did, Bundy had a growing list of young women who were convinced that they loved him; one of those women even engineered a courtroom marriage-by-technicality and would eventually bare Bundy’s son.
Rule’s initial affection for Bundy as a person is a strength of her book and some of what is different about it than, say, Michelle McNamara’s 2018 I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, about The Golden Gate Killer (who oddly and creepily eventually seems to have stopped raping and killing after marrying and taking on a more conventional life). The author of the book somehow manages to both honor Bundy’s humanity and unflinchingly tell the truth about what he did (what the evidence tells us we know) and what he might have done (cold cases that he may or may not have been responsible for). The version of The Stranger Beside Me that I read included four addendum chapters from Rule herself and an additional one (as recent as 2021) from her daughter, Leslie, who had also become a crime writer.
Ann Rule was almost apologetic in some of those epilogues and afterwards and final chapters about how generous she’d been with Bundy, how willing she had been at times to be roped into his schemes (she’s open, throughout, about how many times she sent him small amounts of money while he was in prison to buy stamps and cigarettes, as one example, but she’s also open with him about the fact that she has a book deal for the whole thing, so it seems that both of them eventually conjured up an agenda beyond the additional innocent relationship). I’m not sure her attempts at apology were really necessary, as the way she saw Bundy as a person was a strength, and I shudder to imagine how worse things might have been—for police, for Ted, for his victims—if the relationship between the book’s author and Bundy had never existed. The truth is, Bundy was charismatic and creatively cunning; one of his judges seemed to recognize how talented and impactful of a lawyer (he was a law student during some of his kills and represented himself in the courtroom for long and consequential stretches) he could have been if he had taken a different path with his life.
Rule writes:
“My memory of Ted Bundy is clear, but bifurcated; I remember two Teds. One is the young man who sat beside me two nights a week in Seattle’s Crisis Clinic. The other is the voyeur, the rapist, the killer, and the necrophile. Try as I might, I still can’t bring the images together. Looking at them under an imaginary microscope, I cannot superimpose the murderer over the promising student. And I am not alone. Most of the people who knew him struggle with the same dichotomy.”
It’s a compartmentalization I alluded to, too, in regards to the way I saw and understood my own brother the first time I wrote about Shane publicly. And yet, part of me thinks that the untangling of this expectation of mutual exclusion might be precisely what is most needed. When I learned and ultimately accepted that my own blood brother had killed—my knowledge of and intimacy with him was surely way more credible than the average yahoos out there on the Internet who had things to say—I also had to reckon against how much of my own life experience was steeped in denial and naivety. This combination shielded me from the worst of my brother, and also from my own flawed relationship with him. I don’t know if I could have better “helped” Shane onto a different path or not, but I know that to do so would have required a much different emotional state and awareness.
So what if Shane had allowed himself to be more fully seen and if people like me had given him the permission to do so? And what would it have looked like to encourage that structurally? I want to be clear that I’m talking here about more than therapy and support groups and present fathers, though those things are, of course, good, and both Malvo and Bundy (and Shane!) could have used them. According to Rule’s book, it is relatively unknown who Bundy’s father even was, with a worse case-scenario being that Bundy’s father was also his grandfather. How’s that for something we’d rather not consider or think about? Bundy was also lied to by his mother for most of his youth about the situation.
For someone like a Bundy, the New Age types might say something like, with some legitimacy I think, that the fantasies he experienced were at the very least a kind of energy. And what might it have looked like for him to move that energy without resorting to the behavior that became his downfall and the downfall of many others? There was a mental aspect to his behavior, yes, but there was also surely a physiological aspect (and perhaps even a spiritual one as well). The most dangerous compulsions seem to be both attempts to regulate something internal and perhaps also to “correct” something from earlier in one’s life. The behavior itself becomes a dimented-ish “release.” There’s more to say about this, but I’m probably not the one to say it, or at least not yet. In the meantime, Peter Levine’s 1997 book, Waking the Tiger, is very worthwhile in this regard.
I’m aware that I’m posing questions here more than I am answering them, but I don’t want to finish without saying something about nature, which is roughly the subject of Levine’s book. A few years back, before engaging in a mescaline experience with a friend, he had me listen to a podcast episode about “animism.” It didn’t have a huge impact on me at the time, but it seemed to roughly fit in with the perception that one of the things that psychedelics in general do is put us back into a more right connection with what we’ve tried so hard to disconnect ourselves from, which is nature and perhaps even the entire cosmos. Indeed, it did not seem like an accident that one of the results of my own ceremony was a wading into a pond and letting fish gather around me as a way to speak into the questions I was asking about my own father relationship at the time, and my attempts at dating and sexuality. Another time, I wasn’t quite so sure that I was even going to “survive” a backyard and large-dose experience with mushrooms, but as I “came to” and was about to declare some consequential shit to a friend I had the instinct to first take a bite out of the grass in which my face was lying, while my mind associated to Christ healing a blind person with, yes, saliva-induced mud.
Another way in might be to keep an eye on the practices that have become known as “earthing” or “grounding.” The general idea is that when our literal feet (or body) are in contact with the real earth, this effects the energetic charge of our body in a way that brings on healing properties. Products like shoes and sheets are then being created to put us back in touch with something that our domestication has taken from us. We ought to follow the science here even if/as we experiment, but I think we’re at least right to be asking these questions. We take on such huge, protective behavior changes so often in human history and often with the naive assumption that there won’t be unintended consequences that come from what is beneath the surface of whatever it is.
So yes, there are alternative practices and spiritual myths that might have something to say to us about these things—we are animal and spirit, material and soul—but it is in connection to these kinds of experiences and questions that it also feels so disturbing to see powerful people running the likes of evolutionary biologist Carol Hooven out of Harvard. In the tradition of Dale Peterson’s and Richard Wrangham’s 1997, book, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Hooven’s 2021 book, T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, reports from her observations of chimpanzee behavior in the jungle. It turns out that they can be pretty ugly toward one another: they compete for sex, they attack, they rape, they even stake and raid other chimp villages. ‘We deserve to learn about evolution,’ we’re told when it’s politically expedient, ‘but not, you know, those parts.’
I have an indoor male cat who seems like another fine example of how you can take him away from nature, but you can’t take nature away from him. Sometimes he gets in his hunting mode, even when/though there is nothing for him to hunt, and his needs for food and protection are already met. He runs around, nonetheless, and practices “attacking. He used to do this to his buddy, another male cat who we lost several months ago, but without another cat around, he takes his practiced aggression out on random objects. A quick Google search will confirm that this is pretty normal behavior. And so it almost surely is with male humans as well. There are settings like sports and outdoor hobbies that surely titillate this part of ourselves in the right way, but channeling us into the “helping” careers like nursing are unlikely to exercise the right buttons (which doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with a man who chooses to be a nurse).
To really be willing to look at the world that is there does not, in my view, destine little boys to become Ted Bundys, though it will give us a fuller picture of what we’re up against. The “energy” is there, whether we acknowledge it or not. Hooven fittingly starts her own book with some history and reflection about eunuchs, pointing out the somewhat obvious fact that to castrate is to deprive of male power. Eunuchs are a real phenomenon in our narrative history, but they’re also an apt descriptor and metaphor for many of educational and even religious programs and proposals that aim at forming boys. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man all the way back in 1943,
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
And so, if the solution to the Ted Bundys of the world isn’t killing them and it isn’t castrating them, what is it? Well, I have already suggested that I think it would involve connecting again to the spirituality (for lack of a better word) of nature, and finding healthy (but consequential) ways to channel testosterone, but I suspect there will also be no replacement for communities proactively devoting time and effort into digging around in their development enough to help them find their truest strength—they’ll need real purpose and mission, while we’re at it—lest they continue to fall for the cheap, but deeply-alluring replacement of feeling a moment or two of control in this otherwise scary, frustrating, and chaotic world.