22 years after his execution in 1989, a vial of Ted Bundy’s blood has been found in Florida that yielded a full DNA profile of the evil serial killer. The profile will be uploaded to the FBI’s national database on Friday. Investigators can use the newly data to try to solve cases that went cold decades ago.
Mug shot, 1980, taken the day after sentencing for the murder of Kimberly Leach
The vial of blood was part of evidence taken in 1978 when Bundy was arrested for the murder of a 12-year-old girl. A tissue sample taken before he was executed and cremated had produced only a partial profile.
Bundy’s murders and execution predated the creation of state and national databases that tracks millions of DNA samples of convicted offenders. Law enforcement agencies tap the databases to tackle unsolved crimes, build up their evidence against suspects or to clear them.
Bundy had confessed to more than 30 murders before he was executed but he was suspected of many more. One such case was the abduction of 8-year-old Ann Marie Burr, who disappeared from her Tacoma, Washington, home in 1961.
In custody, Florida, July 27, 1978
There has been much speculation and debate over whether she was one of his victims, even though he’d written to her parents before his execution saying he didn’t know what happened to the girl and denying having anything to do with her disappearance.
Fans of slasher and serial killer movies and TV drama will be familiar with the notorious Ted Bundy. He seems the most quoted serial killer, probably because of how prolific he was and how his charismatic good looks contrast with his heinous crimes.
Unlike the profilers in the TV drama series, “Criminal Minds”, that seems to eschew forensic evidence, and frequently treat the crime scene with scant regard to forensic procedures, the DNA profile will hopefully help investigators resolve cold cases and bring closure to families of those victims.
The account below is extracted from Wikipedia’s entry about Ted Bundy. Photos used in this posting were also from Wikipedia.
1975 Utah mug shot
Theodore Robert “Ted” Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell in 1946 – January 24 and executed at age 43. He was a serial killer, rapist, kidnapper, and necrophile who assaulted and murdered many young women between 1974 and 1978. After more than a decade of denials he confessed to 30 homicides shortly before his execution.
In court in Florida
Bundy was handsome and charismatic, traits he exploited in winning the confidence of his young, attractive female victims. He typically approached them in public places and feigned injury or disability, or impersonated an authority figure, before overpowering and assaulting them at a more secluded location.
Press conference in July 1978
He sometimes revisited his secondary crime scenes for hours at a time, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses until putrefaction and destruction by wild animals made further interaction impossible. He decapitated at least four victims and kept the severed heads in his apartment for a period of time as mementos. On a few occasions he simply broke into dwellings in the dead of night and bludgeoned victims as they slept.
Initially charged in Utah in 1975 and convicted of aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault, Bundy became linked to a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in six states. Facing murder charges in Colorado, he engineered two dramatic escapes, and committed at least three additional murders and several other violent assaults in Florida before his ultimate recapture in 1977. He received three death sentences in two separate trials for the three known Florida homicides.
