Customer Reviews

Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer (Signet)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ted Bundy murdered over 30 women in the late 70's and has a kind of cult status among people who are obsessed with serial killers and voilence, which is not why I read this book. I read this book because I was hoping it would shed light on a problem which seems to be a product of modern American society.
The First half of this book is very interesting. Ted creates a hypothetical psychological model of a killer and in the third person describes how this person developed from a regular guy with deep emotion issues into a full fledged mass murder. That part of the book is very frightening and thought provoking. Ted describes the killer's initial fascination with alcohol and violent pornography. From there he describes the slow progress of the killer instict: how his trips to the pornographic book stores became more frequent and urgent, how he spent a year spying in women's house before almost attacking a woman one night, followed months later by an actual attack, then a rape and killing.He also describes the killer's remorse between killings and his frequent promises that this would be the last one.
Toward the middle of the book it gets pretty boring. The second interviewer takes over and keeps trying to get Ted to admit his guilt, which he won't do. Most of the answers in this half of the book are evasive and tiringly repetitive.
It is redeemed in the last interview in which Ted makes some rather interesting statements about how it is our society which creates the serial killer. He also talks about how this a problem which manifests itself rather early in the life of these sick men,and what's even more frightening, he states that for every man arrested for multiple homicide there are five or six more that are not caught. With a little money, Ted states, a man can kill indiscriminately for the rest of his life without fear of detection. This book is a must read for anyone interested in Abnormal Psychology.

For some reason people believe that this book - "Ted Bundy: conversations with a killer" - was the first time Bundy had discussed his crimes. It wasn't. Bundy talked in the third person about his crimes with Michaud and Anyesworth for their book "The Only Living Witness".

Bundy also spoke with Keppel about his crimes in "Riverman- Ted Bundy and I hunt for the Green River Killer", which again has Ted speaking in the 'third' person about his own crimes as well as the Green River killings.

In my opinion Keppel's book is far superior than this one. This book is the same old same old that was presented in Witness. It's nothing more than edited versions of the notes and interviews that Michaud had from the making of Witness. They'd been there -- and done this before.

Conversations does have some interesting twists and turns to it, but mainly is nothing more than Bundy playing the games he has always played. Bundy the master manipulator all the way to the end.

If you are interested in Bundy there are other books out there that fit the bill better: The Stranger Beside Me, The Deliberate Stranger, and The Only Living Witness.

The authors used an interesting ploy to get Bundy to confess and describe his killings. Whether he was unwilling to admit guilt for psychological reasons or due to legal concerns, no one had reached "first base" with Bundy. The authors cleverly got him to describe his thoughts and feelings in the third person! So his comments were more detached, such as, "The killer would have taken her..." To my mind, that makes it even more chilling. Great reporting and a must read by those who want to understand the obsession and motive of serial killers.

But perhaps this is what would happen when you are reading a sociopath's thoughts. I actually thought it would be more interesting, more first hand, but you find through reading this account, that he still can't admit to himself what he has done. While it allows you to understand the "beast" of being a serial killer, it isn't as gripping to read and descriptive as I hoped it would. I do recommend this book if your interested in Ted bundy, or just interested in the killer mind. It won't be what you think.

They say not to judge a book by it's cover, but in a sense, we must. From the cover, this book looked strangely interesting: it didn't seem like a previously opinionated crime writer's account of Bundy; rather, it was Bundy himself speaking.

The only problem is that what Bundy says in the book is pretty -- in short --boring. I don't want to give away what goes on in this book, but let's just say that the subtitle "conversations with a killer" does NOT fit well. Sure, it may be conversations WITH a killer, but barely about the KILLING that Bundy did.

The authors spend their entire book arguing with Bundy to fess up to at least ONE murder and comment on it; or at least come up with ONE alibi for explanation. He does neither. Instead, Bundy gives a textbook version of what a serial killer would probably be like. If I wanted that, I could have opened my abnormal psychology book from my undergrad psych class.

I found this little number in my local used bookstore. Having been fascinated with Ted Bundy over the last couple of years but yet to read anything in depth about him, I bought it, hoping to learn something new.

Unfortunately, "Conversations With A Killer"'s biggest flaw is Bundy himself. I feel really bad for Michaud and Aynesworth; they honestly try to write a ground-breaking book about the case, and Bundy promises them before the interviews that he will reveal to them "the truth about everything." How could any print journalist say no? Rather than embarking on the horizon of a new look at Ted Bundy, however, the duo are instead treated to interview after interview of Bundy whipping them around this way and that, never once giving them the kind of information they need.

After initially being asked point-blank about his whereabouts during the crimes he is committed of and clamming up immediately, Bundy is instead offered the ability to speak of these crimes in the third-person, freeing him from self-incrimination. Instead of offering any new outlooks, however, Bundy dances about, choosing to "speculate" about the killer's mental workings and treating us to paragraph after paragraph of half-baked, psycho-analytical noodlings. I'm surprised Michaud and Aynesworth didn't fall asleep while interviewing him; when Bundy's not pumping his side of the testimony full of mostly-nonsensical, winding explanations of the "killer's" mindset, he chooses to be very vague about his choice of words, offering a lot of "could be" and "might have been that, also might have been this" and "I don't know". And, of course, he denies absolutely everything about his involvement in these crimes, standing infuriatingly adamant about his innocence all the while. Michaud and Ayneworth ask him numerous times about his whereabouts during crimes or about the testimony of witnesses, and Bundy is rarely ever able to give them an answer, either sidestepping the question and weaseling his way into another subject, or simply refusing to answer at all.

The book does have a few positive marks, as few as they are. The first few chapters of the book do offer a decent, albiet selective, history of Bundy from youth to the (then) present, revealing an education in words passed on by his mother, crippling shyness during high school, and his strange fetish with socks. Also detailed are his struggles with bi-polar disorder, using his escape from jail in Glenwood Springs as a compelling example. Lastly, one can glimpse some truths behind Bundy's words, including the dangerous influences that both "stress" and pornography had on his transformation into a serial killer. However, while these are great tidbits for a newcomer to Bundy's persona, they're not nearly enough to provide one with a fulfilling look at the man and his life & doings.

As for Michaud and Aynesworth, they humble Bundy at the beginning and are eager to try new approaches, but as the book is chronological, it is easy to grasp their growing impatience with Ted's mind games. Aynesworth gets especially agitated, and his multiple outbursts of anger at Bundy (only to be met with smiles, jokes, denial, irritation, and sidestepping on Bundy's end) are by far the most interesting parts of the book. And that's got to be a sad statement: that the anger of one of the authors at the subject of the book is ultimately more interesting than the sum of the book's parts.

I can't really recommend it. Only those truly interested in Ted Bundy or the way his mind works could grasp much enjoyment out of it. Much of the book will just bore you to tears. An interesting first look at Bundy, it proved to be a vastly unfulfilling one for me, and I hope that Ann Rule's "The Stranger Beside Me" will prove to be much better. Good luck next time, Steve and Hugh.

Okay, you are invited to interview and converse with one of the most deadly serial killers in American History, Theodore Robert Bundy. While I was interested in his background especially his family life and his paternity which might have solved some questions about his genetic composition. Except for when he discusses about possession of items like the television or the stereo that he admits to stealing like a game, do we get to understand his problems. He doesn't know how to relate to people even his devoted wife, Carole, girlfriend like Liz, even his family members like his mother or stepfather. He never really identifies or understands human behavior. Just like the television and stereo, he needs to possess somebody particularly a woman but dead. The book doesn't discuss the necrophilia that drew Ted into placing his victims' heads and other body parts in certain areas because like the Green River Killer, Ted visited them and I won't go any further than that. Even in the prison system, he was embarrassed by his necrophilia which probably would place him lowest scale on the prison system hierarchy even below child molesters since he did murder a 12 year old girl. Not enough mentions of the victims that Ted took away and there were probably a lot more that we don't know about because Ted was slick, mobile, and perfected his set-up in luring his victim like a predator catching his prey and rendering them unconscious and murdering them but maintaining their body parts for his own pleasure at the risk of torturing family members, relatives, friends, and neighbors from continuing their search for their loved ones.

This book was slightly a let down, due to no fault of the author. If I had no expectations, it probably would've been very good, but who doesn't have expectations? Especially when they are getting ready to read Ted Bundy's own words, a window into his psyche? But, it's not just the reader who is frustrated with Bundy's hesitant and evasive dialogue. The author, too, voices those same sentiments through the book. Unfortunately, it is not, as I had hoped, some interesting view into the mind of a mad man. But, I suppose I was hoping for the answer to the ever present question of 'why?'. There are no whys here. There are hows, whos, whats and whens, but Bundy will not speak in the first person. He couches everything in the protective cocoon of hypothetical situations, so you aren't exactly sure if he is really telling the truth, or just leading you on. You get a very solid sense of his narcicism, and a disturbing view of his normalcy. While we all hope to see a monster reflected in the page, something recognizable as wrong or dangerous, his words don't ooze evil, and it is easy to see how he was able to fool so many unfortunates. It is an interesting book, and I would still recommend it, but read it with a grain of salt already on your tongue. If you go into it with the wrong idea, it feels anticlimactic.

Pages and pages of verbatim interviews with a megalomaniac, even one as twisted as Ted Bundy, get dull after a while. It would be a necessary reference book for anybody writing a doctoral thesis on Bundy or the psychopathic mind, but really holds little interest for the average reader.

This was agony to read largely because it never gets beyond Bundy's constant evasion. There are numerous references to "the book" that the interviewers and Bundy were hoping to realize but it is obvious that the book they imagined is not what we now have. For most of the interviews, Bundy insists on upholding the illusion that he is not guilty. In the face of what we know, and in consideration for the victims and their families, this becomes nearly intolerable to read. However, the interviewers themselves employ expert technique which redeems this effort.