Ted Bundy Quotes

“Society wants to believe it can identify evil people, or bad or harmful people, but it's not practical. There are no stereotypes.”
― Ted Bundy

“Try to touch the past. Try to deal with the past. It's not real. It's just a dream. -Ted Bundy”
― Ted Bundy

“As I write these recollections of women who survived, I hope my readers are taking careful note of why they did.
They screamed.
They fought.
They slammed doors in a stranger's face.
They ran.
They doubted glib stories.
They spotted flaws in those stories.
They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“Yet, in reality, Ted loved things more than he loved people. He could find life in an abandoned bicycle or an old car, and feel a kind of compassion for these inanimate objects, more compassion than he could ever feel for another human being.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory.”
― Sam Harris

“I am the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you will ever meet.”
― Ted Bundy

“Just be careful," a Seattle homicide detective warned. "Maybe we'd better know where to find your dental records in case we need to identify you."
I laughed, but the words were jarring; the black humor that would surround Ted Bundy evermore begun.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“Some people hate the smell of hospitals. I hate the smell of jails and prisons, all the same: stale cigarette smoke, Pine-Sol, urine, sweat, and dust.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“I ended that letter, 'There is nothing in this life that is a complete tragedy - nothing - try to remember that.' Looking back, I wonder at my naiveté. Some things in life ARE complete tragedies. Ted Bundy's story may well be one of them.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him.”
― Ann Rule

“In court the next morning I sat at a table in the judge’s chambers. On the other side of the table, close enough for me to reach across and touch him, sat Ted Bundy. He’s adorable, I thought, surprised at my first impression, because I’d pictured him in my mind as brooding, dark, intense disdain (p. 83).
(Loftus testified as a defense expert for Ted Bundy in 1976, Bundy was found guilty of aggravated kidnapping)”
― Elizabeth F. Loftus, Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial

“Have you ever been in a great mood, or at least a good one, then decided, “You know what, I’m going to troll through Facebook and see what’s happening with my friends.”? I have.

I shouldn’t though. It’s a disco strangler of good days. It’s the Ted Bundy of good moods. One minute you’re cruising along and the next you’re chained in a moldy hole in someone’s basement, waiting to be transformed into some psycho’s personal Halloween mask, metaphorically speaking, mind you.”
― Steve Bivans

“Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.”
― Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century

“Our effort was mocked by some police supervisors: has the computer caught Ted yet?”
― Robert D. Keppel, The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

“The thought had occurred to me as I was flying to Salt Lake City earlier that day that Ted Bundy might offer to let me stay in his apartment” (p. 74).
(Loftus testified as a defense expert for Ted Bundy in 1976)”
― Elizabeth F. Loftus, Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness, and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial

“I don't want to die. I deserve, certainly, the most extreme punishment society has, and I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me. That's the irony. What I'm talking about is going beyond retribution because there is no way in the world that killing me is going to restore those beautiful children to their parents and correct and soothe the pain.”
― James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future

“Two other highly vocal FMSF Advisory Board members are Dr Elizabeth Loftus and Professor Richard Ofshe. Loftus is a respected academic psychologist whose much quoted laboratory experiment of successfully implanting a fictitious childhood memory of being lost in a shopping mall is frequently used to defend the false memory syndrome argument. In the experiment, older family members persuaded younger ones of the (supposedly) never real event. However, Loftus herself says that being lost, which almost everyone has experienced, is in no way similar to being abused. Jennifer Freyd comments on the shopping mall experiment in Betrayal Trauma (1996): “If this demonstration proves to hold up under replication it suggests both that therapists can induce false memories and, even more directly, that older family members play a powerful role in defining reality for dependent younger family members." (p. 104). Elizabeth Loftus herself was sexually abused as a child by a male babysitter and admits to blacking the perpetrator out of her memory, although she never forgot the incident. In her autobiography, Witness for the Defence, she talks of experiencing flashbacks of this abusive incident on occasion in court in 1985 (Loftus &Ketcham, 1991, p.149)
In her teens, having been told by an uncle that she had found her mother's drowned body, she then started to visualize the scene. Her brother later told her that she had not found the body. Dr Loftus's successful academic career has run parallel to her even more high profile career as an expert witness in court, for the defence of those accused of rape, murder, and child abuse. She is described in her own book as the expert who puts memory on trial, sometimes with frightening implications.
She used her theories on the unreliability of memory to cast doubt, in 1975, on the testimony of the only eyewitness left alive who could identify Ted Bundy, the all American boy who was one of America's worst serial rapists and killers (Loftus & Ketcham, 1991, pp. 61-91). Not withstanding Dr Loftus's arguments, the judge kept Bundy in prison. Bundy was eventually tried, convicted and executed.”
― Valerie Sinason, Memory in Dispute

“To have been possessed by something so awful and so alien, and then the next morning wake up from it, remember what happened, and realize what I had done, with a clear mind and all my essential moral and ethical feelings intact at that moment, [I was] absolutely horrified that I was capable of doing something like that.”
― James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future

“I think people need to recognize that those of us who have been so much influenced by violence in the media- in particular pornographic violence- are not some kinds of inherent monsters. We are your sons, and we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families.”
― James C. Dobson

“it amazes me that somebody could escape from a courthouse and then go to jail, and be allowed to escape again. when you think about the responsibilities of a jail, right, if we use an analogy and we think about a for profit business. you can see people from that business sitting around... well we need to increase sales, we need to decrease costs. if you're in a meeting in a jail, you would think they would talk about people not escaping. that seems to be really a central concept to what a jail does...”
― Todd Grande

“That kind of forgiveness is of God. And if they have it, they have it, and if they don't, well, maybe they'll find it someday.”
― James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future

“Bundy was correct in saying that most serial murderers are addicted to hardcore pornography. FBI records validate that point. Not every person exposed to obscenity will become a killer, of course, but too many will!”
― James C. Dobson, Life on the Edge: A Young Adult's Guide to a Meaningful Future

“When Mary Osmer later told us her story, her eyes glistened with guilt. To her, the stranger seemed friendly, sincere, very polite, and easy to talk to. He had a nice smile and didn’t get upset when she told him she wouldn’t go with him.”
― Robert D. Keppel, The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

“These three women picked up subtle signals that Bundy was sending off. When questioned, they said that he seemed too intent on what he was after and was uncomfortably nervous. Furthermore, they said he had spoken rapidly as if he were reading a script and he acted as if he had had a hidden agenda. Of the five different women who were approached by the stranger that day but didn’t go with him, two would later become severely psychologically traumatized when the truth about “Ted” came out, at the thought that they could have become a murder victim.”
― Robert D. Keppel, The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

“Our inexperience was telling, and it favored the killer.”
― Robert D. Keppel, The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

“The extent of this killer’s crimes was growing as more of the pieces of the puzzle came together.
As the handlers rushed toward me with their eager search dogs sniffing the ground ahead of them, it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t want them anywhere near this cranium. Dogs don’t care where they put their paws. Crucial evidence could be destroyed or altered if the dogs ran through this site. A basic tenet of Criminal Investigation 101 was racing through my head: protect the scene. But it was too late. Almost on cue, and certainly by accident, a dog’s paw struck the ground and a human jawbone erupted through the leafy surface. I yelled for everyone to stay back, but within a few seconds another dog walked across the leaves and dislodged another human jawbone. Then another dog stepped on another mandible. In stunned amazement, we all realized that a detailed search of the mountainside was required. At the very least, we had just discovered the remains of two people.”
― Robert D. Keppel, The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

“We needed an over-confident Ted, not a defensive Ted, because overconfidence breeds mistakes, and that’s just what we needed our Ted to make in order catch him.”
― Robert D. Keppel, The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

“The press creates its own magnified version of an event. The more intense the feeding frenzy for exclusives, the more the story changes from reporter to reporter until what the public gets is a distorted version of the truth. It’s as if the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle were at work everytime a large story unfolds in the media, so that the presence of the media itself creates, changes, and redefines the story. You always have to be wary of what the media reports because the media itself has created parts of the story.”
― Robert D. Keppel, The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

“If it can be said that serial killers, through the control they exert and the terror they spread, make victims of the entire communities—families and loved ones, the police who track them, and the general public who must live in fear—then in his own way, Dave was
a victim of the Green River killer, just as I became one of Ted Bundy’s victims.”
― Robert D. Keppel, The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer

“Years ago I read about a psychiatrist who said, ‘If you could only photograph everybody
who came out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you would have a mug book of all the active violent offenders against women in that particular area.”
― Robert D. Keppel, The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer