Ted Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell, the illegitimate child of Louise Cowell and an unknown man.[1] Louise was a good mother and did all she could to care for her child. “He believed in Santa Clause, hated vegetables and sometimes imagined ogres and scaly things couching in his closet.”[2] But young Ted was haunted by self-esteem issues and a vague uneasiness about the world around him. Before his fourth birthday Louise decided to move to Tacoma Washington, where she met John Culpepper Bundy. They soon married and Bundy adopted little Ted, changing his surname from Cowell to Bundy. After the marriage Bundy felt deprived of his mothers attention, and was contemptuous of his family’s modest lifestyle. Ted always pulled his mother to the most expensive racks in department stores. At an early age Ted become obsessed with material objects and was extremely class-conscious. As he grew older this obsession intensified and developed into an addiction to stealing.
Perhaps the most well known case of young Ted stealing occurred early in high school. Ted considered himself to small and skinny to compete with the other boys in athletics and therefore turned to solitary sports. Some of Ted's childhood friends remembered that Ted took to skiing and somehow managed to buy good equipments. Unknown to his friends was that Ted’s ski gear was stole, a fact that would have shocked family friends who knew the eldest Bundy boy as a regular churchgoer, vice-president of the Methodist youth, and a promising teenager interested in a career in law enforcement. Nor could they have imagined that Ted, along with several other boys had devised a crude ski-lift ticket forgery scheme. They were never caught.
[2] Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, The Only Living Witness (New York: Linden Press/ Simon & Schuster, 1983), 58.
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