Grinning Ted Bundy told me I’d be a good serial killer and called me his ‘homeboy’ – I even organised his wedding

TED Bundy’s bright blue eyes turned deep black and beads of sweat trickled down his forehead as he eagerly recounted his brutal crimes.

The scene was a cramped room at Florida State Prison in the US. I listened in horror and disgust to the doomed serial sex killer’s unspeakable memories before interrupting him with a question about one of his victims.

He suddenly went silent, then smiled and said with a laugh: “You too, Steve, could make a successful mass killer! I really think you have it in you.”

It was one of countless chilling, and deeply disorienting, moments I spent alone with Ted over the six intense months I interviewed him in that small, airless space on Death Row.

There had been no way to prepare myself for the ordeal of prying a personal narrative from this handsome, smiling monster who had hunted, raped and murdered at least 30 women and girls in the 1970s, perhaps many more.

I became Bundy’s ‘homeboy’

I hadn’t realised what I was getting into. Yet from the very first interview, and my unnerving discovery that Ted and I, about the same age, had been born in the same eastern US city then raised by single mothers 3,000 miles away, in the same Pacific Northwest community, I sensed forces more purposeful than mere chance at work.

Maybe Ted felt it, too. He’d immediately started calling me “homeboy”.

Ted was intelligent, genial and well-spoken, hardly the sort of tidily-groomed young Republican whom you’d expect to relish sex with his victims’ mangled and rotting corpses, or preserve their severed heads in a cupboard at home as masturbatory aids, as investigators believed.

He was odious, cursed, and so proud of his handiwork.

Secret wedding and gold Tiffany rings

Yet my partner, Hugh Aynesworth, and I became so deeply entwined in Bundy’s bizarre world that I found myself secretly arranging his courtroom marriage for the day he received his second death sentence in February 1980.

We even paid for the gold wedding bands from Tiffany in New York – though Ted’s new wife, Carole Boone, would immediately lose hers while doing laundry after the ceremony.

Ted’s bizarre sock fetish

I also bought Ted a pair of khakis and some spiffy argyle socks to wear to his wedding.

Of course, I knew that among his multiple paraphilias – perversions – was a sock fetish.

Dozens of pairs of socks he’d purchased as a fugitive with credit cards stolen from women’s purses had been entered into evidence at court.

Ted told me he felt nothing but pride to see all those socks arrayed before the jury, like a cattleman surveying his prize herd.

He also admired my plot for a courtroom coup so he could marry Carole in front of a judge, calling it “devious even by my standards”.

That trial, held in Orlando, Florida, lasted six weeks.

During the case, I spent all day in court, taking notes and looking on as Ted’s rapt groupies made eyes at the defendant, who from time to time flashed them a smile.

Much of my evenings was devoted to interviewing Bundy in the county jail by telephone from a Holiday Inn, where I shared a room with Carole and her teenage son, Jamie.

Death Row drugs and sex

When my Death Row conversations with Bundy began, I visited him under the guise of his appeals investigator, a necessary ruse. Carole, meanwhile, rented a house near the prison.

She later confided to me that she smuggled in drugs for her “Bunny” in her vagina – then unsuccessfully sued me for defamation when I repeated the story in print.

She also conceived a child with Ted in the prison visiting room.

There was a water cooler, Carole told me, that you could get behind and have sex with a bit of privacy – though you’d have to give the guard a little something to look the other way.

Bloody sorority slayings

Bundy was suspected of murdering women and girls in at least six states across the US, but he was tried and convicted of just three killings, all in Florida.

His first homicide trial, held in Miami in 1979, was for the late-night bludgeon murders of Margaret Bowman, 21, and 20-year-old Lisa Levy, two Florida State University students who had been sleeping in their upstairs Chi Omega sorority bedrooms.

He violated Lisa with a can of hairspray and nearly bit off her left nipple – which led to him being dubbed “The Love-Bite Killer” in some newspaper headlines.

His Orlando trial the following year was for the abduction-murder of Kimberly Diane Leach, a 12-year-old schoolchild whose ravaged body was recovered from where Ted had left her, naked and slumped under a country hog shed.

Bundy, who vehemently insisted he was innocent of all crimes, claimed to be the only true victim in this story, the target of a nationwide police plot to frame him for a range of homicides they were otherwise too incompetent to close.

Through Carole, he offered Hugh and me exclusive access to him for a possible book, promising to share all the facts as only he knew them.

In exchange, Ted wanted a complete re-investigation of the cases against him, which he guaranteed that an able investigator of Hugh’s attainments would surely find fraudulent.

The only question was: ‘How many?’

Yet two things immediately became clear.

Hugh’s review of the case material left no doubt that Ted was a cold-blooded serial killer.

The only real question was how many victims he murdered.

Bundy, of course, knew that was what Hugh would find. So why the charade?

It was also obvious that Ted had no intention of addressing substantive matters in his prison conversations with me. Again, why go to the trouble?

The answer, we’d find, lay within Ted’s extraordinary ability to compartmentalise the truth, even at the cost of his own life.

His own biggest fan, Bundy envisioned a gossipy, Hollywood-style book with naughty details that would only indirectly flirt with the question of his guilt.

Hugh and I had something different in mind, of course.

Ted really was a boy

But we realised that, with Ted, an innovative approach was required.

Ted was boyish, as in boyishly handsome, boyishly charming and so on. In fact, I sensed that he really was a boy, emotionally, with manifest mental issues that could be exploited.

So I decided to play to Bundy’s emotional immaturity and narcissism, hoping to persuade him to “speculate” on what sort of person committed the crimes for which he was suspected.

It was a gamble. I was ready for Ted to recognise he was being played and blow up everything.

Instead, to my relief and initial puzzlement, he grabbed my tape recorder, cradled it in his arms and set off on the horrifying saga of a boy in the grip of gradually-intensifying fantasies that over time progressed into sex murders – all recounted in the third person.

“There was a great feeling of power and sexual tension,” Bundy speculated of how the boy felt when one victim died.

He referred to murder as simply “inappropriate acting out” and rape as “satisfying that part of himself”.

Bundy also commented on why the killer kept returning to Taylor Mountain to dispose of his victims’ bodies, saying that animals in the area were “doing his work for him” by gnawing at the bones.

“He had his own garbage disposal,” he said. “A whole bunch of little beasties who would, in effect, destroy every last shred of the victim.”

His eyes turned absolutely black

When he got going, Ted’s eyes turned from blue to absolutely black.

His voice would also get this eerie, disembodied tone to it and, bizarrely, more than once, I saw a horizontal white line like a welt appear across his right cheek.

It was as if an invisible finger was digging a nail into his skin.

At other points during our interviews, Ted cracked jokes and performed salesman sketches for adverts promoting clubs and handcuffs – ‘products’ he’d used in his murders.

“What’s one less person on the face of the earth anyway?” he asked.

Though Ted never explicitly confessed to any of the killings, I did not doubt I was hearing autobiography, nor did any of the police detectives, prosecutors, FBI agents or experts for whom we later played the recordings.

It took every ounce of discipline I owned to listen impassively to what Ted shared with me.

Inwardly, as he described some of his crimes and explained what he called his hidden “entity” that guided him, I yearned to be anywhere but that claustrophobic prison room.

Bundy’s incredible denial

I finally escaped in June 1980, when Hugh, having finished the bulk of the investigation, took over from me with Ted, whom, it had become clear, was untroubled by his behaviour.

Not only did the notorious psychopath deny responsibility for the brutal destruction he had wrought, but he had come to deny the very fact of what he’d done.

On one telling occasion with Hugh, he even asserted that the past was just that, past.

“Try to touch the past,” Ted declared, “You can’t.”

Of course, from there it was a small step to ignoring the future – which for Ted, would come to an abrupt and early end in the Florida electric chair, Old Sparky, in January 1989.

He had told Hugh that he viewed the certainty of execution with complete calmness. “We all are going to die,” he said. “I just have a better idea than most when that will be.”

That self-assurance melted away as his date with the executioner approached.

Eventually, Ted offered to publicly confess to whatever he could remember in the hope law enforcement officials would support a stay of execution so he could be fully debriefed.

Skeptics called this “bones for time”.

The Florida authorities did not buy it.

Ted, then 42, was executed on schedule, as hundreds of demonstrators, mostly young men born well after his final capture, cheered in the early dawn cold outside the prison.

The pretty girls with their adoring looks of ten years before had been replaced by drunken, red-faced men and boys jabbing “Burn Bundy Burn” placards in front of the TV cameras.

I watched the hideous circus unfold on television in my New York City apartment, thought of those girls once more for a moment, then turned off the lights and fell back to sleep.

• Ted Bundy: The Only Living Witness by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, published by Mirror Books, is available now