BUNDY
The Childhood of a Serial Killer - Chapter One
Environmental Loading 101

 

Outside the prison complex, the sun was just beginning to rise. Satellite news dishes were mushroomed among the drunken revelers gathered in the cow pasture adjacent to the buildings. Death penalty protesters gathered among the crowd as well, but they were not effective at keeping history from being made that day. There was a Bundy BBQ planned for later that afternoon at a local saloon, and there were numerous other creative gatherings elsewhere on the planet. About two thousand glee stricken folks were shouting, chanting, and cheering on this long awaited Tuesday. As fireworks filled the sky, people sold electric chair pins, t-shirts, and other memorabilia to mark the momentous occasion.

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It was so chaotically wild that morning that at the next electrocution, no one was allowed within a thousand feet of the building unless they were only carrying a phone, a pager, their medicine, a candle, or a Bible. But on this day the spontaneous circus had gathered as though for a rock concert outside the state prison in Starke, Florida. It was January 24th, 1989.

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​​​​​​​​​​​Crowds were cheering so loud outside that guards and prisoners alike could hear it just fine from the inside of the prison. Although the cacophony from spectators was thrumming inside the walls, the death chamber setting itself was quiet, like in a church when waiting for service to begin. The individuals filling this room would be Ted’s last audience as they watched through glass just feet away from his officially reserved seat. Justice was finally going to be served. The chosen assembly of witnesses consisted of detectives, journalists, documenting reporters, and a minister— forty-two in all.

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Ever the actor, when guards brought Bundy in from the cheering sounds, one witness said he was smiling like a performer on opening night, wanting as much attention as he could possibly have. It’s true that the world was watching and he knew it. Ted always loved the spotlight and this was one more performance.

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Once in the chamber, even though there were gatherers behind the window to charm, he staggered a bit when seeing the chair. Capital punishment has never been a deterrent to crime, but Bundy was a brutally deadly escape artist always plotting his next getaway. Florida law saw to it that Old Sparky, being just as infamous as Bundy, would soon stop him in his tracks and wipe that smile off his face.

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We all know how that day ended. The world watched as the white hearse pulled away slowly. Why a white hearse was chosen, I don’t know. It didn’t seem appropriate, white symbolizing purity and all. Perhaps it was the only one available if no innocents had died that week. I guess the occupant had at least been born a soul. Some would say he never had one at all and if so it was an evil one. The only thing I know for sure is that we don’t understand such mysteries, so we each pick the understanding that suits us best.

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After the execution, John Wilson, a journalist and news anchor for Fox 13 Tampa, actually summed up my entire reason for writing this book. Thank you, John. He said, “We need to know more about our society and who we are, and what makes us what we have become. We don’t know nearly enough about that.”

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Well, here goes my attempt at this very conversation.

How did it all start? Where in the world did this guy come from? We will commence Ted’s side of the story with the very first sign that anything wasawry with him or the people around him. It is an eerie example of behavior and an alarming glimpse into his beginning years that shaped the killer. The following is a grim tale based on true events and it goes like this: A little boy lived in a house with a main floor, an upstairs, and an attic. The three-story family house had been his home for a little over three of his very first years. He didn’t remember his first three months of life of course, but those first months brought about an absence in a part of his mind which led him to not care as much about things. At least not about other living beings.

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By the age of three-and-a-half, he had learned most of the house fairly well and thought he knew the family around him just as much. There were five other household members in this domestic scene, and he was loosely attached to each of them.

One afternoon, Teddy found himself in the old kitchen where daily meals were made by the women of the house, as it was in those days. The room housed the stove, sink, icebox, tall cabinet shelves of food, dishes, towels, and various drawers of cooking and eating utensils. As any preschooler has been warned, knives are dangerous and only to be handled by grownups, yet he gathered several knives of various sizes from one of the kitchen utensil drawers—six in all. It is unclear how the three-and-a-half-year-old thought of this or how his little body could have safely managed collecting such a precarious load, but my sources say he did. Once the weapons were in his arms, the preschooler had to sneak up the creaky wooden stairs all the way to the second floor of the house without falling or dropping any of the knives.

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Once he reached the top of the stairs, the little boy carefully opened a door and went into a quiet bedroom. This was the room of who he understood to be one of his sisters. The girl wasn’t sure where little Teddy had actually come from or to whom he belonged, but she knew where she came from; her name was Julia, and she was twelve years old.

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When the little guy got into her room where she was taking a nap, he found her under her bed covers, breathing quietly, sound asleep. He carefully lifted one side of her blanket and placed a knife pointing at her. Then he added another one and then another until they were all next to her, pointing at her body. He somehow covered the girl back up without waking her.

Later, Julia started to stir and Teddy stood absolutely still near her bed, waiting expectantly for her to notice the knives. Over the years, it would become quite clear that he knew how to go undetected, quietly taking young women and girls by surprise. When Julia woke from the safety of slumber, she was horrified when she first felt and then saw the weapons pointing at her body. Scared and barely moving, she gazed wide-eyed around to find no one else in her bedroom, at least not at the height at which she was looking. But then she saw the little boy peering up at her from the foot of the bed. He was smiling.

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Julia was now wide awake, confused, and distraught. She gathered up the knives and returned them to the kitchen’s utensil drawer. What to do? Who to tell? Julia was only twelve years old. She was to be the first of many twelve-year-olds and younger over the years to be taken unawares by Ted.

His last child victim died when he used his newly bought, or stolen, knife to slit her throat. This incident in Julia’s room was only the beginning. Who to tell . . . Julia wasn’t sure who in her family was in charge of this boy. She decided to notify the whole family: her two older sisters and both of her parents. Having informed everyone about the disturbing act, she was met with another bewilderment. To her amazement, no one said anything about it, and no one did anything about it.

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The boy continued his disturbing pranks, yet no one had conversations with little Teddy about his behavior. Ominously, from the very start and for the rest of his lifetime, his startling conduct was overlooked and dismissed by the ones closest to him.

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At that time in Teddy’s house, there were three adults available to address his behavior. Eleanor Cowell, the woman who he understood to be his mother, may not have been mentally fit to handle the situation. She was incapacitated at times due to mental illness and occasionally had to be treated by electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) at the local psychiatric hospital. Would she have been up to addressing this? Julia did not want to upset her mother if she could help it.

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Samuel Cowell, the man Teddy understood to be his father, needed to be handled with kid gloves. He had an explosive temper, was frighteningly violent with outbursts that could be heard down the block, and sometimes physically abused Julia’s mother. Julia wanted to avoid poking the bear on this touchy subject.

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The little boy’s oldest sister, Eleanor Louise, was about 20 years his senior. At the time, Julia did not know that Eleanor Louise was the true mother of young Ted. All she knew was that Eleanor Louise acted as the mother to all, including Ted, in the house of many stories. But was her sister wise enough to teach the boy right from wrong? Julia wasn’t so sure.

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What would you do in this situation? As a parent? As a twelve-year-old? As one of the other daughters? As a three-and-a-half-year-old little boy? This was to be only the beginning of the people in charge of his care ignoring his troubling behavior. But Julia’s question remained: who was in charge of his care?

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Physiologically and psychologically, our earliest life experiences forever impact each of us. Chase Hughes, an expert on Human Behavior and Behavior Profiling teaches (Law enforcement and Military) (YouTube) that we must keep this in mind: “We are all a product of our childhood experiences, good and bad.”

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Yes, it’s that simple. As the brain is growing and downloading, the limbic system is programming how we relate with and respond to the events in our lives. You may have bought this book hoping for blood and guts, but you are also getting some neurons, hormones, and examples of how human predatory behavior comes about and how to recognize it.

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To understand these examples, we must acknowledge the importance of infant bonding success in the first place, and the outcome of failed affectionate validation. This information has been around for some time. Researchers of child and adolescent psychology gave us the first understanding of the inborn instinctive necessity decades ago.

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Up until about the 1970’s, the philosophies of “don’t spoil the child” and “babies are blank slates” were the infant and child care understanding, although these ideas contradicted themselves. How can an infant be spoiled if they are a blank slate?

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In spite of that paradox, loving parents have always delighted in their children. They cannot help themselves, fortunately. What we understand now is that, rather than blank slates, infants are alert, hungry sponges soaking up everything they observe and experience into their rapidly growing brains. It goes without saying that the growing organisms require a safe, authenticating world to absorb so they know where and how they fit in life.

What children absorb determines what they translate into their forming personalities and ultimately determines the behavior patterns that develop and stick. The information has been self-installing all along into that little scout, and once it’s there, it cannot be shifted easily. For the Christian reader, this might ring a bell from the proverb “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Pr. 22:6. I think Confucius said something along those lines as well, probably because it’s true, and unfortunately Ted was programmed to go in the wrong direction. Unintentionally but effectively, unemotional callous disregard instead of affectionate accord formed from the time he was abandoned as an infant in an orphanage, and it only went downhill from there.

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“I need some special God damn attention. I demand it.” ~Ted

When it comes to instinctually required human interfacing, this knowledge has taken time to trickle down into our neighborhoods and hospitals. Now it is common practice and a standard of care for the parent(s) or permanent caregiver(s) to have consistent affectionate interaction with their infant, which includes holding, soothing, and talking to the child for the purpose of introducing human connection.

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The purpose of bonding is protection. If we are attached emotionally to a child, we are going to do all in our power to ensure physical and affectional needs are met so as to give the child the best starting place. Firstly, a child needs to bond to survive physically and secondly, they need it to thrive interpersonally so they can sustain themselves among others throughout their life. Affectional bonding is so crucial that the newborn grasps for it in a very primal way like plant roots reach for life giving water.

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With disconnected individuals, the inability to understand affection starts early. Sometimes parent-infant bonding is delayed due, for example, to traumatic birth or adoption, but the parents want to bond with their child and persist until the emotional fusion is in place. That didn’t happen for Ted, and if we take a closer look into his early home life, we can see why.
 
Some say that we look like our dogs, and some walk in our houses and say, “this home looks like you!” It’s true that we express ourselves by our choices and how we take care of our choices. Our dogs, cars, and houses express us, and sometimes quite well. Any guests in my house today might witness a puppy piddle on the floor tile because I didn’t get her out in time. We all have issues.

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The Cowell’s lived in a family neighborhood established in the growing city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The houses were built in the 1920’s as the East Coast city continued to expand its borders. Most of the neighboring homes along Ridge Avenue and Domino Lane were respectable, built of brick covered with mortar, whitewashed and then kept white and washed over the years. Some boasted brick based pillars supporting columns which in turn braced the roofs. Many roofs sported dormer windows facing adjacent dormers across the street.

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Unlike the other homes on the street, the corner lot house where this particular family lived had seen better days. The chalky face of the house was scarred with scaling stucco in too many places, and the upper story was nearly brown with soiled, thinning veneer. The white wash was applied up to the very base of the upper story window sills but no further. Perhaps that was as far as the ladder could reach, or the sparse touch up may have been due to limited funds and limited paint. Rather than boasting stately columns like the neighboring houses, this house’s front porch roof was supported by slim, weathered posts. Two rather intact dormer windows emerged from the black roof, as well as a solid brick chimney for Santa.

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Outside of the building was the nursery and greenhouse owned by the father. Customers driving there would have come to a stop in front of a potentially handsome building—if it wasn’t so ugly, that is. Although the business also offered landscaping, the yard itself was unkempt, with random straggly shrubs and dying trees. The space was surrounded by three-foot-tall hog wire held upright by sawed off tree trunks for posts. It looked like the property owner was certainly one to make use of a dead tree. A homemade sign was nailed in place by a post on one side and a still somewhat usable tree on the other side. The hand painted letters on the sign read in script See Flower Beds In Nursery with a bold arrow pointing toward the back of the house. The placard remained tacked up throughout the year, even when the flowers were not in season.

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A naked caned rose bush that at one time may have been lush and blooming still tried to grace the wall of the house behind the nailed tree, and it looked like it grew up as far as the second story when in its glory. The front sidewalk was almost intact until near the end of the property, where it fractured into scattered broken tiles.

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On the side of the house that would have been most visible to nursery visitors towered a bare exterior wall. It had been whitened all the way to the top some time ago, but was deteriorating as well, bearing large patches of wear that had been more recently whitewashed in the same half-hearted manner as the front of the house.

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Connected at the back of the family home was an optimistic two story horizontally planked extension that was painted all the way to the top. Perhaps the photo was taken when they were getting ready to sell. If selling, the upkeep on the house and grounds may have been too much for the tenants to tend properly in older age. On closer inspection, though, it looks like the exterior of the older part of the house had not been properly cared for in years, if not decades. Although perhaps impressive in its earliest years, it was less so now. If the house were to be restored currently, it might be considered suitable for an upscale historic district, but the house as it appeared in the photo resembled something more out of a Stephen King novel.

This setting was Teddy’s introduction to family life. As the preschooler wandered about the lodgings, daily imprinting of life occurred upon his impressionable mind. When the two younger sisters were at school, the oldest sister, Eleanor Louise, took care of the household when the mother of the house was not able to do so. Teddy, as curious little boys have always done, wandered through the living and working spaces, always on the lookout for new adventures.

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While exploring on any given day, he could have found a detective magazine lying here or there. Any of us who have seen one of these magazines are aware that on the covers and pages are images of beautifully terrified women chased by dangerously handsome men carrying knives, guns, or ropes. In other images, the beauties are shown captured and bound to a chair or bed. These visual representations capture the attention of any viewer regardless of age.

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Perhaps there were some Mother Goose fairy tale books around the place as well, but even those beloved stories have a dark twist when we think about it. Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, for example, features the wolf himself looking frail and weak in grandmother’s bed before attacking the terrified girl. We loved those stories and the thrill of fear that came with them when they were read to us by a safe and reassuring adult.

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Little Teddy, however, did not have consistent trusted and loving adults to read to him. Instead, he soaked in pictures of a man with a frightening temper. The father of the house’s dodgy milieu was occasionally accompanied by the sound of him flinging a visiting cat against the wall in the greenhouse where he worked. Those images and sounds would have had an impact on any little boy. What do you think might have been going through three year old Teddy’s mind during those times? I suggest the following: If it is okay to do that to cats, it must be okay for those men in the detective magazines to be doing those things to women.
 
Another alarming-for-a-preschooler activity on the property was when Teddy would watch the father harvest a few chickens for dinner by strangling them and pulling their heads off. This was ominous activity considering what Ted himself would do with beings in the not too distant future.

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Regarding the chicken slayings, Ted said in retrospect those were not warm memories of his grandfather. The hens would be plucked and cooked by older sister Eleanor Louise, or the mother Eleanor if she was feeling well enough despite mental illness or injury recoup from a domestic.

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I remember when I was about three years old and my Grampa decided to kill our big red rooster. He got out the ax and told my brother and me to stand back because the rooster might run around a bit. He put the rooster’s neck on the chopping block and wham, off came the rooster’s head with blood squirting—and it did run around! I will never forget it.

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Grampa doing this was memorable but not frightening for me because he loved us and we were always safe with him. By contrast, it was not always safe at the Philadelphia house. Years later, Eleanor Louise reluctantly admitted in agreement with other family members that her father was violent. She, as you will see throughout her lifetime, valiantly ignored or minimized very serious behaviors, even Ted’s criminal ones. For her to say that her dad beat up her mother sometimes alerts me as to what her growing up years had been like. Based on the hints we have, it appears young Eleanor Louise’s developmental experiences were disturbing.

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Sometimes the father would get drunk and start yelling at the mother and girls. No one could anticipate whether the father would beat on his wife or strong arm his daughters. Apparently that’s what a man has to do in order to manage necessarily subservient women, might have been downloading into young Teddy’s mind at the sight of those incidents. As you will see, that is the conclusion he ultimately espoused as an adult. At times, the house echoed yells, cries, and sounds from punches and slaps.
 
And these were the people little Teddy had no choice but to rely upon to keep him safe.

With confusing surroundings, Teddy’s best bet was to learn how to be liked by the father in order not to be mistreated by the unpredictable man too. The preschooler did not want to be perceived by the father as needing to be subdued like the women, but at the same time he wanted to charm the females around him so they would like him. A child should not have to be in that spot. Teddy had to master the manipulations of charm and good impressions in order to survive. As years went by, however, those cons would prove to be used very skillfully for horrific means.

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Endearing himself to the abuser while charming the abused would have been a daunting task to accomplish. It certainly didn’t validate him as an individual since he had to morph for everyone else. Adaptation to an ongoing relational dichotomy is enough to lead someone to crack another’s head open, which we know he eventually did, but not anyone’s head that lived at the corner of Ridge Avenue and Domino Lane.

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So, now we have set the scene of the Philadelphia house: young Eleanor Louise’s childhood home, Ted’s early childhood home, and the creation address of what I think of as a well meaning horror story.

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“My particular view of the world is that, uh, we’re probably 95% of the way we were raised and where we were raised.” ~Ted