TRUE CRIME DOCUMENTARY: The Ted Bundy Tapes - What Berlinger Missed

Netflix called it Conversations with a Killer. Shannon's verdict: it isn't a conversation, it's a monologue. Bundy's monologue of revisionist personal history.

Joe Berlinger's four part series is built on roughly a hundred hours of tape Bundy recorded in prison, in a deal he made so he could get phone calls with his girlfriend Liz. Two licensed therapists watch all four episodes and then say what a Bundy documentary should actually do instead.

WHAT'S IN THIS EPISODE

The third person trick. The journalist got bored of Bundy's fake biography, so he flattered him into describing what "someone like this" would do. Bundy then narrated his own murders as an expert on a stranger.

The sketch. Seven of the ten witnesses at the lake said it wasn't him. Cathy on why people who looked straight at him still said no.

Dr. Al Carlisle, the prison psychologist Bundy called an asshole, and who got him to admit things he'd told no journalist.

The plea he turned down, and the doctor whose bipolar diagnosis stayed his execution two days out. Shannon on why competency criteria are stricter and simpler than people think, and what she'd want to read in that report.

The blind devotion of Carole Ann Boone and of his mother, and what happened to each of them when he finally admitted it.

Robert Hare's Psychopathy Checklist Revised, the twenty traits, and his book Without Conscience. Cathy on why nobody has written the Bundy version.

WHAT A BUNDY DOCUMENTARY SHOULD DO INSTEAD

Shannon's list, made while watching: tell the stories around him rather than his. The women, the families, the descendants. Kimberly Leach, twelve years old, who gets nothing while he gets everything. Cheryl Thomas in her own words. The system that didn't require police to share information across state lines. The moment America worked out that serial killers were real.

And the one nobody has done: a genuine psychological autopsy. Not behavioural. Not the DSM. Cathy confirms she's never seen one.

THE CLOSING ARGUMENT

So Shannon does it. If you come away from four hours feeling his interior is just out of reach, you have it backwards. It isn't out of reach. What you are feeling is the void, and the void is the thing itself. The superficiality is not hiding a self. It is the whole structure, built over an emptiness formed long before any of this, and it is what tears open when someone like Diane Edwards exposes it.

If you want the case history first, the three-part series covers it: PROFILE: Ted Bundy Part 1 - The Childhood, Ann Marie Burr & Stephanie Brooks. Part 2 - Lake Sammamish, Chi Omega & Carol DaRonch. Part 3 - The Florida Trials, Bob Keppel & Old Sparky.

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

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