SHRINK CHAT: Ted Bundy's Teen Years, Hillside Strangler & ThanksKilling

An eight-year-old girl vanished from a house with unlocked doors in 1961. The paper boy knew her. Did Ted Bundy kill Ann Marie Burr?

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussion of a missing child, sexual deviancy and sexual offending.

December 2021. The teenage years, a murder he was never charged with, and a possessed turkey.

TED BUNDY, THE TEENAGE YEARS

At fifteen he takes the Bundy name, and at fifteen everything else starts. Shoplifting. Suspect in two burglaries. Caught peeping into windows.

And Ann Marie Burr. Eight years old, a piano student of the great uncle Ted and his mother had lived with, gone from a broken into house in Tacoma with no sign of a struggle, never found. Bundy was the paper boy. The Burrs had reported a man at their windows days before. Decades later her relatives told police the two knew each other well enough that she would not have feared him. Nobody was looking at fifteen-year-olds in 1961.

Then the mechanism. Animal mutilation. An obsession with detective magazines that paired graphic sex with violence, read less for the story than for how the man got away with it. A boy described as bubbling over with aggression but not yet a predator.

Cathy on what that builds. How first arousal gets paired with violence, why evaluators ask an offender what he was aroused by first, and why fantasy rehearsal is treated as dangerous rather than harmless. What she saw across years with contact and non-contact offenders, where the early message about sex was either nothing or something poisonous, and the line she draws carefully: a silent house is a correlation, not a cause.

Woodrow Wilson High School in Tacoma. Shy, awkward with girls, one or two friends, and yet assertive with his teachers. The same trick, twenty-five years on, is a man dismissing his lawyers to represent himself. In 1968 he is a Nelson Rockefeller delegate at the Republican National Convention.

TED BUNDY, THE 2002 MOVIE

Not a good film, and the only one willing to show him as depraved rather than charming. Modern Bundy films route around that by making the FBI agent the lead. Both hosts on what gets lost when the story is told by someone likeable.

HORROR NEWS

City of Angels, City of Death on Hulu, and a Toronto Sun piece on why more than twenty serial killers worked Los Angeles at once in the seventies and eighties. The Hillside Strangler and the discovery there were two of them, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono. Yolanda Washington. William Bonin the freeway killer. Doug Clark and Carol Bundy, the Sunset Strip killers, no relation.

BOOKS

Secrets in the Dark, the Darcy Coates sequel, and another chapter of The Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick III.

WATCHES

ThanksKilling (2009), and Cathy's first time, which she has not recovered from. Black Friday (2021) with Bruce Campbell and Devon Sawa. Le Manoir. Black Cadillac (2003) with Randy Quaid. Little Evil (2017) with Adam Scott and a scene stealing Bridget Everett.

Horror Facts with Cath: what Dianne Feinstein gave away at a press conference, the 1992 Ouija board death that became a film, the classic once titled The Birthmark, and the eighties game that was the devil's work.

HAUNTED STORY?

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

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