SHRINK CHAT: Ted Bundy's College Years, Ann Rule & Allen v. Farrow

He was twenty-one, in his first relationship. She ended it. Every woman he killed looked like her.

⚠️ Trigger warning: This episode includes discussion of murder, child sexual abuse allegations, and screen violence.

2 February 2022. The college years, the humiliation that turned him, and 2021's best true crime documentaries.

TED BUNDY, THE COLLEGE YEARS

He enters the University of Washington at twenty-one and tries on a new personality: confident, witty, secure with women. Then he meets Diane Edwards, known to most people by her pseudonym Stephanie Brooks. Long brown hair parted in the middle, and by his own measure above him. It lasted a year. She ended it because he was not mature enough and was not going anywhere. He dropped out and went home.

Cathy on the injury underneath it: what a narcissist falls in love with is what he comes to hate, because he needs it and cannot bear it being better than him. Shannon on the mechanism, which is not rejection but humiliation, one of the largest risk factors in narcissists and offenders.

Then the second blow. He goes to City Hall to look into his own family and confirms what he suspected at ten: his sister is his mother. Two women, and he has been made a fool by both. Many theorists put the revenge killings right here.

The layers stacked: brain chemistry he was born with, a violent home where he identified with the abuser rather than the victim, no safe caregiver and so no model for empathy, an unstable identity, early exposure to sex paired with violence, then humiliation as the switch. Never one cause, and the less time between traumas the lower the resistance.

He returns to UW in 1971 and takes a psychology degree, the only qualification he ever finished. Cathy on why psychopaths are not treated in therapy: they get better at it, they mimic, they use it. He works a suicide crisis hotline beside Ann Rule, who never suspects him and who will write The Stranger Beside Me. In 1974 he enrols at Utah law school, lasts seven months, and becomes a rising Republican star while women begin disappearing across the Pacific Northwest.

Next time in the relisten: the killing years.

THE TEN BEST TRUE CRIME DOCUMENTARIES OF 2021

From Decider, read out in full. Operation Varsity Blues. Bad Sport. Murder Among the Mormons and the Mark Hofmann forgeries. Night Stalker, which Cathy says does not belong. The Way Down and Gwen Shamblin Lara. John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise. LuLaRich. The Lady and the Dale. The Phantom and Carlos DeLuna. At number one, Allen v. Farrow.

WATCHES

The Wasteland (2021), and why one minute of creature in ninety is not enough. Red Snow (2021), a vampire in the garage at Christmas. Coming Home in the Dark (2021) with Daniel Gillies, brutal from the first minute.

PSYCH READ

Out of the Fog by Dana Morningstar, for people who leave a narcissistic relationship asking what just happened. FOG is fear, obligation and guilt, coined by Susan Forward and Donna Frazier in Emotional Blackmail.

Horror Facts with Cath: the Wolf Man makeup chair, the Universal ride that never reopened after the 2008 fire, Jake Gyllenhaal's godmother, and what you call someone who loves being frightened.

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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