True crimes solved and unsolved

ted bundy the most deranged serial killer part 1

during the spring and summer of 1974, police in the Pacific Northwest were in a panic. Women at colleges across Washington and Oregon were disappearing at an alarming rate, and law enforcement had few leads as to who was behind it.

In just six months, six women had been abducted. Panic in the area reached fever pitch when Janice Ann Ott and Denise Marie Naslund disappeared in broad daylight from a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park.

But the boldest of the abductions also yielded the first real break in the case. On the day Ott and Naslund vanished, several other women remembered being approached by a man who had tried and failed to lure them to his car.

They told the authorities about an attractive young man with his arm in a sling. His vehicle was a brown Volkswagen Beetle, and the name he gave them was Ted.

After releasing this description to the public, the police were contacted by four people who identified the same Seattle resident: Ted Bundy.

These four people included Bundy's ex-girlfriend, a close friend of his, one of his co-workers, and a psychology professor who had taught Bundy.

But the police were inundated with tips, and they dismissed Ted Bundy as a suspect, thinking it unlikely that a clean-cut law student with no adult criminal record could be the perpetrator; he didn't fit the profile.

These types of judgements benefited Ted Bundy many times throughout his murderous career as one of history's most infamous , which saw him take at least 30 victims across seven states in the 1970s.

For a time, he fooled everyone — the cops who didn't suspect him, the prison guards whose facilities he escaped from, the women he manipulated, the wife who married him after he was caught — but he was, as his final lawyer , "The very definition of heartless evil."

As Bundy himself once remarked, "I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet."