Ted Bundy's VW goes on display at D.C. crime museum, but should it?

And when the cloth came off, at a bizarre unveiling ceremony Thursday at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, it took work to be surprised by what was underneath it: an unprepossessing tan Beetle, with a sunroof, looking a little worse for wear with touches of rust, fading paint and a few missing pieces of metal trim.

The tires looked as if they still had a few thousand good miles in them. Inside the cab, the interior had that quintessential old Bug smell -- like burning latex -- as if the rubber flooring was always smoking a little from the heat underneath.

But this wasn't any Beetle. This was Ted Bundy's Beetle, the car into which he lured his victims and in which he killed many of them during a terrifying serial killing spree in the 1970s.

"This was kind of like a death wagon," said Wyndell C. Watkins Sr., a retired D.C. police deputy chief, who was on hand to help introduce the latest iconic celebrity murder object joining Washington's museum collections.

The car has been stored in a private collection owned by New York-based Arthur Nash, who owns many of the most grisly objects on display in the museum's main exhibition. Also from the Nash collection: clown and serial killer John Wayne Gacy's painter's box, on display in a room dealing with the unseemly "murderabilia" trade.

Bundy's VW replaces the 1933 Essex-Terraplane car used as a getaway vehicle by John Dillinger. With Dillinger's car shipped off to the Southwest terminal of Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, where it will help present the capital region's best face to visitors, the crime museum needed a marquee object to grace its front lobby.

Of all of the notorious cars in the world -- the white Ford Bronco that O.J. Simpson rode in, the D.C. snipers' shabby Chevy Caprice retrofitted with gun placements -- Bundy's Bug may be the most notorious because it was so intimately connected to its owner's crimes. Bundy killed in this car is the frisson you're supposed to feel when looking at something that was not just a tool, but a container for death.

Compared with the D.C. snipers' car, on display at the Newseum, Bundy's VW has the edge of authenticity. The snipers' car is a mock-up, used at trial, not the actual vehicle from which John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo hunted their victims.

The Bundy car, with a brittle and faded 1976 Utah vehicle inspection sticker (No. 264924) still stuck to its dirty and cracked windshield, was not just the site of murder, but part of the strange, all-American charm and innocence that helped Bundy coerce women to get fatally close to him. It was advertising for a man who made himself an avatar of a free and unfettered age.

But it doesn't belong in a museum. Which is why Thursday's unveiling included some weirdly incongruous preaching from museum officials and others gathered to mark its unnecessary display before a bored and jaded public.

"We want to use it as a safety precaution," said Janine Vaccarello, chief operating officer of the privately owned museum (its partners include John Walsh, host of TV's "America's Most Wanted"). The museum, which opened in May 2008, announced the unveiling with a news release headlined: "Ted Bundy VW Beetle Serves as New Teaching Tool."