Bundy Is Put to Death in Florida After Admitting Trail of Killings

STARKE, Fla., Jan. 24— Theodore Bundy, among the most notorious killers in recent times, was electrocuted today, and about 200 people gathered outside the entrance of the Florida State Prison cheered when they heard the news.

He went quietly to his death nearly 15 years after he embarked on a trail of murder that investigators believe took the lives of 30 or more young women across the nation.

''Give my love to my family and friends,'' the former law student told his lawyer and a minister as guards strapped him into the wooden chair in an execution chamber separated from two dozen official witnesses by a large glass window.

He was pronounced dead at 7:16 A.M. after 2,000 volts of electricity surged through his body for one minute, prison officials said.

Outside the prison gates, the crowd cheered lustily and whooped when a signal came from the floodlit cellblock about 400 yards away, where the execution took place, that Mr. Bundy was dead.

A few opponents of capital punishment were lost in the milling crowd that had come in the predawn chill of northern Florida's piney woods to applaud the death of a man whose ''boy-next-door'' good looks and intelligence concealed the impulses that led him to hunt down women and murder them.

''Buckle Up Bundy - It's The Law'' proclaimed one of the more tasteful placards hoisted by men and a smattering of women gathered along a two-lane blacktop road in an area set aside for them and a small army of reporters and photograpers. 'Thought He Was So Clever'

''This is a big deal,'' said Carey Harper, 26 years old, of nearby Gainesville. ''Some of us have waited 11 years for this moment.''

His companion, Jeannine Gordon, 21, expressed a widely held view that reviled were not only Mr. Bundy's murderous acts but also his personal demeanor. ''He thought he was so clever, so smart, that he could get away with his crimes,'' she said. ''He was laughing at society in court with all of his legal manuevering and delays.''

The execution came on the fourth death warrant signed by a Florida Governor. Three of them were issued in 1986, only to be stayed while his appeals were heard in the courts.

The final warrant was for the 1978 murder of Kimberly Leach, a 12-year-old Lake City, Fla., girl who was abducted, mutilated and slain and whose body was dumped in an abandoned animal pen. He was convicted in 1980 of her killing, a year after he had been found guilty of murdering two Florida State University students who were bludgeoned and strangled as they slept in their beds in a sorority house in Tallahassee three weeks before Kimberly Leach was killed. Spurt of Confessions

The condemned man spent the last few days confessing at least 16 other killings to police detectives who had come here from the states of Washington, Utah, Idaho and Colorado in an attempt to clear up numerous murder investigations before Mr. Bundy was silenced by his date with the executioner. Some of the confessions were made in killings with which the authorities had not connected him, and Federal and state officials still link him to a dozen or more similar crimes since his spree began in February 1974 in Seattle.

Over the years he maintained his innocence, saying he had been drawn into a web of circumstantial evidence woven by ''conniving investigators.''

Finally running out of appeals that would be heard by the Federal courts, his confidence apparently crumbled. Described as ''visibly shaken,'' he supplied the detectives with the names of victims in four Western states and the dates he killed them.

By the time he entered the death chamber shortly before 7 o'clock this morning, he appeared tense but composed, apparently resigned to his fate, according to the witnesses.

One of these, Jerry Blair, was the state prosecutor in the Leach murder trial. Mr. Bundy nodded to him in recognition as he was being strapped into the chair. ''I think he was trying to say there were no hard feelings,'' Mr. Blair said later.

But Mr. Blair and a host of others who had worked on the Bundy crimes over the years conceded they were no closer now than at the onset to the central mystery of what had turned a handsome, articulate, urbane young man into one of the most savage and unpredictable killers in the nation's history. 'Killed for the Sheer Thrill'

''Ted Bundy was a complex man who somewhere along the line went wrong,'' Mr. Blair said. ''He killed for the sheer thrill of the act and the challenge of escaping his pursuers.

''He probably could have done anything in life he set his mind to do, but something happened to him and we still don't know what it was.''

The killer, who stalked victims in the Pacific Northwest in the mid-1970's terrorized several university communities, selecting coeds for abduction from campuses at night or crowded parks in daytime when their defenses were lowered in familiar settings. Accounts of witnesses and other evidence in crimes he was believed to have committed show that he typically used his good looks and soft-spoken charm -often bandaging an arm or leg to gain sympathy or help - to lure them to their death.

He usually throttled them and then sexually abused and mutilated them before disposing of their bodies in remote areas. If the skeletons were found months or years later there was nearly always evidence of fractured skulls and broken jaws and limbs.

''This kind of mutilation reveals a hatred of the female body,'' said Dr. David Abrahamsen a New York psychiatrist who is an authority on those who kill people in a series and is author of ''The Murdering Mind.''

''The victim is not really the target,'' he said in a telephone interview. ''The victim is a substitute, and that is why these crimes seem so random and capricious.''

Dr. Abrahamsen, who analyzed David Berkowitz, the ''Son of Sam'' murderer who terrorized New York in the 1970's with his random slayings of young women, theorizes that when a man commits a violent sexual crime against an unknown woman the real motive is rooted in acting out ''strong and repeated fantasies of revenge and power'' subconsciously directed at his mother.

Mr. Bundy previously hinted that alcohol played a role in his mood swings. On Monday he tearfully told James Dobson, a psychologist and religious broadcaster who served on a Federal pornography commission, that hard-core pornography become an obsession and drove him to act out his fantasies in murder.

Theodore Robert Bundy was born to a young, single Philadelphia woman who raised him in Tacoma, Wash. But his mother, Louise Bundy, said there was never a shred of evidence in her son's first 28 years, before he became a murder suspect for the first time, to hint at any aberrant behavior. Boy Scout and B-Plus Student

People familiar with his early years say he was a Boy Scout, a B-plus college student; he loved children, read poetry and was a rising figure in Republican politics in Seattle. The year the murders began there he was the assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission and wrote a pamphlet for women on rape prevention.

''If anyone considers me a monster, that's just something they'll have to confront in themselves,'' he said in a 1986 interview with The New York Times. ''For people to want to condemn someone, to dehumanize someone like me is a very popular and effective, understandable way of dealing with a fear and a threat that is incomprehensible.''

Photo of Louise Bundy at her home in Tacoma, Wash., saying goodbye by telephone to her son, Theodore Bundy, shortly before the convicted murderer was executed yesterday morning in Florida (Tacoma Morning News Tribune/Russ Carmack)