Serial killer Ted Bundy did not always carry out murders he had planned, according to comments Bundy made to an investigator shortly before dying in Florida's electric chair in January.
Bundy said that at the same University of Washington sorority where he abducted Georgann Hawkins, he was on the verge of capturing another woman but backed out at the last minute.At 11 p.m. one Friday in 1974, he faked an injury to talk a woman into helping him get to his car, Bundy told Washington state investigator Bob Keppel. According to a transcript released Thursday, the woman did, but Bundy did not go through with the abduction.
"I got all the way to the car, and what happened, would happen sometimes, I just said I don't want to do it. I said `Thank you. See you later.' And she walked away."
Transcripts from tape recordings that Keppel made with Bundy in the days just before Bundy was executed also indicate that Bundy felt some of his greatest remorse when he realized his stepson was discovering what he had done.
"You see, I saw the look in my stepson's eyes yesterday - after he had been told for the first time that - you see, he's always believed in his heart - I mean, he's always wanted to believe that I had never done anything like this," he said.
The tapes were made available by the state attorney general's office, where Keppel works, at the request of the news media. During the interviews, Bundy indicates he is very concerned that Keppel is going to release contents of the interviews before the electrocution date. Keppel repeatedly assures him he will not.
Certain parts of the transcript were deleted, which officials said was to preserve leads on active investigations.
Much of one interview focused on the case of Hawkins, who disappeared from behind her University of Washington sorority on a warm June night in 1974.
Bundy described in detail how to find where he dumped the body outside of Issaquah. Then he described the murder, saying he used a briefcase and crutches to lure the young woman to help him into his car near Seattle's University District. He then hit her with a crowbar, put her in the car and handcuffed her, he said.
In describing Hawkins, Bundy expressed some regret. Hawkins regained consciousness at one point, he said.
"At this point she was quite lucid, talking about things, about some - it's funny, it's not funny but it's odd the kinds of things people will say and under those circumstances," Bundy said. "And she thought, she said that she thought that she had a Spanish test the next day and she thought that I had taken her to help tutor me for her Spanish test."
Shortly after that, he knocked her unconscious again, he said, and strangled her.