I’ve even watched snippets of his jailhouse interviews over the years - enough to deduce that Bundy was the classic charming sociopath, milking the attention while ultimately revealing very little. I am familiar with the chilling physical similarities between his targets and his storied ex-girlfriend (echoes of which surfaced last year with news that the Golden State Killer had been similarly fixated on his former fiancée). I know the basic chronology of Bundy’s crimes - his early assaults and murders beginning around 1974, his kidnapping arrest and conviction in 1976, repeated escapes from authorities, and the Chi Omega sorority murders he committed at Florida State University in 1978 that would turn him into a cultural fixture of evil. I’ve read Ann Rule’s classic memoir of her friendship with Bundy, A Stranger Beside Me. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-markĪs a true crime fan, I feel decently up to speed on my Bundy knowledge. The true number of his victims is unknown.

Prior to his execution in 1989 at the age of 42, Bundy confessed to murdering between 30 and 37 women between 19 of these, 20 of his victims have been identified, along with five other survivors. In addition to incorporating Bundy’s prison interviews, the filmmakers talked to journalists, detectives, Bundy’s friends, attorneys, and even one of his survivors in an apparent effort to balance Bundy’s words about himself with broader context and insights. Using a mix of archival news footage of the investigations into Bundy’s crimes and his subsequent arrest and trials, stock footage of ’70s-era cultural detritus, and interviews, the four-part Netflix series recounts the story of the killer’s dozens of murders and assaults. It’s drawn from many hours of recorded interviews the pair conducted with Bundy during his imprisonment in the 1980s. The documentary, which was released Thursday, is a dramatization of the 2000 book Ted Bundy: Conversations With a Killer by investigative reporters Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth.

Ironically, that’s also what Conversations With a Killer seems to be doing now. One of the implications of Netflix’s new true crime documentary series, Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, is that its subject - one of America’s most well-known serial killers - perpetually manipulated the media and his many interviewers into feeding his glorified narrative of himself. A high number of serial killers are malignant narcissists - often the kind who suffer from delusions of grandeur.

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