Ted Bundy trial; Lynda Ann Healy. Photo:

Bettmann/Getty; Find A Grave

Ted Bundy was one of the most notorious serial killers and sexual predators in American history.

Throughout the 1970s, Bundy traveled across the United States on a rape and murder spree of young women and girls, with known victims from Washington, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado and Florida — as well as possible unknown victims that have yet to be accounted for.

While most of the country was terrified of Bundy, his good looks and on-camera charisma attracted fans and supporters, many of whom came to court for his trials and sent him love letters in prison. Combined with his two escapes from prison, representing himself in court, the sheer number of victims and the depravity of his crimes, Bundy left behind a horrifying, but powerful, legacy that remains over 30 years after his death by electric chair on Jan. 24, 1989.

“He wanted people to see what he wanted them to see,” survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin told PEOPLE in 2023. “He portrayed himself as the good guy. Then at night, he would turn into another thing. That’s when he would go hunting for women. He killed most of his victims in their bedrooms at night. He wanted to take their souls, and keep them, not face them and fight them.”

Investigators believe Bundy could have killed up to 100 victims while the killer confessed to a much smaller number of murders. So, how many people did Ted Bundy kill? Here is everything to know about his life and crimes — including stories from the few victims who survived the notorious serial killer.

Ted Bundy. Bettmann/ Getty

Ted Bundy was born on Nov. 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vt., to single mother Eleanor Louise Cowell. She and her young son later moved to Tacoma, Wash., and she married John C. Bundy who adopted the future serial killer. Cowell and John went on to welcome four more children.

“We are a family that has always tried to raise our kids in the right way,” Bundy’s mother told PEOPLE in 1980. “We weren’t the kind that sent their kids off to Sunday school and then went back to sleep.”

Bundy was active in Boy Scouts and had a paper route as a child. After graduating high school, he enrolled at the University of Puget Sound, then transferred to the University of Washington in Seattle, but dropped out before graduating.

Bundy then had various jobs, including working for Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign and, per The Washington Post, taking a role at a suicide prevention hotline alongside crime writer Ann Rule, who later went on to pen the bestselling The Stranger Beside Me about their time together and his hidden brutal side. Bundy re-enrolled at the University of Washington and graduated with a psychology degree in 1972.

He continued to work in Seattle, where, unknown to anyone, he was also on a murder spree. In 1974, Bundy moved to Salt Lake City and enrolled in the University of Utah Law, though he never graduated or got a law degree.

He was arrested in August 1975 after a highway patrolman pulled him over for speeding and found suspicious items in his car, including a ski mask and a crowbar. His profile matched that of Carol DaRonch‘s description — the 18-year-old had survived Bundy’s attempt to kill her the year prior. The patrolman also remembered a call from Elizabeth Kloepfer, who was Bundy’s girlfriend and had contacted Utah authorities after noticing he resembled police sketches of their suspect.

Bundy was charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault after DaRonch picked him out of a lineup, and he was found guilty and sentenced to up to 15 years behind bars after waiving his right to a jury trial. After two escapes from imprisonment, more of Bundy’s crimes came to light and he was sentenced to death in 1979.

Kimberly Leach. Acey Harper/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty

When he was on death row, Bundy confessed to murdering at least 30 women and young girls between 1974 and 1978.

In a 1987 conversation recounted in detective Robert Keppel’s book The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer, Bundy alluded to committing other murders in 1972 and 1973 but didn’t provide details. The serial killer also told the detective that by 1974 he figured out how to murder and attack women without leaving evidence behind.

Keppel later estimated in a 1989 TV special that Bundy may have killed between 50 and 75 people, and The Washington Post reported that the murderer told police at one point that his victim count might be “three-digits.” In the book Ted Bundy and the Unsolved Murder Epidemic, criminologist Matt DeLisi estimated that Bundy may have killed close to 100 people.

Bundy’s first confirmed murder was Lynda Ann Healy in February 1974. Donna Gail Manson (who was on her way to a concert), Susan Elaine Rancourt, Roberta Kathleen Parks and Brenda Carroll Ball (who was leaving a bar) followed, all in the Western States. Not long after, Bundy murdered Georgann Hawkins, Janice Ann Ott and Denise Marie Naslund.

After the latter killings, which ended up helping capture Bundy, the serial killer moved to Salt Lake City and murdered a still unidentified hitchhiker, 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox and Melissa Anne Smith. He also killed 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime who was last seen trying to hitchhike after leaving a Halloween party.

His unsuccessful attempt at murdering DaRonch happened shortly after but Bundy killed Debra Jean Kent later that same evening. The slayings of Caryn Eileen Campbell, ski instructor Julie Lyle Cunningham, Denise Lynn Oliverson and 12-year-old Lynette Dawn Culver followed.

Janice Ann Ott.

In Bundy’s final taped confession, before being executed, he admitted to killing Susan Curtis around this time. After his second prison escape, following his arrest for the murder of Campbell, Bundy murdered two Chi Omega sorority girls, Margaret Elizabeth Bowman and Lisa Janet Levy. A month later, he killed his last known victim Kimberly Dianne Leach.

Many, though not all, of Bundy’s victims were petite brunettes. The women and girls he targeted ranged in age from 12 to 26 years old, and according to a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bundy’s murders followed a pattern: He would often feign an injury or pretend to be a police officer to lure women and girls to his vehicle, where he would bludgeon his victims until they were unconscious, then handcuff them and drive them to another location, where he would beat or strangle them to death, sexually assault them and dispose of their remains.

In interviews resurfaced for 2019’s Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, the murderer spoke in the third person and talked about his motive. “Perhaps this person hoped that through violence, through this violent series of acts, if with every murder leaving a person of this type hungry … Unfulfilled. It would also leave him with the obviously irrational belief that if the next time he did it, he would be fulfilled,” Bundy said.

In addition to raping and murdering his victims, Bundy admitted in his final confessions before his death to desecrating his victims’ corpses.

“When he said he was clearing his soul at the end, he wanted me to know that he practiced necrophilia,” FBI Special Agent Bill Hagmaier said in Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. “That was something he never talked about even in the third person before that. You know, the truth is terrible.”

Ted Bundy in Court-January 04, 1980. Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

Bundy’s first known murder was Healy, a 21-year-old Washington State University student who went missing on Feb. 1, 1974, and whose remains weren’t recovered until months later. Her skull was found on Taylor Mountain in an area where five of Bundy’s other victims were discovered, eventually becoming known as “Bundy’s graveyard.”

Despite his confessions to around 30 murders, investigators believe the true number may be significantly higher. In Ted Bundy and the Unsolved Murder Epidemic, DeLisi argued that based on the rate and “confidence with” which he murdered women and girls between 1974 and 1978, Bundy likely began killing in his adolescence — and estimated that the serial killer may have murdered close to 100 people.

In her 1994 book Defending the Devil: My Story As Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer, the killer’s attorney Polly Nelson recalled him telling her that he murdered his first victim in 1971. Homicide detective Keppel also believes Bundy began killing in his teens or even earlier. The serial killer himself told different timelines of when his murder spree first started.

Some investigators also believe he was involved in the slaying of 8-year-old Ann Marie Burr, who went missing on Aug. 31, 1961, near the University of Puget Sound.

“Evidence collected at the scene is limited due to the resources and methods of crime scene investigation during that era of law enforcement,” a representative for the Tacoma Police Department told KING 5 in 2019 adding, “We periodically review all cold cases to determine if new technology and techniques in forensic science can be utilized.”

At the time of the murder, Bundy’s uncle lived in Burr’s neighborhood, where the then-14-year-old had a paper route and would visit often.

After Bundy’s murder convictions, Burr’s mother wrote to him asking for information about her daughter. Bundy denied responsibility in his reply, but Tacoma police reportedly haven’t ruled him out as a suspect in the case.

AP Photo; AP Photo/Mark Foley

There are five known women who survived Bundy’s attacks.

Karen Sparks was 18 when the infamous killer sexually assaulted and bludgeoned her with a metal rod in her bed in Seattle. She later said in the Reelz special Ted Bundy: The Survivors that she believes her male roommate talking in his sleep spooked Bundy into fleeing and ultimately saved her life. Though she survived, Sparks suffered a split bladder and permanent brain damage from the assault.

DaRonch was 18 years old when Bundy approached her at a mall in November 1974, flashing a police badge and saying he was there to investigate someone breaking into her car. She went with Bundy to his Volkswagen, which she later told PEOPLE was merely because she felt obligated to help an authority figure — not because she found him charming or attractive.

“I thought he was kind of creepy … I thought he was a lot older than he was,” DaRonch said, adding that she smelled alcohol on his breath.

When they were in his car, Bundy struck DaRonch and tried handcuffing her wrists, but failed. Though he had a gun and crowbar, she fought back against him and was able to exit the car, though Bundy followed and continued to fight her.

When a car approached from the opposite direction, DaRonch broke away from Bundy and jumped into the other vehicle with the handcuffs still hanging on one of her wrists.

DaRonch later identified Bundy in a lineup and testified against him in court in 1976. He was found guilty of kidnapping and assault, but his reign of terror would continue even after his incarceration: He escaped from jail twice and made his way to Florida, where he murdered more women and girls.

An unidentified woman peers through drapes on the 2nd story balcony of the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla. Mark Foley/AP/REX/Shutterstock

After the two Chi Omega murders, Bundy attacked sorority sisters Kathy Kleiner Rubin and Karen Chandler. Kleiner Rubin suffered a broken jaw, shattered chin, ripped cheek and nearly severed tongue. Chandler later told CBS News that Bundy broke nearly every bone in her face (including her jaw), plus one of her arms and several fingers. She also suffered a concussion and a skull fracture from the attack.

Kleiner Rubin told PEOPLE that Bundy was likely going to kill her and Chandler, but his plan was interrupted.

“There was a car bringing home a date late that night, and the light had shown up into our room,” she recalled. “He started stumbling around and just ran out the door … We don’t know how far it could have gone, but it ended at my room.”

After the Chi Omega murders and attacks, Bundy went down the street and attacked a Florida State University dance student, Cheryl Thomas, who was alone in her apartment. He bludgeoned her similarly to his other victims that night, leaving her with a broken jaw, a dislocated shoulder and five skull fractures; the attack left her permanently deaf in one ear.

Thomas’ neighbors heard the attack and called the police, which saved her life.

“I felt very grateful,” Thomas told CBS News. “Because, obviously, if I had not had two neighbors next door … to call that night when they heard me crying and a beating kind of sound, I know I wouldn’t — I would not have survived.”

Suspected murderer Theodore Bundy (l) leans on the Leon County jail wall as an indictment charging him with the murdersof two FSU coeds at the Chi Omega house is read by Leon County Sherriff Ken Katarsis. Bettmann/Getty

Following the Florida killings, Bundy was arrested on Feb. 15, 1978, for driving a stolen Volkswagen in Pensacola. At the time, local police didn’t realize he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

Bundy was charged in the murders of the Chi Omega victims and almost pled guilty in a deal that would have given him a maximum sentence of 75 years behind bars, per The Seattle Times. But, he backed out of the plea bargain, with then-Tallahassee public defender Mike Minerva explaining, “It made him realize he was going to have to stand up in front of the whole world and say he was guilty. He just couldn’t do it.”

In July 1979, after less than seven hours of deliberations, a jury found Bundy guilty of murdering Bowman and Levy, two counts of burglary and three counts of first-degree attempted murder for his attacks on Kleiner Rubin, Chandler and Thomas. A judge sentenced Bundy to two death sentences, one for each of the murder convictions he received.

Six months after his conviction in the Chi Omega case, Bundy went on trial for the murder of Leach. After eight hours of deliberations, a jury found Bundy guilty of raping and murdering the seventh-grade student. He received his third death sentence for the slaying.

Theodore Bundy rests his head on his fist as he listens to attorneys argue the merits of his case in the pre-trial hearings prior to Bundy’s trial for the killings of two Florida State University coeds. Bettmann/Getty

Bundy attempted to appeal his death sentences and convictions many times over the course of nearly a decade, but he failed to overturn his convictions or change his capital punishment sentences.

Celebrations for Bundy’s impending demise were held nationwide, and ABC News reported at the time that fireworks and crowds gathered and cheered for his execution. Some attendees even wore custom T-shirts reading “BURN BUNDY” and “TOAST TED,” according to The Washington Post.

Bundy was executed by electric chair on Jan. 24, 1989. Just before his death, Bundy’s last words were reportedly, “I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”