The Deliberate Stranger

A few nights ago I was riding around with Ted Bundy. Yes, I know he's been dead since 1989, but regardless, there it is.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of an old pickup truck, and he parked some distance from the building. It was, I take it, a nursing home, and he walked slowly across the parking lot. He must have sauntered the same way through the Chi Omega Sorority House in 1978.

Waking up from this dream, I knew the day before yesterday would be Ted Bundy Day. I take my cues from dreams, and so I watched the three-hour or so film The Deliberate Stranger, with the incredible Mark Harmon, who exemplified the role of Ted Bundy to perfection in this television film. Although it is filled with television cop show conventions and familiar (for the period) cop show actors, such as the late M. Emmett Walsh, it's still a terrific, engrossing portrait of a man that remains, over thirty years after his death, an enigma. The real-life inspiration behind Brett Easton Ellis' novel American Psycho, and its famous Wall Street executive cum serial killer Patrick Bateman (also played to absolute perfection by actor Christian Bale, who now defines the character in many minds), Bundy was a charming, handsome, popular grad student in Seattle, with a bevy of female admirers and a bright future in politics when he, seemingly, began a murder spree of serial killings that stretched across an estimated six states. (Bundy made this claim. He also claimed a tally of victims in the "triple digits"; he was tried for kidnapping in Utah, but got the death penalty for the murder of twelve-year-old Kimberly Ann Leach in Florida).

To most, the memory of Bundy is one they want to shuffle under the rug of history. This is an inevitability, as he has been supplanted by the neverending stream of "mass shooters" that now pop up daily somewhere in the United States (so many that they now have to have a relatively high body count to even merit much public scrutiny).

Cult Films and Midnight Movies

"From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1

By

Tom Baker

Bundy had a voracious appetite for sex and murder, and an unerring ability to camouflage his bestial nature behind an affable and friendly, even admirable and praiseworthy exterior. Inside, he was a seething, brutal basilisk of desire and rage.

The film The Deliberate Stranger introduces us to Bundy as an attractive, if somewhat superficial-seeming social climber, alternately the "perfect boyfriend" to girlfriend: "Cas" (Glynnis O'Connor) and her young daughter (Maia Brewton), and a man who, occasionally, lets the mask slip, and shines forth with that cruel, seething monstrousness buried just beneath the surface. Bundy WANTS, Bundy craves--status, power, control. Sex. Beautiful women, beautiful objects; a lifestyle his fractured upbringing could not provide for him.

At a backyard barbecue for the local Republican Party, Bundy casually mentions that "If this were the Iranian Embassy, we'd be eating caviar. I LOVE caviar." The comment comes across as strange and non-sequitur as one of Patrick Bateman's soliloquies on the rhapsody of an Armani suit or a valise from Valentino Couture. Bundy is all appetite for surface objects, for status symbols; pleasures of the flesh, so to speak. An insatiable, monstrous desire to consume: people, objects, and women.

And to that end, like a good chameleon, like the lurking predator, he dons the mask of harmless, good-natured, affable passivity, turning every situation to his advantage. The recreation of the Lake Sammamish killings, in which the always predatory and always insatiable Bundy abducts two women (victims Denise Naslund and Janice Ott) and kills BOTH the same day, reminds us of the relentless bloodlust of the Victorian killer Jack the Ripper from eighty-six years earlier (dating back from 1974), who likewise killed two victims in the space of several hours (victims Catherine Eddowes and Elizabeth Stride), to slake a burning, bloody thirst.

But Jack the Ripper was most likely from a lower socioeconomic class (the impoverished, huddling masses of dirt-poor laborers living in the infamous London Whitechapel slum). Bundy was graced with life much more privileged, although it fostered the same festering human cobra that the Ripper was. Next, Bundy proceeds to law school in Utah, and everywhere he goes women just seem to disappear.

The cops in Washington are still looking for "Ted, who drives a VW" and have a police composite. Bundy is unconcerned with this and attempts to abduct victim Carol Daronch from a shopping center parking lot. Wearing a mustache and a bad, cop-like suit, posing as a policeman, he makes up a cock-n-bull story to lure Daronch into the VW bug. Then, after flashing a phony badge, he stops and attempts to handcuff her. She fights him and flees down the road, and he takes off. But he'll be picked out of a police line-up soon enough.

Much of the film follows the frustration of police in different jurisdictions to pin down such an elusive, anonymous maniac. They bring in primitive computer equipment and take thousands of leads, yet still find themselves drawing a blank. Meanwhile, Bundy abducts a woman at a ski resort in Aspen and gives himself a whole new suit of investigators (Bob Masters and Frederick Coffin, with the deep, resonating, spooky tones of Masters a pleasure to listen to) to deal with.

Carol Daronch Clip

Eventually, Ted is apprehended and tried for the attempted kidnapping of Daronch. He mounts his defense, always brimming with confidence, and when convicted and sentenced to one to fifteen years, "feeling his suffering" (as it is observed serial predators and sociopaths invariably do) he declares"They say I'm 'dependent on women'? I don't think there's a single man in this courtroom that isn't. OUR MOTHER WAS A WOMAN." One would think this rather a self-evident truth, but the line demonstrates that Bundy's thought processes are not quite on a par with those of his fellow man.

Convicted, working on his appeals, Bundy escapes for the first time but is quickly recaptured because of his poor driving. Meanwhile, detectives work feverishly across state jurisdictions to connect him with the seemingly neverending string of murders. Girlfriend Cas has already gone to the police about the Plaster of Paris she's discovered in Ted's medicine cabinet. Ted, previous to going to prison, was playing a cat-and-mouse game with police surveilling him, washing out his VW bug of all the evidence right in front of them, while out on bail. His cocky arrogance, his confident self-assuredness that he could not only handle his defense but get away scot-free, was his ultimate undoing.

Escaping a second time, he has previously asked reporter friend and initial sympathizer Richard Larsen (who authored the book upon which this film is based) where in America it was most likely for someone to be executed. Larsen, played here by veteran actor Ben Grizzard in a somewhat detached performance, answers "I don't know...maybe Florida?" Bundy climbs through the ceiling of his cell and is off.

In Florida, he's back in his preferred environment, the hunting grounds of a large university. It's here he stalks young women returning from the disco to the Chi Omega Sorority House and perpetrates the infamous killings, prowling like a dark, hideous panther, a character from a slasher film (he used a log to bludgeon the two victims that died) and erupting in a nightmare of savagery. Here the previously not-very-violent film turns curiously bloody, presenting splashes of grue on the wall over victims' family photographs, stressing the point that Bundy's victims are not just the ones he kills, but that his acts resonate in a tide of pain stretching across the lives of all who knew and loved those victims as well.

Ted lurks while Masters and the other cops, knowing that "Bundy's been locked up for two years...he's going to explode," frantically try to find him. We see him lurking at a middle school and finally abducting the twelve-year-old Leach (here renamed). This killing is of course not shown, but the final apprehension of Bundy is shown, as well as his sentencing to death in the electric chair.

At his first trial, Bundy declares that he's there, "Not because of anything I've done, but for what this system has done to me." Evading responsibility for his actions, he passes the buck, uncomprehending and in disbelief that they could ever convict him. His cleverness and cat-and-mouse mien didn't save him.

His mother Louise (played here by Bonnie Bartlett), whom Bundy grew up believing was his sister, a fact many speculate could have been one of the impetuses for his bottomless, murderous rage, begins crying. Ted seems genuinely outraged that he got caught. (Note: we're not here to defend the System. We think it's a sham too. Just that Ted Bundy played the victim and always felt his pain. We demonstrate that he was constitutionally incapable of feeling guilt or remorse, or feeling the pain of others.)

Taking a beating upon his rearrest, he sits, during the final scenes of the film, battered and bruised, but still remarkably cheerful, and says, obliquely, when referring to his number of victims, "It's probably in the triple digits." Bundy spent the rest of his life, up until his execution, confessing to a seemingly neverending succession of homicides of young women, trying to buy himself more time. Eventually, even this could not stave off the electric chair.

The film closes with Bundy in prison duds, walking the hallways between cells. In this, it is somewhat like Helter Skelter, the Manson television movie with Steve Railsback (star of the later Ed Gein, from 2000) and Marilyn Burns (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, from '74) playing Charles Manson and Linda Kasabian. That movie was made ten years earlier, in a different era. The Manson Family represented an inversion of everything America was supposed to be about: affluence, good homes, stable family lives, and general contentment, well-being, and prosperity.

Bundy, Ted, represents something sinister beneath the surface of all that, a kind of crass, psychopathic materialism and greed, a kind of empty WANT that lurks just a few feet beneath bourgeois American culture. He is all affable charm, good looks, the illusion or projection of success, white male privilege, and social grace. In the hierarchy of things, Bundy, had he not been a serial killer, would have made (as the judge at this death penalty trial stated) "a fine lawyer. I'd have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way partner."

Indeed. he DID "go another way." The Way of DEATH; the "Wages of Sin." And, on that pathway, "...his shroud became a road."

Paved with misery, splattered in blood.

Extended 1986 interview of Mark Harmon on being Ted Bundy in The Deliberate Stranger