Inside the Horrific Legacy of Serial Killer Ted Bundy

Looking at photos of Ted Bundy now, it's hard to see what unsuspecting people saw in the 1970s.

Which, according to so many, was a handsome, charming man.

That's been the forever-buzz on Bundy, the serial killer who was executed 30 years ago today and is the subject of both a new Netflix docuseries and an upcoming film starring the unarguably good-looking Zac Efronthat he was a guy who had no problem getting women to let their guard down around him due to his numerous socially acceptable traits.

"Bundy represents for us our most primal, deepest, darkest fear, which is that you don't know the person next to you," Joe Berlinger, director of the Efron film, the aptly titled Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, and executive producer of Netflix's Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, tells E! News.


"We want to think that serial killers are easily identifiable, that once you see them you know, 'OK, that guy must be a serial killer,'" Berlinger continued. But "people really liked him."

And they liked him until the day he died at 42 years of age in the electric chair at Raiford Prison after confessing to the murders of 30 women.

"I shouldn't be surprised that I still get letters and emails from twenty-year-olds who are fascinated with Ted Bundy," wrote Ann Rule in a 2009 update to her 1980 best-seller The Stranger Beside Me (which was made into a 2002 TV movie starring Billy Campbell as Bundy). "Thirty years ago, I watched the Florida girls who lined up outside the courtroom in Miami, anxious to get a place on the gallery bench behind his defense table.

"They gasped and sighed with delight when Ted turned to look at them."

Rule, who died in 2015, befriended Bundy after meeting him at, of all places, a suicide hotline office in Seattle where they were both answering phones on the night shift.





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