Jason Y: It sort of reminds me of happened to Ted Bundy in the 70’s, an otherwise, well-liked pretty boy who had been driven insane by something, some have claimed it was a BDSM porn addiction.
That is just an excuse. There was something wrong with that boy from Day One I am afraid. His home environment was horrible. His adoptive father was a cruel, wicked man who beat the family pets and hated Jews and Blacks, who he often went on tirades against. He was a real terror.
At age three, one of Ted’s aunt’s was visiting. She lay down to go to sleep in the bedroom, and when she woke up, there was little three-year-old Ted standing at the foot of the bed with an evil smile on his face. He had taken 10-15 knives from the kitchen and had arranged them all around her sleeping body with the blades pointed towards her. This guy was a Bad Seed, probably a born incurable psychopath.
Ted probably committed his first murder at age 14. He was working as a paperboy when an 8 year old girl disappeared right from his own neighborhood. He was friends with her, she had been over at his house before, and she had been seen over at his house at night in the few weeks before the killing. She had been abducted from her bedroom via a bedroom window. Tennis shoe marks were found below the window sill. The size matches Ted’s shoe size.
The girl was never seen again. There was construction work going on at a nearby community college, and a large pit had been dug there. Ted was seen at the site of that construction pit watching over the workers two days after the disappearance. He had an evil little smile on his face.
Many years later, a native American woman complained that when she was near the school library, she often heard the horrible screams of a young girl. She kept making these complaints. At some point, an area near the library was excavated for some reason. The girl’s body was found buried there, many years after her disappearance.
Before Ted committed his first known murder, he made a couple of trips back to visit relatives on the East Coast near Maryland. He stayed there for a few weeks each time. During one or both visits, young women were raped and murdered near where Ted was visiting, say within 50-100 miles. The young women were college-aged. So Ted is suspected of 2-4 murders on the East Coast while he was still a university undergrad. All of these women were killed during the precise few-week periods when Ted was visiting the area. I believe that Ted killed these women.
Ted never fessed up to these killings, though he did admit to 36 murders. However, in privileged conversations with his attorney, the lawyer once asked Ted how many murders he had been responsible for. The lawyer threw out a figure of around 30. Ted smiled and said, “Add another figure to that.” This implies that Ted said he was responsible for over 100 murders. Since his execution, no new murders have been added to the 36 he is already suspected of, although there are quite a few cases of rapes and murders of young women near the various areas where Ted was living over the years.
Ted used to leave the bodies on rugged mountains. He would then go back to these kill sites and visit the bodies in the days after the killings. He would lie next to the bodies, put makeup and lipstick on the girls’ faces and have sex with the dead bodies, even days after the girls had died. He took a skull of one of the young women that he killed and hid it in his fireplace for a long time.
Ted’s victims often showed bite marks, typically very deep bite marks on the breasts. Ted seemed to go into some sort of a wild animal-like frenzy when he killed, beating the women to a bloody mess with clubs and tearing at their flesh around their breasts like a wild predatory animal, which is basically what he was. It takes a lot more than some exposure to “porn” to create such a depraved beast of a man. In fact, such monsters are probably more born than created.
Authorities long suspected Ted of having committed that first murder when he was 14 years old, and they tried many times to get him to fess up to it. But Ted always turned rigid and defensive whenever that case was brought up. Even the worst criminals have a hierarchy of evil. Some things are beyond the pale even for them.
Ted did not mind at all being thought of as the killer of beautiful young college-aged women, often with long brunette hair like his former girlfriend who broke up with him and broke his heart. He seemed to take some sort of pride in being a rapist and killer of beautiful young coed types.
He even went so far as to confess to the rape and murder of a 12 year old girl in Florida, one of the crimes that earned him the death penalty. The girl had been so savagely attacked that parts of her flesh had been actually ripped out with Ted’s teeth as he did his human predator frenzy routine on her. But a 12-year-old girl is on the edge of puberty, so she could seem to be heading towards a woman. And he got caught for that crime, and there was little he could do but confess.
Ted Bundy was a malignant narcissist or narcissistic sociopath like our current President-Elect Donald Trump, and indeed, Mr. Trump reminds me of Bundy in some ways. Malignant narcissism is where narcissism has gone clear over into sociopathy. The two problems are similar, and there is a lot of overlap. Most narcissists are a bit sociopathic, but the sociopathy usually stays rather limited because as sociopathy increases, your chances of success in life start to diminish, and the narcissist is all about being successful and especially being seen as successful in the face of others. Narcissists would probably like to do a lot more bad things than they actually do but are stopped due to the consequences, which they are painfully aware of.
Sociopaths on the other hand could care less what anyone thinks of them. They think they are the center of the world or perhaps that they are the only people who exist at all. Others are not even really humans to them but are seen more as objects like the tools in your toolbox that you can use for whatever purpose you wish or even destroy or throw away if you are so inclined.
In Malignant Narcissism, the narcissism has gone all the way over into sociopathy and you have what is for all intents and purposes a sociopath. And malignant narcissists can be pretty bad sociopaths. Bundy is not the only serial killer with Malignant Narcissism. However, in Malignant Narcissism, the sociopath craves the attention of others which he eagerly seeks out. He is very attentive to the opinions of others. Negative opinions can be devastating, and positive opinions can serve as sources of narcissistic supply.
Yes, Ted was extremely vain and also susceptible to the negative views of others. While being a coed killer might be just fine for Ted, there is little worse than a child killer. I suspect that Ted’s massive ego simply could not handle the blow to it that would have occurred once Ted got labeled a child killer. Ted could see himself as some heroic coed slayer, but no one likes a child killer. There is no criminal so reviled or despised. There is nothing even possibly heroic or noble in killing a little child, even for a man as depraved as Ted Bundy.
Based on Ted’s history, I would say that porn played little role in his development. Obviously Ted developed the BDSM fantasies of a severe sexual sadist early on in life somehow, maybe as early as age three. The “porn” Ted references is not even pornography. Ted liked to read and apparently masturbate to detective magazines. I am not sure if these are still around, but they used to be when I was younger. There were often many photos of rigged-up crime scenes with masked men holding knives or guns to struggling, captive, and often bound and gagged women. There’s nothing erotic there unless you get off on violent rape or even murder. Ted was already set up that way anyway, but the images in detective magazines simply fueled his pre-existing tendencies.
There was no porn problem with Ted Bundy. The porn thing was just made up by Ted the narcissist to attempt to take the blame away from his crimes and make his crimes the fault of something other himself. Of course narcissists are rarely wrong, and everything is the fault of some other person or entity. “Detective magazine porn made me do it” is just Ted’s narcissistic way of saying that all those murders were not really his fault.
