Terrible Secrets Quotes

“One of our elusive killer’s critical advantages was the ingrained habit among police agencies not to share information with one another.”
― Stephen G. Michaud, Terrible Secrets: Ted Bundy on Serial Murder

“When I asked if a guy so obviously crazy would have a history of mental problems, including institutionalization, neither of them believed he necessarily did. In contrast to the brutal and primitive murderer they described, Liebert and Berberich agreed that the public “Ted” obviously was highly credible, which suggested to them that he was well-concealed within his community and circle of friends. For that reason, he likely would be difficult to isolate as a suspect.”
― Stephen G. Michaud, Terrible Secrets: Ted Bundy on Serial Murder

“Liebert and his team added that an offender so slick and bold and self-assured probably was practiced in committing this sort of crime and that he did so compulsively. He’d killed before and would want to kill again. There also was a good chance that he was a necrophile. If we ever found the victims, they likely would have been mutilated or dismembered.”
― Stephen G. Michaud, Terrible Secrets: Ted Bundy on Serial Murder

“Our captain, Nick Mackie, for some reason didn’t trust that Roger and I could interview anybody, so Mackie decided that the first round of interviews with witnesses at Lake Sam would be done by a team of local mental health professionals led by Dr. John Liebert and Dr. John Berberich, since deceased. Liebert is a forensic psychiatrist, and Berberich was a clinical psychologist, who advised police departments on internal issues. Both men taught at the University of Washington. Liebert advised King County Superior Court Judges on murder defendants’ potential for violence. For 20 years or more, he had interviewed every convicted murderer in the county and prepared a post-sentence report for the court.”
― Stephen G. Michaud, Terrible Secrets: Ted Bundy on Serial Murder

“Mike Fisher had extradited Bundy to Aspen in January from the Utah state prison in Draper, where the personable former law student was serving up to 15 years for the 1975 aggravated kidnap of a 19-year-old telephone operator. Bundy already had been caught in an escape attempt from the penitentiary print shop, “a miserable little plot that I hatched,” as he’d later describe it to me. At the time, I agreed with Mike Fisher and others that he’d probably try again. Since his arrival in Aspen, Ted had become a celebrity to many of the mountain resort’s young and irreverent fun seekers, who reacted to his dramatic courthouse leap with amusement.”
― Stephen G. Michaud, Terrible Secrets: Ted Bundy on Serial Murder

“Though an incredibly destructive example of the so-called lust murderer, a fantasy-driven offender whose homicides are marked by a wild and primitive fury, Bundy was also a bright and smooth-talking psychopath, witty and urbane, handsome in his younger days, and the object of not a few young women’s sexual fantasies, as well. Until you got to know him, it was a battle (even for cops) to reconcile the pleasant and friendly defendant who so fascinated the press and the public with the beast that lurked within. These qualities, plus his extraordinary instincts as a predator, were major reasons Ted made it so devilishly difficult for us to stop him. As he’d later brag to me, “I have a Ph.D. in serial murder.”
― Stephen G. Michaud, Terrible Secrets: Ted Bundy on Serial Murder

“Bundy also cleared cases with detectives from three other western states, acknowledging in all a murder toll of 31 victims, certainly fewer cases than he actually committed, but as many as Ted in his confused final hours was prepared to admit.”
― Stephen G. Michaud, Terrible Secrets: Ted Bundy on Serial Murder

“The rest of the story is better told in the concluding chapters of Terrible Secrets. With almost no chance of rescuing himself, Bundy nonetheless directly cleared four cases for Keppel, and indirectly confirmed he had killed the four other victims on Bob’s list. He denied, unconvincingly, his culpability for several other unsolved Washington state killings – including that of an eight-year-old child Keppel believes Ted killed when he was fourteen - and then suggested in their anxious final interview that three other of his Washington victims remained unaccounted for. He could not, or would not, say who they were, or where they were.”
― Stephen G. Michaud, Terrible Secrets: Ted Bundy on Serial Murder