9781422271049

year-old Republican campaign worker appeared affable, intellectual, and fun. Tall, athletic, and well-built, with a handsome face that featured high cheek bones and big blue eyes, Bundy looked all the part of a Hollywood actor. Later, Mark Harmon and Zac Efron would play him in films. Neither needed makeup to look like him. The charming, educated Bundy used his wiles and looks to lure women to accompany him or help him. He developed intricate ruses to trick them. Ted also devoted himself to education, entering law school after obtaining his undergraduate degree in psychology. Whether at a university mixer, law class, political fundraiser, or disco, Ted Bundy blended in because he had taught himself how to alter his personality to suit his audience. It wasn’t always like that. Ted’s first escape was his childhood home, a macabre place where he’d been reared to believe that his grandparents, Samuel Cowell and Eleanor Longstreet Cowell, were his parents, and his mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell, was his sister. Shades of a V.C. Andrews novel aside, when Bundy found his birth certificate as a youth, he learned part of the truth. The birth certificate listed his mother as Cowell, who went by her middle name, and a father named Lloyd Marshall, a salesman and Air Force veteran. Journalists have never located the recorded father. Louise gave birth in Burlington, Vermont, at the Elizabeth Lund Maternity Home for Unwed Mothers. Because of family confessions, law enforcement now believes that his father was his grandfather, Samuel, and that he was conceived when his mother’s father molested her. The unmarried Cowell, 22, left her home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for Vermont to hide her pregnancy. Originally, her parents told her she must give up the child for adoption. Louise could not do it. She begged them to help her keep her baby, so her parents

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