Advanced students of the Ted Bundy case know the oft-perpetuated story that Ted didn't discover his "parents" were actually his grandparents, his "sister" his mother until he was a young man, is categorically false. It is, however, generally accepted that Ted believed this familial hoax for the first few years of his life while living in the Cowell household, but that by the time his mother Louise Cowell married his adoptive father Johnnie Bundy on May 19, 1951, all parental identities had been reconciled for the four-year-old boy. But was Ted ever really told Samuel and Eleanor Cowell were his parents and Louise was his sister? And if not, what is the origin of such a myth? After all, there is nothing on record wherein Bundy addressed, confirmed, or denied this rumor in the press, to investigators, or any mental health professionals; upon gaining notoriety and having details of his life publicized, he didn't directly say, "As a child, I called my grandparents 'Mom and Dad' and my mother 'Louise' because I thought they were my parents and she was my sister."
In Bundy literature, as well as in Ted Bundy's personal history, the first reference to such an event is found in the biography Bundy: The Deliberate Stranger, by Richard W. Larsen (1980). The following account was unearthed during interviews conducted by prison psychologist Dr. Al Carlisle, Ph.D., during Bundy's court-mandated, 90-day psychological evaluation of 1976:
[A] woman Ted had known [when he was living] in Washington remembered the day she accompanied him when he drove on an errand to the Bundy family home at Tacoma, a midday visit when he knew his mother and the others would be away from the house. "I didn't know anything about Ted's family," she recalled, "and while we were driving there, he told me about everyone. Ted said his father was dead and that his mother was an older woman, in her sixties."
When they arrived at the Bundy home, Ted pointed out some family photographs hanging on the wall. "He pointed out the photo of his mother, his older sister, his younger sister and brother." Much later [probably after Bundy's first arrest], the woman went on, "I saw a photograph of Ted's mother, and I figured out that the photo Ted had said was his 'mother' was actually his grandmother. His 'father' was his grandfather, his 'older sister' was really his mother. I could never figure that out."
The next chronological reference is identifiable as the primary source of this persistent rumor about Bundy's childhood, largely because of the popularity of the book that features it. In The Stranger Beside Me (1980), author Ann Rule recounts a conversation between herself and Ted in which he confided to her one night at the Seattle Crisis Clinic, sometime during the period of Autumn 1971 - Spring 1972 when they worked there together. Here is Ted's side of the dialogue:
"You know, I only found out who I really am a year or so ago [he goes on to clarify he found out at age twenty-two]. I mean, I always knew, but I had to prove it to myself."
"I'm illegitimate. When I was born, my mother couldn't say that I was her baby. I was born in a home for unwed mothers and, when she took me home, she and my grandparents decided to tell everyone that I was her brother, and that they were my parents. So I grew up believing that she was my sister, that I was a 'late baby' born to my grandparents."
"I knew. Don't ask me how I knew. Maybe I heard conversations. Maybe I just figured out that there couldn't be [twenty-two] years' difference in age between a brother and a sister, and Louise always took care of me. I just grew up knowing that she was really my mother."
[. . . .]
"[I never said anything.] It would have hurt them. It just wasn't something you talked about. When I was little, we moved away - Louise and I - and left my grandparents behind. If they were my mother and father, we wouldn't have done that. I went back east in 1969. I needed to prove it to myself, to know for sure. I traced my birth to Vermont, and I went to the city hall, and I looked at the records. It wasn't difficult; I just asked for my birth certificate under my mother's name - and there it was."
Certainly, the stigma attached to a unmarried woman having a baby out of wedlock was all too impactful in 1940s' culture; so much so, that Louise was sent from her parents' home in Philadelphia to Vermont in her seventh month to wait out the rest of her pregnancy and give birth privately at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers. Ultimately deciding against adoption, Louise brought baby Ted back to her parents' home when he was three months old. All preceding or subsequent concealment by the Cowells in order to allay suspicion and avert said-stigma would be quite understandable... and, hence, lends credence to the narrative in question. In other words, because the Cowells went to the lengths they did to hide Louise's pregnancy, the continued measure of falsifying the baby's parentage would be reasonable. But could Bundy, a pathological liar, have invented this parental identity element of his family history, as conveyed to Rule, just as he was feigning his twenty-two-year ignorance about the truth? Or, could the dialogue be Rule's fabrication? The following passages from the third edition of Rule's book, published nine years after the original with the addition "The Last Chapter - 1989," suggest Rule had been, for the most part, relating Ted's story as she'd heard it:
[. . . .] For fourteen years, I [Ann Rule] have wondered if there was not something more to know about Ted's childhood, something beyond his illegitimate birth, beyond his mother's deception (if, indeed, Ted was even telling me the truth about that), something traumatic back in Philadelphia. It finally spilled out in Dr. [Dorothy] Lewis's testimony in Orlando [during Bundy's 1987 appellate incompetency hearing].
[. . . .]
Some of the relatives recall that Sam and Eleanor [Cowell] said they had adopted the baby boy in 1946. [Note - the only relative identified as "recalling" this information publicly was Virginia Cowell Bristol.] Adults in the family [i.e., Mrs. Bristol] didn't believe such a story. Eleanor was too ill to be cleared as an adoptive parent. They [i.e., Mrs. Bristol] all knew the child was Louise's, but no one talked of it aloud. That might well substantiate the story that Ted told me. He believed, at least for a time, that Sam and Eleanor were his parents. I know he did; he was so intense and disturbed when he said he never really knew who he was, or who [sic] he belonged to.
Rule's perception of Ted's demeanor while he was discussing the charade of his parentage is weak constitution for his story's validity. He may well have been "intense" and "disturbed," but more likely it was due to the lifelong, "troubling psychological dynamic" (Larsen) of his illegitimacy, with similarly emotional reactions having been documented from his conversations on the subject with childhood friend Terry Storwick while in high school, one-time fiancée Liz Kloepfer (pseudonym "Liz Kendall"), and Dr. Al Carlisle. This article won't delve into the corresponding topic of Bundy's illegitimacy, but what is significant about the aforementioned conversations Bundy had with those three individuals (as well as with others such as Hugh Aynesworth), is that none of them included the additional information about shifting parental identities; in available research, only the woman mentioned in Larsen's book and Ann Rule were privy to that narrative. Those emotionally charged incidents also yield possible clues about Bundy's reasons for manufacturing the family-relations lie to the Washington woman and Rule; the issue of his illegitimacy so traumatized him, tales were perhaps woven to inflate significance of a self-worth otherwise besotted with shame. Important to note is that though Ted's intimate talk with Liz about his illegitimacy was quite similar to the one Rule reports - with about a two-year difference between the two conversations, the one with Liz having transpired "not long after we started spending time together [in September 1969]" (Kendall) - Rule likely did not draw inspiration from Kendall's account; Rule's book was published one year ahead of Kendall's. There does exist, however, the possibility that Rule crafted Ted's dialogue from the Washington woman's experience, whether it be via Larsen's book, released a year before Rule's, or via Dr. Carlisle's files, which she accessed for research.
More on the last excerpted passage from Rule's book above momentarily.
The Only Living Witness, by Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, brings us the next reference to the rumored parental pretense in Bundy's early childhood. Published in 1983, the book reveals:
[. . . .] Later, a story attributed to the adult Ted Bundy had it that Louise posed as his older sister, not his mother. This is not so; he always knew her as Mom. [. . . .]
And, finally, we have the article "The Roots of Evil," written by Myra MacPherson and published in the May 1989 edition of Vanity Fair magazine. This piece is arguably the most thorough resource for exposition of the Cowell household, as several relatives, including Louise, gave interviews to the author. The article was an extension of the groundbreaking discoveries psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis and appellate attorney Polly Nelson had made about the Cowell family in the spring of 1987 while preparing for Bundy's October/December 1987 appellate competency hearing. The family background gleaned from Nelson's and Lewis's interviews with various Cowell relatives was first introduced at the hearing and then put into print in Nelson's 1994 book Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy's Last Lawyer. However, nothing in Nelson's book alludes to Ted's having referred to Sam and Eleanor as his parents, nor to Louise as his sister. The Vanity Fair article, however, provides the following illumination:
Louise: "When [Ted and] I lived with the folks it was 'This is Granddad, this is Grandmother, and here is Mother.' "
[. . . . ]
[. . . As] an adult, Bundy once told a friend that his grandfather was his father, his grandmother his mother, and his mother his sister (although family members remember Bundy calling Louise "Mommy" when he was three). "I can't imagine where that came from. I'm not sure Ted ever said that," says Mrs. Bundy. Then, with satisfaction, "It must be a made-up tale."
With these quotes, not only does Louise provide zero corroboration for Ted's account of his lineage, she seems genuinely skeptical of its authenticity.
Continuing within the article (and highlighted in red) is the closest evidence to validating Ted's fanciful anecdote, and perhaps, along with Ann Rule's book, is what has reinforced the public's belief in his claim. Furthermore, a potential inception of the fable Ted constructed is recognizable. (Notice that the quote from Virginia Bristol matches Rule's writing in the last passage excerpted above from The Stranger Beside Me, "The Last Chapter - 1989." As an aside, the Vanity Fair article was published two months before the third edition of Rule's book was released, so Rule likely borrowed her information from that source, though it is not credited.)
[. . . .] Stories [about baby Ted's paternity] were invented for curious relatives - vague stories that many doubted.
[. . . .]
[Ted's] Great-aunt Virginia [Cowell] Bristol recalls the year Ted was born: "When I heard Louise was 'not home' I knew things were not right. Next thing I heard was that Sam and Eleanor had adopted a boy. I was smart enough to know damn well they weren't adopting this baby. No adoption agency would give them one; Eleanor wasn't well enough to take care of one! I knew it had to be Louise's baby. But they wanted to cover up. All we ever got was evasions. I had a very secretive brother."
So, "stories were invented for curious relatives," but did these inventions - namely, that Sam and Eleanor had adopted a baby boy - extend to the community, as well? MacPherson inquired of Louise: [. . . In Ted's] first four years didn't he question why there was no daddy in his life? At birthday parties or with other children? (Note that this very question assumes an understanding that Samuel Cowell was not posing as Ted's father.) Louise's response: "In our neighborhood there were no other children his age. He didn't know any differently." It seems improbable that in a neighborhood where little Ted wasn't interacting with other children that there would be a need to pass Sam off as Ted's father; or, at the very least, doubtful that Ted himself was trained to perpetuate a parental ruse in a community devoid of young families.
Admittedly, the actions of image-conscious Louise in the ensuing years are consistent with the maintenance of supreme secrecy begun during her pregnancy and, again, lean towards a legitimation of the grandparents-as-parents/mother-as-sister deception. Louise's two different versions of the identity of Ted's biological father, her never discussing the man with Ted, changing Ted's last name temporarily to the arbitrary "Nelson" before his fourth birthday, and, perhaps, even relocating across the country to Washington State are reasons enough to believe she and the Cowells, for a time, either propagated a lie to their people and/or mismatched their relationships with Ted to the little boy himself. However, as this blog post outlines, there is scant evidence to support such a possibility.
Blogger's Note: Thank you to Gillian Gaar, who was the first to identify the origin of the story that Ted was told his grandparents were his parents, his mother his sister when I made such an inquiry and first posted my doubts about the validity of said-story in Facebook's The Ted Bundy Research Group, December of 2019.
BONUS MATERIAL
In the more reportorial, biographical narrative of The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule wrote the following material derived from her Crisis Clinic conversation with Ted about his lineage. These passages exemplify how Rule's book was the catalyst for the ongoing myths surrounding Bundy's family background, including Ted's discovery of his true parentage and illegitimacy at age twenty-two. (Though this blog post has avoided unpacking the substantial evidence disproving the long-held, continually misreported conjecture that Ted believed Louise was his sister, etc. into early adulthood, if any readers are still in the dark about the matter, please leave a comment and your question will be addressed.)
1.) [Louise] took her [three-month-old] son back to her parents' home in Philadelphia and began a hopeless charade. As the baby grew, he would hear [Louise] referred to as his older sister, and was told to call his grandparents "Mother" and "Father." [. . . He] sensed that he was living a lie.
[. . . .]
[As the child] grew older, it was clear that remaining in Philadelphia would be impossible. Too many relatives knew the real story of his parentage, and [Louise] dreaded what his growing-up years would be like. It was a working-class neighborhood where children would listen to their parents' whispered remarks and mimic them. She never wanted Ted to have to hear the word "bastard."
2.) Oddly, Louise had never directly confirmed to Ted that she was, in fact, his mother and not his older sister. Sometimes he called her Mother, and sometimes just Louise.
3.) [. . . .] In early 1969, [Ted] set out on travels that might help him understand his roots.
[. . . .] He had to know who he was.
Rule chronicles that Ted located his birth certificate in Burlington, Vermont, and discovered it stamped "illegitimate" along with "Lloyd Marshall" given under "Father's name."
[. . . .] He [now] knew that what he had always sensed was true: Louise was, of course, his mother. Johnnie Bundy wasn't his father, and his beloved grandfather wasn't his father either. He had no father.
Copyright © (2020) Cynthia Walker. All Rights Reserved.
