Without the interwebs, was there enough info for people outside of the Northwest to read about one of America's most prolific serial killers in action? When he was incarcerated in Colorado, did the rest of the country know who/what he may have been? When he began murdering in Florida, did people think it was just a fucked up thing, or did they suspect that the monster came to their home? And, if it's not too much, what was the international attention he received? I read that news teams from several countries covered his trial. How and when did news travel across seas about his crimes?
Basically, I'm asking what the media portrayal and layman view (if any) of Ted Bundy was in his time, and how that traveled as far as it did by the end of his crimes. Thanks in advance!
Not a historian, but I have read just about everything there is on Bundy himself.
Regarding info for people outside the Northwest, the initial crimes concerned minor campus disappearances. Bundy tried his best to select single targets from a location, and to plant them in different jurisdictions. He had knowledge of the toe-stepping and bureaucratic obstacles departments put in the way of other departments investigating crimes in their areas.
He was known, primarily, as a young up & coming Republican, having been 'caught' recording the stump speeches of democratic candidates in Washington (before youtube, there were people who followed politicans around and recorded their statements), and as a minor 'hero' for running down a purse snatcher.
He did have a knack for stirring up hysteria in the regions he hunted in. Lake Sammamish is one of his more well known attacks, kidnapping two women in broad daylight in a crowded beach on the same afternoon. There are pictures showing the beach deserted in the weeks after, though Bundy was long gone by then.
While he was incarcerated in Colorado, it was again a local matter, concerning a kidnapping. Only by virtue of a forward-thinking detective was Bundy's name passed back to Washington's investigation of the college killer. He gained his fame here from his two escapes, the second being a fugitive flight to Florida, where he attempted to lay low and assume new stolen identities. By now he had the FBI's attention, being added to the 10 most wanted list with his famous pastiche of appearances, his most deadly asset as a chameleon in a crowd.
After the Chi Omega murders and the most tragic of all, that of the abduction of Kimberly Leach from an elementary school, Bundy gained national attention from an unprecedented televsion broadcast of his trial, where the nation first gained a glimpse of Bundy. Here is where the cultural shock set in; the murderer of these women was an attractive, outspoken, charming man in his 30s. It shook the popular perception of an 'ugly hunchbacked killer' as the authors of The Only Living Witness condemned.
Bundy also gained public awareness from a coworker & amateur detective Ann Rule, who had investigated his crimes unaware that her friend was the perpetrator, and who published her book,The Stranger Beside Me, during his trial to an eager public wanting details of this walking contradiction.
Bundy's entire MO was secrecy and 'hiding in plain view', and it wasn't until his graveyards began to be uncovered that the scope of his crimes became known to the public, but by then he was a fugitive, then the subject of a highly public trial, and finally years of exhausting legal manuevers before his execution.