The life of serial killer Ted Bundy

Early Life

Ted Bundy was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, to Eleanor Louise Cowell (1924-2012; known as Louise) at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers, in Burlington, Vermont. His father's identity has never been confirmed. His birth certificate is said to assign paternity to a salesman and Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, though other accounts state his father is listed as "Unknown". Louise claimed she had been seduced by an old money war veteran named Jack Worthington, and the King County Sheriff's Office has him listed as the father in their files. Some family members have expressed suspicions that Bundy might have been fathered by Louise's own violent, abusive father, Samuel Cowell, but no material evidence has ever been cited to support this.

For the first three years of his life, Bundy lived in the Philadelphia home of his maternal grandparents, Samuel (1898-1983) and Eleanor Cowell (1895-1971), who raised him as their son to avoid the social stigma that accompanied birth outside of wedlock. Family, friends, and even young Ted were told that his grandparents were his parents and that his mother was his older sister. He eventually discovered the truth, although he had varied recollections of the circumstances. He told a girlfriend that a cousin showed him a copy of his birth certificate after calling him a "bastard," but he told biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth that he found the certificate himself. Biographer and true crime writer Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally, believed that he did not find out until 1969, when he located his original birth record in Vermont. Bundy expressed a lifelong resentment toward his mother for never talking to him about his real father, and for leaving him to discover his true parentage for himself.