Post by Joanna on Jun 10, 2018 21:27:45 GMT -5
Was Ted Bundy Possessed?
Approximately a week before Ted Bundy abducted and killed two girls on the same day at Lake Sammamish in Washington state, his girlfriend, Liz Kloepfer, thought he seemed odd. He inexplicably pushed her out of a raft into icy water and made no move to help her get out. “His face had gone blank,” she later wrote, “as though he was not there at all. I had a sense that he wasn’t seeing me.”
To several of his post-arrest interviewers including Bill Hagmaier, Bob Keppel and Steven Michaud, Bundy described a malignant being – an “entity” – that seemed to possess him when he was tense or drunk.
Joe Aloi, an investigator with the public defender’s office in Tallahassee, believed he came face-to-face with this entity one day when he and Bundy were talking. Aloi said he became aware of a peculiar odor that seemed to be emanating from Bundy and both his face and body appeared to change. “I felt that negative electricity,” Aloi claimed, “and along with that came that smell.” The investigator suddenly became terrified that Bundy would kill him.
Bundy discussed the times this malignant part of his personality took over, saying it was looking for satisfaction. It wasn’t an alter ego, he insisted, but more like a disordered part of himself, a “malignancy.” Under its influence, he was aware of what he was doing, but the entity was in control. In third-person, he described the experience: “What began to happen was that ... important matters were not being rearranged or otherwise interfered with by this voyeuristic behavior, but ... things were postponed or otherwise rescheduled, to, uh, work around, uh, hours and hours spent on the street, at night and during the early morning hours. … And as the condition develops and its purposes or its characteristics become more well defined,” continued, “it begins to demand more time of the individual [referring to himself]. ... There’s a certain amount of tension, uh, struggle, between the normal personality and this, this, uh, psychopathological, uh, entity. ... This condition inside him seems to be competing for more attention ... a point would be reached where we’d had all of this, this reservoir of tension building. Building and building.” Finally, he said, the entity would break through. “The tension would be too great and the demands and expectations of this entity would reach a point where they just could not be controlled.”
I interviewed Rosemary Ellen Guiley about her book The Djinn Connection, in which she described a force or entity from Arabian folklore that isn’t well-known in this country. The Djinn, it is said, were here first and were overpowered and some of their number are still angry and want to reclaim their former position. This could be applied to Bundy, so I told Rosemary about what he said and she offered the following interpretation:
“The entity that Ted Bundy described as having an influence on his murderous behavior could very well have been a Djinn. In Djinn lore, every person is born with a Djinn that stays with the person for their entire life. Like the Greek daimon, the Djinn can be either good or bad, and it will influence a person accordingly.
“A bad or evil Djinn understands the person’s weaknesses and takes advantage of them in a type of possession. Its means of influence can include a voice in the head, dreams, and thoughts and urges that arise. It would be capable of creating a physical tension or pressure that would build until released by action – in Bundy’s case, killing. And, it would be relentless, pushing and pushing until the person went over the edge.
“Defense investigator Joe Aloi noticed dramatic changes in Bundy: contortions of the face and body, an unpleasant odor and ‘negative electricity.’ All of these would be consistent with Djinn possession. When the Djinn gains the upper hand, it distorts the person’s body, especially the face. Foul odors are common. The description of ‘negative electricity’ is especially interesting, for the Djinn are said to be made of ‘smokeless fire,’ perhaps a type of plasma, and they often give off an electrical presence when they manifest.”
When I was writing Inside the Minds of Serial Killers, I noticed that several of these extreme offenders had described the feeling of being possessed by some force that seemed outside their control. I made a list of those who had not been diagnosed with schizophrenia and each expressed it in a different way, but there are similar undertones. The following list is not exhaustive, but it is a good sample of those, like Bundy, who sensed the “dark stranger” hovering near. A few were just malingering, but others gave seemingly sincere descriptions. In fact, there might be a neurological explanation.
Before he was identified as the “BTK Killer,” Dennis Rader called a reporter at The Wichita Eagle and instructed him to go to the public library and look inside Applied Engineering Mechanics, where there would be a letter detailing his slaughter of a family of four. Also in this note, the offender said he had studied the habits of other sexual criminals and had a “monster” in his brain that compelled him to kill: “The pressure is great and sometimes he run the game to his liking.” BTK indicated this monster had “already chosen his next victim.” In another letter in which he aligned himself with elite serial killers, including Bundy, he referred to this force as “Factor X.”
John Wayne Gacy, who killed 33 young men, attempted to attribute the murders to “Jack Hanley,” an alter personality. After he confessed and drew a map of the crawl space beneath his home where he’d placed more than two-dozen of his victims, he “tranced out” and pretended Hanley had actually drawn the map. However, his attempt at an insanity defense didn’t work.
In Britain, a six-year investigation of the murders attributed to the Yorkshire Ripper ended in 1981 with the arrest of Peter Sutcliffe. All his victims had been bludgeoned and slashed. In some cases, the killer had mutilated the woman’s genitals and while the first victims were prostitutes, his targets soon included ordinary working girls and college students. The Ripper also switched to a screwdriver. Upon arrest, Sutcliffe, a former mortuary worker, eventually confessed to 20 mutilation assaults and 15 murders. He claimed God’s voice issuing from a grave he’d been digging one day had ordered him to attack.
Israel Keyes, who admired Ted Bundy, said he felt something similar to Bundy’s “entity” as he carried out a cross-country series of murders spanning more than a decade before committing suicide in prison. Like Bundy, Keyes also overindulged in alcohol prior to his killing escapades.
As a teen, Sean Sellers carried a copy of The Satanic Bible and brought vials of blood to school and drank them in front of other students. He spent hours performing rituals in his bedroom, writing notes to Satan in his own blood. Eventually he decided to prove he could exercise the ultimate power over another person and on September 8, 1985, he entered a convenience store and fatally shot the clerk. Not long thereafter, he dressed in black underwear before entering the bedroom where his mother and stepfather slept and shot them both in the head. After he was arrested and charged with the murders, he claimed he had been influenced by dreams about blood. “Demons were the beings that would do things I wanted done,” he wrote in his confession. “They were the keys to the power Satanism promised.” According to Sellers, when his courage almost failed him, he reverted to a “cold, determined, heartless and evil” personality. “When I was that person, that murderer, I felt superior.”
Danny Rolling, “The Gainesville Ripper,” did the same during the murders he committed at the University of Florida in August 1990. He initially killed two 17-year-old freshmen, repeatedly stabbing and mutilating the girls and posing their corpses for “effect.” The following day, he broke into the apartment of Christa Hoyt, 18. Rolling cut off her head and placed in on a shelf facing her body, to shock those who found her. His final victims were Tracy Paules and her male roommate, Manny Taboada, both 23. He used a stun gun on Manny, who was sleeping when he entered the apartment. When charged with the killings, Rolling an alter ego he called “Gemini.” Investigators were convinced he had gotten the idea from Exorcist III, a 1990 movie which includes a sadistic murderer known as the Gemini Killer. No one believed Rolling and he was convicted. He was put to death October 25, 2006.
Bessie Gilmore, mother of Gary Gilmore, whom Norman Mailer immortalized in The Executioner’s Song, believed her son was possessed and claimed to have actually seen the entity. She was convinced that while using a Ouija board as a child, she had conjured a demonic ghost that in some way became attached to her family. When she married, Fay Gilmore, her mother-in-law, a self-proclaimed medium who bragged she had the ability to contact spirits, held a séance one night to contact the spirit of a suspected killer. Bessie did not attend and when she came home, found Fay exhausted and frightened. Later, Bessie was awakened by something touching her and when she turned over found herself looking into the eyes of a leering “creature.” She rushed to her son’s room and discovered the same monster leaning over Gary’s bed. Terrified, she got her children out of bed and left the house. Shortly thereafter, Gary began having nightmares in which something was cutting off his head and the horrifying dreams continued for the remainder of his life. Though he never blamed a demon for his short-lived murder spree, Bessie was convinced the “thing” had taken over his soul and his life thereafter was one of anger and malevolence and bent on self-destruction.
Though I’m not sure about the Djinn, I have come across accounts in scientific literature offering rational explanations for such behavior. In September 2009, scientists reported the case of a 37-year-old woman with no history of mental illness who began to have seizures. She went to a German epilepsy center, where it was learned that since her initial seizure, she had frequent déjà vu, nausea, sudden fear and sometimes she emerged from a seizure perceiving herself to be a man. Her arms became hairy like those of a male and her voice was lower in pitch. In fact, not only did she see herself as a man, other women in the room also appeared to be men. It was discovered she had a benign tumor in her brain near the amygdala, affecting the right temporal lobe, and this was believed to be the cause of her seizures and hallucinations. Anti-convulsive medications relieved her symptoms.
Even more interesting is the case reported in Nature in 2006 in which Swiss neuroscientists stimulated an area of a patient’s brain prior to surgery for epilepsy. The subject, No. 22, had no history of psychiatric disorders or delusions. When the left junction of her temporoparietal lobe was stimulated, the patient reported an impression of a young, silent man posing in a manner to mirror her positions, however, no one was there. Doctors urged her to sit up and again stimulated her brain once again. This time she reported the man had wrapped his arms around her in the same manner her own arms were wrapped around her knees. In another test, she held a card in her right hand, and following stimulation, she again reported the shadow person, but this time, she had the impression he wanted to take the card and did not want her to read it.
When some offenders are in a highly aroused state, could some of the wiring in their brains spark a similar experience of a shadow person or entity close at hand? This wouldn’t explain what Bessie Gilmore supposedly saw, but it could be implicated in Factor X, Bundy’s entity and the other “dark passenger” descriptions that killers have offered ... that is, when they’re not simply malingering. I think it’s worth consideration.
Source: Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D., Psychology Today, September 2013.
See also “January 31, 1974: The Disappearance of Lynda Healy”: whatliesbeyond.boards.net/thread/1074/january-1974-disappearance-lynda-healy
“July 14, 1974: Murder on a Sunday Afternoon”: whatliesbeyond.boards.net/thread/4028/july-1974-murder-sunday-afternoon
“November 8, 1974: Encounter with a Killer”: whatliesbeyond.boards.net/thread/520/november-8-1974-encounter-killer