Bundy Miscellaneous.
Timeline / Profile.
The 1992 FBI Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992.
Ted Bundy, College Information and Transcripts.
Some photos related to Ted’s execution:
Letter By Louise Bundy to Judge Stewart Hanson, March 10, 1976.
On March 10, 1976, Louise Bundy penned an emotional plea to Judge Stewart Hanson on Ted’s behalf.
Seattle Yacht Club & Mrs. Sybil Ferris.
A Washington state institution for well over a century, the Seattle Yacht Club is located at 1807 East Hamlin Street in the Montlake neighborhood of Seattle, WA. Where it was technically established in 1879, the club remained slow-growing and mostly uneventful until 1909, when it joined forces with the Elliott Bay Yacht Club. Like most businesses, it has experienced both high and low points over the years, including the Great Depression, both world wars, and societal/economical changes.
The yacht club really came into its own after WW I when the Lake Washington Ship Canal was completed and it was relocated to a beautiful new location on the eastern shore of Portage Bay, where it remains to this day (as of August 2024). Founded by the city’s social and financial elite, it now has over 2,500 members and is constantly evolving and striving to get better as time goes by. I will say that its absolutely beautiful, and luckily when I visited in April 2022 it was on a lovely day and I was able to walk around a bit while I took my pictures.
Ted Bundy was (briefly) employed at the yacht club beginning in the fall of 1967, however nobody seems to be exactly sure of when he was there: per the ‘TB Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ he started there as a busboy sometime in September (that part appears to be universally agreed on) but was fired after a brief period for stealing food. Now, the discrepancy mostly lies in when he was let go: his friend (and the clubs ‘elderly’ pastry chef) Sibyl Ferris said that he was fired after only six weeks, however true crime author Ann Rule said that the position lasted for six months. Additionally, in Robert A. Dielenberg’s ‘TB: A Visual Timeline,’ the author states that Bundy parked cars at the establishment until January 1968, and police files report that he left on January 13, 1968, which means he worked there for anywhere from four to five months.
Ted’s one-time coworker Mrs. Ferris described him as a ‘peculiar boy’ that always seemed to be ‘sneaking around.’ After he was let go the two maintained their ‘friendship,’ although she suspected that he only did this so that he could ‘borrow’ things from her: on multiple occasions she let him borrow her car, and despite him promising to return it by midnight, he often wouldn’t get back until 3 or 4 AM.
The following are excerpts from the Seattle Police Department archives (courtesy of archives.org) with information related to Bundys ‘relationship’ with the Seattle Yacht Club. For whatever reason there are a TON of spelling errors, and I tried to clean it up the best I could but despite my best efforts there are still parts that are unclear. Remember that’s not my fault, and please be gentle. I’m a sensitive snowflake.
‘Mrs. Ferris is 69 years old but has a good memory of her dealings with Ted Bundy. She advised that she met him about 5 years ago when he was working as a bus boy at the Seattle Yacht Club. Another person that knew him well there is Kenny Gilman, who is now the chef at the Moose Club by the Seattle Center. Mrs. Ferris recalled Bundy taking men home who were drunk and other employees suspected him of trying to ‘roll’ the customers after hours. She also remembered a young secretary whom Bundy took up into the ‘Crow’s nest’ for sexual purposes, Bundy is a schemer and a sneak according to Mrs. Ferris, and would befriend older people like herself and live with or off of them. He had little or no money and would borrow money and fail to repay it. He would often borrow Mrs. Ferris’ car and be gone into the night, Mrs. Ferris later thought Bundy might be robbing but was afraid of him at the time and still is and requests her name not be used. She got Bundy a job at the Olympic Hotel as a busboy and he worked there for a few months as he did at the Yacht Club. Persons at the Olympic suspected Bundy of brewing into the employees lockers and on one occasion Bundy showed Mrs. Ferris a waiter’s uniform (new) that he said he had taken from the Olympic, It was around this time Bundy borrowed some of Mrs. Ferris’s China and silver to put on some special sort of dinner for his girlfriend who was a high class girl from San Francisco, Bundy had showed Mrs. Ferris how he planned to prepare and serve an excellent dinner to the girl and put on a British accent for Mrs. Perris, During this time Bundy had borrowed a car from someone but later got a VW in Tacoma which needed a good deal of work, Bundy also had a job at a Safeway store on Queen Anne Hill, stocking.’
‘Ted had a friend who lived on Sunnyside Ave. Pi. who owned an antique.. whose in his home and also worked in a prison. Bundy lived with this man for a while, Bundy had a black wig that he showed Mrs. Ferris and Mrs. Ferris also saw a picture of him during the Rosellini-Evans campaign wearing a wig. On it one occasion Mrs. Ferris drove Ted to Diane’s (the girlfriend’s) house of Greenlake, and another time she. went to the ocean on business and Ted went with her. They also made a trip to Mossyrock, and at other times Bundy would take the car to “visit his parents”. He borrowed’ Mrs. Ferris’s, phone to make a lot of calls… ‘The last time Mrs. Ferris saw Bundy was in the Post Office on the Ave. before he left for Salt Lake. They had small talk at that time.’
‘Earing the time she knew him best he never talked about going, to law school. She also vaguely remembers seeing Ted at the Albertson’s store in Greenlake with a cast on his arm. Mrs. Ferris remembers Ted going to Ellensburg frequently and to meet friends from there to go skiing. He would ski at Snoqualmie Pass or Crystal Mountain, When he went to Aspen Ted had new, imported ski equipment – something he could not well afford. She has no idea where he got his money and recalls him mentioning he had a strict home life. Mrs. Ferris took r/0 to locates the places she knew Ted lived in. She was unable to locate, the address on 17th but will look again and call this office. She also showed K/O Bundy’s residence by the Seattle Yacht Club.’
Kathy McChesney from the King County Sheriff’s Department also commented that: ‘Mrs. Ferris recalls about four years ago Bundy coming to her house on a rainy day in a grey VW, He had a 6-10 year old boy with him and said they were going horseback riding in Issaquah and borrowed an umbrella. Bundy told Mrs. Ferris his father was a chef.’
The following are excerpts from Ann Rule’s controversial true crime classic, ‘The Stranger Beside Me’ regarding his time at the Seattle Yacht Club (Beatrice Sloan is a pseudonym for Sibyl Ferris, in an attempt to protect her identity):
‘Ted worked a series of menial, low-paying jobs to pay his way through college: in a posh Seattle yacht club as a busboy, at Seattle’s venerable Olympic Hotel as a busboy, at a Safeway store stocking shelves, in a surgical supply house as a stockboy, as a legal messenger, as a shoe clerk. He left most of these jobs of his own accord — usually after only a few months. Safeway personnel files evaluated him as “only fair,” and noted that he had simply failed to come to work one day. Both the surgical supply house and the messenger service hired him twice, however, and termed him a pleasant, dependable employee (Rule, 13).’
‘Ted became friends in August of 1967 with sixty-year- old Beatrice Sloan, who worked at the yacht club. Mrs. Sloan, a widow, found the young college student a lovable rascal, and Ted could talk her into almost anything when they worked at the yacht club together for the next six months and then for many years after. She arranged for his job at the Olympic Hotel, a job that lasted only a month; other employees reported they suspected he was rifling lockers. Mrs. Sloan was somewhat shocked when Ted showed her a uniform that he had stolen from the hotel, but she put it down as a boyish prank, as she would rationalize so many of his actions (Rule,13-14).’
‘Several years ago when Ted was out of the University of Washington he took a trip to Philadelphia to visit an uncle in politics. Mrs. Ferris took him to the plane and gave him $100 which she later tried to get back and called Mrs. Bundy looking for Ted, Mrs. Bundy said that Mrs. Ferris was a fool to give Ted that money, and she’d never get it back and Ted was a stranger around there.’
‘When Ted returned from Philadelphia Mrs. Ferris took him to the airport again: he was going to Aspen, Colorado to be a ski instructor. Mrs. Ferris was going to knit Ted a ski hat but he already had one, possibly white, that fit over the face. She also recalled mention of his seeing his girlfriend from San Francisco at Aspen, Bundy had a key to McMahon Kali and sometimes would go inside and sleep when he had no other place to sleep. He went for some time with this girl who attended Stanford and had a desire to go to Taiwan to get out of the army.’
‘Ted also called Beatrice Sloan, his old friend from the Seattle yacht club. She found him the same as he’d always been, full of plans and adventures. He told her he’d been to Philadelphia, where he’d seen his rich uncle, and that he was on his way to Aspen, Colorado, to become a ski instructor (Rule, 18).’
While editing this article in August 2024 I did some digging (just a little bit) into Ted’s friend, Mrs. Ferris, and the first thing that jumped out to me is that her first name is frequently spelled wrong: it’s spelled Sibyl and not Sybil. Born Sibyl Templeton on February 6, 1906 (which means when Bundy befriended her in September of 1967 she would have been sixty-one years old), she was a widow at the time that she met Ted at the Yacht Club (her husband Steve died on November 8, 1961). She passed away on August 2,1980 from cardiac arrest, and interestingly enough, on her death certificate physical therapist is listed as her occupation, which is a far cry from being a pastry chef (this isn’t meant to be judgmental, I admire people who are talented at multiple things).
The Cascade Mountains: Bundy’s Final Resting Place… (but, not really).
“In a will signed the night before his execution, Ted Bundy asked that his body be cremated and the ashes spread over Washington state’s Cascade Mountains, where at least four of his victims’ bodies were found, a newspaper reported.
The will prepared by Bundy’s civil attorney, Diana Weiner, was released by Florida State Prison officials Wednesday at the request of The Florida Times- Union in Jacksonville, which reported the story in Thursday’s editions.
‘Diana A. Weiner will contact family and friends as to any services. The ashes are to be spread over the Washington Cascade Mountains,’ Bundy stated in the will.
The will did not give a specific location for the ashes, and attempts by The Associated Press to reach Ms. Weiner by telephone were unsuccessful.
Sandy Williams, co-owner of the Williams-Thomas Funeral Home in Gainesville where Bundy’s body was sent, would not give details about the final disposition of the body because of an agreement with Ms. Weiner.
‘There will be no public funeral as of right now,’ Williams said. ‘We do not believe there will be a public funeral in the future.’
Bundy was executed Tuesday at Florida State Prison near Starke for the February 1978 murder of Kimberly Leach, 12, of Lake City. He also was convicted of two other Florida deaths and is suspected in at least 50 deaths nationwide.
He was suspected in as many as 15 rapes and murders of young women in Washington while he lived in the Seattle area in the mid-1970s. Four of his victims’ bodies were found on Taylor Mountain in the foothills of the Cascades.
In the typewritten will, Bundy gave Ms. Weiner control over his remains, personal property and assets, including mail sent to him at the prison.
Prison records show Bundy’s personal property included a radio with a headphone, a gold-tone chain with a cross, a religious book, stationery, a gold wedding band and a bottle of suntan lotion.
He also had $709.66 in cash, money donated by family and friends for snacks and other items from the prison canteen.
The items were inventoried Tuesday and picked up at the prison by Ms. Weiner, said Department of Corrections spokesman Bob Macmaster.
Volusia County State Attorney John Tanner, a friend of Bundy’s who visited him often in recent years, was designated to handle the arrangements if Ms. Weiner was unable to do so.”
‘Bundy Wanted Cremation, Ashes Spread Over Cascades.’ Published January 25, 1989. Taken July 27, 2022 from AP News.com.”
“After Bundy’s death, celebrants cheered at the departure of the van carrying his remains to Gainesville, where he would be cremated. But the party ended there. Bundy was dead, and the evil he had carried was apparently gone from the world. Vendors packed up their souvenirs and counted their earnings. Spectators rolled up their signs, piled into their cars, and drove back home. Camera crews dismantled the equipment and left in search of the next story. And Ted Bundy’s ashes, along with all his other earthly possessions, were given to his attorney, with the instructions that they be scattered at an undisclosed location in Washington’s Cascade Range, in lieu of a public funeral. In many ways, he’d already had one.
Bundy had disposed of two of his victims in Lake Sammamish State Park, and of another two on Taylor Mountain, both locations west of Seattle and not far from the Washington Cascades. It was in these secluded, wooded areas that he revisited his victims for hours at a time, possessing them as fully as one human being can ever possess another. (In his interviews with Aynesworth and Michaud, Bundy described his fondness for theft, and how the joy of ownership was, for him, far superior to the thrill of the crime.) It is not so far-fetched to guess that there may be other, undiscovered bodies somewhere in the Washington Cascades—perhaps one, perhaps a dozen, perhaps all of them clustered in the undisclosed location where Bundy’s ashes were laid to rest.
The truly remarkable thing about the disposal of Bundy’s remains, however, is how little anyone seemed to care what happened to them. Anyone who followed the Bundy case with even the vaguest interest can piece together the likelihood of his remains mingling with those of his victims. Yet the fate of his body became a nonissue once it became just that—the fate of a body, and not of a man.
If we are to believe in evil—evil as a substance, as nonhuman dark matter that sometimes comes to rest in human bodies, as something as intangible yet identifiable as a soul—then what happens when the person who possesses it dies? The people who clustered outside Florida State Prison on the morning of Bundy’s execution seemed to believe that it would simply dissipate, and would perhaps descend to hell just as a soul ascends to heaven. Yet this is a fiction that perpetuates the same blind spot that allowed Bundy to seem above suspicion for so long. If “evil” is an unknown quantity, a supernatural presence in an otherwise normal human body, then we will fail to suspect the seemingly normal humans surrounding us—let alone a handsome, successful, intelligent young man—of harboring “evil” impulses. Bundy, unable to acknowledge the enormity of his crimes until it was clear that doing so was his only hope at survival, comforted himself with the same fiction by describing “the entity” and “the personality”—two separate beings coexisting within the same body. But there was no entity. There was no pure evil or “special kind of malevolence.” Bundy wasn’t possessed, nor was he a larger-than-life monster. Though psychologically atypical, he was in all other ways a normal, flesh-and-blood member of the human race, and his death was the same as anyone else’s. No great evil departed the world at the moment he died. No one was safer. No one’s life was measurably improved. The human capacity for evil actions remained unaltered: greater in some, but present in every man, woman, and child on earth.
Ultimately, the scattering of Bundy’s ashes in the Cascades is a testament to his humanity, and a crucial reminder to us that he was human after all. He may have committed brutal crimes in Washington’s parks and woods, but they were also areas that he loved the same way the rest of us do: the way we love the beauty of an area that will live long after us; the way we love a place that affords us peace; the way we love our home. And Bundy himself, though no longer able to cause us harm, is still present in our world, his earthly remains at rest in one of the most beautiful parts of the country. They have no magic qualities. They pose no threat to the area they inhabit. They are, in the end, the remains of a human being—no more, no less.”
Marshall, Sarah. “The Earthly Remains: Revisiting Ted Bundy.” January 4, 2013. Taken July 27, 2022 from https://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/article/the-earthly-remains-revisiting-ted-bundy/.
Ted Bundy: Application to law school in Utah.
This is worth a read, it’s Teds application to law school in Utah and its really strange. Thanks Erin Banks!
Why?
So… a few people have inquired why this group is called ‘The Yellow Beetle,’ as Ted’s Beetle has been described as tan. Or gold. Or bronze. Or even light brown.
Well, personally I look at it and I see yellow. If I were to describe it, I would call it a yellow Bug. But I think that adds to the mystery.
Another Bundy Blog. 