Reflections on Bundy - execution of Ted Bundy

TED BUNDY certainly deserved execution, more even than most other murderers. Before his electrocution, Bundy told detectives from four states that he had murdered 23 young women. At that, he was probably being modest. Informed estimates put the figure at between 36 and a hundred during a life of rape and murder.

The 42-year-old Bundy, a law-school dropout, was a peculiarly intelligent and introspective killer. In a fascinating interview given the day before his death, he provided an insight into his mentality. His homicidal urges, he thought, were triggered by violent pornography. This is the first important instance we know of since the infamous Britis"moor murderers" of the mid Sixties in which a killer has made explicit the connection between sadistic material and actual murder.

Bundy did not blame sadistic pornography for his crimes, but he said that such pornography-along with alcohol-influenced what he did. "There are loose in the towns and their communities people like me," Bundy said, "whose dangerous impulses are being fueled day in and day out by violence in the media, particularly sexual violence."

The relationship between fantasy and action has always been problematical. To move to a much higher level than Ted Bundy, Yeats worried that certain poems of his had moved Irish revolutionaries to undertake the Easter rebellion, men who were subsequently shot by the British. Auden always insisted, fighting against Yeats's large and guilty claims for poetry, that poetry was just a game, accomplishing nothing in the realm of action. Yet Auden, before he died, edited his early work in a moral direction. Between Yeats and Auden, Yeats won.

This debate goes back to Athens and beyond. Plato thought that flute music was erotically exciting, detracting from reason. He banned flute players and poets from his imaginary Republic.

"I can't begin to understand the pain that the parents of these children felt," Bundy told the interviewer. "I don't ask them to forgive me. I'm not asking for it. That kind of forgiveness is of God." Few thugs and murderers are as articulate.

Obviously Ted Bundy deserved every one of the two thousand volts he received. But the thought lingers that it might have been worth while to keep him alive and study him. For it is possible that Ted Bundy could have lived a decent life in a society that did not set out to gratify his worst instincts. He and others paid a high price for the ACLU view of what liberty and the First Amendment require. If there are victimless crimes, selling pornographic magazines to Ted Bundy was not one of them.