Looking at photos of Ted Bundy now, it’s hard to see what unsuspecting people saw in the 1970s.
Which, according to so many, was a handsome, charming man.
That’s been the forever-buzz on Bundy, the serial killer who was executed 37 years ago and, when his story is being told onscreen, has historically been played by really good-looking men, including Mark Harmon, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, James Marsters, Adam Long, Zac Efron and Chad Michael Murray—all ways of illustrating how he was a guy who had no problem getting women to let their guard down around him thanks to his appearance.
“Bundy represents for us our most primal, deepest, darkest fear, which is that you don’t know the person next to you,” Joe Berlinger, director of the aptly titled Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring Efron, and executive producer of Netflix’s Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, told E! News in 2019.
“We want to think that serial killers are easily identifiable, that once you see them you know, ‘OK, that guy must be a serial killer,'” Berlinger continued. But “people really liked him.”
And they liked him until the day he died in the electric chair at Raiford Prison when he was 42 years old after confessing to the murders of 30 women.
