Editor's Letter

American Gothic

The compound horror of the Ted Bundy story was that a serial killer had seemed to be so charming and normal—and that, according to newspaper reports and to his mother, he had had an unexceptional childhood. The public searched in vain for clues to the causes of violence, for the seeds of madness, for the symptoms of abnormality that would make the case less unsettlingly incomprehensible. Television coverage following Bundy's execution in Florida, after ten years on death row, tended to exploit the private grief of the victims' mothers instead of exploring the why of the tragedies. "Tell me what, in your mind, were Denise's last moments like?'' was one inanely cruel line of questioning.

The significance of the report by Myra MacPherson on page 140 is not just that she breaks news, but that she makes a contribution to the debate on the pathology of the serial killer. MacPherson, a veteran Washington Post reporter who covered the gruesome Chi Omega murders and Bundy's execution for the Post, is the first writer to penetrate fully the Bundy-family facade. In doing so she throws new light on the psychological mystery. She talked extensively with Bundy's mother, his aunt, and his investigators— and she had the cooperation of a key figure who had kept silent until now: one of Bundy's last confessors, the New York psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis. At the end of her inquiries, MacPherson is able to demonstrate that Ted Bundy's apparently Norman Rockwell boyhood was in truth a chilling chapter of American gothic.

One must feel sympathy for the ordeal of the mother who has to live with the aberrant reality and the memory of the son she thought she bore, and with the warring emotions poignantly suggested in the remarkable portrait by Vanity Fair photographer Harry Benson on page 144. At the same time, it is unfortunate that there seem to be so many family clues still hidden. It is clear that Mrs. Bundy wants the book closed on Ted's childhood. Until there is full disclosure that can never happen.

Editor in chief