Is This Why Ted Bundy Became a Murderer?

In 1989, Ted Bundy summoned Dr. Dorothy Lewis to Florida State Prison for a visit. Sitting face-to-face with a serial killer was nothing new for her: Lewis had spent her career as a clinical psychiatrist talking to murderers in maximum security prisons and in death row halls, trying to understand what made them kill. But the timing of this particular conversation—the day before his execution—was creepy, even to her.

“It made me queasy,” Lewis remembered in an interview with Vanity Fair. “While we were in the room talking, with his attorney Polly Nelson, the secretary to the warden came in to ask Ted who he wanted to see the night before he was executed and what he wanted for dinner…. It was really grim.”

By that point Lewis had already met with Bundy several times. The murderer’s defense team had called her in three years earlier to evaluate him. She and her team of experts determined that Bundy was not psychotic, as he had been diagnosed by other psychiatrists; instead, based on his significant mood swings, they believed he suffered from bipolar disorder.

Bundy had hoped that in this final meeting, Lewis might be willing to offer him a Hail Mary from the electric chair—and argue that he was incompetent to be executed. Lewis refused, saying that doing so would invalidate her life’s work. Bundy understood, and sat with her for over four hours anyway—answering her questions about his upbringing.

“I was not fascinated in his perversions,” Lewis says in Crazy, Not Insane, Alex Gibney’s compelling new HBO documentary—which follows the psychiatrist as she looks back on her meetings with Bundy. “I was far more interested in how he got the way he was.”

The serial killer ended up sharing a few never-before-known details about his childhood.

Why was Bundy so candid with her? “Lots of people wanted to see him, talk with him, write books about him, and make money off him,” Lewis said. “I think that I was the only one who was not out to write a book about him or anything. [My initial evaluation] was a favor that we were doing for his lawyers. And I think that he trusted me a lot more because I was not making a living on him.”

Through her research, Lewis and her longtime collaborator Dr. Jonathan Pincus had come to identify three common factors in murderers: abnormal brain function (especially in the lobes that govern emotional regulation and impulse control), predisposition to mental illness, and a history of horrific childhood abuse. Bundy did not fit her template at the time; he maintained that his childhood had been idyllic.

Still, she did what she could to help Bundy understand why he became the person he was—the best closure she could provide the day before his death.

“I was able to talk with him about urges in the deepest part of his brain and about the way the frontal lobes are supposed to rein in these kinds of impulses—and that, for some reason, his brain was not doing that,” said Lewis. “I drew pictures of the brain, and the frontal lobes, and the limbic system, and tried very hard to give him some insight into his loss of control.”

In the 31 years since Bundy’s execution, Lewis has uncovered evidence that the serial killer actually suffered significant childhood trauma, and has rediagnosed him—a journey documented in Crazy, Not Insane. In the film, now available, Lewis carefully takes viewers through her captivating findings—making the ultimate argument that serial killers are more useful to society alive and behind bars than dead. If only Lewis had been able to share her more accurate diagnosis with Bundy himself. “I wish I had known that before he died, but I didn’t,” said Lewis regretfully. “I goofed.”

Lewis has been described as the real-life version of Clarice Starling, the insightful FBI agent-in-training and serial-killer tracker played by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs. The comparison is apt—when Lewis saw the film, she noticed such a similarity that she suspected the actor might have researched her. “I thought it was wonderful. But it felt to me as though she were copying me,” said Lewis, noting that by the time the film premiered in 1991, “I had been doing this for years.”

Her decades of research have led her to believe that people are not born murderers, but are made to murder by a cocktail of traits. In speaking to Arthur Shawcross—the serial killer dubbed the Genesee River Killer, who did unspeakable things to sex workers in the Rochester area in the late ’80s—Lewis determined that he suffered horrific sexual abuse by family members. (She also found out that he had a cyst pressing on his temporal lobe, as well as scarring on his frontal lobes—possibly caused by abuse.)

Children who undergo such traumatic abuse often dissociate as a survival mechanism—sometimes triggering dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder). In 1990, after witnessing Shawcross dissociate during her interviews, Lewis testified on behalf of the defense that Shawcross suffered from the condition. Her testimony and controversial diagnosis were criticized and dismissed; today, though, dissociative identity disorder is an accepted condition listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Lewis approaches each interview with empathy, even when speaking with society’s most dangerous people—as if she could have ended up on the opposite side of the conversation had she experienced a different upbringing. This understanding is what compelled Gibney to make a film about her.

“Very often people are obsessed with killers and serial killers, and I think they’re obsessed with them in part because they feel that they’re so different,” explained Gibney. “What was interesting about where Dorothy took us was that she took us to a place where by studying their behavior and also what formed them as adults, it took us back to their childhoods. And in childhood we see a kind of broad commonality.