Ted Bundy

In January 1978 Bundy settled in Tallahassee, Florida, and began living his life as a fugitive under the alias Chris M. Hagen. By January 15, two women were dead and two more had been severely beaten in Tallahassee at Florida State University's Chi Omega sorority house, only a few blocks from Bundy's rooming house. On February 9 twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach was kidnapped from her Lake City, Florida, junior high school and brutally murdered.

Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy. In 1979 Ted Bundy was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair for the murders of these two women. (© Bettmann/Corbis)

Bundy was arrested in January as he drove a stolen vehicle towards Pensacola, Florida. By this time sufficient evidence and eyewitness accounts existed to indict Bundy for the Tallahassee and the Lake City killings. In June 1979 a sensational trial, the first on national television, took place in Miami, Florida. Bundy was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair for the sorority house murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy. In Orlando, Florida, the following year Bundy was handed his third death sentence, this time for the murder of twelve-year old Kimberly Leach.

Bundy spent the next nine years on death row in Florida, filing appeals and giving select interviews. He ultimately confessed to thirty murders but estimates put the count as high as one hundred. He was never tried for most of his crimes. Bundy made a last effort to trade information on an additional fifty murders of which he had knowledge in exchange for a stay (delay) of execution. His appeals exhausted, Bundy was electrocuted on January 24, 1989, at the Florida State Prison in Starke.