Jim was one of Ted Bundy's lawyers, Fred was the minister who had spent the night with him. He turned down his last mean. Bundy was an American serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, burglar, and necrophile who assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. Shortly before his execution and after more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 homicides that he committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. The true victim count will forever be unknown and could be much higher than the number to which Bundy confessed.
Many of Bundy's young female victims regarded him as handsome and charismatic, which were traits that he exploited to win their trust. He would typically approach them in public places, feigning injury or disability, or impersonating an authority figure, before overpowering and assaulting them at more secluded locations. He sometimes revisited his secondary crime scenes for hours at a time, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses until putrefaction and destruction by wild animals made further interaction impossible. He decapitated at least 12 of his victims, and for a period of time, he kept some of the severed heads as mementos in his apartment. On a few occasions, he simply broke into dwellings at night and bludgeoned his victims as they slept. Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. Biographer Ann Rule described him as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after". He once called himself "the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet"; Attorney Polly Nelson-a member of his last defense team-wrote: "Ted was the very definition of heartless evil."