'Falling For A Killer' Director Trish Wood Wants You To Stop Trying To Psychoanalyze Ted Bundy
by Lindsay GellerIf Falling For A Killer director/producer Trish Wood were the type of person to decorate her car with call-to-action bumper stickers, one would probably say something like, "Honk if you wanna stop psychoanalyzing Ted Bundy ."
Instead, the 63-year-old created a five-part Amazon Prime documentary series that looked at the infamous serial killer through the lens of Bundy's female victims, survivors, and even former lovers set against the backdrop of clashing gender norms during the misogynistic culture in 1970s America.
"The idea that we could kind of step back to include what was happening in the culture at the time these murders were taking place... and to not want to tell the Ted Bundy story, but rather the story of the women was really important," Wood tells Women's Health. "We weren't entertaining the idea about why he [Bundy] did it or why he didn't do it. That doesn't get us anywhere anymore."
What is newand long overdueis hearing the same old story about one man and more than 30 women primarily through the voices of women. And not just any women. Wood interviewed survivors Karen Sparks (believed to be Ted Bundy's first victim ) and Carol DaRonch, the family and friends of other victims, and perhaps most notably, Elizabeth Kendall, Bundy's longtime girlfriend , and her daughter, Molly.
He hated women and he\'s a misogynist and that\'s why he killed them.
Though Liz and Molly do reflect on their once loving relationship with Bundyso different, at least in the beginning, than his short interactions with the countless other women he murderedthe docuseries is not an attempt to understand or explain away Bundy's mental health or sense of morality.
"I think one of the most interesting things the series does is it reduces [Bundy's] motivation to the simplicity of the fact that he hated women," Wood says. "I don't think we need to medicalize his problem. I think we should just say he hated women and he's a misogynist and that's why he killed them. It's pretty simple."
Whether or not you agree with Wood's take, she makes a strong case that Ted Bundy was a product of his timea time when violence against women was not only still accepted, but even considered funny. The true crime docuseries juxtaposes the Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s into the 1970s and beyond against classic television shows like The Honeymooners that played domestic violence for a laugh ("Pow, Alice! To the moon!") and advertisements encouraging men to "Beat your wife tonight"in bowling, but still.
"It was absolutely unsettling," Wood says of watching American culture unfold in her docuseries. "The other thing that's sort of shocking about the times in which this began meaning [Bundy's] rampagewas it was still, for instance, legal to rape your wife. And you couldn't get a credit card without your husband's signature... If you look at the crimes through that context, it changes the way you view it, right?"
But hindsight wasn't a luxury Liz Kendall had when she started to grow suspicious about her boyfriend, even when he disappeared for days at a time.
"She would have these moments of clarity where her gut instinct would say, 'You've got a problem,'" Wood explains.
But when Kendall went to the police, they first told her that they'd already ruled Bundy out and, later, authorities said they just weren't able to get people to identify him. "Also, she was surrounded by people who didn't think it could be him. So, when you look at it that way, she isn't just a woman who made a big mistake," Wood continues. "She was a woman who was surrounded by people who supported her romantic worldview that Ted couldn't be a killer, even though her gut instinct was telling her that maybe he was."
"What a state of cognitive dissonance she was in," Wood adds. "It nearly drove her mad, I believe. And she says that."
Kendall, who has purposefully lived under the radar since publishing her memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy , was "tricky" to get on camera, says Wood. But she eventually agreed to be interviewed because she and the director "shared a bond of trust" due to their similar experiences as single parents trying to recover from alcoholism.
Kendall and Wood share striking similarities with another woman in Bundy's life: Carole Boone . She became romantically involved with Ted Bundy when he was on trial in Florida for murdering Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy in the Chi Omega sorority house and 12-year-old Kimberly Leach (his youngest victim). Boone a single mother, with a son, James, from a previous relationship, wound up marrying Bundy.
Unlike Kendall, however, she wholeheartedly believed in Bundy's innocence and, after giving birth to her and Bundy's daughter, Rosa, "there really was a dream that Ted would get out, they'd find him proven innocent, and they would move in together and raise the kids," says Wood.
Boone's family aspirations echoed those of Kendall, who wanted to marry Bundy and raise Molly together. Whether or not Bundy would have ever been capable of such a Brady Bunch life that normal is unclear, and, as Wood sees it, ultimately unimportant.
"I did wonder why [Bundy] didn't kill [Kendall] for a while, and I did wonder about if there was authentic romantic love because certainly the photographs portray that to me," she says, referencing the family photos Kendall shared with her. "They're incredible photographs. They really shook me up... Looking at them, portraying what seemed to be an authentic romantic relationship and family relationship, I was kind of gobsmacked by it."
Wood explains that the pictures initially caused her to wonder if Bundy really was capable of love. "But there was a point where I dropped that, and then that was reinforced for me when Molly and I were talking. [In the docuseries], she had this ultimate powerful woman moment where she said, 'I don't give a f*ck if he loved us or not.' And I thought, 'Okay, she's right,'" Wood recalls. "It was a big quest for me initially and then...the more I got into the damage he'd done and how he went on to damage more women later, I just thought that's not a question anybody can probably answer."
Instead, Wood hopes to provide some kind of solace to those searching for answers. Her documentary aims to shift the focus from Bundy to the women he harmed, yes, but also to the resilient women who have survived in the face of fear, danger, and grief. "It's time we stopped talking about him. I think everybody knows his name. Nobody knows who the women were," Wood says. "And I think that any future endeavors like this should focus more on the people who survived and who can talk about the culture in which it happened."
That sentiment won't exactly fit on a bumper sticker, but it sure as hell makes for a compellingand more importantly, enlighteningdocuseries.
Watch Falling For A Killer on Amazon Prime Video .