Part
2: A Troubling Focus
The notoriety these true crime films
continue to provide is troubling. For example, since the 1970s anyone on the
street can tell you who Bundy was. But if you ask this same person to name one
of Bundy’s victims, you’d likely get a blank stare.
Lynda Ann Healy was just
21, had been a good student at the UW and was on the verge of graduating in
1974 when she disappeared, leaving behind only a bloodstained mattress. Healy
worked part time for Western Ski Promotions and did daily radio broadcasts of conditions
in the mountain passes. My mother and grandparents used to listen to her reports.
Georgann Hawkins was just 18 years old when she disappeared only steps from her sorority house at the UW in 1974. Hawkins’ family was from my hometown of Lakewood and she went to Lakes High School, the same high school I later attended. From all accounts she had a bright future ahead of her. Then she vanished into thin air in an incident that would become one of the most haunting aspects of the Bundy case. Just before his execution in 1989, Bundy would finally confess to Hawkins’ murder and detail how he had done it. While Bundy did provide details on where he had dumped the body, Hawkins’ remains were never recovered.
Another victim, Susan Rancourt, had a 4.0 GPA at Central Washington University. She disappeared after attending a meeting at CWU. Soon after, other students came forward, saying that a handsome man with his arm in a sling had been walking around campus. After Rancourt disappeared, the campus went on high alert. Women no longer walked the area at night and people in this tiny farming town began locking their doors.
Recently, I gave a speech about Robert Hayward, the Utah State Patrolman who arrested Ted Bundy in 1975. Afterward, a woman who heard my speech came up to me and said that she had been hitchhiking in Washington when she was a young woman and had been picked up by man in a VW bug. When she told him where to drop her off, he drove by it without a word and at the next stop began getting physical with her. She pulled off one of her high heeled shoes, struck him in the groin, then jumped out and ran from the car. Much later, when she saw his face on television news reports of his crimes, she realized the man had been Ted Bundy.
If we are to take away any lessons from infamous murders they should be lessons similar to those we glean from a natural disaster. After every major hurricane, blizzard or earthquake, at some point there is a meeting where people sit down as say, “What can we do better next time?” and, “How can we lesson the damage in the future?” Law enforcement can always learn something about better information sharing and more patrols to certain high-risk areas, but much like the best-intentioned city and state planners who see yet another storm about to make landfall, they can only learn from hindsight, and can never predict something they’ve yet to experience.
Perhaps the best solution in this media driven age is to not remember the killer at all. Why should a school shooter’s face be plastered on TV for hundreds of hours? Why should someone be able to immediately name Bundy, Ridgway and Dahmer, but not the name of one of their victims? Aside from honoring the killer and hurting the victims’ families, the families of the killers are constantly reminded of what their relative did. Ted Bundy’s daughter and Gary Ridgway’s son will have to live with the fact that their fathers did something that was unforgivable and forever cast a pall over their names. Hollywood writers and directors and news outlets need to seriously consider what they are trying to accomplish when they make a criminal famous. I would never call for government censorship of the media, but people within in the industry need to independently decide not to show a killer’s face or say his name after his arrest and conviction. Let them die in obscurity and be forgotten.
If museums would like to have things like Bundy’s car. Rather than mention him, they should talk about Robert Hayward instead and how a wrong turn and a hunch led to his capture. The faces and names of the victims who met their end via that car also need to be part of the display. The lessons that the exhibitors want visitors to take away should also be carefully structured and presented.
Being riveted with the macabre
is nothing new, but American media and museums need to present criminal stories
with a sensitivity that does not glorify the killer or enhance their legacy. In
an age when audiences seem to have become desensitized to everything, it is
important to not blur the line between harmless fantasy and heinous acts that
had very real, tragic consequences. I wish more people knew about Lynda Ann
Healy, Georgann Hawkins and Robert Hayward and less people knew about Bundy.
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