ABSOLUTELY CHILLING TRUTH! Was This THE FORGOTTEN CHILDHOOD SECRET That Transformed Ted Bundy Into America’s Most Ruthless Serial Killer?

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.

“We have a tendency, that is exacerbated by the justice system, of thinking about people as inhabiting different categories—as if you go shopping for people in different aisles of a supermarket,” said Gibney. “You know, the good people are in aisle 10, and the bad people are in aisle seven, and the weak people are in aisle six. That is very often what the justice system tries to do.”

As a result, “most of us think we don’t have anything in common with serial killers,” he continued. Lewis, of course, thinks differently. The movie opens with her asking a provocative question: “Have you ever wondered why you don’t 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁?”

Her approach has been considerably less popular inside the prison system, according to Lewis.

“The guards and the prison, they don’t like psychiatrists,” said Lewis. “They feel psychiatrists are just there to get these evil people off for murders, to give them an excuse.” (Lewis herself doesn’t use the word “evil” when describing her subjects.)

Though she has empathy for Bundy, she also had a reasonable amount of fear when meeting him face-to-face. She recalled one meeting in the late ’80s, when she was sitting alone with Bundy in a locked room.

A guard initially kept watch from behind a glass wall, “so I felt perfectly safe,” said Lewis. “After a few hours I started to get really hungry. So I looked up to kind of motion to the guard that I had to go and find a candy bar or something to keep going. And to my astonishment, there was no guard…. Not a soul was there.

“Let me tell you, I was the most understanding psychiatrist you had ever met at that point,” laughed Lewis. “I think I was set up.” She has a theory about why the guard vanished. “If something happened to me—let’s say Mr. Bundy lost it and strangled me—my guess is that there would be no more contact interviews for years to come. But he held it together, and I held it together. So here I am to tell you about it.”

Said Gibney, “Guards would play tricks on her, partially by intent. They would leave the room, or leave the surrounding area, as if to prove a point to her. It’s like, Oh, you’re so sweet on these serial killers. So we’re going to see how you feel when we leave you alone with them. See how sweet you are on them then.”

Lewis said that she has grown more fearful of her meetings with murderers over the years.

“When I was younger, and when I was less experienced, I had more faith in my own ability to keep somebody calm, and not homicidal,” said Lewis. “But as I began to see very violent people who did dissociate, I realized they could turn on a dime.”

In the decades since Bundy’s execution, Lewis has come across stunning evidence suggesting the the serial killer also suffered from dissociative identity disorder.

“Years later, after he was executed, I got a call from his wife, Carole Boone,” said Lewis. “I had never spoken with her before, and she said she wanted to give me a pile of the love letters that he had written to her during his incarceration in Florida.”

When Lewis received the letters, she was struck by what she saw—not in the content, but in the signatures. “He had different signatures, and he had different names that he used at different times.”

Lewis went back and pored over all the Bundy documentation she could get her hands on, using a new lens.

“Others who had seen him had said that they thought that he dissociated, that he spoke with some being in his head called the entity. I started to give more credence to that,” said Lewis. “I had read some of the books about him, and looking at them and then at the switches that he made in his letters, in his signatures, in his name, and in his behavior, it became clear that he also dissociated.”

She also reached out to Bundy’s surviving family members.

“We tried to interview as many relatives of his as we could, because he had no memory of his childhood, and when he did try to talk about it, he would use these kind of euphoric terms—that it was just an ideal childhood,” said Lewis. “What we learned over time by talking with his aunts, his mother, and others was that, actually, the first three years of [his] life, he and his mother had lived with her father, his grandfather, and that he was an extraordinarily violent person, and also a very psychiatrically disturbed man. Bundy had no recollection of this—till the day he died, he did not remember that.”

Lewis noticed another eerie coincidence—Bundy’s grandfather’s name had been Sam. And some of the love letters that Bundy wrote his wife were signed Sam. Said Lewis, “It is not unusual for a child who has been horribly abused throughout childhood to at times take on the persona of the abuser and do to others what the abuser did to him. And I wish that I had known that before he died.”

Lewis said that Bundy asked her on multiple occasions to write a book about him. She doesn’t believe that his request was a vain one. “I don’t think that he wanted me to write a book about him to make him more infamous than he already was,” said Lewis. Instead she thinks he wanted her to help people understand what makes a murderer. “Now I understand so much more about him and I have so much more data…It’s a debt I would like to pay.”

But more than writing the book, Lewis wishes she could tell Bundy her new diagnosis face-to-face.

“I feel bad that I did not at that time realize that he dissociated the way he did. It was not until I got these letters that were kind of proof that he did have this condition,” Lewis said regretfully. “If he were alive now, I would be talking with him about what his mother and what his aunts told me about his upbringing. I would have gone over the letters with him.”