Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer is a true crime documentary mini-series directed by filmmaker, Trish Wood (I Didn’t Do It). The pitch from IMDb states, “After nearly 40 years of silence, Elizabeth Kendall and her daughter Molly share their experiences with unsettling new details about Ted Bundy”.
This docu-series does exactly what it sets out to do. It tells the story from the perspective we’ve never heard, straight from the victims’ mouths. It is incredibly powerful to hear Elizabeth and Molly speak. There have been many times where a spouse or child is sympathetic to the killer, but while Elizabeth and Molly express sadness in losing this valuable person, they are in no way blinded by him or consider him a victim.
As someone fascinated by true crime (as many of us are given the amount of tv series, docu-series, podcasts, etc on the subject), Ted Bundy is a person I’ve heard about quite a lot. The thing is, as this series makes clear, most of what we’ve been told about Bundy and his crimes came from men who were involved with him (lawyers, officers, psychologists) or those who have studied him. This is the first time I can recall ever hearing about his crimes directly from the women who were there. It is especially rare and heartbreaking to hear from Elizabeth and Molly, who had to face the reality that this person they loved so dearly, who took care of them and provided for them, was a monster.
It’s not just Elizabeth and her daughter Molly who come to speak, though. There are a number of other almost victims, survivors, police women, and psychologists who discuss not only Ted Bundy, but what was going on in the world during that time in order to answer the biggest questions revolving around Bundy: Why did this happen? How did this happen?
It’s pretty well known that Bundy had more “traditional” views of women’s domestic life and, as is evident in his horrible crimes, sought to dehumanize intelligent, ambitious women. With that in mind, it isn’t exactly a surprise that a good chunk of this series is dedicated to the Women’s Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s and how many men were opposed to women marching towards positions of power and changing social norms, since Bundy was one of those men.
Overall, Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, is a well-done series that manages to tell a known story in an unknown way. The bits from Ted Bundy’s younger brother, sprinkled throughout, are also emotional and provide an insight we didn’t previously have. Even if you’ve watched every other Ted Bundy series out there and think you know all there is to know, you don’t. And you won’t, until you actually hear the stories from the actual survivors.
