The HLN documentary, "How It Really Happened: Ted Bundy" began airing with Parts 1 and 2 being shown last night, October 7. I settled down to view the show with a great deal of interest. Before watching the Oxygen Channel documentary on Bundy (which impressed me as being quite shallow), I had never watched a video presentation, either documentary or movie, from beginning to end. I'd seen glances of some of the stuff as I walked through rooms where the videos were airing, but whenever I had control of the remote, I switched channels quickly. When I didn't have control of the remote, I left the room.
The Oxygen Channel documentary is a prime example of what I expected of Bundy documentaries and why I had never watched one. I forced myself to watch the Oxygen documentary because I knew the HLN documentary was in the pipeline and I wanted to have a benchmark to compare it with. The HLN documentary was far superior to the Oxygen documentary.
Hour 1 of the HLN documentary was educational. When I was working the Bundy case I purposely tried to remain as ignorant as possible of Bundy's western crimes because I didn't want my mind crowded with irrelevant facts which might skew my judgment. Because of my relative ignorance of the cases I learned all kinds of details which rekindled my intense dislike for Theodore Robert Bundy. The presentation was, I think, well-done. It handled the grisly details of those cases in as matter-of-fact a manner as was possible, with its focus on the trauma suffered by the victims and their families and not the "awesome marvelousness" of the "criminal mastermind," Ted Bundy.
Yeah, right, Bundy was such an evil genius that he went around introducing himself to potential victims using his real name. That was a brilliant tactic for directing suspicion away from himself. And his two escapes in Colorado were truly the work of a genius. Escape #1: He jumped out of a second story window which had been left open while the people who were supposed to be guarding him were in another room counting their change. Escape #2: His jail cell had a hole in the ceiling which was big enough for him to crawl through. While he was banging around in the crawlspace in the ceiling, his guards were ignoring alerts from other inmates that Bundy was trying to escape.
The second hour was an account of Bundy's activities in Florida up to and including his arrest in Pensacola, Florida. I can speak to the accuracy of their narrative because they were talking about events which were a large part of my life for a number of years. The only error I found was a rather minor one. They said Bundy's identity remained a mystery until the Pensacola authorities sent his prints to the FBI. The FBI verified his identity through fingerprints, but Bundy had already 'fessed up and told the detectives who he was before the prints were sent off. In that day and age, before automation, it was well-nigh impossible to send off unknown prints to the FBI and have the FBI identify your suspect for you.
All-in-all, I was well-satisfied with the production. I rate it the best true crime documentary on any crime that I have ever seen from beginning to end. I am certainly going to watch the next two hours of the documentary, and I expect it to have the high quality displayed by the first two hours. I may even become a regular viewer of "How It Really Happened."
ENDNOTE: As I watched the program, it occurred to me that if I accomplished nothing else in my career as a prosecutor, I had done much good by helping to rid the world of Ted Bundy.
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