Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,
the new Netflix movie about serial killer Ted Bundy, is pretty upsetting. It explores how Bundy fooled many of the people
around him with his charm and good looks, until all of his evildoing caught up with
him. But here are some things the Ted Bundy movie
gets wrong. A lot of what you see in Extremely Wicked,
Shockingly Evil and Vile is a condensed version of real-life events. The fictionalized version of Bundy's capture
and trial isn't all that far off from the truth — which makes sense, considering director
Joe Berlinger was already extremely familiar with all the gory details. It's actually his second Ted Bundy film: He
also directed Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, a Netflix documentary
based on actual recordings of Bundy's confessions. "Creating an identity is... is not terribly
difficult to do at all." Since life doesn't move along at a brisk and
tidy pace, any film based on a true story inevitably combines, embellishes, or pares
down real events. For example: In Extremely Wicked, Bundy is
arrested for the first time after a bag of suspicious evidence is found in the backseat
of his car. His arrest is immediately followed by an interrogation,
and then a scene in which Carol DaRonch picks him out of a police lineup. It feels like the whole process lasts for
only a few days. But in actuality, charging Bundy was a much
longer process. He was indeed pulled over in August 1975 when
officers found handcuffs and other suspicious objects in his car. But they actually let him go because they
didn't have enough evidence to hold him. It wasn't until Bundy sold his car the following
month that police got what they needed to charge him with a crime. Authorities seized the car from the buyer
and found strands of hair that linked him to some of the missing women they were investigating. DaRonch didn't actually pick him out of a
lineup until October 1975. "When Ted was brought in for a lineup, he
had changed his appearance completely from a few days before." In Extremely Wicked, there's an initial trial
for the aggravated kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, followed by an epic trial for the Florida
State University murders and attacks. That trial takes place in Miami, and it ends
with a conviction and a death sentence. But the real Bundy actually was put on trial
three times, not just two. Following a 1979 trial for the Florida State
University murders and attacks, a separate trial in 1980 revolved around the murder of
12-year-old Kimberly Leach, who was reportedly strangled a month after Bundy's murderous
crime spree at Florida State University. During the third trial, Bundy pleaded not
guilty by reason of insanity, but it didn't help. The jury returned a guilty verdict, and he
received a second death sentence. It's clear why Extremely Wicked omitted that
third trial: It would've felt redundant. But plenty of material from the final trial
makes for fascinating viewing, and the filmmakers folded its major events into the trial we
saw. That outlandish marriage proposal to a witness
in open court? It actually happened at the Leach trial in
Orlando, not in Miami. And yes, that act made the wedding legal. "Will you marry me?" "Your honor..." "Yes!" Ted Bundy and the woman he eventually married,
Carole Ann Boone, obviously had plenty of conversations that nobody ever actually heard,
so any dialogue between them in Extremely Wicked is highly fictionalized, if not completely
made up. The timing of Boone's pregnancy in the film
doesn't quite align with the facts, either. Boone became pregnant during conjugal visits
she made after he was convicted, not before. Boone divorced Bundy in 1986 and moved back
to Washington with the couple's daughter and a son from a previous marriage. Some of Boone's acquaintances have said she
felt betrayed by Bundy's eventual confessions. According to People, Boone stopped visiting
Bundy during the last two years of his life. That's an understandable move, since it wasn't
just about her anymore by that point, she also had a young daughter to protect. One scene near the end of the film is completely
made up. When Elizabeth Kloepfer visits Bundy prior
to his execution, she shows him a photograph of the decapitated corpse of one of his victims. "What happened to her head?" Bundy tries selling her on some lame excuse,
but she's not having it. So then he quite literally spells it out for
her and for us writing "HACKSAW" in the foggy glass that separates them. It's a shocking, emotional moment. But it didn't really happen. According to Cosmopolitan, there's no evidence
that Kloepfer ever visited Bundy before his execution. Director Joe Berlinger even admits the scene
is a total fabrication. What really happened is rather anticlimactic
in comparison. Bundy's "confession" wasn't really a confession
at all, and he didn't make it in person. After his arrest in Florida, he reportedly
told Kloepfer over the telephone that he was driven by, quote, "a force." According to Vanity Fair, he told her: "I just couldn’t contain it. I’ve fought it for a long, long time. [...] It got too strong." Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
is a film that generally keeps the cliches to a minimum… but one scene stands out for
some alarmingly on-the-nose foreshadowing. Bundy and Kloepfer find themselves at a dog
adoption center… and you'll never guess what happens next. [Just a serial killer spookin a dog] This definitely didn't happen in real life. In an interview with Esquire, director Joe
Berlinger says he included the scene because, quote, "animals know." He added: "When the dog did not get along with Bundy,
that's a clue, but it's not like finding a knife. I did my own interpretation of having some
clues along the way." In the film, Elizabeth Kloepfer is comforted
by her coworker Jerry, portrayed by Haley Joel Osment. Jerry eventually becomes Liz's protector and
confidant, and he tries to help her see the truth about her monstrous ex-boyfriend. But according to Oxygen, Jerry isn't a real
person at best, he's a composite of several people she knew. It's likely that he's based on someone named
Hank, a man Kloepfer was romantically involved with for awhile. In her memoir, Kloepfer says she met Hank
at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, writing: "Although we didn't have a lot in common other
than our recovery from alcoholism, he made me feel safe. He began to stay with me even at night." Hank reportedly had a few altercations with
Bundy over the telephone, much like the one we see between Bundy and Jerry in the film: "Can you tell her that I love her?" Kloepfer's continued correspondence with Bundy
evidently became a point of contention between her and Hank, although no one really knows
how their relationship panned out. In one scene in Extremely Wicked, Bundy gives
Kloepfer a copy of Papillion, an autobiographical novel by Henri Charrière about a man who's
been falsely convicted of murder. Bundy is highly insistent that she read the
book. "It's about this guy who's wrongfully convicted
of a terrible, terrible crime and he gets sentenced to life, but he didn't do it." Eventually, Bundy manages to give her a copy
of the book as a gift, and at one point she's even seen reading it. According to Esquire, there's no mention of
Papillon in Kloepfer's memoir, and the storyline was likely invented to provide some more foreshadowing. John Malkovich plays Judge Edward D. Cowart,
a character who's a little bit over-the-top: He calls Bundy nicknames, compliments his
attire, and tells him he's good at lawyering. It turns out the real-life Cowart actually
was a little bit over-the-top, too. According to USA Today, a lot of Malkovich's
dialogue actually comes directly from court records, including the odd praise he lavished
upon Bundy toward the end of the trial: "You'd have made a good lawyer and I would
have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went a different way, partner." The film's name also comes from something
Cowart said during Bundy's second trial, when he characterized Bundy's crimes as: "...extremely wicked, shockingly evil, vile
and the product of a design to inflict a high degree of pain." But not everything Malkovich says comes directly
from court documents. He reportedly improvised a line or two. For example, at one point, he admonishes court
spectators after they cheer for Ted Bundy: "You are not waiting for the 'Flipper and
Friends' show at SeaWorld. It is a capital murder case." Well, at least it sounds like something Cowart
might have said, so at least Malkovich knew the character he was playing. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
skims past a lot of Ted Bundy and Elizabeth Kloepfer's life together. Based on the film, their relationship looks
like rather smooth sailing: Birthday parties, snowball fights, bike-riding lessons with
Kloepfer's daughter… the stuff movie montages are made of. "How the heck did you get so smart?" "I get it from my mom." "You do, don't you?" What we don't see is the bad stuff, and there
was reportedly plenty of it. According to Newsweek, Bundy was verbally
and emotionally abusive. Kloepfer's out-of-print 1981 memoir The Phantom
Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, written under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall, paints a
far bleaker picture of their relationship. Kloepfer says he'd sometimes lock her out
of the house, and he once threatened to break her neck after she confronted him about some
items that he'd stolen. He reportedly physically abused her once,
too. She writes: "I was drunk. I couldn't remember what we were arguing about
but I kept telling Ted to 'go ahead and hit me. Go ahead!' Finally he slapped me." However, she also denied that he was a violent
person: "When we argued he was always calm and reasonable. […] I could count on the fingers of one
hand the times that Ted had lost his temper since I'd known him." But Bundy reportedly did try to kill Kloepfer
once, and he even admitted it to her after he was arrested. According to E! News, Bundy left her sleeping
on a hide-a-bed in front of the fireplace one night after she'd been drinking. Before slipping out, he closed the damper
and put a towel under the crack in the door. Kloepfer could've died from smoke inhalation,
but she woke up coughing and managed to clear the smoke and put out the fire. In Extremely Wicked, Elizabeth Kloepfer tells
Bundy that she's the one who called the police and reported him, because of his physical
resemblance to a police sketch, and the fact that he drove a Volkswagen; the same kind
of car the suspect drove, according to eyewitnesses. "I'm the one who gave your name to the police." In reality, Kloepfer had much more than that
to go on. According to Esquire, Kloepfer found a number
of items that potentially linked him to the recent murders and disappearances in Seattle. For example, she found plaster of Paris in
one of Bundy's desk drawers. In her 1981 memoir, Kloepfer wrote: "Now I keep thinking about the cast the guy
at Lake Sammamish was wearing—what a perfect weapon it would make for clubbing someone
on the head." She also reportedly discovered a hatchet tucked
away inside his car. In The Ted Bundy Tapes, Kloepfer claimed she'd
found a few pairs of women's underwear and a bowl full of other people's keys inside
Bundy's apartment. In Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, Kloepfer
also claimed Bundy kept a knife in the glove box of her car, revealing: "Sometimes it was there; sometimes it was
gone." According to PopSugar, actor Zac Efron wore
fake teeth in order to play Ted Bundy, with director Joe Berlinger telling the website: "The only thing we did is we put in false
lower teeth to match Bundy's because bite mark evidence plays a role in how he was ultimately
convicted." However, modern forensic science has more-or-less
rejected bite mark evidence. In fact, a forensic scientist told Oxygen: "To say that Ted Bundy is the source of this
bite mark based only on a comparison of his teeth to the impression is a scientifically
impossible statement to make." At any rate, Extremely Wicked gets that part
of the story correct: The jury was very much swayed by the bite mark evidence. What the film gets wrong is the scene in which
Bundy cross-examines Richard Souviron, the forensic odontologist who provided the bite
mark testimony. It was actually Bundy's defense attorney Ed
Harvey who tried to discredit Souviron, asking: "Analyzing bite marks is part art and part
science, isn't it?" Souviron reportedly replied, quote, "I think
that's a fair statement." That "junk science" may have been instrumental
in convicting one of the world's most notorious serial killers, but it doesn't make it any
less of a discredited practice today. Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite
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