Ted Bundy Chi Omega Murders | Theories of Mania & Psychopathy

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel hello this is dr. grande today's question asks if I can review the Chi Omega murders that were committed by the serial killer Ted Bundy in 1978 now Ted Bundy of course was a real individual so it's important note from the beginning here that I'm not diagnosing him or anyone else rather just speculating what could have been going on in a case like this so we look at the Chi Omega murders and we see that there are quite a bit different than the other murderers that Ted Bundy committed and he committed a lot of murders of course that attracted a lot of attention in different places like Washington Utah and Colorado but the murders in Florida the Chi Omega sorority house specifically at Florida State University in Tallahassee really stand out quite a bit these murders seem to break in terms of his MO like he changes his style and there's some other factors here that speak to potential mental health issues and really give us more insight into what he was doing and maybe what he was thinking kind of toward the end of his time as a serial killer so I'll go through the timeline of the Chi Omega murders and then look at some of the behavioral and mental health issues that may have been at work specifically from what we see in this case now we look at Ted Bundy's MO we do see that he did spend time on college campuses so him kind of ending up at Florida State University in Tallahassee and being near the different sororities including Chi Omega that part wasn't really unusual but there were many unusual features in the Chi Omega murder case we see for one thing that not many people who were physically attacked by Ted Bundy actually survived we see that Carol the Raj survived of course by her escaping this resulted in charges for Ted Bundy and he was convicted of kidnapping her and we see that Kathy kleiner and Karen Chandler survived they were in the Chi Omega house and they were assaulted as part of Ted Bundy's crime and Sheryl Thomas who lived a few blocks way she survived as well so three people had a four that were physically attacked by Ted Bundy were tied in here in Florida two specifically at Chi Omega now we see that there are other people that claim that Ted Bundy attacked them and really we don't see any additional evidence other than them saying they were attacked so many are skeptical about their claims I don't know I've looked at their claims but it's really impossible to tell they could have been victims of Ted Bundy and escaped and then not talked about for many years and talked about later but I just don't know I think certainly it's possible and it's also possible that crimes were attributed to Ted Bundy that he didn't commit so there's a lot of unknowns when it comes to Ted Bundy's behavior we believe he murdered somewhere around 30 or 35 women but some estimates are as high as a hundred so there's a lot of gray area when looking at his criminal history so taking a look specifically at the timeline for the Chi Omega murders again as I mentioned Ted Bundy was active in Washington Utah and Colorado he escaped custody in Aspen Colorado and was apprehended and then later escaped custody again from a jail and Glenwood Springs Colorado so he escaped custody from a courthouse initially then in jail and this escape took place on December 30th 1977 Ted Bundy was 32 years old now eight days later he was taking a room at a boarding house that was just five blocks away from the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee so he escaped from Colorado with really just clothes they took from the jail and maybe some money or other items it's unknown and he made his way to the Midwest and all the way to Florida and rented a room in a boarding house all this in eight days now a lot of the time when we talk about the Chi Omega murders we hear different stories about the murders this story kind of starts with Ted Bundy approaching the Chi Omega sorority house but really the story starts a little bit before that so the murders took place on January 15 1978 on January 14th late we see that Ted Bundy was at a club named Sherrod's at that time it was called Sherrod's and it was right next to the Chi Omega sorority house and at that club a few events happen which I think are pretty interesting and speak to the mental health and behavioral aspects of this crime and maybe to what Ted Bundy was thinking at the time so again he was at this club and at this club several of the Chi Omega sorority sisters hung out and some work there and we know two of the victims that he would murder that night Margaret Bowman and Lisa levy were there at that club earlier they were there at the time potentially when Ted Bundy was there now it's really not known if Ted Bundy encountered them but they were there that night and again he was there so it's possible now we do know that several other of the sorority sisters word that Club and they do remember Ted Bundy one of them worked there and remembers serving Ted Bundy at the bar that night and we also see that a few others remember him and he kind of stood out because they considered him much older again he was 32 and most of them were in their early 20s now it's interesting because a few reported that he was scanning the club and looking at all the women and that made them feel uncomfortable so he was like staring at them and also one of the sorority sisters he asked her to dance but she was holding a drink and he took it from her and put it down and she remembers remarking to friends saying look at this guy I'm getting ready to dance with he looks like an ex-con so that's interesting because he had been convicted of kidnapping and he was a fugitive from justice so these abilities for these women to see Ted Bundy and recognize that something was off we're really there they were intact something was different the way he was staring and what he was looking the way he was behaving the fact that his age difference was there but it was around a 10 year age difference so I'm not sure how unusual that was but they reported was unusual but either way he stood out and he stood out as somebody who was potentially dangerous one last encounter at that club before the Chi Omega murders that I think was somewhat interesting the police interviewed a woman who reported that there was a man outside the club and the man asked her if she was a member of the Chi Omega sorority as she was not and he was by saying you're lucky seems unusual and the police did believe that this was Ted Bundy it kind of makes sense that it would be again a strange thing to say concerning the Ted Bundy would commit these murders just a few hours later so now we move to January 15th and the time isn't really clear perfectly but we think it was around 2:45 a.m. if you look at most of the sources that's about the time that Ted Bundy made his way to the Chi Omega sorority house now we see that when he arrived at the house he went out to the back and he picked up a log some have referred to it as a tree branch but either way it was a piece of wood and he noticed that the combination lock on the door was broken so he made entry into the sorority house fairly easily he walked to the second floor hallway and he made his way into the first room he would enter that night and this was occupied by a woman named Margaret moment she was sleeping Ted Bundy hit her with the log and then strangled her with a pair of pantyhose he then crossed to the other side of the hallway to the room of Lisa levy and he attacked her again hit her in the head strangled her and sexually assaulted her now after this he crossed the hall again and went into a room that was occupied by two people Kathy kleiner and Karen Chandler this was around 15 minutes later from when he entered initially upon entering the room he tripped over a trunk that they kept between the beds but then he regained his balance and he struck kleiner and Chandler several times with the log but before he was able to murder them or do anything else the room filled with light now we hear different accounts as to what caused this we see that there was a another sorority sister returning with her boyfriend and it might have been the car headlights that filled the room with light and there's another report that somebody was using the bathroom down the hall and trends a light on so whatever happened to caused the room to light up it did light up and Ted Bundy began to flee as Ted Bundy was exiting the Chi Omega sorority house the woman who had returned with her boyfriend again around 3 o'clock saw him he was wearing pantyhose over his head but she got a look at his profile and she was actually the only eyewitness that would to fight at the trial so he left the Chi Omega sorority house and he continued looking for victims he went four blocks to the west and went to the South and found an apartment occupied by a 21 year old student named Sherrill Thomas he climbed through the window and attacked her head with a log broke her jaw and caused other nerve damage she survived though because her neighbor's grew concerned they heard the noise and they approached and they were knocking and calling on the phone so Ted Bundy fled and he left the pantyhose mask and the log behind so just in that one morning just in the time of about an hour maybe even less than that Ted Bundy murdered two women and attempted to murder three others now there was one more victim in this case that we know about that I want to mention because it really relates to the PTSD potentially the PTSD type effect of this and the mental health effects in general this there was another sorority sister named Valerie Duke who was not attacked but she was in the room right across from Lisa Levy's and during the attack she didn't hear anything happened but of course after the attack took place she saw the victims and it was a traumatic experience she dropped out of school on the first anniversary of the attack and four months later she died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound so this would have been before Ted Bundy's trial now there's no way to know what happened with Valerie Duke it could have been seeing the aftermath of this destruction of these attacks survivor's guilt wondering why she didn't hear the attacks which I think happened to a number of the sorority sisters the walls were thin but Ted Bundy managed to stay very quiet during the attacks so a lot of factors could have been a play there but either way it's another tragedy and it was directly caused by Ted Bundy so after Ted Bundy escaped from the Chi Omega murder scene he went on to kill a 12-year old named Kimberly leach who lived in Lake City Florida this happened on February 9th 1978 he was arrested on February 15 1978 who's pulled over in a traffic stop and the police officer had to wrestle him and take him into custody by force this was in ciccolo which was around 200 miles away he was driving a stolen car at that time now moving forward to July of 1979 we see the Ted Bundy was convicted for killing Lisa Levy and marver Bowman and assaulting the other three women that night while in February 7th he was convicted of killing Kimberly leach and of course he received a death sentence as a result of both of those series of convictions so now moving to kind of the mental health and behavioral components we see kind of the facts of the case the timeline what happened right before the murders during the murders and what happened afterward well I think the first significant mental health issue to bring up potential issue would be post-traumatic stress disorder we see that there were a number of women in the sorority house that night in the Chi Omega house and there were many consequences for them not just the victims directly the ones that Ted Bundy assaulted but the ones that were there had to see the aftermath of that assault again a lot of consequences a lot of loss terrible memories the loss of safety survivor's remorse and we see their stories I found many of their stories on the internet and they're really just heart-wrenching so Ted Bundy's actions caused a number of people to be victimized he hurt a lot of people in these murders and many of the women that were there that night that weren't assaulted still felt the effects many years later and some still feel the effects now and of course the three survivors one of course who was not in the Chi Omega house they all have suffered tremendously as well so Ted Bundy's actions in terms of just the mental health component of just the effect he had on others mental health was really unbelievably powerful it was just a terrible effect he had on so many people now addition to this we know that Ted Bundy acted as his own attorney which gave him the right to depose everyone in the Chi Omega house and he called them in one by one for interviews some of them were interviewed multiple times and some of the interviews lasted for hours so we wouldn't be surprising to me if many of those women were reach Ramat iced by Ted Bundy in the course of his trial now we don't know if he chose to be his own attorney deliberately just to do that that was one of the consequences of him representing himself so now moving on to the behavioral aspects and potential mental health aspects for Ted Bundy again specific to the facts in the Chi Omega murder case well we see here that he did break from his MO he typically would lure victims sometimes with a fake cast on his arm and he would disengage if things got too risky so if somebody wouldn't come over to like his car he would typically disengage now in the Chi Omega murders what we saw is he broke somewhat from his MO so this one at the time of the murder didn't involve charm didn't have an appearance component or verbal communication when I say charm I talk about the superficial charm that we see with psychopathy and of course it's theorized that Ted Bundy had some psychopathic characteristics what we see instead with the Chi Omega murders as he goes directly to sheer rage and brutality but I'll talk about whether it was really rage or not in a few moments now you could make the argument though that there was still a charming component because he was at the club he danced with at least one of the sorority sisters and he was watching them and kind of picking out victims so again potentially there was contact with the victims before or with people that would have been the sorority house at least even if they weren't people that eventually become his victims so again the argument could be made there that there was a social component to his behavior prior to the murders this brings up a few other questions as well though like did he go to the club with the intention of finding victims was he may be on the fence he just needed that motivation to see the women that he may attack which would make his fantasies or his plans a little bit more concrete it's really not known it's not known kind of how he planned this murder it could have been that he knew he wanted to kill somebody that night no matter what he just started the club and look for victims or it could have been that of course he was always having that potential of killing somebody and he was at the clubs willing to find victims and willing to leave without committing a murder now because he mentioned specifically to that one individual they were lucky not to be a member of Chi Omega makes me think he kind of went there with the intention of picking out victims and then of course he only went just one door down to attack the people at Chi Omega on the other side of this we see that he didn't bring a weapon he found the weapon at Chi Omega that log that's what the police believe anyway and he didn't bring a clear way to break in it's not really clear that he had some sort of device like a crowbar anything to break in again the lock was broken on the back of the Chi Omega sorority house now he was still aware that he was at risk at some level anyway because he had a disguise a pantyhose mask and he did bring that with him so that shows that he was at least to some degree prepared to commit a murder and as I mentioned before he fled when the lights appeared and he also fled from Cheryl Thomas's apartment so again he was aware of that risk he was aware they didn't want to be caught and he wasn't just going into this not taking any precautions he was trying to commit these murders and get away with it which more or less contradicts the theory that he was kind of in a blind rage where he was just going about and being completely barbaric without any consideration for consequences undoubtedly he was barbaric but it still seemed like he had some level of control now another way he kind of broke from the mo is he killed more than one person typically Ted Bundy killed one victim at a time at least that's what we believe based on what we know he did here we have the sense with the Chi Omega murders which is actually pretty frightening that if Ted Bundy had not had been stopped if he wasn't scared off by the lights that he would have just killed many more victims he was just kept killing these sorority sisters until there was no one left he seemed to have an unlimited amount of energy and he had the ability to kill them and he could just kept going it's really actually quite frightening he killed in a manner that was quiet enough not to be detected and again he just could have kept going so this is really again inconsistent with his MO he's killing one victim at a time typically once he kills them of course he had a whole ritual he performed after that but once he killed them that was it he moved on to the next person he didn't move on to the next person immediately after but with Chi Omega he did now to speak for a moment about the rage theory I mentioned earlier that a lot of people believe he was in a blind rage and he just went throughout this sorority house with this log kind of hitting people murdering people not really understanding what he was doing or having all have intentionality but just rather not having any control at all now before in his life he was described as emotionally stable by people we see people in Washington who described him that way and we do believe that he had what we call low neuroticism which is typical of psychopathy meaning he wasn't easily angered or easily made anxious or depressed so we see with Chi Omega is this kind of mystery whether he was in a rage or whether he was calm was he methodical or did he lose control or was a some combination of both he expended so much energy and the attacks they're just physically demanding attacks that one is kind of led to believe that he was a rage but then we see other evidence that suggests he may have been calm for example it was an eyewitness to reported seeing him walking from the Chi Omega house to Cheryl Thomas's apartment of course that eyewitness didn't know where he was going but he appeared to be hiding the log and he wasn't wearing the mask we know he was wearing the mask when he attacked Shawn Thomas so he wore it and during the Chi Omega murders he took it off while he was walking and again tried to hide the log and then put it back on to attempt to murder Sheryl Thomas that doesn't seem to be behavior somebody kind of in a rage somebody's lost control rather he was being deliberate at all the different points here throughout the murders now it's worth noting that within eroticism eroticism has a number of facets and Ted Bundy could have been low in like anxiety and depression and vulnerability but been high and anger so neuroticism all the facets don't have to move in the same direction together so somebody's low and a few facets they can still be high in others now the next kind of area around potential mental health concerns that's been brought up specifically about the Chi Omega murders is the argument from mania back then they called mania manic depression that's what they call the disorder now it's known as bipolar disorder and the defense team hired a psychotherapist who diagnosed Ted Bundy with what we would now call bipolar disorder now this would explain the tremendous amount of energy that he would had to expend during these murders but he was only 32 so he was young and it makes sense that he would be physically strong but at the same time he escaped from jail just eight days before and he had to lose a lot of weight to fit through an opening in his jail cell that's how he escaped so he seemed to have a lot of energy for someone who just lost a lot of weight like that but really we don't know for sure we do know that mania can't have an irritable component so a lot of people say well it can't be mania because he would have been really happy mania can present as very irritable as well especially if the mania tends to last but we see some evidence that perhaps he wasn't manic too and I'll talk about that now bipolar disorder can have a psychotic component and we see throughout Ted Bundy's criminal career that some people said that he said that he had heard voices that voices told him to commit crimes so it's possible he had psychotic symptoms and as possible those symptoms were related to bipolar disorder now another possible disorder I've seen kind of thrown around specifically talking about Chi Omega murders here with Ted Bundy is schizoaffective disorder and schizoaffective disorder is really schizophrenia together with bipolar disorder symptoms so they're kind of merged together and we call it schizoaffective disorder I don't think we have a really good a clear picture here with Ted Bundy in terms of schizoaffective disorder it's get so effective the component that would be different in terms of schizoaffective versus bipolar would be the negative features the negative symptoms and some other things so like flat effect but this could be explained through psychopathy so I'm not sure there's a real strong case for schizoaffective disorder and as I mentioned I'm not sure there's really a strong case for bipolar either but I think you could make a better case for my Poehler then schizoaffective I think you can make a strong case here for what we call factor 1 psychopathy so personality traits like being callous unemotional being manipulative having superficial charm and being a pathological liar factor 1 psychopathy has some overlap with antisocial personality so a number of people who have factor 1 psychopathy who commit crimes do get diagnosed with antisocial personality now this doesn't explain the amount of energy had but it could be that he was just very motivated I think probably specifically motivated toward sexual gratification because I believe that's what he obtained by committing these murders I think that was his motive now before I talked about the mania I talked about how I'm not really sure he was manic at this time if we look to the club if we look to his behavior at the club right before the murders he didn't appear manic there again dancing with one of the women there and kind of stalking and staring at people that's not consistent with mania so he may have had bipolar disorder but either way he didn't appear to be manic during these murders so stepping back a bit from the potential mental health aspects in the behavior no matter what Ted Bundy's characteristics were specifically or what diagnosis he may or may not have had the idea of Ted Bundy is quite frightening to a lot of people and I think specifically because of the behavior we see with the Chi Omega murders there's this idea that someone can be fit enough to cuss survive in society to fool people Ted Bundy made people believe that he was a good person that he was a non-violent person that he was regular or normal although some people of course did not believe that but many did so he was able to fit in able to get along with people to a fairly substantial degree but also had the capability to commit our barrack and heinous crimes so that's what's really scary about Ted Bundy and specifically I think frightening about the Chi Omega murders now I know whenever I talk about these different criminal cases and personality and mental health there gonna be a lot of opinions and thoughts if you agree or disagree with me or have other opinions please put those in the comments section these comments always drive a really interesting dialogue as always I hope you found this description of the Chi Omega murderers to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 153,217

Keywords: Ted Bundy, Chi Omega, murder, Chi Omega sorority house, Florida State University, Tallahasseem, mental health, mania, psychopathy, sociopathy, biplor disorder, rage, anger, sexual domination, serial killer, carol daronch, Kathy kleiner, karen chandler, Cheryl thoman, Margaret bowman, lisa levy, Valerie duke, ptsd, counseling

Id: p8CorU7bWkU

Length: 24min 37sec (1477 seconds)

Published: Sat May 04 2019