Ted Bundy’s wife: What happened to Carole Ann Boone?
It’s hard to be compassionate about serial killers & murderers. It’s even harder to understand how anyone could fall for them romantically, knowing the atrocities they’ve meted out in the past. There’s a famous episode from Grey’s Anatomy where Meredith Grey goes to attend the execution of a serial killer & former patient to show him compassion. She feels horrible later & is shown sobbing inconsolably.
The point is that even feeling human compassion for such felons seems hard. How do you forgive someone who doesn’t regret any bit of what they’ve done, when they’ve killed literal people? There seem more questions than answers here.
Then we have a slew of hot actors playing serial killers in movies & series. There’s Zac Efron as Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Darren Criss as Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, then there’s Evan Peters in American Horror Story, among others. Does a criminal being attractive justify your attraction to them?
More about hybristophilia
What are we talking about? Hybristophilia is sexual deviance in which a person “gets sexually aroused over someone else committing an offensive or violent act”, as per a statement from Katherine Ramsland, PhD, a professor of forensic psychology at DeSales University and author of the book Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer to Cosmopolitan.
There’s no empirical research, only anecdotal evidence & reports that hint at how hybristophilia can show itself. It’s also often talked about – as conjecture at this point in the absence of research – that an incarcerated partner is fantasy for some, whereas it could be a preference because of the assurance that he will be faithful to you. The human mind works in weird ways.
But we have many examples of serial killers who managed to sweep someone off her feet, got married, had a family. One of the most famous cases is Ted Bundy’s relationship with his wife Carole Ann Boone. Carol wasn’t the only woman to fall for Ted Bundy but was the only one to marry him & have his child.
Where’s Carole Ann Boone now?
Some background: Ted Bundy was a serial killer, a rapist, and a necrophiliac. It is known that he abducted & murdered at least thirty-six young women in the 1970s, extremely sadistic crimes for which he was given a death sentence in 1989. He was survived by his wife Carole Ann Boone & their daughter Rosa Bundy.
Bundy is known to have been charismatic – a quality that supposedly helped him claim his women victims easily – and Boone was not immune to his charms. They met while working in the Department of Emergency Services in Washington & Boone had initially resisted his advances, chalking it up to timing.
She was just getting out of divorce & busy being a single mom to her son James, while Bundy was involved with Elizabeth Kloepfer.
Eventually, they started dating & Boone was somehow convinced that Bundy was innocent. Boone served as his character witness, helped him plan his escape from prison to Florida, and became an unassuming accomplice to the murder of three women. Bundy married Boone in a courtroom – not in the traditional way, but by using his marriage to her as a ploy to distract the jury.
Boone in the second part of her life
Later, Boone moved closer to where Bundy was imprisoned for his death penalty & they were extremely sneaky on her visits. Reportedly, she smuggled drugs for her husband in her vagina & the two even managed to have sex, leading to the birth of their child Rose Bundy in 1982. What’s public information is that Boone only divorced Bundy just three weeks before his execution was due.
Meanwhile, Bundy had confessed to a whole spectrum of his horrific crimes – from murder to rape & even dismemberment. Boone never spoke to him again, went off the grid, and presumably tried to work through the trauma for her sake & that of her children. She is reported to have hidden her new identity & whereabouts from everyone.
In January 2018, it was finally revealed that she had passed away in a retirement home at seventy years of age. It was attributed to septic shock & no one in that home knew of her past. They only knew she was extremely keen on knitting & nature programming on television.
