Ted Bundy's Childhood Home

Author: Jewls Krueger

Ted Bundy lived in this home with his mother, Louise, and his stepfather, Johnny Culpepper Bundy, from the mid 1950s through his high school years. According to the Puget Sound Regional Archives, the Bundy family bought the house in 1955, when Ted was 8, and sold it in 1965. The News Tribune reported that he was 9 at the time of the move, so accounts of his exact age differ by a year. He lived here with his mother, stepfather, and four younger siblings.

Louise and Johnny married in 1951. Johnny, a hospital cook, formally adopted Ted and tried to include him in camping trips and other family activities, though Bundy remained distant from him and later complained to a girlfriend that Johnny was not his real father. The couple went on to have four children together.

Bundy would confess to 30 homicides before his execution, though the true total has never been established. His victims included women and girls as young as 12. He escaped custody twice in Colorado, once through a courthouse window in Aspen and once through the ceiling of the Garfield County jail, and was executed in Florida's electric chair on January 24, 1989.

Ted Bundy's Childhood

Ted Bundy said various things about his childhood and high school years, and his accounts often contradicted each other. He told biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth that he chose to be alone as an adolescent because he did not understand how friendships worked. Ann Rule, who knew him personally, reported that his classmates at Woodrow Wilson High School remembered him as "well known and well liked." Rule also wrote that at Hunt Junior High School he was teased by classmates who poured cold water on him while he showered.

Neighbors remembered the family more clearly than they remembered Ted. Hope Murry, who grew up a few houses down and later bought back her childhood home, told the News Tribune that she has no memory of seeing him at all. She played with his younger sisters and was babysat by Louise, and once was told to stay away from Ted's bedroom because he had the measles. She described the Bundys as a nice family.

A Disturbed Child

Bundy gave shifting accounts of what he was doing during those years. He told Michaud and Aynesworth that he picked through trash barrels looking for pictures of naked women. He told attorney Polly Nelson that he read detective magazines and crime novels for stories involving sexual violence, especially when they were illustrated with pictures of dead or injured women. In a letter to Ann Rule, however, he insisted he had never read fact-detective magazines at all and was disturbed by the idea that anyone would.

He was more consistent about one habit. He told Michaud that he would drink heavily and move through the neighborhood late at night looking for uncovered windows where he could watch women undressing.

First Arrests

During high school, Ted Bundy was arrested at least twice on suspicion of burglary and motor vehicle theft. When he turned 18, the details of those incidents were expunged from his record, as was customary in Washington and many other states at the time, so the exact circumstances of his earliest known crimes may never be known.

The Ann Marie Burr Case

Investigators have long wondered whether Bundy began killing while he still lived in this house. Ann Marie Burr, an 8 year old girl, was taken from her family's home in Tacoma's North End in August 1961, when Bundy was 14. After he was imprisoned in Florida and named as a suspect, Bundy denied any involvement in a letter to the girl's mother. DNA testing conducted in 2011 was unable to link him to her disappearance, and because detectives were never able to clear him, he remains listed as a suspect.

Despite the house's reputation, there is no evidence that Bundy committed any crime inside it.

The Renovation

In September 2016, David Truong bought the 1,400 square foot house intending to remodel it and flip it. He did not research the property's history and did not know who had lived there. He hired contractor Casey Clopton and his company, Extreme Contracting, to do the work.

Clopton told KOMO News his crew experienced roughly 30 odd incidents across seven months on the job. On an early visit he brought his 11 year old daughter, who started crying, said she felt strange, and asked to leave. Crew members reported jiggling doorknobs and footsteps with no one there. They arrived some mornings to find drawers and cabinets standing open in a house that had been locked with the alarm set, with nothing taken. A heavy dresser wedged into an upstairs hallway wall ended up face down on the floor while the crew was working downstairs, and workers said it took more than one person to move it at all. One crew member said he found the word "Leave" written in construction dust on a bedroom floor with no footprints around it. Another reported a plea reading "Help me" on the inside of a basement window.

Clopton eventually asked neighbors whether there had been break ins in the area, and that is how he learned who had once lived in the house. He told the News Tribune he penciled Bible scriptures on the walls and brought in two pastors from a Puyallup church to bless the property, and he instituted a rule that Christian music play inside at all times. He said the incidents settled down afterward. The penciled verses are no longer visible beneath the fresh paint.

The project ran about four months longer than planned and finished in April 2017, shortly before the house sold.

The Home Today

The house sits in a quiet residential neighborhood on the west side of Tacoma, not far from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It was built in 1946, the same year Bundy was born in Vermont, and has four bedrooms and one and a half bathrooms. Accounts of which room was his conflict. Neighbors recalled a bedroom on the ground floor, while at least one record places his room at the foot of the basement stairs.

The renovation left the property substantially changed, with new paint, a bright yellow front door, and rebuilt floors and ceilings. Nearby, the high school Bundy attended still stands, though Woodrow Wilson High School was officially renamed Dr. Dolores Silas High School on July 1, 2021.

The house is a private residence and has been continuously occupied since the flip. If you visit, stay on public roads and sidewalks, do not enter the property, and do not approach or attempt to contact the current residents or their neighbors. The people who live here now have no connection to this history, and the families affected by Bundy's crimes are still living with it.