I was in Florida when Ted Bundy was on trial. My mother was right about his, and every, execution

October 15, 2026 — 10:30am

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Tallahassee was still in shock when my family arrived from Melbourne at the start of 1979, just 12 months after Ted Bundy hideously murdered two young women asleep in their college dorm.

My father was going to do his PhD at Florida State, the university where the victims studied, and Bundy’s blank, handsome features still featured regularly on the front page of the Tallahassee Democrat.

Adults talked in whispers about what happened to those poor girls and conversations stopped when children entered the room. I had turned 10, just old enough to start paying attention to adult matters and curious to find out more.

It was easy enough to glean the details – two sorority sisters were discovered in their beds, clubbed to death, two others barely alive. Girls at the elementary school speculated, in languid accents I could barely understand, that there was a victim our age. What happened to her used words we didn’t understand.

Bundy was locked up two hours away in Florida State Penitentiary but the most famous convict in America loomed over the town as everyone waited for his trial to begin.

First a cage fight, now a live-streamed execution. America’s........

© Brisbane Times