A new Amazon documentary focuses on the women who interacted with Ted Bundy, promising a comprehensive look at the serial killer without glamorising his crimes.
“This story has been told many times by men,” says Elizabeth Kendall, Bundy’s former girlfriend, in the just-released trailer for Ted Bundy: Falling For a Killer. “Now is the time to talk about our own story from beginning to end, because we lived, and so many people didn’t.”
The documentary examines how Bundy raped and murdered women in the ‘70s, during a time in which many women were taking to the streets to fight for the rights to their own bodies. Other people in the documentary include a police officer who was the only woman in her academy class, and one who became the only woman on-air reporter in Utah.
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The fact that the world seemed more welcoming and safe for women than ever before made news of Bundy’s crimes all the more troubling, according to one woman in the documentary.
“You’re starting to feel like you can do anything, when all of a sudden, you get walloped,” says one woman in the documentary, speaking of how she felt reading about the women who were murdered by a then-unknown killer.
Also speaking in the documentary is Kendall’s daughter, who tells the camera that she, Kendall, and Bundy were a “family” before the true scope of Bundy’s crimes were revealed.
While Bundy does appear in archival footage, the trailer focuses more on how his crimes impacted the women around him — and offers a chilling, but important, tribute to the people who suffered due to his crimes. The trailer ends with images of the women who were murdered by Bundy, along with overlapping voiceover from their loved ones speaking about the people they lost.
Falling For a Killer comes after Netflix released Joe Berlinger's documentary series Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. The series used archival footage of Bundy, speaking about his crimes, and was met with some backlash for highlighting the killer instead of focusing on the survivors and victims of his crimes. Berlinger also helmed Netflix film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile which starred Zac Efron as Bundy. Though the movie is told from the perspective of Kendall (also known as Elizabeth Kloepfer) and based on her book The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy some believed the film painted Bundy as too charming and likeable a character.
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Here, fortunately, the story of Bundy will be balanced with ones of his survivors, and the women who tried to take him down. Watch the trailer below:
Ted Bundy: Falling For a Killer debuts on Amazon Prime 31st January 2020.