Ted Bundy

Ted Bundy confessed, shortly before his execution in 1989, to killing thirty young women and girls across at least seven states in the 1970s. Investigators believe the true number may be higher. Part of what made his case notorious was how ordinary he appeared: a law student and political volunteer who used charm, a fake cast or a feigned injury to approach his victims, and who later represented himself in court.

He was born Theodore Robert Cowell on November 24, 1946, at a home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont, at 10:35 at night, the time on his birth certificate. That hour puts Leo on the Ascendant, a placement associated with confidence and a strong sense of presence. Saturn and Pluto, also in Leo, sit behind it in the twelfth house, the region of the chart linked with what is hidden.

The rest of the chart is concentrated in one place. His Sun, Moon and Mars are in Sagittarius, and Mercury and Venus are in Scorpio, and all five fall in the fourth house, which astrologers associate with family, origins and the private home. His own origins were wrapped in secrecy. He was raised for years believing his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his older sister, and his father's identity was never confirmed.

His mother moved with him to Tacoma, Washington, where she married Johnny Bundy, who adopted him. Bundy studied psychology at the University of Washington, worked on a Republican campaign and on a crisis hotline, and enrolled in law school. During those same years, beginning in 1974, young women began disappearing in Washington and Oregon, then in Utah, Colorado and Idaho.

He was arrested in Utah in 1975 and convicted of kidnapping. Extradited to Colorado to face a murder charge, he escaped twice, the second time making his way to Florida. In January 1978 he attacked women at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University, killing Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, and weeks later he abducted and murdered twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach.

His Florida trials were among the first to be televised nationally, and the attention he drew, including from people who wrote to him in prison, has been studied since as a case of how violence can be mistaken for glamour. He was sentenced to death three times. He was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989.

The crime writer Ann Rule, who had worked beside him at a Seattle crisis line, wrote The Stranger Beside Me about the shock of discovering who he was, and later accounts have increasingly centered the women he killed rather than the man. The chart shows a man whose public warmth and private life were badly divided, but the record of his crimes speaks more plainly than any reading could.

Survivors of sexual violence, and the people close to them, can reach RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline in the United States can be reached at 1-800-656-4673.