Corey Warner

Rhetorical Analysis

English Composition 1

Nicole Short 

October 24, 2019

       

 

      “What’s one less person on the face of the Earth, anyways?”: Ted Bundy’s Vile Truth.

 

Can a man be born evil? Or does he become evil because of his natural surroundings? Was it society that did it; and make men feel like they have to be cold-blooded and strong to the point they have no remorse for anything that they do? Where is the turning point in someone’s timeline of their life where it gets decided that someone is mentally incompetent? Ted bundy was a very smart man, he was an educated man. He had a girlfriend and a step-child. He was playing “house” and had a little family of his own. How can he be evil for God’s sake? He passed tests in court and showed that he was mentally sane but, when he was deemed guilty all of a sudden he’s insane. Ted Bundy confessed to the atrocities, but was it because that’s the way he saw fit. There was no way getting out of it for him, he has been stripped of his innocence, and every news source, person believed that he was evil. Maybe that’s what it was. I believed that Ted Bundy was not a murderer, all thanks to the portrayal of him by Zac Efron in the movie: “Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.” After the movie came out I observed that that social media was going crazy and saying Ted Bundy didn’t commit these crimes and that he was innocent. I watched the movie and thought the same thing and it dawned on me that this movie, Zac Efron’s performance was surreal as Ted Bundy. But the turning point for me in this Ted Bundy story was to realize that the movie was not reality and it was definitely dramaticized and then I watched the documentary series “Conversation With a Killer: Ted Bundy Tapes.” The documentary series definitely had a different limelight of Ted and it was the true limelight of Ted Bundy. The documentary series appealed to my emotions, and to my logic of thinking. The tapes used evidence such as pictures of victims and tape recordings of Ted talking about himself in the third person about the crimes. 

 

The crimes that Ted committed made me see him as the monster everyone saw him as, I couldn’t believe that a man that looked like he was so normal and that he fitted in like an everyday person could be this thing lurking behind the shadows, he fooled us. The Ted Bundy tapes tug on my heart strings, I’ve never felt so disgusted in my life with a human being but, at the same time I was having those feelings the series made me feel something else for Ted Bundy and that was fascinating. In the beginning of the series they led in with a narrator, talking about how people can be dangerous and that the world can be fun and dandy but, that’s not how it is because with the bad comes the good, and that means horror will strike whenever. And as they were talking about this good with the bad behind the scenes, they kept flashing images of Ted obviously showing the correlation between the theme of bad behind the good and him. They wanted to make a statement to the audience that Ted was not who he conveyed to be, and just like the world he wasn’t as perfect as the way he made it seem. In the next scene of the opening credit the narrator’s voice  get deeper and louder and then they play this ominous tone while they start rapidly showing images the police and inspectors took of the lifeless victims of Ted and their decimated bodies and skulls while showing the girls portraits. They demonstrated in the opening credits: pathos they were appealing to my emotions and the damage Ted caused. It was devastating to see the bodies laying in their own spilled blood, it hardened my heart seeing that. These young girls who were probably afraid for their lives to be laying there beaten, violated, and stripped of any dignity that they had because of this murderer. I understand the choice of doing this though, why this was an appeal to the emotions because, good human beings were taken to soon from the world all because a man was sick and did it because he felt like he needed to, and that he wanted to, to satisfy his cravings. As the series continued, there were so many gut wrenching things about Bundy that not only made you hate him but actually felt bad for him. I don’t think that was series true purpose but, it transpired. It was the moments when the journalist made Ted talk about his life and his background to see if the intent to kill stemmed came from something environmental and it affected his mental state of mind.One thing that stood out to me was the moment the journalist brought up the fact about Ted’s birth certificate and the space where it says “father” it says “unknown”. So they pointed out the fact that Ted was an illegitimate child and also, that his mother had him at a place for unwed mothers and that when she gave birth to ted she left him there. Ted responded on the tapes and said that, that never mattered to him and he doesn’t care about that, but they raised his vocals on the tapes and you could hear the uneasiness in his voice. That moment depicted clear pathos it made me feel so bad for Ted because he always claimed to have this “peaches and cream” life with his parents but it wasn’t the truth. I felt like in that moment he desperately wanted it to not mean anything, but you could tell it was something because he lied about it. But the series behind that pathos filled scene and moment and it was to make you feel angry with him because they tried to depict that because of his mother doing that to him, he sort of had a revenge against women because he felt some sort of betrayal by the main woman in his life; so he took it out on women. For me, I didn’t get that feeling I got the feeling that he was this man who burrowed sadness and anger inside of him until the point that it got explosive and I could only feel bad for Ted. The series also brought in one of his almost victims. It was a woman who got away from him, when he tried to kidnap and kill her. The series used techniques by zooming into her face to see the distraught in her eyes when she talked about how afraid she was for her life and that her “life flashed before her eyes” and I felt nothing but compassion for her and I all I could think to myself was, what would I do if I were in that situation, and how I would feel in the heat of the moment? Those questions brought chills down my body because, imagining yourself in that situation is unreal and worrisome. The series appealed by emotion  because in that scene the woman said all she can clearly remember was “his black beady eyes”and instead of her just saying that and the scene being finished they showed a picture of Ted and zoomed into his eyes. That resonate with me because, when someones eyes turn black like that like darkness consumes them I immediately think about the demons and that’s how I felt about Ted. Ted was a demon. There was another time that the series brought me to tears and it was the scene where they made one of the victims mother talk about Ted. Her eyes were filled with nothing but tears, it made me cry because, she got her daughter stripped away from her because she was a random target by a monster who wanted to inflict nothing but pain for his pleasure. That scene literally brought me into tears because, that was the moment I thought Ted was inhumane. How can you be humane and take another soul, How? This mother was in pain and I wished that I would never feel that pain nor ever see the person who caused it and they have no remorse.The tapes that had Ted speaking about himself in third person, that the series included had nothing but pathos it made you feel angry with him, because he was arrogant and he laughed and he would boast about how good of man he was. It was disgusting. Ted was not this man,and for him to speak and you could just picture the smirk on his face as he spoke like he had nothing to do with this but he was just merely a man with a psychology degree analyzing a man and the “why?” factor about the killings. The docu-series used pathos to make us, the viewers feel these emotions. They wanted us to feel how they felt. That feeling was that an evil man raised hell on people’s lives and didn’t even blink an eye.

  The docu-series also connected through logos and ethos. The main purpose of it this docu-series to show who and what Ted Bundy is and apart of that is to prove that he is a serial killer with facts cold hard facts. This was pretty simple and easy for the series to do, they had facts, proof and people who experts to talk about Ted Bundy in the series. One major piece of evidence that stuck to me and clearly stuck to the jury was the bite marks that was found on one Ted’s victims, they showed the bite marks were consistent with Ted’s teeth especially his K9 teeth and that those were a perfect match because the bite mark outlined crooked K9 teeth and Ted Bundy had K9 teeth. That piece of evidence made me believe that Ted was the killer because, you can’t argue with science nor can you argue with the lab’s analysis of the bite on the woman and how they matched it with Ted Bundy’s teeth. The series also had psychologists there to analyze and talk about the mind of serial killers and the similarities between the serial killers and Ted Bundy. One similar quality was this wave of arrogance that they had, thinking that they could kill, and get away with it by lying. That piece of information that was said, I immediately knew Ted Bundy was a serial killer because he was arrogant and that showed me that they got these psychologists to prove a point about Ted in the series. Another piece of information that the series showed that demonstrates ethos is the Psychologists talking about his mind and how he ticked and they said that Ted internally felt like he wasn’t in control but, he wanted to be but he just couldn’t because the urge to kill became more great. I had a feeling that was true not only because it was from an expert, but also because on the tapes, Ted talks about some sort of “entity” in his head that he couldn’t ignore. Then the series showed pictures of Ted’s medical records and that it showed that he was bipolar and suffered from manic depression. Therefore, I knew that Ted was an evil man, but he was an evil that was sick in the head, and they talked about his brain and that he lacked a cognitive function, which was to feel compassion, and love. Ted said it himself that he pretended to love but, he couldn’t actually fill those, all he felt was rage and pleasure from killing. All the facts lined up and had two feet pointed narrow right for Ted, police officers, medical examiners, courts they had the evidence that not only showed his involvement but, that there was premeditation and pure intent to kill because of the things he had in his car, the destinations he would pick. Ted was an experienced killer and knew what he was doing and science and experts prove that. I can’t argue with logisticas, and experts, but Ted thought he could fool them because he was intelligent in the law field and the psychology field. The series used logos and ethos to prove Ted Bundy in fact was killer, they wanted to show from a science and logistics point of view, and as well let us hear the commentary of experts who studied men like Ted Bundy.

 

I wondered why Ted got a degree in psychology, was it to understand his own mind? Did he want to understand this “entity” he believed to have in his mind?  Or even why become a lawyer? Did he just want that life? Or was it that he needed knowledge to protect himself like he thought he did by becoming his own counsel. Ted also used pathos, he went down on the path of being a man who was wrongfully convicted, but it wasn’t that for me that solidified it for me. It was the moment when he proposed to Carol Anne in the front of the jury and the court. It dawned on me, he wanted to look human. Carol Anne was a woman who actually looked like one of his victims and therefore proposed to her, to show that he can’t kill and all he can do is love and that he loved Carol Anne and he wanted to portray those emotions to be portrayed as humane. But, the jury saw right through it. It was nothing less than a distraction from the truth for them. This documentary series used  pathos which left chills and goosebumps and logos that left me in awe, but fascinated of the mind of Ted Bundy. It was to convey the truth about Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy is a serial killer and that’s the truth. They showed that you can’t trust the “guy next door” sometimes because sometimes it takes lies and deceit to make the perfect killer, and to make someone evil. Ted Bundy said it himself, that you will never know if there’s a killer walking among us, and that the nicest person you meet one day can be a cold blooded monster the next.