EXCLUSIVE: Ted Bundy household reveal serial killer purple flags they missed

The family of infamous serial killer Ted Bundy have revealed the subtle, bone-chilling red flags they brushed off while he was secretly murdering dozens of women. 

During his time in Tacoma, Washington, in the 1970s, Bundy was remembered as a charming, ‘normal’ person, expertly hiding his crimes even as some victims were close to his circle of friends. 

Bundy’s cousin Edna Cowell Martin, now in her 70s, told DailyMail.com that in their youth the budding young murderer seemed obsessed by lurid pulp fiction depicting damsels in distress.

Then, as they grew older, she believes the handsome killer may have left a dinner party at her apartment to carry out murder after letting the ‘mask slip’ in front of her when she spied him staring menacingly at her roommate. 

She delved into their childhood together ahead of the release of her upcoming book ‘Dark Tide: Growing up with Ted Bundy’, offering a glimpse inside the mind of a young maniacal killer. 

Psychiatrists, analysts and true crime fanatics have spent years exploring Bundy’s youth, hoping to answer the question of whether he was born evil or made that way. 

Edna admitted that her childhood with Bundy in Tacoma, Washington, was for the most part, ‘normal’, and she fondly remembered him as an older-brother type as he was five years older than her. 

But she recalled several moments that, while overlooked at the time, in hindsight may have been glimpses of an early psychopath – including his obsession with reading ‘salacious detective novels’. 

When hanging out with her older brother John as a teenager, she said he would be consumed by books with ‘compromising covers’ depicting a damsel in distress, tied up or otherwise helpless, with ‘some guy looming over her’, she said. 

‘They were kind of young, and John thought that was really weird.’ 

In his final years when Bundy eventually confessed to a slew of crimes, he told investigators in Utah that he would take women back to his apartment, ‘where he could reenact scenarios depicted on the covers of detective magazines.’ 

After their adolescence in Tacoma, Edna lived in Arkansas for several years, but grew closer than ever to him when she moved back home to attend the University of Washington. 

However, in one bone-chilling incident, Edna said she caught Bundy potentially eying up her own roommate during what should have been a tender moment. 

‘I got an apartment about a five-minute walk from where Ted was living, and I saw him a lot and he would drop by frequently,’ Edna told DailyMail.com this week. 

During one dinner with friends at her apartment, the group ended the evening by dancing to vinyl records, and Edna recalled returning back to the room to find Ted and her roommate Margie slow dancing to a romantic song. 

‘Margie had her head leaned against Ted’s chest, and as they turned with the music, I got a direct view of Ted. I could see him looking down at her,’ she noted. 

‘I will never forget the look on his face.’ 

In her book, she said Ted danced with his ‘jaw clenched tight, and his usually blue eyes appeared coal black’, in a kind of trance. Following his arrest, investigators would describe seeing Bundy’s eyes turn black and his pupils dilate when recounting his murder victims.

‘For a moment, I swear, I didn’t recognize him at all. It wasn’t Ted. His countenance was tense. Mean,’ Edna said, adding that after she snapped him out of it by calling his name, Ted left in a hurry.

‘I have no idea what might have occurred that night after he left my apartment. What he might have done.’ 

Looking back at the incident, Edna told DailyMail.com that she believes this was a moment the ‘mask slipped’, and ‘it might have concerned him so much that he ran out the door.’  

The episode came only months before his first known kill in 1974 – local Washington ski reporter Lisa Ann Healy, who Edna revealed she had even met. 

A number of detectives, notably Robert Keppel who ran the Washington State Police’s investigation into Bundy, have posited that Ted had already killed several women by this time, even before he was on the radar of authorities. 

Edna said this revelation stunned her as she realized her cousin was likely carrying out murders while spending time with her and her friends, and she felt disgusted at how he ‘was just too smooth, too comfortable doing what he did.’

‘Ted had two personas,’ she continued. ‘He had the mask on when he was with his family and friends, and he put us in a completely different space to where he could appear quite normal.’ 

Like many of his family members, when Ted was first arrested for kidnapping in 1975 – and suspected of being responsible for dozens of missing or murdered women in the area – Edna admitted she believed his cries of innocence. 

She met Ted after he was bailed out following his first arrest in 1975 in Salt Lake City, and said she was easily reassured when he stressed that he wasn’t responsible for the crimes. 

‘Call it confirmation bias. Call it familial immunity, but I believed him,’ she writes in her book. ‘Everything would be fine, I knew then. Just fine.’

By that time, Ted’s face was already plastered across newspapers linking him to missing women throughout the state, and Edna said it was his gleeful reception of this attention that sparked panic inside her. 

After picking him up from jail, Edna stopped in a bookstore, and said she emerged to find Ted lapping up attention from members of the public who recognized him from his newfound infamy.

‘Ted’s arms were outstretched wide, a street-corner messiah, and he was slowly turning in a circle. From his smiling lips, he chanted over and over, projecting for all to hear: ‘I’m Ted Bundy. I’m Ted Bundy. I’m Ted Bundy.’

‘This is the image that probably haunts me most, the image that still, 50 years later, makes my heart rate surge,’ she wrote.

Edna said seeing his appearance then reminded her of the jet-black eyes she had seen when he slow danced with her roommate, and told DailyMail.com that the glass shattering moment was ‘devastating.’

‘I had a hard time coming around, but when I finally realized that he for sure wasn’t the cousin that I thought he was came when I was in the car alone with him’ outside the bookstore, she said.

‘Realizing he had done it was awful, it was sickening,’ she added. ‘It was not the Ted that I knew and loved, I felt betrayed and manipulated by him.’