Journalist Stephen Michaud shocked the globe with his chilling taped conversations with America'south most notorious serial killer .

He infamously tricked Ted Bundy into revealing central details of his gruesome murders during the half dozen months he spent talking with him inside his prison house cell.

The tapes, which formed the basis of a book, take now been released for the Netflix documentary, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.

But before anyone else had read or heard the killer'southward claret-curdling ramblings, the journalist first played the tapes to Bundy'due south mother and begetter-in-law at their home in Tacoma, Washington state.

Hugh recorded over 100 hours of interviews with Bundy (

Image:

Netflix)
Ted Bundy's mum ever claimed he was innocent (

Image:

King)

Louise Bundy always claimed her son was innocent, and stood by him right up until the moment he was executed.

In an exclusive interview with Mirror Online, Stephen, who worked with colleague Hugh Aynesworth, recalled the moment he bankrupt the news to Bundy'southward family that he was in fact "as guilty as hell".

He said: "I got to know Ted'southward mother Louise. I was a kind of liaison to her, occasionally phoning her and passing on letters.

"She a tea-totaller and a devout methodist, and was sure that I was going to become her son off by proving that he was innocent.

"When we finished our piece of work we felt duty bound to sit downwardly with her and her husband and say that, unfortunately, the sum total of our work and the conversations with your son led inexorably to the conclusion that he is in fact guilty.

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"Then I sat downwardly with them in their house and played for her and her husband the sound tapes with the more telling confessions, the descriptions he had shared with us.

"I recall how she listened intently, and as she was listening she started making these little sounds, like someone was squeezing a mouse, it was very baroque.

"But fifty-fifty more bizarre was when the recording was over and we turned off the tape recorder, and everybody sabbatum there quietly.

"And then Louise suddenly stood up and clapped her easily and announced: 'Whose for apple tree pie and water ice-cream?' It was just bizarre.

"She didn't say any more about it and connected insisting, right upward to his execution, that her boy could never take done those things.

Bundy believed his conversations with Stephen would become him off the hook (

Image:

www.alamy.com)

"She clearly had the capacity to compartmentalise. I wondered if in that location was a genetic component in her son'southward ability to do the same affair."

Unable to believe Bundy was guilty even afterwards hearing from his own mouth, Louise, who died aged 88 in 2012, later told a local paper: "Ted Bundy does not get around killing women and footling children!

"Our never-ending faith in Ted - our faith that his is innocent - has never wavered. And it never will. Ted has been the best son the earth."

In fact Bundy himself eventually confessed to 36 murders simply days before his execution in Jan 1989, telling agents who asked how many women he had actually killed: "Add i digit to that, and y'all'll have it."

After bludgeoning his female victims to death, and sometimes spending the night with their expressionless bodies, the psychopath would oftentimes remove their heads with a hacksaw and keep them in his apartment as mementos.

Bundy's mother Louise believed her son was innocent (

Paradigm:

Youtube)

With the severed heads at home, sick Bundy would wash their hair, use brand-upward to them, and engage in sexual acts with them.

Americans were so sickened by his horrific crimes that his electrocution was celebrated by the largest crowd ever seen outside an exeuction.

Stephen was a 31-twelvemonth-old journalist working for Business Calendar week in New York when, in 1979, he was approached by Carole Anne Boone, who would later ally Bundy in jail and have his baby, request if he wanted to write a book about his case.

Bundy had simply been arrested in Florida and was pending trial, and believed that having a announcer speak to him and reexamine the murders he had been charged with would end up exonerating him.

Stephen, who turned downward a motility to beginning a new bureau in Tokyo to write the volume, said he hoped to discover Bundy innocent.

He said: "I though, if he is innocent it will exist a hell of the story. And if he did them and he tells me everything, that volition be a great story too.

The killer concluded upwardly giving upwardly central details of his crimes

"And then I chosen my old colleague, Hugh, who I worked with at Newsweek earlier in the 70s.

"We decided that I would interview Bundy in prison and he would get to the West Coast where the murders have been committed and see if he'south telling the truth.

"I went at that place in the hope that he was innocent, as he said he was. It would have been a amend story.

"Then many of the murders he had been charged with were based on coincidence and inference, and none of them on particularly hard evidence.

"If Hugh could have disattached Ted to a couple of them, the whole affair would have come up down.

"It took nearly 2 weeks, nonetheless, for me to realise that Ted was as guilty as hell."

The outset claiming was to become into the Florida Country Prison and spend the time they needed with the man who was by now America's most notorious serial killer.

He said: "They were non going to allow some reporters waltz into the prison house any time they felt like to talk the most infamous serial killer.

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"Hugh had a private investigator's licence, and through his connections I got one too.

"So I asked one of his attorneys if he would walk me into the prison and introduce me every bit an investigator for his appeals attorneys, and believe it or not I made that story stand for six months.

"I thought, allow's try to get away with it every bit long as nosotros can, and then nosotros'll figure out what they are going to charge me with for breaking in to a prison."

Over the next six months, Stephen filled 75 to 90 tapes with Bundy's talking, with over 100 hours worth of audio recording.

Simply at the beginning Bundy thought he could outsmart him and stuck to the line that he had't killed anyone.

He said: "He wanted to use us to escape the electric chair. Like, I've got these ii reporters and they've gone out and they can't find anything either.

"I think Ted idea he was smarter than the states, and that he could get a glory bio out of this which would in his view perpetuate this 'did he do it or did he not do information technology' kind of game he was playing.

"He was clearly a narcissist, and he was also paranoid. So while he didn't trust everyone he besides really enjoyed beingness in the limelight, and thought it was a wonderful game that he was playing.

Stephen says Bundy enjoyed being in the limelight (

Image:

Netflix)

"He wanted to go downwardly in history as a serial killer but at the same time he wanted to go let off then he could go murder again.

"So while he wanted us to go abroad telling others that he was a hell of a nice guy and couldn't have washed those things, he also wanted to talk virtually these crimes for which he was really proud. He considered his murders his life's masterwork.

"And Ted really, really, really, liked killing, and he wanted to get out and disappear and so he could kill again, that was his raison d'etre.

"But on the other paw he enjoyed calling attention to himself, and thought information technology was a clever game he would win by somehow being exonerated or on a technicality.

"That was how his brain worked -  I wish I was anonymous again so I could impale, and it's so smashing to exist famous."

It was when he understood Bundy's warped listen - and this weakness - that Stephen was able to gull him into confessing.

He remembered: "After one peculiarly frustrating day with him I was driving back to a crummy hotel and information technology was sort of an epiphany.

"I idea, possibly I'one thousand dealing with a 12-year-old inside the trunk of a 25-yr-old.

"And so I went back to the prison and said, 'you know, Ted, I'm not happy with the way this conversation is going.

Some of Ted Bundy'due south victims - (left to right) Roberta Parks, Julie Cunningham, brenda ballad brawl, Georgann Hawkins, Susan Rancourt, Kimberly Leach, Nancy Wilcox, Janice Ott

"I've been thinking about this unique position here, as a suspect in these cases, you know more about these killings than anybody, you lot've seen all the evidence, you've been taken to the offense scenes, and you are a trained psychologist.

"So why don't you tell me what kind of person y'all think could have done this?

"He grabbed the tape recorder out of my hand and off he went."

Bundy started talking virtually himself in the third person, and with each conversation he opened up more virtually why and how he had killed.

Stephen said: "He started explaining how as a young man this person felt uncomfortable, how he got an interest in sex activity and violence and pretty shortly was following women home at night.

"And eventually and inevitably he started attacking them.

"He talked of this voice in his head which he called the 'entity' which directed him. And I listened to that for 6 months!"

Bundy told Stephen that it wasn't the killing itself which motivated him, but that "what he was actually after, the real key to it, was to possess the adult female's dead body every bit he memorably said 'equally you would a potted found or a Porsche'.

The journalist said: "Merely I remember he was just cleaning upwardly his act for my sake. I think he actually, really enjoyed cracking them over the head and and then playing with their dead bodies."

Stephen with fellow journalist Hugh Aynesworth (

Image:

Netflix)

What shocked him the almost, though, wasn't Bundy'south retelling of the murders only "the overall dispassion with which he discussed them".

I mean, talk about lack of guilt or remorse. He actually was a common cold blooded killer.

Stephen said: "At i point Hugh asked him if he didn't experience anything, the pain he had caused.

"And Ted replied, 'yous know, Hugh, I think I have an advantage over other people in that " tin't feel guilt, I feel no guilt over anything that's every happened.

"'Anyway, it'south in the by and the by is not real. Bear witness me the past, tin you touch the by, Hugh?'"

Bundy's belief that opening up to a journalist would help him escape prison backfired spectacularly as Stephen's recordings ensured he was condemned to die for his crimes.

Ted Bundy as a teenager (

Epitome:

Netflix)

And Stephen never found out how the killer reacted when he discovered he had been tricked into confessing, saying they had a "complete and utter divorce" one time the recordings were over.

Bu he did hear how Bundy once insisted that he had "never met them" when asked by prison staff if he had been interviewed by Stephen and Hugh.

Stephen, all the same, admits that his half dozen months with one of the world's most infamous series killers affected him emotionally over the next xxx years, claiming that "Ted used to visit me every now and once again in my sleep".

He said: "Nobody came abroad from an association with Ted Bundy without beingness tainted, and that was whether you were a cop, attorney, family or friend, Ted stained everything.

"He would do anything and say anything to manipulate y'all.

"To be in the presence of that for any extended period of fourth dimension leaves a mark on yous.

Bundy's electrocution was a moment of commemoration for many
Stephen's book is available now

"I'm proud of the fact that I tricked him into talking, but I sort of wished Ted had come along towards the end of my career, not when I was however young.

"It made me a more than cynical person. When he was executed I didn't shed a tear. For me he was a virus, someone for whom in that location was no redemption.

"Information technology really helped me to write a volume about it, information technology was sort of therapeutic. I had to confront it and examine what had happened to me."

And he is sure that Ted Bundy would be revelling in his infamy and the continued publicity, xxx years subsequently his decease.

He said: "To be the object of so much fascination and contemptuousness and misplaced dear and to exist so infamous is what he e'er wanted. It just interfered with his beginning love of going out and murdering girls.

"But from whatever vantage indicate Ted may or may not take out in in that location in the cosmos today, I remember on balance he probably says, i did a actually good task, they nevertheless haven't forgotten me."

  • Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer is bachelor from @TheMirrorBooks