On January 24th, 1989, serial killer Ted Bundy was executed by electric chair after being sentenced for the rape and murder of over 30 women and girls. The day before his death in his final interview, he talked almost exclusively about the dangers of pornography and the effects it had on his life. I’ve transcribed the fascinating and disturbing clip, originally published by FightTheNewDrug.org I’ve pasted their introduction to the video so everyone is on the same page:
Keep in mind that the last thing we want people to think after watching this video is that we are saying that pornography makes you a serial killer. It doesn’t and the odds are it won’t. We are not here to use scare tactics. Our mission from the beginning has been to raise awareness on the harmful effects of pornography using science, research and personal accounts. Well, this is a pretty strong personal account.
Ted Bundy’s sincere, personal account about how pornography affected his mind, his perceptions and ideals is impactful to say the least.
And the fact that a person like Bundy, sitting on death row, having been desensitized by years of rape and murder, used his final interview to warn society of the harmful effects of pornography, says something.
For more, see the complete archive of articles on integrity.
Transcript:
Bundy: As a young boy, and I mean boy–12 or 13, certainly. I encountered outside the home in the local grocery store, the local drug store, the soft-core pornography–what people call soft-core. And it happened in stages, gradually. It doesn’t necessarily–not to me, at least–happen overnight. Once you become addicted to it–and I look at this as a kind of addiction. Like other kinds of addiction, I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder. Something which gives you a greater sense of excitement.
Again, I’m talking from personal experience. Hard, real personal experience. The most damaging kinds of pornography are those that involve violence, and sexual violence. Some people would say, “Well, I’ve seen that stuff and it doesn’t do anything to me.” I wasn’t a pervert in the sense that people look at somebody and they say, “I know that something’s wrong with him.” And you can just tell. I was essentially a normal person. I had good friends. I lived a normal life except for this one small, but very potent, and very destructive segment of it that I kept very secret, very close to myself, and didn’t let anybody know about it.
I’m no social scientist, and I haven’t done a survey, and I don’t pretend that I know what [people] think about this. But I’ve lived in a prison for a long time now. And I’ve met a lot of men who were motivated to commit violence just like me. And without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography. Without question. Without exception. Deeply influenced and consumed by an addiction to pornography. There’s no question about it.
The FBI’s own study on serial homicide shows that the most common interest among serial killers is pornography. And pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home 20, 30 years ago.
As diligent as my parents were, and they were diligent in protecting their children. And as good a Christian home we had–and we had a wonderful Christian home–there’s no protection against the kinds of influences that are loose in the society, that [it] tolerates. There are kids sitting out there switching the TV dial around, and come upon these movies late at night. I don’t know when they’re on, but they’re on, and any kid can watch them. It’s scary what I think what would have happened to me if I had seen [that]–it was scary enough. I just ran into stuff outside the home. To know that children are watching that kind of thing today or can pick up their phone and dial away for it, or send away for it.
Let’s come into the present now. What I’m talking about happened 20, 30 years ago. That is, in my formative stages. And what scares and appalls me, Dr. Dobson, when I see what’s on cable TV–some of the movies, some of the violence in the movies that come into homes today with stuff that they wouldn’t show in x-rated adult theaters 30 years ago.
