Ted Bundy was born on November 24, 1946, in a home for unwed mothers in Burlington, Vermont (via Biography). His mother, Eleanor Louise Cowell, wanted to give up Bundy for adoption but later took her son home to her parents in Philadelphia. There, he was raised to believe that his grandparents were his parents and that Cowell was his older sister. When Bundy was 3, Cowell left Philadelphia for Tacoma, Washinton, taking him with her. She met and wed Johnnie Bundy, who later adopted him and gave him his surname.
Cowell never acknowledged that she was anything other than Bundy’s sister, a lie that Bundy claimed he was able to see through at a young age. In “A Stranger Beside Me” (via Biography), Ann Rule pens that Bundy told her that he “just figured out that there couldn’t be 20 years difference in age between a brother and a sister, and Louise always took care of me. I just grew up knowing that she was really my mother.”
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Bundy claimed that he discovered his birth certificate as a teenager, taking note that the “father” section was marked “unknown.” Rule points out in her book that Bundy’s mother remained fairly quiet on the subject of who impregnated her, saying only that it was a sailor (via Oxygen). According to Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, his name was Jack Worthington, and little is known about him. Though Worthington is the man that Cowell said fathered Bundy, his name hasn’t been associated with Bundy’s original birth certificate.
