It’s fairly com­mon knowl­edge that, Theodore Robert Bundy, a con­fessed ser­ial mur­derer of at least 30 indi­vid­u­als, went to the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton (grad­u­ated with a degree in Psy­chol­ogy), and lived on cam­pus in McMa­hon Hall.

But when asked what room he lived in, I could find no answers other than “I think he
was on the 12^th floor.” This was prob­lem­atic, of course, because McMa­hon only has eleven floors. Find­ing no reli­able infor­ma­tion on his room online, in a fit of curios­ity I decided to look through Uni­ver­sity Archives in some hope of actu­ally ascer­tain­ing his res­i­dence location.

The first step was to find out when he was liv­ing on cam­pus. To this I turned upon Ann Rule’s book The Stranger Beside Me, where she notes that “Ted met Stephanie Brooks in the spring of 1967 at McMa­hon Hall.” This was all I needed. With the help of Dun­can Smith, is like the god of obscure mate­ri­als, we located “Hous­ing and Food Ser­vices Office Records, 1963–1968, Acces­sion No. 80–068″ in the spe­cial col­lec­tion of the UW’s library system.

After find­ing this I quickly rushed down to spe­cial col­lec­tions to place a request to view these records, for they were stored off cam­pus. The request was filed on Mon­day, and I was told it would be in by late Tues­day (but they closed when I was in class), and I could view them from Wednes­day onward.

42 painfully slow hours pass…

Finally, Dun­can and I go down to pick up the box for inspec­tion. Sur­pris­ingly, the records were in chrono­log­i­cal order and find­ing the Autumn, Fall, and Spring 1966–1967. We found the entry for “Bundy, Theodore Robert” quite easily–but quickly ran into a prob­lem: only the phone num­ber was listed. How­ever, it appeared that the RAs listed in McMa­hon all had the pat­tern of 3-7xxx, where xxx is their room.

Ted Bundy had 3–7469. That means he lived in 469, right? We were fairly sure, but I man­aged to see in a brochure from 1977 that McMa­hon clus­ters shared two phones. So we went through the direc­tory look­ing for clus­ter­mates to con­firm that this was indeed true.

So what we can con­clude is that Ted Bundy did indeed live in McMa­hon, on the 4^th floor in the South Tower. Not exactly the sure of room, still quite close. This hap­pens to be directly across the hall from where I’m cur­rently stay­ing [as of spring 2007], which is quite awesome(?).

Ted’s fel­low clus­ter­mates included: Ho-Chin Yang, Richard David Mayer, Larry Chapin Fos­ter, Yuku Sae­gusa, and Jean Charles Bel­lour. If any of them are watch­ing, what room did he stay in? :)

In con­clu­sion, I noticed while leav­ing spe­cial col­lec­tions (about an hour after enter­ing), they were sell­ing old pho­tographs for three dol­lars each. I got a really cool one of a church being con­structed and Dun­can got two: one of an old indus­trial engine and the other of a guy next to a huge drill bit of some sort.