MAYS LANDING, N.J. -- Executed serial sex killer Ted Bundy's alleged admission that he killed two college students in New Jersey five years before his first known murder was not direct or specific enough to allow the case to be closed immediately, a prosecutor said Thursday.
Any conclusion that Bundy did indeed kill two 19-year-old women in Somers Point, N.J., in 1969, would push back the known start of Bundy's string of slayings. Authorities had believed Bundy's first murder occurred in 1974 in Washington state.
Atlantic County Prosecutor Jeffrey Blitz said he is skeptical about the information provided in a telephone call Thursday with Arthur Norman, a forensic psychologist in Portland, Ore.
'I think this should be crystal clear,' Blitz said. 'Based on the interview today, it is Norman's conclusion that Bundy killed these girls. Bundy did not specifically say that he did, in the terms of 'I killed these two people.'
'I did not find the information particularly helpful, only because it is not specific, some of it is drawn on Dr. Norman's conclusion, and, at least at the present time, it is not subject to corroboration,' Blitz said.
Norman worked with Bundy on his appeals in 1986 and 1987 at Florida State Prison. Bundy, 42, was executed on Tuesday in Starke, Fla., for the murder of a 12-year-old girl, one of between 28 and 50 killings to which he has been linked or in which he is suspected.
Blitz said Norman reported that Bundy told him 'that he was in this area ... in the spring of 1969 and that he picked up two girls in the shore area.'
'Dr. Norman advised me that Bundy did not say that he killed anybody in this area,' the prosecutor said. 'What Dr. Norman told me is that it is his conclusion, as a psychologist dealing with Bundy, that when Bundy was referring to these two girls that he 'picked up,' as he says, that he meant he killed them.'
Norman said in a telephone interview with United Press International that Blitz had not revealed all the specifics he had provided from Bundy's discussions.
'Either Ted was playing games with me, or he was not playing games with me and my interpretation was incorrect of what he said, or he was not playing games with me and my interpretation was right on and correct,' Norman said. 'I personally have no reason to believe that he was lying.'
Norman said he did not contact New Jersey authorities for more than two years after Bundy's Oct. 30, 1986, revelation because the patient-doctor privilege remained in force as long as Bundy lived.
Authorities have never solved the May 30, 1969, murders of Elizabeth Perry of Camp Hill, Pa., and Susan Davis of Excelsior, Minn., both students at the now-defunct Monticello Junior College in Godfrey, Ill.
Their bodies, one clothed and one unclothed, were found under leaves near the Garden State Parkway on June 2, 1969. Both women both suffered multiple stab wounds. Authorities have never revealed whether the women were sexually molested.
Perry and Davis, who were returning from a vacation in Ocean City, were last seen at a Somers Point diner, where witnesses said they left with a young male hitchiker.
A composite sketch of the hitchhiker circulated at the time depicts a white male with dark wavy hair that can be said to resemble Bundy.
Blitz said Bundy was never a suspect in the Perry-Davis murders.
