Ted Bundy’s cousin dishes on the dark family history that made a serial killer

Edna Cowell Martin was at work processing king crab legs in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in late 1975 when she got a long-distance phone call from her brother.

John told Edna the good news that an arrest in Utah led authorities to believe they’d caught the psycho who’d been kidnapping and killing female college students in Seattle the previous year.

The bad news?  The suspect was the Bundy cousin with whom Edna and John spent their childhoods.

“It’s Ted,” John said.

It was impossible for Edna to believe, that a man who admitted to raping, torturing, and killing (sometimes beheading) more than 30 women in Washington, Colorado and Utah had been the gentle boy idling his summers away with Edna and John, fishing and swimming and chasing sand crabs on Puget Sound.

“These were idyllic days, golden-hued and carefree, and Ted was a big part of them,” Edna writes (with Megan Atkinson) in “Dark Tide: Growing Up With Ted Bundy” (Permuted Press, July 23).

In 1950, Louise Cowell and her 4-year-old son Ted moved from Philadelphia to Tacoma to escape the scandal of Louise’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy with Ted.  Stories abound that Louise’s own father may have impregnated her, but while that rumor was never proven Ted’s birth father was never made clear.

“I know that always bothered him,” Edna writes.  “I believe it even angered him.”

Louise moved to the Pacific Northwest to live with her extended Cowell family, meaning Ted grew up close with cousins Edna and John.

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When Louise married Johnie Bundy, Ted took his step-father’s last name, ultimately making the moniker synonymous with murder.

Miserably considering himself a self-proclaimed “bastard,” Ted Bundy was coddled by his mother and told he was special, a characterization he took to heart.

“He wouldn’t settle for a small life,” Edna writes.  “Ted Bundy was going to be somebody.”

Throughout her childhood Edna Cowell saw her cousin Ted as a charming, cheerful companion, and when she became a college student at the University of Washington in the early 1970s she welcomed his visits.  Ted would make Edna and friends spaghetti for dinner and become enthusiastically involved in their conversations.

He was a good listener, someone genuinely interested in what others had to say.

“Ted knew how to make a person feel special,” Edna writes.  “Later on, he learned he could use this skill to his terrible advantage.”

Edna recalls few instances when Ted acted anything but normal.  But boating once near the Cowell’s waterfront cabin in Longbranch, when a playful water skier splashed Ted and Edna with spray he became apoplectic with fury.

“Ted had been the butt of a joke.  He didn’t like that at all.”

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In her college years Ted once took Edna out dancing, but ultimately Edna realized her older cousin wasn’t really interested in boogeying.

Rather, Edna now sees, Ted was scouring the nightclub, studying the women there with “hunting eyes.”

And when another time Ted slow-danced with one of Edna’s friends, his inner demons were hard to miss.

“Ted’s jaw was clenched tight, and his usually blue eyes appeared coal black.  It was as if he was someplace else — a completely different universe . . . It wasn’t Ted.  His countenance was tense.  Mean.”

During Edna’s college years Seattle was haunted by a man attacking, raping, and killing women, but Ted Bundy was no suspect.

Rather he was a rising star in local politics, working on crime prevention in the city and justice planning for the county, ironically having expressed a particular interest in studying “violent assaults against women.”

Edna considered Ted a champion of women, so even when police announced the serial killer likely drove a tan Volkswagen Beetle like Ted’s, Edna and John never considered their cousin a suspect.

Volkswagen Beetles were everywhere and Ted was just Ted.

The cousins never wavered even when authorities further stated the suspected culprit had introduced himself to various victims as “Ted.”

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So confident were Edna and John in Ted’s innocence that they just teased their cousin about the possibility he was the murderous psychopath tormenting Seattle.

“A good sport, Ted just smiled.”

For unknown reasons the serial killings of Seattle women stopped after three years, a timeline that would later be matched to Ted Bundy’s stint living in the city and his subsequent departure for law school in Utah.

When similar murders of single women began happening in Utah and Colorado, it became harder to scoff at the idea of Ted’s guilt.

After authorities in Utah arrested Ted for attempted kidnapping, a lack of evidence meant he was released on personal recognizance.

He returned to Seattle to go out with Edna one last time, at which point the Cowell cousin could no longer dispute reality.

When one of Edna’s friends asked if he was the man whose name had recently been filling the newspapers, Ted puffed up.

“Yes, I’m the Ted Bundy,” he crowed.

Later that night Edna found her cousin alone on a busy street corner, spinning in place with his arms spread wide, repeating again and again to a creeped-out crowd that “I’m Ted Bundy, I’m Ted Bundy, I’m Ted Bundy.”

It was the last time Edna Cowell would see her cousin, but no longer had she any doubts.

“My cousin, who was more like a brother.  My teaser and protector and confidant.  My friend.  He’d done it.  All of it.”

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