Theodore Robert Bundy was an American serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, burglar and necrophile who assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. Take a look below for 30 more interesting and terrifying facts about Theodore Robert Bundy.

1. Shortly before his execution and after more than a decade of denials, he confessed to 30 homicides that he committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978.

2. The true number of victims is unknown and possibly higher than what is reported.

3. Many of Bundy’s young female victims regarded him as a handsome and charismatic, which were traits that he exploited to win their trust.

4. He would typically approach them in public places, feigning injury or disability, or impersonating an authority figure, before overpowering and assaulting them at more secluded locations.

5. He sometimes revisited his secondary crime scenes for hours at a time, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses until putrefaction and destruction by wild animals made further interaction impossible.

6. He decapitated at least 12 of his victims, and for a period time, he kept some of the severed heads as mementos in his apartment.

7. On a few occasions, he simply broke into dwellings at night and bludgeoned his victims as they slept.

8. In 1975, Bundy was jailed for the first time when he was incarcerated in Utah for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault.

9. He then became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in multiple states.

10. Facing murder charges in Colorado, he engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults, including three murders, before his ultimate recapture in Florida in 1978.

11. For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two separate trials.

12. Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989.

13. Biographer Ann Rule described Bundy as, “a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human’s pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after.”

14. He once called himself, “the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet;” Attorney Polly Nelson – a member of his last defense team – wrote: “Ted was the very definition of heartless evil.”

15. His father’s identity has never been determined with certainty.

16. His birth certificate assigns paternity to a salesman and Air Force veteran named Lloyd Marshall, but Louise later claimed that she had been seduced by a “sailor” whose name may have been Jack Worthington.

17. Years later, investigators would find no record of anyone by that name in Navy or Merchant Marine archives.

18. Some family members expressed suspicions that Bundy might have been fathered by Louise’s own violent, abusive father, Samuel Cowell, but no material evidence has ever been cited to support or refute this.

19. After graduating from high school in 1965, Bundy spent a year at the University of Puget Sound before transferring to the University of Washington in 1966 to study Chinese.

20. In 1967, he became romantically involved with a UW classmate who is identified in Bundy biographies by several pseudonyms, most commonly Stephanie Brooks.

21. In the early 1968, he dropped out of college and worked at a series of minimum-wage jobs.

22. He volunteered at the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign and in August attended the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami as a Rockefeller delegate.

23. Shortly thereafter, Brooks ended their relationship and returned to her family home in California, frustrated by what she described as Bundy’s immaturity and lack of ambition.

24. Psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis would later pinpoint this crisis as “probably the pivotal time in his development.”

25. Devastated by Brooks’ rejection, Bundy traveled to Colorado and then farther east, visiting relatives in Arkansas and Philadelphia and enrolling for one semester at Temple University.

26. It was at this time, in early 1969, Rule believes, that Bundy visited the office of birth records in Burlington and confirmed his true parentage.

27. There is no consensus on when or where Bundy began killing women. He told different stories to different people, and refused to divulge the specifics of his earliest crimes, even as he confessed in graphic detail to dozens of later murders in the days preceding his execution.

28. He told Nelson that he attempted his first kidnapping in 1969 in Ocean City, New Jersey, but didn’t kill anyone until sometime in 1971 in Seattle.

29. Circumstantial evidence suggests that he abducted and killed 8 year old Ann Marie Burr of Tacoma in 1961 when he was 14, an allegation he denied repeatedly.

30. His earliest documented homicides were committed in 1974, when he was 27 years old.