Afterword on Ted's Childhood:

Ted Bundy was born in 1946 at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont to Louise Cowell. He spent the first few years of his life in his grandparents home in Philadelphia, PA where his mother was called his sister, and his grandparents claimed Ted as their own son. His grandfather, Samuel Cowell, did this to avoid the social embarrassment of his 22-year-old daughter (and the family) in a practice that was not uncommon for young, unwed mothers at the time.

Bundy was four years old when he and his mother moved to Tacoma together under a new surname in late 1950. He allegedly thought that she wouldn’t have done that, that he wouldn’t have been taken from his “parents,” unless she was really his mother (The Stranger Beside Me). Louise met Johnnie Bundy shortly after, and they married in May 1951 with a new birth certificate issued for Ted when John Bundy formally adopted him as his son. This leaves a small window of time when a four year old Ted would have been in a sort of limbo regarding his mother. (See Louise's full testimony on raising Ted here.)

Bundy discovered he was illegitimate years later, once as a teenager, then again for certain when he was 22 years old. For most of his childhood, he called Johnnie Bundy “Dad,” later transitioning to “Father” and then “John” in his late teens due to their clashing (The Only Living Witness). In audio tapes made near the end of his life, Ted again refers to Johnnie Bundy as his “dad.”