Claim: Ted Bundy received three death sentences for the Florida homicides.

Theodore Robert Bundy -LRB- born Theodore Robert Cowell ; November 24 , 1946 -- January 24 , 1989 -RRB- 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 . Shortly before his execution -- after more than a decade of denials -- he confessed to 30 homicides committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978 . The true victim count remains unknown , and could be much higher .   Bundy was regarded by many of his young female victims as handsome and charismatic , traits that he exploited to win their trust . He typically approached them in public places , feigning injury or disability , or impersonating an authority figure , before overpowering and assaulting them at more secluded locations . 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 . He decapitated at least 12 of his victims , and kept some of the severed heads in his apartment for a period of time as mementos . On a few occasions , he simply broke into dwellings at night and bludgeoned his victims as they slept .   Initially incarcerated in Utah in 1975 for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault , Bundy became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in multiple states . 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 . He received three death sentences in two separate trials for the Florida homicides .   Bundy died in the electric chair at Raiford Prison in Starke , Florida , on January 24 , 1989 . Biographer Ann Rule described him 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 '' . 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 , agreed : `` Ted '' , she wrote , `` was the very definition of heartless evil . ''