{"id":2299,"date":"2010-02-19T00:05:34","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T07:05:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2010\/02\/bundys-death-bug\/"},"modified":"2010-02-21T10:42:59","modified_gmt":"2010-02-21T17:42:59","slug":"bundys-death-bug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2010\/02\/19\/bundys-death-bug\/","title":{"rendered":"Bundy’s Death Bug"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Washington Post<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Ted Bundy’s VW goes on display at D.C. crime museum, but should it?<\/strong><\/font>
\nBy Philip Kennicott
\nFriday, February 19, 2010; C03
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

Even under a thin, black shroud, the lines of a vintage ’68 Volkswagen Beetle were unmistakable.<\/p>\n

And when the cloth came off, at a bizarre unveiling ceremony Thursday at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, it took work to be surprised by what was underneath it: an unprepossessing tan Beetle, with a sunroof, looking a little worse for wear with touches of rust, fading paint and a few missing pieces of metal trim.<\/p>\n

The tires looked as if they still had a few thousand good miles in them. Inside the cab, the interior had that quintessential old Bug smell — like burning latex — as if the rubber flooring was always smoking a little from the heat underneath.<\/p>\n

But this wasn’t any Beetle. This was Ted Bundy’s Beetle, the car into which he lured his victims and in which he killed many of them during a terrifying serial killing spree in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

“This was kind of like a death wagon,” said Wyndell C. Watkins Sr., a retired D.C. police deputy chief, who was on hand to help introduce the latest iconic celebrity murder object joining Washington’s museum collections.<\/p>\n

The car has been stored in a private collection owned by New York-based Arthur Nash, who owns many of the most grisly objects on display in the museum’s main exhibition. Also from the Nash collection: clown and serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s painter’s box, on display in a room dealing with the unseemly “murderabilia” trade.<\/p>\n

Bundy’s VW replaces the 1933 Essex-Terraplane car used as a getaway vehicle by John Dillinger. With Dillinger’s car shipped off to the Southwest terminal of Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, where it will help present the capital region’s best face to visitors, the crime museum needed a marquee object to grace its front lobby.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Of all of the notorious cars in the world — the white Ford Bronco that O.J. Simpson rode in, the D.C. snipers’ shabby Chevy Caprice retrofitted with gun placements — Bundy’s Bug may be the most notorious because it was so intimately connected to its owner’s crimes. Bundy killed\u00a0in this car<\/em>\u00a0is the frisson you’re supposed to feel when looking at something that was not just a tool, but a container for death.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>[ click to read full article at The Washington Post<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Washington Post Ted Bundy’s VW goes on display at D.C. crime museum, but should it? By Philip Kennicott Friday, February 19, 2010; C03 Even under a thin, black shroud, the lines of a vintage ’68 Volkswagen Beetle were unmistakable. And when the cloth came off, at a bizarre unveiling ceremony Thursday at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}