Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, the new Netflix movie about serial killer
Ted Bundy, is pretty upsetting.
It explores how Bundy fooled many of the people around him with his charm and good looks,
until all of his evildoing caught up with him.
But here are some things the Ted Bundy movie gets wrong.
A lot of what you see in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is a condensed version
of real-life events.
The fictionalized version of Bundy's capture and trial isn't all that far off from the
truth — which makes sense, considering director Joe Berlinger was already extremely familiar
with all the gory details.
It's actually his second Ted Bundy film: He also directed Conversations with a Killer:
The Ted Bundy Tapes, a Netflix documentary based on actual recordings of Bundy's confessions.
"Creating an identity is... is not terribly difficult to do at all."
Since life doesn't move along at a brisk and tidy pace, any film based on a true story
inevitably combines, embellishes, or pares down real events.
For example: In Extremely Wicked, Bundy is arrested for the first time after a bag of
suspicious evidence is found in the backseat of his car.
His arrest is immediately followed by an interrogation, and then a scene in which Carol DaRonch picks
him out of a police lineup.
It feels like the whole process lasts for only a few days.
But in actuality, charging Bundy was a much longer process.
He was indeed pulled over in August 1975 when officers found handcuffs and other suspicious
objects in his car.
But they actually let him go because they didn't have enough evidence to hold him.
It wasn't until Bundy sold his car the following month that police got what they needed to
charge him with a crime.
Authorities seized the car from the buyer and found strands of hair that linked him
to some of the missing women they were investigating.
DaRonch didn't actually pick him out of a lineup until October 1975.
"When Ted was brought in for a lineup, he had changed his appearance completely from
a few days before."
In Extremely Wicked, there's an initial trial for the aggravated kidnapping of Carol DaRonch,
followed by an epic trial for the Florida State University murders and attacks.
That trial takes place in Miami, and it ends with a conviction and a death sentence.
But the real Bundy actually was put on trial three times, not just two.
Following a 1979 trial for the Florida State University murders and attacks, a separate
trial in 1980 revolved around the murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, who was reportedly
strangled a month after Bundy's murderous crime spree at Florida State University.
During the third trial, Bundy pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but it didn't
help.
The jury returned a guilty verdict, and he received a second death sentence.
It's clear why Extremely Wicked omitted that third trial: It would've felt redundant.
But plenty of material from the final trial makes for fascinating viewing, and the filmmakers
folded its major events into the trial we saw.
That outlandish marriage proposal to a witness in open court?
It actually happened at the Leach trial in Orlando, not in Miami.
And yes, that act made the wedding legal.
"Will you marry me?"
"Your honor..."
"Yes!"
Ted Bundy and the woman he eventually married, Carole Ann Boone, obviously had plenty of
conversations that nobody ever actually heard, so any dialogue between them in Extremely
Wicked is highly fictionalized, if not completely made up.
The timing of Boone's pregnancy in the film doesn't quite align with the facts, either.
Boone became pregnant during conjugal visits she made after he was convicted, not before.
Boone divorced Bundy in 1986 and moved back to Washington with the couple's daughter and
a son from a previous marriage.
Some of Boone's acquaintances have said she felt betrayed by Bundy's eventual confessions.
According to People, Boone stopped visiting Bundy during the last two years of his life.
That's an understandable move, since it wasn't just about her anymore by that point, she
also had a young daughter to protect.
One scene near the end of the film is completely made up.
When Elizabeth Kloepfer visits Bundy prior to his execution, she shows him a photograph
of the decapitated corpse of one of his victims.
"What happened to her head?"
Bundy tries selling her on some lame excuse, but she's not having it.
So then he quite literally spells it out for her and for us writing "HACKSAW" in the foggy
glass that separates them.
It's a shocking, emotional moment.
But it didn't really happen.
According to Cosmopolitan, there's no evidence that Kloepfer ever visited Bundy before his
execution.
Director Joe Berlinger even admits the scene is a total fabrication.
What really happened is rather anticlimactic in comparison.
Bundy's "confession" wasn't really a confession at all, and he didn't make it in person.
After his arrest in Florida, he reportedly told Kloepfer over the telephone that he was
driven by, quote, "a force."
According to Vanity Fair, he told her:
"I just couldn’t contain it.
I’ve fought it for a long, long time.
[...] It got too strong."
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is a film that generally keeps the cliches
to a minimum… but one scene stands out for some alarmingly on-the-nose foreshadowing.
Bundy and Kloepfer find themselves at a dog adoption center… and you'll never guess
what happens next.
[Just a serial killer spookin a dog]
This definitely didn't happen in real life.
In an interview with Esquire, director Joe Berlinger says he included the scene because,
quote, "animals know."
He added:
"When the dog did not get along with Bundy, that's a clue, but it's not like finding a
knife.
I did my own interpretation of having some clues along the way."
In the film, Elizabeth Kloepfer is comforted by her coworker Jerry, portrayed by Haley
Joel Osment.
Jerry eventually becomes Liz's protector and confidant, and he tries to help her see the
truth about her monstrous ex-boyfriend.
But according to Oxygen, Jerry isn't a real person at best, he's a composite of several
people she knew.
It's likely that he's based on someone named Hank, a man Kloepfer was romantically involved
with for awhile.
In her memoir, Kloepfer says she met Hank at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, writing:
"Although we didn't have a lot in common other than our recovery from alcoholism, he made
me feel safe.
He began to stay with me even at night."
Hank reportedly had a few altercations with Bundy over the telephone, much like the one
we see between Bundy and Jerry in the film:
"Can you tell her that I love her?"
Kloepfer's continued correspondence with Bundy evidently became a point of contention between
her and Hank, although no one really knows how their relationship panned out.
In one scene in Extremely Wicked, Bundy gives Kloepfer a copy of Papillion, an autobiographical
novel by Henri Charrière about a man who's been falsely convicted of murder.
Bundy is highly insistent that she read the book.
"It's about this guy who's wrongfully convicted of a terrible, terrible crime and he gets
sentenced to life, but he didn't do it."
Eventually, Bundy manages to give her a copy of the book as a gift, and at one point she's
even seen reading it.
According to Esquire, there's no mention of Papillon in Kloepfer's memoir, and the storyline
was likely invented to provide some more foreshadowing.
John Malkovich plays Judge Edward D. Cowart, a character who's a little bit over-the-top:
He calls Bundy nicknames, compliments his attire, and tells him he's good at lawyering.
It turns out the real-life Cowart actually was a little bit over-the-top, too.
According to USA Today, a lot of Malkovich's dialogue actually comes directly from court
records, including the odd praise he lavished upon Bundy toward the end of the trial:
"You'd have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of
me, but you went a different way, partner."
The film's name also comes from something Cowart said during Bundy's second trial, when
he characterized Bundy's crimes as:
"...extremely wicked, shockingly evil, vile and the product of a design to inflict a high
degree of pain."
But not everything Malkovich says comes directly from court documents.
He reportedly improvised a line or two.
For example, at one point, he admonishes court spectators after they cheer for Ted Bundy:
"You are not waiting for the 'Flipper and Friends' show at SeaWorld.
It is a capital murder case."
Well, at least it sounds like something Cowart might have said, so at least Malkovich knew
the character he was playing.
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile skims past a lot of Ted Bundy and Elizabeth
Kloepfer's life together.
Based on the film, their relationship looks like rather smooth sailing: Birthday parties,
snowball fights, bike-riding lessons with Kloepfer's daughter… the stuff movie montages
are made of.
"How the heck did you get so smart?"
"I get it from my mom."
"You do, don't you?"
What we don't see is the bad stuff, and there was reportedly plenty of it.
According to Newsweek, Bundy was verbally and emotionally abusive.
Kloepfer's out-of-print 1981 memoir The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, written under
the pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall, paints a far bleaker picture of their relationship.
Kloepfer says he'd sometimes lock her out of the house, and he once threatened to break
her neck after she confronted him about some items that he'd stolen.
He reportedly physically abused her once, too.
She writes:
"I was drunk.
I couldn't remember what we were arguing about but I kept telling Ted to 'go ahead and hit
me.
Go ahead!'
Finally he slapped me."
However, she also denied that he was a violent person:
"When we argued he was always calm and reasonable.
[…] I could count on the fingers of one hand the times that Ted had lost his temper
since I'd known him."
But Bundy reportedly did try to kill Kloepfer once, and he even admitted it to her after
he was arrested.
According to E! News, Bundy left her sleeping on a hide-a-bed in front of the fireplace
one night after she'd been drinking.
Before slipping out, he closed the damper and put a towel under the crack in the door.
Kloepfer could've died from smoke inhalation, but she woke up coughing and managed to clear
the smoke and put out the fire.
In Extremely Wicked, Elizabeth Kloepfer tells Bundy that she's the one who called the police
and reported him, because of his physical resemblance to a police sketch, and the fact
that he drove a Volkswagen; the same kind of car the suspect drove, according to eyewitnesses.
"I'm the one who gave your name to the police."
In reality, Kloepfer had much more than that to go on.
According to Esquire, Kloepfer found a number of items that potentially linked him to the
recent murders and disappearances in Seattle.
For example, she found plaster of Paris in one of Bundy's desk drawers.
In her 1981 memoir, Kloepfer wrote:
"Now I keep thinking about the cast the guy at Lake Sammamish was wearing—what a perfect
weapon it would make for clubbing someone on the head."
She also reportedly discovered a hatchet tucked away inside his car.
In The Ted Bundy Tapes, Kloepfer claimed she'd found a few pairs of women's underwear and
a bowl full of other people's keys inside Bundy's apartment.
In Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, Kloepfer also claimed Bundy kept a knife in the glove
box of her car, revealing:
"Sometimes it was there; sometimes it was gone."
According to PopSugar, actor Zac Efron wore fake teeth in order to play Ted Bundy, with
director Joe Berlinger telling the website:
"The only thing we did is we put in false lower teeth to match Bundy's because bite
mark evidence plays a role in how he was ultimately convicted."
However, modern forensic science has more-or-less rejected bite mark evidence.
In fact, a forensic scientist told Oxygen:
"To say that Ted Bundy is the source of this bite mark based only on a comparison of his
teeth to the impression is a scientifically impossible statement to make."
At any rate, Extremely Wicked gets that part of the story correct: The jury was very much
swayed by the bite mark evidence.
What the film gets wrong is the scene in which Bundy cross-examines Richard Souviron, the
forensic odontologist who provided the bite mark testimony.
It was actually Bundy's defense attorney Ed Harvey who tried to discredit Souviron, asking:
"Analyzing bite marks is part art and part science, isn't it?"
Souviron reportedly replied, quote, "I think that's a fair statement."
That "junk science" may have been instrumental in convicting one of the world's most notorious
serial killers, but it doesn't make it any less of a discredited practice today.
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Grunge videos about your favorite movies are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one!