Oxygen’s “Violent Minds: Killers on Tape” (2023) is a crime docuseries that documents Dr. Al Carlisle’s journey and experiences in conducting one of the most extensive research on some of America’s most notorious serial killers in the 1970s, including Ted Bundy, Manny Cortez, Arthur G. Bishop, and the Hi-Fi Killers. The series features collections of raw audio recordings, written accounts, and diary entries from Dr. Carlisle’s actual interviews of these criminals at the Utah State Prison. The pilot episode documents the story of the inception of perhaps one of the most well-known serial killers to date, Theodore ‘Ted’ Bundy. It states that Dr. Carlisle’s collection consists of more than 650 hours of unheard tapes, which helped him develop his theory of how serial killers can pass as very normal everyday persons but at the same time harbor a dark addiction to killing. The ultimate goal of his research, as he states in the documentary, was to explore the factors that contributed to the development of a ‘hostile and violent mind.’ While studying at Utah State University, Dr. Carlisle was fascinated by Charles Manson, which drove him to study psychology, especially the field of psychology that dealt with violent offenders.
Spoilers Ahead
Ted Bundy: The Evaluation
After his graduation, Dr. Carlisle was hired as a psychologist at the Utah State Prison, along with Dr. Allan Roe. Their job was to interview inmates, and on occasion, when a judge was unable to come to a conclusion about how to sentence an offender, they would place the subject on a 90-day evaluation program, to discern the psychological and moral dimensions of their mind. The court would then rely on Dr. Carlisle’s report to pass the final sentencing decision, whether to charge the offender with prison time or to grant probation. He became acquainted with Ted Bundy on one such program at Utah State Prison after Bundy was charged in a kidnapping case in 1975.
The world had yet to know the man that Ted Bundy was when he was arrested in 1975 by a state trooper who noticed his car, a Volkswagen Beetle, driving slowly through a neighborhood in Utah with no lights on. Being suspicious, the trooper makes a traffic stop on the car and finds several burglary tools, a ski mask, and a crowbar in it, and subsequently apprehends Bundy. Following this, Carol DaRonch, a 19-year-old girl whom Bundy had attempted to kidnap in 1974, positively identified him as her kidnapper. Bundy was found guilty of aggravated kidnapping on March 1, 1976, which marked his first conviction. Prior to his arrest, Bundy was known among his acquaintances as a well-educated law student with no criminal affiliations whatsoever. Owing to his affiliation with the Mormon Church and his well-spoken attitude, there were several accusations that the authorities had apprehended the wrong man, as Ted Bundy did not fit the profile of a man capable of abducting a young woman. Therefore, the judge passed on the case to the 90-day program, where Dr. Carlisle was tasked with determining whether Bundy had a violent streak to his nature and whether he had the capacity to be violent in the future if released into the world. One of the first character traits of Bundy that Dr. Carlisle noted was that he was unusually ‘cheerful’ for a man being tried for a serious crime, almost as if he was certain that he would be set free.
According to Dr. Carlisle’s files, Ted had approached him with the intention of getting to know the person who would finally release him into society, oblivious to the fact that Doc’s review was not to be confined merely to the interviews that he conducted. Doc administered several psychological tests to evaluate Bundy’s mental abilities, including the Rorschach test, an IQ test, and a personality test, among others. Bundy’s IQ came up to be in the superior range, which Dr. Carlisle noted would contribute to a certain level of difficulty in his evaluation as Bundy understood the line of questioning and was very much equipped to manipulate his way out of tricky situations. But an interesting fact about him, documented by Doc (Dr. Carlisle) in his files, was that he had scored significantly low on the personality test, which indicated that simple human emotions like anxiety, anger, and depression were practically non-existent in his psyche, which appeared to be unusual, especially for a person spending time in prison for a serious crime, as repeated contemplations about a turbulent future could not possibly allow a sane individual to score as low as Bundy in the personality test. This led Doc to settle on two contrasting inferences: either Ted was, in fact, telling the truth and was free of any mental turmoil, or he was exceptionally good at lying about his mental state. It was later determined that Bundy was, in fact, manipulating Dr. Carlisle’s assessment, and this pushed him to resort to other, more aggressive measures to examine the character of the suspect. He began to talk to Bundy’s family and old acquaintances, including his mother, his previous girlfriends, and his neighbors, an assessment that would finally lead Carlisle to conclude that Bundy had majorly violent tendencies that might, in the future, motivate him to commit more serious crimes if he were released on probation.
‘Violent Minds: Killers On Tape’ Season 1: Ending Explained – The Report Of Dr. Carlisle
While conducting the telephonic interviews of Bundy’s acquaintances, Dr. Carlisle noted the account of one of Ted’s previous lovers, Sandy, who had described their affair as short-lived and rather violent. She narrates that he had once playfully tried to drown her while on a date and described their moment of intercourse as an emotionless affair, with Bundy trying to choke her into submission, all while keeping himself in a controlling position. This is the moment, according to Doc, that spurred him to begin analyzing Bundy, not just as a suspect but as someone who was capable of real violence. Another old acquaintance of Bundy, Sybil Ferris, described him as a very ‘peculiar’ boy, narrating how he used to borrow her car at night and would go out for hours without notice, which scared her as, at the time, she thought he might have been involved in running drugs. These details helped Doc realize that Ted had a secret life, one he had kept hidden from everyone around him.
There were several other reports that Bundy may have been involved in a string of homicides around Lake Sammamish State Park, Washington, after an investigation was launched by the police in 1974 following the disappearance of two young women, Denise Naslund and Janice Ott, in the area. There were around seven eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen someone matching the description of Ted Bundy in the area at the time of the disappearances. Although Doc was aware of these allegations against him, he could not use any of them, as there was no proof tying him to the crimes. At one point towards the end of Doc’s evaluation, Ted asked him point-blank whether he believed that he had killed the girls, to which Doc could not provide a legally appropriate answer but replied by saying he was unaware of the facts of the crime, but if he had committed it, he was sure to repeat it.
Dr. Carlisle submitted his report of the 90-day evaluation of Ted Bundy to the court on June 14, 1976, clearly stating his concerns with the violent tendencies of Bundy that he had so closely observed and documented in his research, and Bundy was convicted for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch on June 30 based on his findings. After Doc’s findings were presented to the court, Bundy finally revealed his anger and frustration, as he was recorded stating, with tears in his eyes, that the report was ‘written to fit the crime’ and was not a true account of his character. Bundy’s outburst in open court points to the fact that while Bundy was convinced that he had Carlisle under his control, it was, in fact, not true. After he had begun serving his sentence for the kidnapping charge, the authorities investigated him again for the murder of Caryn Campbell, a Michigan nurse, having found new evidence in the case. At the trial, Bundy opted to represent himself, which would give him access to the public law library of the courthouse, an opportunity he would capitalize on. Keeping a close watch on the guards, he waited for the perfect opportunity to escape during the recess of the hearing and jumped out of the second-story window of the law library. Ted Bundy had escaped, putting the life of Dr. Carlisle at great risk. Bundy would be coming to exact his vengeance on the man who had made his assessment and had sealed his fate. The episode ends with Doc receiving a call from Bundy after he has escaped, implying that Bundy has every intention of maintaining some sort of twisted power play with him, maybe even planning to harm him physically.