A guitarist who snatched an 18-year-old Bobby-Ann McLeod at the bus stop he was obsessed with murders and serial killers, and one in particular – Ted Bundy.
Cody Ecland grabbed Miss McLeod from a bus stop in the League, Plymouth last November, twice hit her on the head with a clawed hammer before shoving her into his car.
He later killed her to death in a remote parking lot on Dartmoor.
Three days after the murder, Ecland surrendered, and investigators found more than 3,000 images of the bodies of the victims, murder weapons and blood-stained clothing.
Ecland studied the lives of famous serial killers, but his decision to attack Miss McLeod with a hammer was strikingly similar to the way the American killer Bundy acted.
Cody Eckland on the dock at the Plymouth Crown Court (Elizabeth Cook / Pennsylvania)
(PA wire)
Bundy has confessed to killing 30 women in different states OregonUtah, Florida, Coloradoand Idaho since the 1970s.
The real figure could be much higher.
It focused on young women who usually lived on their own either in the early stages of their careers or as college students.
Bundy usually approached them in public and imitated disability to get them to help him with a task such as picking up something from his car.
He knocked them unconscious with a hammer or other blunt weapon before moving them to a secret location where he raped and strangled them.
He often returned to their bodies, sometimes washed them, applied make-up and sexually assaulted their corpses.
In some cases, he beheaded corpses and kept heads in his apartment.
He twice managed to escape prison, and in February 1978 he was repulsed.
A drone view of Bovisand, outside Plymouth, where Bobby Ann’s body was found (Devon and Cornwall Police, Pennsylvania)
The Bundy case captured the attention of the American public, and his trial was one of the first to be broadcast live on television.
After a lengthy litigation and numerous arrests, Bundy was finally executed in an electric chair in January 1989.
Anne Ruhl, one of Bundy’s many biographers, described him as “a sadistic sociopath who enjoyed another person’s pain and control over his victims until death and even after.”
Like Bundy, despite having surrendered and confessed to his crime, detectives working on the case say Ecland has never shown the slightest remorse for Miss McLeod’s murder.
