Poor Richard B

Here’s the video, press play, here’s the past reanimated—a man, middle-aged, sitting hunched in a trailer. Ted Bundy’s younger brother. 

Here’s six minutes of Ted Bundy’s younger and only brother talking about their childhood together, how much he looked up to his brother. Long unwashed white hair. Crumpled t-shirt. This is years ago and he’s dead now but at the moment he’s talking, living out of a trailer, he explains, because he can’t bear to settle anywhere, believing people will soon realize who he is, what he’s related to by blood. He can’t bear to be near people because of the part of him that still hurts, having loved under the spell of deceit a killer of women. 

He wipes a hand down his face but the features remain. He reaches to pet a dog off-camera. 

The man vanishes, voice remains. Photographs now of Bundy camping with his younger brother, Bundy smiling with arm around the boy. Often he’d visit Ted wherever he was living, the voice relates, a week or so. Seattle, Utah. Once Ted cut one of the visits short and this much older version of this younger brother explained how the boy had been deeply hurt by that, bewildered. No reason given. No effort to apologize. In hindsight he believed his older brother may have simply been feeling an unbearable “urge to kill again.” 

The voice returns from photographs and blends with the face and shoulders and gesturing hands of its man again. He’s lived out of an R.V. for a decade, he says, jobless. Alone except for his pet cat (so correction—not a dog he reached for earlier, but a cat). It’s a life, so he’s living it. Can spend days simply sitting in the camper in a depressive haze, hardly able to think, so why try? A killer and rapist and torturer of young women; looked up to that; desired approval from that. The voice goes silent and leaves a face looking down at its hands. He’ll travel to a new town soon, a park on its outskirts where no one will bother him. He’ll walk in the woods if his legs will let him. But in the meantime, the last ten seconds of his life on camera—cat in his lap purring and his hands released from the story he’s finished telling, to smooth a path from head to  neck to hindquarters, cat the very image of trust and comfort. End of video. Man gone. On to the next one.