Title
The title of the novel is an example of irony. The title is an ironic twist on actual words spoken to Ted Bundy by the judge presiding over his trial. Those words are repeated verbatim in the novel when Judge Lambert refers to “the Defendant” as a “bright young man.” The narrator spends much of the book undermining this evaluation as ill-befitting the reality of Bundy’s life. The tweak of this phrase for the title also speaks to the irony of the killer becoming more well-known than his many victims.
The Girlfriend
It is the killer’s old girlfriend who is the first person to tip off police that he may be the suspect in the disappearances of multiple young women in the Pacific Northwest. The irony of this circumstance is directly addressed by the narrator in a conversation with a reporter. “You also said he’s personable and bright…with a girlfriend and many friends who believe he is innocent. But his girlfriend was the one who called the tip line on him.” This aspect also mirrors the real-life facts of the case. It really was Bundy’s girlfriend who was responsible for putting him on the radar of law enforcement.
Journalistic Integrity
That very same reporter also undergoes his own ironic transformation. The narrator accusingly reminds the journalist that he originally “said the person who did what he did to Denise deserved to burn.” This personal opinion comes to seem hypocritically ironic after the journalist begins to take a personal interest in the case that includes actual communication with the defendant. This communication subtly infuses the ironic alteration of the reporter’s originally hardened dismissal of the accused killer’s right to avoid death by conflagration.
This Charming Man
During the trial, young female “groupies” attended the trial in the courtroom with the intent of catching the defendant’s attention and flirting with him. This may seem a fictional invention for the novel, but it is steeped entirely in historical fact. That the judge himself fell under the spell of Bundy’s charm is also factually accurate as proven by his exceptionally positive characterization of the killer even while in the process of sentencing him to death. The greatest irony of the Bundy story for many, especially the narrator, is that such a vicious psychopath could so easily charm unsuspecting victims. The narrator seeks to undo this perspective with her persistent insistence that his charm is vastly overstated. This aspect of the novel speaks directly to the greatest irony of the story: the manner in which Bundy lured most of his victims to their doom absolutely required that he be capable of charming them since force was not engaged until after he had already gotten them alone.
Modus Operandi
For Bundy himself, the ultimate irony of his story is that the murders for which he was finally convicted go completely against what had been his standard operating procedure throughout his serial killing spree. Bundy first came to attention in the Pacific Northwest as a potential suspect in a string of disappearances of young women who were abducted one at a time and taken to a remote location to be murdered. This manner of conducting his crimes allowed him to go undetected for years. It is therefore the supreme irony that he was captured, tried, convicted, and eventually put to death for committing a crime bearing absolutely no resemblance to any murders he had ever previously committed: multiple victims within a single location in which he left surviving witnesses.
