Synopsis
An account of the Los Angeles serial killer and the woman who loved him enough to kill for him describes how Carol Bundy, a lonely nurse and mother of two, helped Douglas Clark in his torture and murder sprees. National ad/promo.
Reviews
In 1980 in L.A. Douglas Clark, with the assistance of his girlfriend Carol Bundy, murdered at least five young women either part of or on the fringes of the demimonde. The son of a career Army officer, Clark traveled around the world as a child, briefly attended a Swiss boarding school and lived in a house in India staffed with a retinue of servants. He developed a deep-seated arrogance which as an adult he fed by having affairs with passive, worshipful, unattractive women. He found an ideal partner in the overweight, visually handicapped Bundy, rejected by her mother and physically and sexually abused by her father. At the trial the self-important Clark sometimes conducted his own defense; he is now on death row. Bundy is serving a life sentence. Freelance writer Farr captures the complex personalities of the two slayers and gives readers an insight into the rootless youths who populate the seedier side of California life.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Grisly dual portrait of serial-killer Douglas Clark and his confederate Carol Bundy, whose murders of young women along the gritty, glitzy streets of Hollywood stunned southern Californians in 1980. Farr, a free-lance journalist, doesn't flinch when confronting her protagonists' depravities--which included decapitation, pedophilia, necrophilia, and sadomasochism. Douglas Clark spent his childhood as an ``Army brat'' constantly shunted about as his officer father was posted around the world. Carol Bundy's early background was marked by an alcoholic father, a physically abusive mother, obesity, and near- blindness. Douglas grew into a sex-obsessed, manipulative misanthrope, while Carol, equally passionate about sex, sought domination by the men in her life. When the two met and began an affair, they fed each other's neuroses, their indulgent, sometimes violent behavior gradually extending from the bedroom to the night streets in search of ``kicks.'' Clark would entice young prostitutes and drifters into his car and, while engaged in sex with them, would shoot them. In some cases, Bundy witnessed the slayings; in others, she actively participated. After Bundy confessed, Clark was arrested and charged with five murders, though the real number evidently was much greater. Bundy was charged with two slayings, and told one police officer, ``Murder is fun''--this from a woman who later confided to an examining psychiatrist that she had always considered Eleanor Roosevelt a role model. Clark is currently on San Quentin's Death Row; Bundy is serving life imprisonment. Farr organizes the tangled, multicharactered material with clarity and a fine sense of pacing, although her prose is merely adequate. (Eight-page photo insert--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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