"I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet"
About this Quote
A line like this is less confession than performance: Bundy auditioning for the role he wanted the world to assign him. The profanity and swagger do the heavy lifting. It compresses a complicated reality into a clean, marketable identity - not just remorseless, but singularly, competitively remorseless. "Most" turns cruelty into a leaderboard. "You'll ever meet" recruits the listener as witness and judge, forcing an intimate proximity: you, here, face-to-face with evil. Even "son of a bitch" is a choice that leans on American macho shorthand, a barroom bravado that makes the horror feel familiar, almost legible.
The subtext is control. By declaring himself "cold-hearted", he preemptively shuts down pity, therapy-talk, and any narrative that makes him a product of damage. It's also a hedge against vulnerability: if you brand yourself as incapable of feeling, no one can demand that you prove you feel anything. That matters for someone who cultivated charm and normalcy in public; the claim of icy interiority lets him keep both masks available, switching as circumstances require.
Contextually, Bundy understood media. Late-20th-century true-crime culture was already starting to treat killers as dark celebrities, and he learned how to feed that appetite. The line flatters the voyeurism of the moment: it offers a punchy, quotable evil that reporters can print and audiences can repeat. It isn't just what he did; it's how he wanted to be remembered - as myth, not man.
The subtext is control. By declaring himself "cold-hearted", he preemptively shuts down pity, therapy-talk, and any narrative that makes him a product of damage. It's also a hedge against vulnerability: if you brand yourself as incapable of feeling, no one can demand that you prove you feel anything. That matters for someone who cultivated charm and normalcy in public; the claim of icy interiority lets him keep both masks available, switching as circumstances require.
Contextually, Bundy understood media. Late-20th-century true-crime culture was already starting to treat killers as dark celebrities, and he learned how to feed that appetite. The line flatters the voyeurism of the moment: it offers a punchy, quotable evil that reporters can print and audiences can repeat. It isn't just what he did; it's how he wanted to be remembered - as myth, not man.
Quote Details
| Topic | Savage |
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