• Subscribe
  • Interested Authors
  • Blog
    • All Posts
    • Media Appearance Archives
    • WildBlue Press Author Bios
    • Crime Fiction Books
    • Fantasy Books
    • History Books
    • Horror Books
    • Mystery Books
    • Romance Books
    • Science Fiction Books
    • Thriller Books
    • True Crime Books
  • About Us
    • Catalog
    • Privacy Policy
  • Partners
    • BookBub (author resources)
    • bookshop.org
    • The House Of Mystery with Al Warren
    • ImaginePublicity
    • MacGregor Literary
    • Open Road Media
    • Tantor Media
    • True Crime Uncensored with Burl Barer and Mark Boyer
  • Contact Us
    • Acquisitions Team Sign-Up
    • Street Team Sign-Up

WildBlue Press

Great Reads from Exceptional Authors

Great Reads from
Exceptional Authors

  • Home
  • Business
  • Fantasy
  • History
  • Horror
  • Mystery
  • Thrillers
  • True Crime
  • Science Fiction
  • Reader Favorites
    • Award Winners
    • Bestsellers
    • Box Sets
    • Coming Soon
    • New Releases

Author Christian Barth on Samuel Cowell, Ted Bundy’s Abusive Grandfather: Fact Or Fiction?

Ted Bundy Wanted Poster

From somewhere within Dante Alighieri’s Ninth Circle of Hell, encased far beneath the deepest strata of ice the Florentine bard carved especially for Judas Iscariot, the ghost of Ted Bundy has surfaced, merrily laughing. With the rating success of the true-crime docuseries Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, America’s preoccupation with the notorious serial killer has rekindled once more, enjoying a peculiar renaissance unseen since Anne Rule’s seminal book, The Stranger Beside Me, first hit the shelves nearly thirty-years ago. Where Mark Harmon originally starred as Ted in the television movie The Deliberate Stranger, Zac Efron assumed the lead for the latest iteration, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, which premiered on Netflix last May.

America’s lust for true crime has never been greater. Ironically, female viewers—a demographic that would seemingly be most sensitive to the barrage of graphic crime scene photos and character re-enactments these programs routinely broadcast—are the targeted audience of this latest Bundy craze, and its greediest voyeurs. Monthly, it seems, the Hollywood sausage vat churns product culled from the same recycled batch of gristly trimmings. Allowing for chronological variation, most renditions begin with the same photo, a Ken Burns-effect monochromatic close-up of Bundy’s cocksure smirk as he preens for the cameras at his Florida trial, accompanied by a narrator’s ominous baritone. This somber introduction is usually followed in due course by exclusive interviews featuring several women, each shot in relief against an infinite black background, who claim they escaped Bundy’s clutches some forty years ago and lived to tell about it. There is grainy B-roll footage of his carnivalesque Florida electrocution in 1989, comprised of drunken frat boys, soaring roman candles, a bevy of idling news trucks, dour vigils, and opportunistic hucksters pawning miniature replicas of ‘Ol Sparky, the nickname of the oaken throne upon which the innards of the once cocksure former law student were boiled at dawn on January 24, 1989. Unshackled from the ethical bounds of attorney-client privilege, several of Bundy’s former lawyers appear in turn, promising to divulge never-before-heard tape recordings, delivering instead the same timeworn fare. Retired FBI profilers feed from the trough as well, offering stale talking points on serial killers and sexual deviants of similar ilk.

Christian Barth
Author Christian Barth

At some point along the storyboard’s predictable trajectory, these narratives inevitably revert to Bundy’s beginnings, a search for a starting point. Was he a genetic aberration? Perhaps his insatiable yearning to abduct and slaughter pretty young women arose at the moment he learned that his sister was actually his mother. Did he inherit his mutated chromosomal map through gardener Samuel Cowell, Ted’s allegedly abusive maternal grandfather, with whom he lived in Roxborough, Pennsylvania, until age four? Or did he acquire his genes from Jack Worthington, the father he never knew? During a pivotal moment in Conversations With a Killer, the camera zooms in upon a faded black and white snapshot of Ted as a smiling, towheaded little boy wearing a tank-top bathing suit on a crowded beach as he poses in the arms his mother, Louise. This picture appears to have been taken in Ocean City, New Jersey, for the Fourteenth Street Pier looms in the background, jutting out from the boardwalk promenade. Despite the prominent display of the photograph, the narrator never mentions where it was taken. Or that Bundy made numerous jaunts to the Jersey Shore when during his adolescence. Also left untold is any substantive discussion of the time he spent with his mother’s family in the Philadelphia suburb of Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1969 while attending Temple University that winter and spring. His possible involvement in the murders of Susan Davis and Elizabeth Perry on Memorial Day 1969, a few weeks after the semester ended, is conspicuously absent from the story as well.

While gathering material for my forthcoming book, THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS: A COLD CASE MYSTERY, the first and only true account of the serial killer’s possible involvement in the Jersey Shore murders, I unearthed an entirely divergent narrative of Bundy’s origins, contradicting several commonly held assumptions. Each relative and Roxborough native I interviewed vehemently denied that Ted was abused as a young boy, or that his atrocities were at all attributable to his grandfather’s purported violent disposition and tyrannical hold upon his family. Though somewhat eccentric, Sam Cowell was a teetotaling, well-regarded horticulturist and doting grandfather, they insisted, not a “violent alcoholic” who “swung cats by the tail” and “once threw one of his daughters down the stairs when she missed curfew,” myriad journalists and authors have written time and time again, as if reporting an uncontroverted fact.

“He was a fine man,” said Sylvia Myers, a former member of the Roxborough Garden Club, recalling one occasion as she stood outside Sam’s Ridge Avenue home, helping him wrap burlap around a set of young dogwoods as his toddler grandson stood watching beside his mother. As the name Ted Bundy grew more infamous each year the body toll rose, Myers and her Roxborough neighborhood friends remained unable to reconcile the image of this serial killer with the little boy they saw scampering about his grandfather’s yard. And while their idyllic image of Bundy tarnished once they learned the grisly details of his horrific crimes, their views regarding Samuel Cowell haven’t wavered. They insist he was an upstanding citizen unfairly maligned due to his grandson’s name. 

THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS

“The characterization that [Sam] was a raging alcoholic and animal abuser was a convenient characterization used to make people justify why Ted was the way he was,” Bundy’s cousin told me. “From my limited exposure to him, nothing could be farther from the truth. His daughters loved him dearly and had nothing but fond memories of him.”

For a far deeper exploration of Ted Bundy’s Philadelphia roots and his possible involvement in the 1969 Memorial Day slayings, make certain to read THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS, from WildBlue Press, available from Amazon beginning January 21, 2020.

Filed Under: Blog, Christian Barth, THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS, True Crime Tagged With: Christian Barth, Murder, Serial Killer, Ted Bundy, Ted Bundy case, Ted Bundy murders, THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS, True-crime
January 20, 2020 By Christian Barth 1 Comment

Comments

  1. Matt Wintsch says

    April 25, 2022 at 11:38 am

    Why was Ted Bundy so murderous? You will find the answer in chapter 12 of Erich Fromm’s masterpiece “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, first published in 1973. Bundy’s diagnosis and the cause of it are the same as Hitler’s: Necrophilia caused by a malignant incestuous fixation on the mother. The mother was the problem, not the father. Hitler also had a sadistic father, but Fromm was not aware of it at the time his work was published. The first volume of Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler was published in 1998. In it the great historian describes how Hitler was severely beaten by his tyrannical father. Erich Fromm obviously had no access to this research. But for the development of the necrophile character, it’s the mother whose responsible, not the father, in Hitler’s and Bundy’s case.
    Here are a few quotes from Fromm’s book: “I am speaking of children in whom no affective bonds toward mother emerge to break through the shell of autistic self-sufficiency. […] These children never break out of the shell of their narcissism: they never experience the mother as a love object; they never form any affective attachment to others, but, rather, look through them as if they were inanimate objects, and they often show a particular interest in mechanical things. […] It would seem that such infants never develop warm, erotic, and later, sexual feelings toward mother, or that they ever have a desire to be near her. Nor do they later fall in love with mother substitutes. For them mother is a symbol: a phantom rather than a real person. […] she is not the life-giving mother, but the death-giving mother; her embrace is death, her womb is a tomb. The attraction to the death-mother could not be affection or love; it is not an attraction in the common psychological sense denoting something pleasant and warm, but in the sense in which one would speak of magnetic attraction, or the attraction of gravity. The person tied to mother by malignant incestuous bonds remains narcissistic, cold, unresponsive; he is drawn to her as iron is drawn to a magnet; she is the ocean in which he wants to drown, the ground in which he wants to be buried. The reason for this development seems to be that the state of unmitigated narcissistic aloneness is intolerable; if there is no way of being related to mother or her substitute by warm, enjoyable bonds, the relatedness to her and to the whole world must become one of final union in death.”

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS by Christian Barth

Buy THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS now:

Amazon Kindle eBook Barnes & Noble Nook eBook Kobo eBook Apple eBook Books A Million eBook Google Play eBook  eBook
Amazon Trade Paperback  Paperback
Audible Audio Book iTunes Audio Book  Audio Book

INTERNATIONAL KINDLE EBOOKS
USA   UK   Canada   Australia   Germany   France   Spain   Japan   Italy   Brazil   India   Mexico

GET A FREE AUDIBLE AUDIO BOOK

Get this Title for FREE at Audible with a free trialGet this Audible Title for FREE with a 30-day free trial

Christian’s Interview on True Murder

Listen to “THE GARDEN STATE PARKWAY MURDERS-Christian Barth” on Spreaker.

Christian Barth on The House Of Mystery with Alan Warren

Christian Barth on Murder At Land Between The Lakes

More True Crime From WildBlue Press

book cover

SECRETS OF A HOLLYWOOD PRIVATE EYE: A Rollicking No-Holds Barred Expose Of Tinsel Town by Fred Wolfson and Burl Barer

Famous Rock Stars, TV Celebrities, Stone Cold Conmen, A Daring Rescue of Kidnapped Kids, And More! Ready to uncover the truth behind Hollywood's elite? SECRETS OF A HOLLYWOOD PRIVATE EYE is your ultimate source for the juiciest stories, scandals, and … [Read More...]

Death By Talons Book Cover

Author Tiddy Smith Explores ‘Owl Theory’ and North Carolina’s Infamous ‘Staircase Murder’ in DEATH BY TALONS: Did An Owl ‘Murder’ Kathleen Peterson?

It was not enough to suggest that Kathleen began to bleed outside. It was not enough to point to prior owl attacks on humans. Larry needed a smoking gun. And he would find it. -from DEATH BY TALONS by Tiddy Smith On December 9, 2001, Kathleen … [Read More...]

Lou And JonBenet book cover

In LOU AND JONBENÉT, Author John Wesley Anderson Reveals the Inside Story of the Failed Police Investigation Into the Kidnapping and Murder of JonBenét Ramsey

On Christmas Night 1996, six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in her family's home in Boulder, Colorado. A ransom note was found in the home, but it was hours before her father, John, found her body in the basement. She had been strangled with a … [Read More...]

Book Cover

New From Burl Barer with Punch Stanmirovic—STEALING MANHATTAN: The Untold Story of America’s Billion Dollar Gem Heist Masterminds

Punch Stanimirovic insists: "My father, known as Mr. Stan, is the greatest gentleman thief who ever lived-a true genius." Punch was raised to be an exceptional diamond thief. He could work magic on a safe that would have sent Mandrake the Magician … [Read More...]

book cover

PRECIOUS FEW CLUES: The True Crime Investigation Of Kansas City’s “Precious Doe” Murder

On an unseasonably warm April evening in 2001, the headless body of a tiny girl was found discarded in a makeshift dump site in the woods on the southeast side of Kansas City, Missouri.    One long night turned into four long years for … [Read More...]

book cover

HIDDEN DEMONS: Evil Visits A Small New England Town

A father, his daughter, and a brave young girl thwarted criminals whose escalating hidden demons led them to bolder and more risky acts of violence in Margery Metzger's Debut True Crime. About The Book On January 7, 1994, residents of Berkshire … [Read More...]

audiobook cover

Audiobook Narrator Claire Duncan brings Marla Bernard’s BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD to Listeners

BY THE SIDE OF THE ROAD by Marla Bernard and narrated by Claire Duncan, is available in audiobook format now. In the early hours of March 22, 1989, two friends - career criminals with violent felony convictions - drove around the eastern Kansas City … [Read More...]

Book cover

Steve Jackson’s Classic True Crime—About A Monstrous American Serial Killer—LOVE ME TO DEATH Has Been Revised and Updated

Originally released in 2011, New York Times bestselling author Steve Jackson has revised and updated this classic true crime about one of the most monstrous serial killers in American history. "Here's What Happens When You Mess With Me!" -William … [Read More...]

Genres, Types

New Releases
Featured Books
Coming Soon
Award Winners

Business
History
Horror
Mysteries
Romance
Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Thrillers
True Crime

eBooks
Paperbacks
Audio Books
Box Sets

Available

Biography
• Dances With Donkeys
• Secrets Of A Hollywood Private Eye
• Stealing Manhattan
• Escape From Mariupol
True Crime
• The Delphi Murders
• Death By Talons
• Lou And Jonbenet
• Hidden Demons
• Love Me To Death
• By The Side Of The Road
• Going Under
• I Don't Like Mondays
• The Last Jewish Gangster, The Middle Years
• The Tuskegee Strangler
• The Decision To Kill
• All Along The Watchtower
• Ted Bundy
• The Last Jewish Gangster, The Early Years
• Carmine And The 13Th Avenue Boys
• Vampires, Gators, And Wackos
• The Curse Of The Turtle
• Deadly Associates
• Jane Doe 9
• Watch Me Die
• Mystery At The Blue Sea Cottage
• The Wheels Of Justice
• 16 Minutes
• Terror Town, Usa
• Raging On
• Grilling Dahmer
• The 'Peyton Place' Murder
• Cold Blooded
• Faith Based Fraud
• The Real Mr. Big
• The Son Of Seven Mothers
• 'The Son Of Sam' And Me
• Serial Killers
• Satin Pumps
• Out Of The Mouths Of Serial Killers
• True Crime Chronicles Volume Two
• The World Encyclopedia Of Serial Killers Volume Three
• The Enigma Of Ted Bundy
• True Crime Chronicles Volume One
• Killing Women
• From The Mob To The Movies
• The World Encyclopedia Of Serial Killers Volume Two
• To Kill Or Be Killed
• No Angels
• Monster
• Under A Full Moon
• 'Til Death Do Us ...'
• The World Encyclopedia Of Serial Killers
• First Degree Rage
• The 'Supreme Gentleman' Killer
• Beast Of New Castle
• The Garden State Parkway Murders
• How Now, Butterfly?
• The Encyclopedia Of The Ted Bundy Murders
• Survival
• Missing ... And Presumed Dead
• Wrong Numbers
• Tantamount
• Playing Dead
• Mothers And Murderers
• Dead Reckoning
• Underworld
• Gabacho
• The Gangster's Cousin
• Race To Justice
• Ted Bundy's Murderous Mysteries
• Travesty Of Justice
• Railroaded
• You Have A Very Soft Voice, Susan
• A Family Business
• Pathological
• Wrecking Crew
• The Last Man Standing
• My Son, The Killer
• Inconvenience Gone
• Toxic Rage
• The Killing Game
• Shots In The Dark
• The Case Of The Golden State Killer
• His Garden
• The Crate
• Burned
• The Case Of The Zodiac Killer
• A Murder In My Hometown
• Bullied To Death
• The Beast I Loved
• Summary Execution
• The Shawcross Letters
• Better Off Dead
• Sidetracked
• My Brother's Keeper
• Targeted
• Held Hostage
• Room 1203
• A Special Kind Of Evil
• Brooklyn's Most Wanted
• Outlaw Los Angeles
• Unsolved No More
• She Is Evil
• The Rise And Fall Of A Casino Mobster
• Outlaw Southwest
• A Clockwork Murder
• Raw Deal
• The Bundy Secrets
• Betrayal In Blue
• The Politics Of Murder
• Murderers Row
• Rough Trade
• Daddy's Little Secret
• Murder In The Family
• Failure Of Justice
• Ice And Bone
• Smooth Talker
• The Trail Of Ted Bundy
• A Taste For Murder
• Sketchcop
• Body Of Proof
• Kentucky Bloodbath
• No Stone Unturned
• Repeat Offender
• Dixie's Last Stand
• Vampire
• Man Overboard
• Bogeyman
• Murderers Row Volume Two
Thriller
• Gasping For Air
• Big Dogs
• The Shadowmaker
• A Nest Of Snakes
• Blood Red Ivory
• No One Will Hear Your Screams
• The Screaming Room
• Bone Thief
• Sword Of The Caliphate
• Last Son Of The War God
• The Strait
• Enemy Of The People
• The Reckoning
• 16 Souls
• Borderland
• Paper Wings
• Lockout
• Pitfall
Mystery
• Deaf Row
• The Humanzee Experiments
• The Killing Machine
• Murder At Mardi Gras
• The Right Thing
• Raven's Ridge
• Raptor's Ridge
• Napa Noir
• Melia Ridge
• Emerald Ridge
• Crevice
• Headlock
• Identity Crisis
• The Obituary
• Naked Addiction
• The Deadline
Horror
• Four
• Acadia Event
• The Red Son
• Highwayman
• The Equinox
• The Pure And The Hated
• Savage Highway
Science Fiction
• Tribulations
• Crux
• Leviathan
• Happenstance
• Cain
• Dark Visions
• Hunter
• Created
Fantasy
• Dawn Of Legacy
• Destruction Of Justice
• Blunt Force Magic
History
• Fields Of Fortune
• Legion Rising
• The Korean Crisis
• Tempest Tost
• Saving Sandoval
• Killing Rasputin
Politics
• The (Redacted) Mueller Report
Romance
• When Fall Fades
Business
• Leaderology
• The Age Of Pluralism
• Bamboo Strong
• Corporate Superpower
• Wordpress Websites For Business
• Productivity Tools For Business
Cookbook
• Frank Cullotta's Greatest (Kitchen) Hits

New Releases

book cover

Robert Dodge Combines Biographies of a Norwegian Family and Immigrant Experience from the Mid-19th Century through WWII in FIELDS OF FORTUNE

Available Now About the Book In the spring of 1853, a family of eight drove their wagon to the wharf in Bergen, Norway. They unloaded their belongings alongside the other stacks labeled, AMERICA, MINNESOTA, ILLINOIS, MICHIGAN, NEW YORK CITY, CHICAGO … [More...]

Death By Talons Book Cover

Author Tiddy Smith Explores ‘Owl Theory’ and North Carolina’s Infamous ‘Staircase Murder’ in DEATH BY TALONS: Did An Owl ‘Murder’ Kathleen Peterson?

It was not enough to suggest that Kathleen began to bleed outside. It was not enough to point to prior owl attacks on humans. Larry needed a smoking gun. And he would find it. -from DEATH BY TALONS by Tiddy Smith On December 9, 2001, Kathleen … [More...]

Lou And JonBenet book cover

In LOU AND JONBENÉT, Author John Wesley Anderson Reveals the Inside Story of the Failed Police Investigation Into the Kidnapping and Murder of JonBenét Ramsey

On Christmas Night 1996, six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in her family's home in Boulder, Colorado. A ransom note was found in the home, but it was hours before her father, John, found her body in the basement. She had been strangled with a … [More...]

Book Cover

NYT Bestselling Author Ron Franscell Delivers A Crime Mystery With Shocking Twist: DEAF ROW

About The Book As you read along, be sure to dog-ear the pages bursting with Franscell's gritty descriptions - a sentence, a paragraph or a page - of the silver-haired people and the gray places of rural Colorado in this raw, wintry crime novel." … [More...]

Coming Soon

book cover

SECRETS OF A HOLLYWOOD PRIVATE EYE: A Rollicking No-Holds Barred Expose Of Tinsel Town by Fred Wolfson and Burl Barer

Famous Rock Stars, TV Celebrities, Stone Cold Conmen, A Daring Rescue of Kidnapped Kids, And More! Ready to uncover the truth behind Hollywood's elite? SECRETS OF A HOLLYWOOD PRIVATE EYE is your ultimate source for the juiciest stories, scandals, and … [More...]

Book Cover

New From Burl Barer with Punch Stanmirovic—STEALING MANHATTAN: The Untold Story of America’s Billion Dollar Gem Heist Masterminds

Punch Stanimirovic insists: "My father, known as Mr. Stan, is the greatest gentleman thief who ever lived-a true genius." Punch was raised to be an exceptional diamond thief. He could work magic on a safe that would have sent Mandrake the Magician … [More...]

book cover

PRECIOUS FEW CLUES: The True Crime Investigation Of Kansas City’s “Precious Doe” Murder

On an unseasonably warm April evening in 2001, the headless body of a tiny girl was found discarded in a makeshift dump site in the woods on the southeast side of Kansas City, Missouri.    One long night turned into four long years for … [More...]

Recent Posts

  • New Audiobook Alert | Charles Constant Narrates I DON’T LIKE MONDAYS: The True Story of America’s First Modern School Shooting’ by N. Leigh Hunt
  • Robert Dodge Combines Biographies of a Norwegian Family and Immigrant Experience from the Mid-19th Century through WWII in FIELDS OF FORTUNE
  • Behind the Scenes: Front Cover Concepts Not Chosen for Robert Dodge’s FIELDS OF FORTUNE, History | Out Tomorrow!
  • The San Diego Reader Features Author James Stewart, Highlighting the Glamour and Grit of the City During a Tumultuous Era
  • SECRETS OF A HOLLYWOOD PRIVATE EYE: A Rollicking No-Holds Barred Expose Of Tinsel Town by Fred Wolfson and Burl Barer
  • Acquisitions Team Sign-Up
  • Street Team Sign-Up

Sign Up for Our Newsletter

eZine SignupJoin our email list and be the first to get hot deals, new releases and...
* Author updates
* Free eBooks
* Free audio books
* Enlightening and entertaining posts
* Advance notice of book deals, special offers

Follow Us

Blog Tag Cloud

best true crime books Bogeyman Bradley Nickell Brian Whitney Burl Barer Caitlin Rother Cold Case crime Crime Fiction Crime thriller Detective Detectives Facebook True Crime John Ferak Kevin Sullivan Las Vegas memoir Murder murder book murder mystery Mysteries Mystery mystery thriller Non-Fiction Serial Killer serial killer books Serial Killers Steve Jackson Suspense suspense thriller Ted Bundy Thriller Thriller Books True-crime truecrime True Crime True Crime Authors true crime book true crime books True Crime Original true crimes true crime stories True Murder WildBlue Press writing

Privacy Policy

As Seen On:

Our Authors Have Been Seen On...

Interested Authors Click Here
See Our Entire Catalog
SSL Secure Connection

Copyright © 2023 WildBlue Press. All rights reserved.
Website design by Denver Local SEO Marketing Company
Author Christian Barth on Samuel Cowell, Ted Bundy’s Abusive Grandfather: Fact Or Fiction?

Join our newsletter for awesome content, free offers and launch notifications!

By joining our list you will be entered into a contest for a free eBook, audio book or paperback of your choice! We select them regularly, so sign up NOW!

Loading