Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll

Format: Kindle
Read: April 2024

I read Bright Young Things immediately after  Penance  by Eliza Clark, so I was already riled up about the true crime industry. Where that novel is a more general critique that directly challenged the reader, this one is more specific in taking appart the myth and legend that law enforcement and the media created for serial murderer Ted Bundy.

He is never named, but the sad thing is his crimes and the story around him are so well known, and the subject of so many documentaries and movies, that he doesn’t need to be for anyone who’s seen a documentary to identify who The Defendant is based on.
Bright Young Women, the title a reference to be judge’s fucking outrageous comment to Bundy before sentencing him for multiple brutal murders, is recentering the story on his victims.

Sometimes I think The Defendant is just another old wives’ tale. That law enforcement backed up his self-purported claims of brilliance to cover up their own incompetence—in interviews they gave the media, in testimonies they made before the judge—and it all cemented from there, hardening into a generational truth passed down from mother to daughter. Consider this my own warning: The man was no diabolical genius. He was your run-of-the-mill incel whom I caught picking his nose in the courtroom. More than once. (Pamela)

Though the crimes and eventual trial are real, the characters and individual details are fictional.

Pamela

Pamela is the president of the Florida State University sorority house when a man breaks in and attacks four of her sisters. Two are killed, including her best friend, and two are left with life-altering injuries. We get Pamela’s perspective in the immediate aftermath, the lead-up and the trial, and in 2021 after she receives a phone call that sends her back to Florida.

I liked Pamela a lot. She’s super Type A but she owns it, and because we have her perspective with over 40 years of hindsight she is also able to recognise the socialised motivations behind her younger self’s drive to be a Good Girl, and fit in society’s box, when she knows herself to be capable of much more.

I appreciate that the story and the lives of the surviving victims are not ended by The Defendant. He is a horrible thing that happened to them, but life went on afterwards and they were even happy and successful ones.

Ruth

We also have the perspective of Ruth, one of The Defendant’s earlier Lake Sammamish victims. We learn about Ruth’s life, her relationship with Tina (whom Pamela meets years later) and the circumstances that lead to her death.

While I appreciate look at the homophobia – and absolutely awful mothers – in the 70s, these chapters were the weak point. I never felt connected to Ruth. Partly I think because we already know her fate through meeting Tina, but also because Tina herself is a lot more interesting in her life both before and after Ruth! Her chapters were an annoyance to me honestly, I always wanted to get back to Pamela.

The myth

This book had me so frustrated for the victims and their familes. This myth of Bundy being some kind of charismatic genuis seems to be born of the police conjuring excuses for why they failed to catch his dumb ass, and when they did… repeatedly allowed him to escape.
His crimes were sloppy, and he did repeatedly caught on his visits to different states! It was luck more than brains that kept him free for as long as he was. His escapes were only impressive in the fact of law enforcement incompetence! He climed out an open window when he was unguarded, and he climbed up into a hole in the ceiling above his bed.

He was also not all that charming. There is anecdotal evidence out there of women he’d approached that found him creepy and turned him down. Most of his victims he attacked when they were defenceless in their sleep! The people he really charmed were the men in the media just out to sell a good story.

As Pamela points out, there are records that clearly show he was of little more than average intelligence. He was barely a law student. He got into a new law school with a very low bar for entry, and he struggled at that. The young women he murdered had gotten into better universities than him, they were the bright ones.

It’s infuriating.

This book, like  Penance , has made me re-evaluate True Crime and how I have interacted with it over the years. It’s not an fun read but it’s a thoughtful and a worthy one, and it’s definitely successful in what I think Jessica Knoll set out to do, even if I would prefer to either remove Ruth’s chapters or switch her POV for Tina.

I will look out for more books by this author!