Did Mormons Posthumously Baptize Hitler, Dracula, Ted Bundy and Others?
When Mormon leadership encouraged church members to donate $20 million to the Proposition 8 campaign in California last year — instead of, say, giving the money to feed the hungry or house the homeless — the leaders also invited unwanted scrutiny of the church’s unusual practices and beliefs.
One of the strangest of these is the practice of “saving” dead people through posthumous baptism, which they call “proxy rites.” According to this belief, the dead are not automatically saved. Instead, the rites give them the option to choose salvation in the afterlife.
In a letter to the Salt Lake City CityWeekly last week, researcher Helen Radkey claimed that the list of famous people who have received these rites includes fascists Adolf Hitler, Martin Bormann and Benito Mussolini, Communist dictators Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung; pirates Blackbeard and Jean and Pierre Lafitte; and gangsters Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde and Benjamin “Bugsy” Seigel, who was, of course, Jewish.
Also on the list, according to Radkey, are two infamous serial killers, Vlad the Impaler, whose exploits were fictionalized in the Dracula story, and the only known Mormon serial killer, Ted Bundy.
Bundy raped and killed as many as 100 women on a cross-country crime spree from 1974 to 1978. He became a Mormon around 1974, while he was attending law school at the University of Utah. It’s unclear whether he was excommunicated before or after he was executed in Florida, in 1989, but Radkey says the list of those given posthumous rites includes Theodore Robert Cowell, the name given Bundy when he was born on Nov. 24, 1946, in Burlington, Vt.
The names of those who have received proxy rites are stored in a huge database called the International Genealogical Index (IGI). A search of the online database for Theodore Robert Cowell produced no results, but it’s possible that Bundy’s and the other controversial records are not included in the online database.
It’s also possible, based on their recent behavior, that church officials have scrubbed the records in the week or so since Radkey’s letter was published.
Update: A source close to the investigation says the church apparently scrubbed Bundy’s name from the IGI database after the story was reported in the Salt Lake City media on Feb. 11, 2009. There’s more on the scrubbing here.
