The tires looked as if they still had a few thousand good miles in them. Inside the cab, the interior had that quintessential old Bug smell — like burning latex — as if the rubber flooring was always smoking a little from the heat underneath.

But this wasn’t any Beetle. This was Ted Bundy’s Beetle, the car into which he lured his victims and in which he killed many of them during a terrifying serial killing spree in the 1970s.

“This was kind of like a death wagon,” said Wyndell C. Watkins Sr., a retired D.C. police deputy chief, who was on hand to help introduce the latest iconic celebrity murder object joining Washington’s museum collections.