“I don't feel guilty for anything. I feel sorry for people who feel guilt.”― Ted Bundy
Today we talk about one of the biggest and longest cases I’ve been working on. It is the story of Ted Bundy.. Ted Bundy was a Republican, law student, crisis hotline volunteer and a charismatic handsome young man .He was also a rapist, necrophiliac, a sociopath and one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Here is almost everything you need to know about the sadistic killer, Ted Bundy
Theodore Robert Cowell was born on November 24, 1946, to Eleanor Louise Cowell While he never knew who his father was, Bundy's birth certificate lists a "Lloyd Marshall" , although Bundy's mother would later tell of being seduced by a war veteran named "Jack Worthington". For the first three years of his life, Bundy's grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, took him as their son; in taking their last name, he became Theodore Robert Cowell. He grew up believing that his mother was his older sister.
He eventually discovered the truth. Bundy had a lifelong resentment toward his mother for never telling him the truth. In 1951 Louise Cowell met Johnny Culpepper Bundy, and the couple were married, and soon after Johnny Bundy adopted Ted, legally changing his last name to "Bundy". He later complained to his girlfriend that Johnny wasn't his real father, Ted didn’t like him and was described as not very bright by Ted.
In some interviews, Bundy spoke warmly of his grandparents .However, he and other family members told attorneys that Samuel Cowell was a bully and hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews, beat his wife and the family dog, and swung neighborhood cats by their tails. He once threw Louise's younger sister Julia down a flight of stairs for oversleeping. He sometimes spoke aloud to unseen presences, and at least once flew into a violent rage when the question of Bundy's paternity was raised.
Bundy described his grandmother as an obedient woman who was being treated for depression. Bundy showed sadistic behavior at an early age. Julia recalled awakening from a nap to find herself surrounded by knives from the kitchen and Bundy standing by the bed smiling.
Socially, Bundy remained shy and introverted throughout his high school and early college years. He would say later that he was unable to understand social behavior. He had no natural sense of how to get along with other people, saying: "I didn't know what made things tick. I didn't know what made people want to be friends. I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interactions."
While still in his teens, he roamed his neighborhood, picking through trash barrels in search of pictures of naked women. Bundy would look through libraries for detective magazines and books on crime, focusing on sources that described sexual violence and featured pictures of dead bodies and violent sexuality
University years
After graduating from high school in 1965, Bundy attended the (UPS) university for one year before transferring to the (UW) to study Chinese. In 1967, he became romantically involved with a UW classmate who is most commonly "Stephanie Brooks." In early 1968 he dropped out of college and volunteered at the Seattle office of Nelson Rockfeller's presidential campaign and became Arthur Fletcher’s driver and bodyguard during Fletcher's campaign.
Shortly after Brooks ended their relationship and returned to her family home in California, frustrated by what she described as Bundy's lack of ambition. He described her as the woman of his dreams and was devastated by her rejection. Bundy traveled to Colorado and then farther east, visiting relatives in Arkansas and Philadelphia and enrolling for one semester at Temple university. It was at this time in 1969, that is believed that Bundy visited the office of birth records in Burlington and confirmed his true parentage.
Bundy was back in Washington by the fall of 1969 when he met Elizabeth Kloepfer Their relationship would continue well past his initial incarceration in Utah in 1976.
In mid-1970, Bundy re-enrolled at UW, this time as a psychology major. He became an honor student and was well regarded by his professors. In 1971, he took a job at Seattle's Suicide Hotline Crisis Center, There, he met and worked alongside former Seattle policewoman and crime writer Ann Rule, who would later write a biography of Bundy and his crimes, The Stranger Beside Me.
“Ted and I would work as a team, Ted was wonderful on the phone he sounded caring and he was interested in people. I can still picture him hunched over the desk with the phone to his head, and many times we saved lives which seems very ironic to me now. But I got the sweet Ted and who would walk me out to my car at 2:00 in the morning when my shift was over and he says Ann please lock the doors ,I don’t want anything bad happens to you on your way home. Well I just been locked up with probably the most dangerous man in the western state. Never had a clue”-Ann Rule
Bundy graduated in 1972 from UW with a degree in psychology. In early 1973, Bundy was accepted into the law schools of UPS and the University of Utah.
In the summer of 1973, Bundy started dating Brooks again. He continued to date Kloepfer as well; neither woman was aware of the other's existence. In January 1974, however, he broke off all contact. Her phone calls and letters went unreturned. When she finally talked to him on the phone a month later, Brooks wanted to know why Bundy had ended their relationship. In a flat, calm voice, he replied, "Stephanie, I have no idea what you mean" and hung up. She never heard from him again. He later explained, "I just wanted to prove to myself that I could have married her".
By then, Bundy had begun skipping classes at law school. By April 1974, he had stopped attending entirely, as young women began to disappear .
A long journey of his horrific crimes:
“I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet.”- Ted Bundy
On January 4, 1974 (around the time that he ended his relationship with Brooks), Bundy entered the basement apartment of 18-year-old Karen Sparks. After bludgeoning Sparks with a metal rod from her bed frame, he sexually assaulted her with either the same rod causing extensive internal injuries. She remained unconscious for 10 days, but survived with permanent physical and mental disabilities. In the early morning hours of February 1, Bundy broke into the basement room of Lynda Ann Healy, a UW undergraduate who broadcast morning radio weather reports for skiers. He beat her unconscious, dressed her in blue jeans, a white blouse, and boots, and carried her away.
During the first half of 1974, female college students disappeared at the rate of about one per month. On March 12, Donna Gail Manson, a 19-year-old student left her dormitory to attend a jazz concert on campus, but never arrived. On April 17, Susan Elaine Rancourt disappeared while on her way to her dorm room after an evening advisors' meeting. Two female Central Washington students later came forward to report encounters—one on the night of Rancourt's disappearance, the other three nights earlier—with a man wearing an arm sling, asking for help carrying a load of books to his tan Volkswagen beetle. On May 6, Roberta Kathleen Parks left her dormitory at to have coffee with friends but never arrived.
On June 1, Brenda Carol Ball, 22, disappeared. She was last seen in the parking lot, talking to a brown-haired man with his arm in a sling.
In the early hours of June 11, UW student Georgann Hawkins vanished while walking down a brightly lit alley between her boyfriend's dormitory residence and her sorority house. After Hawkins' disappearance was publicized, witnesses came forward to report seeing a man that night who was in an alley behind a nearby dormitory. He was on crutches with a leg cast and was struggling to carry a briefcase. One woman recalled that the man asked her to help him carry the case to his car, a light brown Volkswagen Beetle. Bundy later told Keppel that he lured Hawkins to his car before knocking her unconscious with a crowbar he had earlier placed beside the vehicle. He then handcuffed Hawkins and strangled her, before spending the entire night with her body. Prior to her murder, Hawkins had regained consciousness inside his car, and had begun talking with Bundy, she had informed him she had a Spanish test the following day and she "thought that I had taken her to help tutor her for the Spanish test", adding "it's not funny, but it's odd the kinds of things people will say under those circumstances". He admitted to revisiting Hawkins' corpse on three separate occasions. He stated that he returned to the UW alley the morning after Hawkins' abduction and murder. There, in the very midst of a major crime scene investigation, he located and gathered Hawkins' earrings and one of her shoes, where he had left them in the parking lot, and departed.
During this period, Bundy was working in as the Assistant Director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission .Later, he worked at the Department of Emergency Services (DES), a state government agency involved in the search for the missing women. At DES he met and dated Carole Ann Boone
Bundy's Washington killing spree began on July 14, 1974, with the daytime abduction of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish State Park . That day, eight different people told the police about the handsome young man with his left arm in a sling who called himself "Ted". Five of them were women whom "Ted" asked for help unloading a sailboat from his Beetle. One of them went with "Ted" as far as his car, where there was no sailboat, before declining to accompany him any farther. Three more witnesses testified to seeing him approach Ott with the story about the sailboat and to seeing her walk away from the beach in his company. She was never seen alive again. Naslund disappeared without a trace four hours later.
Police finally had a detailed description of their suspect and his car, posted fliers throughout the Seattle area. A sketch was printed in newspapers and broadcast on local television stations. Elizabeth Kloepfer, Ann Rule, a DES employee, and a UW psychology professor all recognized the profile, the sketch, and the car, and reported Bundy as a possible suspect ;but detectives—who were receiving up to 200 tips per day thought it unlikely law student with no adult criminal record could be the killer.
In August 1974, Bundy received a second acceptance from the university of Utah law school and moved to salt lake city leaving Kloepfer in Seattle. While he called Kloepfer often, he dated many other women . When he studied the first-year law a second time, He was disappointed to find out that the other students were smarter than him.
Killings began the following month. On September 2, he raped and strangled a hitchhiker in Idaho, then either disposed of the remains immediately in a nearby river, or returned the next day to photograph and dismember the corpse. On October 2, he seized 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox .Her remains never found.
On October 18, Melissa Anne Smith—the 17-year-old daughter of the police chief of Midvale disappeared after leaving a pizza parlor. On October 31, Laura Ann Aime, also 17, after leaving a café just after midnight. Both of their bodies were found, and both women had been beaten, raped, and strangled with nylon stockings. Years later, Bundy described his postmortem rituals with the corpses of Smith and Aime, including hair shampooing and application of makeup.
On November 8, Bundy approached 18-year-old Carol DaRonch .He identified himself as "Officer Roseland" of the Police Department and told DaRonch that someone had attempted to break into her car. He asked her to accompany him to the station to file a complaint. When DaRonch pointed out to Bundy that he was driving on a road that did not lead to the police station, he immediately attempted to handcuff her. During their struggle, he fastened both handcuffs to the same wrist, and DaRonch was able to open the car door and escape. Later that evening, Debra Jean Kent, a 17-year-old student disappeared after leaving a theater production at the school to pick up her brother. Outside the auditorium, investigators found a key that unlocked the handcuffs removed from Carol DaRonch's wrist.
In November, Elizabeth Kloepfer called the police a second time after reading that young women were disappearing in towns surrounding where Ted was. One detective interviewed her in detail. In December, Kloepfer called the Sheriff's Office and repeated her suspicions. Bundy's name was added to their list of suspects, but at that time no evidence linked him to the Utah crimes In January 1975, Bundy returned to Seattle after his final exams and spent a week with Kloepfer, who did not tell him that she had reported him to police three times.
In 1975, Bundy shifted much of his criminal activity Utah to Colorado. On January 12, a 23-year-old registered nurse named Caryn Eileen Campbell disappeared while walking down a hallway between the elevator and her room. On March 15 Julie Cunningham, 26, disappeared while walking from her apartment to a dinner date with a friend. Bundy later told Colorado investigators that he approached Cunningham on crutches and asked her to help carry his boots to his car , where he handcuffed her, then assaulted and strangled her. Weeks later, he made the six-hour drive from Salt Lake City to revisit her remains.
Denise Lynn Oliverson, 25, disappeared on April 6 while riding her bicycle to her parents' house. On May 6, Bundy lured 12-year-old Lynette Dawn .He drowned and then sexually assaulted her in his hotel room, before disposing of her body in a river .
On June 28, Susan Curtis vanished from the campus. Curtis' murder became Bundy's last confession, tape-recorded moments before he entered the execution chamber.
Arrest and first trial
“Sure, I get angry. I get very, very angry and indignant. I don't like being locked up for something I didn't do, and I don't like my liberty taken away, and I don't like being treated like an animal, and I don't like people walking around and ogling me like I'm some sort of weirdo, because I'm not.” Ted Bundy
On August 16, 1975, Bundy was arrested by Utah officer Bob Hayward. Hayward had observed Bundy cruising a residential area in the pre-dawn hours; Bundy fled the area at high speed after seeing the patrol car. The officer searched the car after he noticed that the Volkswagen's front passenger seat had been removed . He found a ski mask, a second mask fashioned from pantyhose, a crowbar, handcuffs, trash bags, a coil of rope, an ice pick, and other items initially assumed to be burglary tools. After a search of Bundy's apartment he was released .Bundy later said that searchers missed a hidden collection of polaroid photographs of his victims, which he destroyed after he was released.
Salt Lake City police placed Bundy on 24-hour surveillance, and they flew to Seattle to interview Kloepfer. She told them that in the year prior to Bundy's move to Utah, she had discovered objects that she "couldn't understand" in her house and in Bundy's apartment. These items included crutches, and a meat cleaver that was never used for cooking. Additional objects included surgical gloves, an Oriental knife in a wooden case, and a sack full of women's clothing. She said Bundy became "very upset" whenever she considered cutting her hair, which was long and parted in the middle. She would sometimes awaken in the middle of the night to find him under the bed covers with a flashlight, examining her body. The detectives confirmed that Bundy had not been with Kloepfer on any of the nights during which the Pacific Northwest victims had vanished, nor on the day Ott and Naslund were abducted. Shortly thereafter, Kloepfer was interviewed by Seattle homicide detective, and learned of the existence of Stephanie Brooks and her brief engagement to Bundy.In September, Bundy sold his Volkswagen Beetle to a teenager. Utah police impounded it, and FBI technicians dismantled and searched it. They found hairs matching samples obtained from Caryn Campbell's body. Later, they also identified hair strands from those of Melissa Smith and Carol DaRonch. 
On October 2, detectives put Bundy into a lineup. DaRonch immediately identified him as "Officer Roseland”. There was more than enough evidence to charge him with kidnapping and attempted criminal assault in the DaRonch case. He was freed on $15,000 bail, paid by his parents.Seattle police had insufficient evidence to charge him in the Pacific Northwest murders, but kept him under close surveillance. "When Ted and I stepped out on the porch to go somewhere," Kloepfer wrote, "so many unmarked police cars started up that it sounded like the beginning of the Indy 500."
In February 1976, Bundy stood trial for the DaRonch kidnapping. Judge found him guilty of kidnapping and assault. In June he was sentenced to one-to-15 years in the Utah State Prison. Later that month, Colorado authorities charged him with Caryn Campbell's murder and was transferred to Aspen in January 1977.
In the pic: Carol DaRonch
Bundy Escapes
On June 7, 1977, Bundy was transported from the Garfield County jail to Pitkin county courthouse in Aspen for a preliminary hearing. He had elected to serve as his own attorney, and as such, was excused by the judge from wearing handcuffs or leg shackles. He once asked to visit the courthouse's law library to research his case. While shielded from his guards' view behind a bookcase, he opened a window and jumped to the ground from the second story, injuring his right ankle as he landed then hiked southward onto Aspen mountain. Near its summit he broke into a hunting cabin and stole food, clothing, and a rifle. Days later he walked back north toward Aspen, he stole a car and drove back into Aspen, where two police officers noticed his car weaving in and out of its lane and pulled him over.
Back in jail in Glenwood Springs, , Bundy assembled a new escape plan. He acquired a detailed floor plan of the jail and a hacksaw blade from other inmates, and accumulated $500 in cash, smuggled in over a six-month period, he later said, by visitors—Carole Ann Boone in particular.During the evenings, while other prisoners were showering, he sawed a hole about one square foot between the steel reinforcing bars in his cell's ceiling and, having lost 16 kg, was able to go through it into the crawl space above.
On the night of December 30, with most of the jail staff on Christmas break, Bundy climbed into the crawl space. He broke through the ceiling into the apartment of the chief jailer—who was out for the evening with his wife changed into street clothes from the jailer's closet, and walked out the front door .
He got on a morning flight to Chicago. In Glenwood Springs
Florida crimes
From Chicago, Bundy traveled by train to Michigan,Five days later, he stole a car and drove to Atlanta, where he boarded a bus and arrived in Florida on the morning of January 8. He rented a room under the name Chris Hagen at the Holiday Inn near the (FSU) campus. Bundy later said that he initially resolved to find legitimate employment ;but his lone job application, at a construction site, had to be abandoned when he was asked to produce identification. He got back to his old habits of shoplifting and stealing credit cards from women's wallets left in shopping carts.
On January 15, 1978—one week after his arrival in Tallahassee—Bundy entered FSU's sorority house through a door with a faulty locking mechanism. Beginning at about 2:45 a.m. he bludgeoned Margaret Bowman, 21, with a piece of oak firewood as she slept.He then entered the bedroom of 20-year-old Lisa Levy and beat her unconscious, strangled her, tore one of her nipples, bit deeply into her left buttock, and sexually assaulted her. In another bedroom he attacked Kathy Kleiner, breaking her jaw and shoulder; and Karen Chandler, who suffered a concussion, broken jaw, loss of teeth, and a crushed finger.Chandler and Kleiner survived the attack; Kleiner later attributed their survival to automobile headlights illuminating the interior of their room and frightening him away.Detectives later determined that the four attacks took place in less than 15 minutes.After leaving the sorority house, Bundy broke into a basement apartment eight blocks away and attacked FSU student Cheryl Thomas, dislocating her shoulder and fracturing her jaw and skull in five places. She was left with permanent deafness, and equilibrium damage that ended her dance career.On Thomas' bed, police found a semen stain and a pantyhose "mask" containing two hairs "similar to Bundy's in class and characteristic".
In February 8, Bundy he approached 14-year-old Leslie Parmenter, the daughter of Jacksonville Police Department's Chief of Detectives, identifying himself as "Richard Burton, Fire Department", but backed off when Parmenter's older brother arrived and challenged him. That afternoon 12-year-old Kimberly Dianne Leach was summoned to her home room by a teacher to retrieve a forgotten purse; she never returned to class.As witnesses said later that they saw her with a man leading her to a
car, and she was almost in tears. They thought he was a parent that was
angry with his daughter. Seven weeks later, after an intensive search, her partially mummified remains were found in a pig farrowing shed .She appeared to have been raped, with her underwear found near the body containing semen, and killed by violence to the neck with a knife.
On February 12 Bundy stole a car and fled Tallahassee. Three days later, at around 1:00 am, he was stopped by a police officer after a check showed his Volkswagen Beetle was stolen.When told he was under arrest, Bundy kicked the officer's legs out from under him and took off running. The officer chased and tackled him. The two had a struggle before the officer finally arrested Bundy.In the stolen vehicle were three sets of IDs belonging to female FSU students, 21 stolen credit cards and a stolen television set. As officer transported his suspect to jail,he heard Bundy say, "I wish you had killed me."
Florida trials, marriage
Bundy stood trial for the Chi Omega homicides in June 1979.The trial was covered by 250 reporters from five continents and was the first to be televised nationally in the United States. Bundy again handled much of his own defense. Ted was facing murder charges, with a possible death sentence, and all that mattered to him apparently was that he be in charge.
A pre-trial plea bargain was negotiated in which Bundy would plead guilty to killing Levy, Bowman and Leach in exchange for a firm 75-year prison sentence. At the last minute, however, Bundy refused the deal.At trial, crucial testimony came from Chi Omega sorority members who saw him leaving the sorority house. Physical evidence included impressions of the bite wounds Bundy had inflicted on Lisa Levy's left buttock, which was proven by forensic evidence to match castings of Bundy's teeth.The jury deliberated for less than seven hours before convicting him on July 24, 1979, of the Bowman and Levy murders. Trial judge Edward Cowart imposed death sentences for the murder convictions.
In pic: The unique the indentation marks were outlined and showed how it matched the dental impressions of Bundy's teeth
Six months later, a second trial took place in Oralndo, for the abduction and murder of Kimberly Leach. Bundy was found guilty once again.During the trial, Bundy took advantage of a Florida law providing that a marriage declaration in court, in the presence of a judge, constituted a legal marriage. As he was questioning Carole Ann Boone—who had moved to Florida to be near Bundy, had testified on his behalf during both trials, he asked her to marry him. She accepted, and Bundy declared to the court that they were legally married.
On February 10, 1980, Bundy was sentenced for a third time to death by electrocution. As the sentence was announced, he reportedly stood and shouted, "Tell the jury they were wrong!" This third death sentence would be the one ultimately carried out nearly nine years later.
In October 1981, Boone gave birth to a daughter and named Bundy as the father. While visits were not allowed at Raiford prison inmates were known to bribe guards to allow them intimate time alone with their female visitors.
Death row, confessions and death
“Guilt. It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism and it's very unhealthy. It does terrible things to our body.”-Ted Bundy
In some of his interviews he said " Possession proved to be an important motive for rape and murder as well. Sexual assault, he said, fulfilled his need to "totally possess" his victims. At first, he killed his victims "as a matter of expediency ... to eliminate the possibility of [being] caught"; but later, murder became part of the "adventure". "The ultimate possession was, in fact, the taking of the life", he said. "And then ... the physical possession of the remains."
In October 1984, Bundy contacted Robert Keppel and offered to share his in serial killer psychology in the ongoing hunt in Washington for the "Green River Killer".
In early 1986, an execution date (March 4) was set on the Chi Omega convictions;but the execution was quickly rescheduled. In April, shortly after the new date (July 2) was announced, Bundy finally confessed to details of what he did to some of his victims after their deaths. He told them that he revisited Taylor Mountain, Issaquah, and other secondary crime scenes, often several times, to lie with his victims and perform sexual acts with their decomposing bodies . In some cases, he drove for several hours each way and remained the entire night. In Utah, he applied makeup to Melissa Smith's lifeless face, and he repeatedly washed Laura Aime's hair. "If you've got time," .. "they can be anything you want them to be."He decapitated approximately 12 of his victims with a hacksaw, and kept at least one group of severed heads—probably the four later found on Taylor Mountain (Rancourt, Parks, Ball and Healy)—in his apartment for a period of time before disposing of them.
A firm execution date of January 24, 1989, was announced.
He confessed to Keppel that he had committed all eight of the Washington and Oregon homicides for which he was the prime suspect. He described three additional previously unknown victims in Washington and two in Oregon whom he declined to identify (if indeed he ever knew their identities). He said he left a fifth corpse—Donna Manson's—on Taylor Mountain, but incinerated her head in Kloepfer's fireplace. ("Of all the things I did to [Kloepfer]," he told Keppel, "this is probably the one she is least likely to forgive me for. Poor Liz."
Boone had felt deeply betrayed by his admission that he was, in fact, guilty. She moved back to Washington with her daughter and refused to accept his phone call on the morning of his execution.
Bundy died in the Raiford electric chair at 7:16 a.m. EST on January 24, 1989. Hundreds sang, danced and set off fireworks outside from the prison as the execution was carried out,then cheered as the white hearse containing Bundy's corpse departed the prison. He was cremated, and his ashes scattered at an undisclosed location in the Cascade range of Washington State, in accordance with his will.
“I don't want to die. I'm not going to kid you. I'll kid you not. I deserve certainly the most extreme punishment society has...I think society deserves to be protected from me and others like me.”-Ted Bundy
All of Bundy's known victims were white females, most of middle-class backgrounds. Almost all were between the ages of 15 and 25 and most were college students. In their last conversation before his execution, Bundy told Kloepfer he had purposely stayed away from her "when he felt the power of his sickness building in him."Rule noted that most of the identified victims had long straight hair, parted in the middle—like Stephanie Brooks, the woman who rejected him, and to whom he later became engaged and then rejected in return. Rule speculated that Bundy's animosity toward his first girlfriend triggered his protracted rampage and caused him to target victims who resembled her. Bundy dismissed this hypothesis: "Too many people have bought this crap that all the girls were similar ... but almost everything was dissimilar ... physically, they were almost all different .
After Bundy's execution, Ann Rule was surprised to hear from numerous women, who wrote or called to say they were deeply depressed because Bundy was dead. Several said they suffered nervous breakdowns when he died. "Even in death, Ted damaged women," Rule wrote. "To get well, they must realize that they were conned by the master conman. They are grieving for a shadow man that never existed."
“When you feel the last bit of breath leaving their body, you're looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!” Ted Bundy
On the afternoon before he was executed, Bundy got an interview with James Dobson .He used the opportunity to make new claims about violence in the media and the pornographic "roots" of his crimes. "My experience with ... pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality, is once you become addicted to it ... I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far ... where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give that which is beyond just reading it or looking at it."Violence in the media, he said, "particularly sexualized violence", sent boys "down the road to being Ted Bundys."You are going to kill me," he said, "and that will protect society from me. But out there are many, many more people who are addicted to pornography, and you are doing nothing about that."
Bundy deflected blame onto a wide variety of scapegoats, including his abusive grandfather, the absence of his biological father, the concealment of his true parentage, alcohol, the media, the police , society in general, violence on television, and, ultimately pornography. On at least one occasion, he even tried to blame his victims : "I have known people who ... radiate vulnerability", he wrote in a 1977 letter to Kloepfer. "Their facial expressions say 'I am afraid of you.' These people invite abuse ... By expecting to be hurt, do they subtly encourage it?"
The night before his execution, Bundy confessed to 30 homicides, but the true total remains unknown. Published estimates have run as high as 100 or more
Serial killer Ted Bundy's former girlfriend, her daughter wonder why he spared them
Elizabeth Kloepfer said it feels “strange” to flip back through old photos of her former boyfriend, to see him smiling at the camera next to a younger version of herself, to see him playing with her daughter who was a child at the time, to see him being silly.
“I sometimes can’t believe this has really been my life,” .. “I kept those photos of us when we were happier, before we knew what he was capable of.”
“That’s my childhood,” Molly Kloepfer said. “Unfortunately, the memories that are attached to those pictures have lost their original emotional content and become something different.”
“I still have a sense of disbelief that this man that I loved and that seemed to be a great guy could go out and do such horrific things,” Elizabeth Kloepfer said. “It’s just so hard to accept.”
Elizabeth Kloepfer said she and Bundy dated for about five years, from 1969 to 1974, which overlapped with some of his gruesome crimes. She and her daughter said that at the time, they had no idea the man they spent so much time with was a serial killer.
“I always felt loved,” Elizabeth Kloepfer said of the man she once planned to marry. “But with Ted, it's impossible to tell. It could've been love, it could've been just another manipulation.”
She once thought Bundy was the man she was going to marry, she said, and she has wondered why he spared her and Molly.
“I hate to even say this because it makes him sound normal, but I do think he loved us,” Elizabeth Kloepfer said.
“I heard a story told by one of his attorneys he had. He said Ted told him that he would play games with these animals, I don’t remember if they were mice or something else,” her daughter Molly Kloepfer added. “And he would let some of them live and some of them die, and to me, that’s us, we’re just these mice that were allowed to live.”
Elizabeth Kloepfer said she met Bundy in at a bar in Seattle. A single mother who had just moved to town from Utah at the time, Kloepfer said she was “pretty smitten” when she saw Bundy, who had grown up in Tacoma, Washington.
“I saw him sitting at a table. I went over and talked to him because I told him he looked lonely,” she said.
When they were dating, Bundy was earning a degree in psychology at the University of Washington. He drove a Volkswagen Beetle, worked on political campaigns and had aspirations of going to law school. To Kloepfer , he appeared to be a smart and doting boyfriend.
“He put a lot of energy into making us happy, doing fun things… he always seemed to embrace us as a family unit,” Elizabeth Kloepfer said. “I loved going to places with him. He was never at a loss for words, whereas I was on the shy side.”
While they were together, Kloepfer recalled some oddities about Bundy’s behavior. She said one day he showed up at her apartment with a pair of ski boots he had stolen from the university’s student union.
“And he said, ‘If I hadn't stolen them, somebody else would've, so I just took them,’” Kloepfer said.
Authorities later learned that Bundy’s crimes had started with animal mutilation and petty theft, then evolved into peering into people’s windows and then brutal killings.“He would start walking home late at night, rather than spending the night at my house. Just subtle changes where I felt like maybe I was losing him or maybe he was seeing somebody else,” she said.
“Never in my dreams did I think he was out stalking women and then eventually … abducting and murdering women. There was no context for that,” she added.
Looking back now, Elizabeth Kloepfer said there were some red flags that her boyfriend at the time could be the suspected abductor police were looking for in those cases, but she said she kept “talking herself out of it.”
Kloepfer said a co-worker gave her a newspaper article that had a composite drawing of the suspect because that person thought it looked “similar” to Bundy. She said police had identified the suspect’s car as a Volkswagen Beetle but the color they noted didn’t quite match Bundy’s car.
Even a report about the Lake Sammamish disappearances that noted witnesses told police the suspect was a handsome young man who called himself "Ted" struck her as odd, Kloepfer said, but she still tried to talk herself out of believing this could be the Ted she knew.
“It wasn't something that I looked at and thought, ‘Oh my God.’ It was like, ’Oh, that's weird,’” she said. “Even the idea that this man went up and introduced himself by ‘Ted,’ I think, ‘Oh, you know, if you're going to abduct somebody, you'd never say your real name.’”
“When they had a profile of him, I brought up the similarities to him,” Molly Kloepfer said. “I said, ‘This guy's name's Ted. Your name's Ted. This guy has a Volkswagen. You drive a Volkswagen. You know it's you,’ and he just laughed. [He said], ‘No, Monkey, of course, I would never do anything like that.’”
“Once I started to worry, like, ‘Could this be true?’ I didn't feel safe bringing it up," Elizabeth Kloepfer added. "I didn't want him to know what I was thinking."
“I loved talking with him or being with him because he was just Ted. He was just the Ted I knew. Nothing was amiss,” Kloepfer said. “And then I'd hang up and think, ‘What was I thinking that this could possibly be true?’”
Eventually, Elizabeth Kloepfer said she began talking with authorities. All the while, Bundy was continuing his vicious spree of abducting, raping and murdering young women. In a matter of weeks, Bundy had murdered four women in Utah that fall.
By then, Elizabeth Kloepfer ’s relationship with Bundy had ended, but she said they kept in touch. She said she found out about the car search incident from Bundy’s Washington state landlord, who told her detectives had been by his apartment there.
“It was just very frightening to see it all laid out together, and I was devastated,” Kloepfer said. “Eventually, I ask him about it after I told him that I'd gone to the police, and he tried to just brush it off. ‘Oh, for God sakes, Liz,’ he said … ‘I need the crowbar for if I get in a wreck and need to pry cars apart. I need the ski mask for when I'm shoveling snow. Sometimes I wear a pantyhose mask under that just for warmth.’”
“It took him telling me himself that he had something wrong with him,” Kloepfer said. “It was awful, and yet it took me so long to really fully accept that he did those things. Even after he told me that, I still was spending endless hours trying to figure out how this could be, how this man that I thought I knew could do these things. It was really a struggle.”
Molly Kloepfer was particularly shaken by the Leach case. They both would have been the same age if Leach were alive today.
“It's hard to find words for how devastating it is, the loss of this girl, and the things that he did to her,” Molly Kloepfer said. “It's been a lifelong source of agony, thinking about her parents, her friends, and… just the loss of personal relationship that we thought we had to this person.”
Looking back on her relationship with Bundy, Elizabeth Kloepfer said she still carries a lot of guilt with her.
“Guilt about … causing this in my daughter's life, guilt about what he had done, guilt that I had loved this man that was so gruesome.”
She said she worked hard to rebuild her and her daughter's lives, and she hopes that sharing their story now will serve as an inspiration for others trying to overcome hardships.
“I hope others will see that it's possible to have terrible, traumatic experiences and it's possible to rebuild your life,” Elizabeth Kloepfer said
Remembering the victims...
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