First of Two Murders
Washington/Oregon
With no consensus on when or where Bundy began killing women, Bundy told different accounts to different people, refusing to divulge the specifics of his early crimes, while confessing in graphic detail to dozens of later murders in the days before his execution. He told Nelson that he attempted a kidnapping in1969 in Ocean City, New Jersey, but didn’t kill anyone until sometime in 1971 in Seattle. He told psychologist Art Norman that he killed two women in Atlantic City in 1960 while visiting family in Philadelphia. Hinting, but refusing to elaborate to homicide detective Robert D. Keppel that he committed a murder in Seattle in 1972, and another murder in 1973 involving a hitchhiker near Turnwater. Rule and Keppel both believe Bundy may have started killing as a teenager. Circumstantial evidence suggests he may have abducted and killed eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr of Tacoma when he was 14 years old in 1961, an allegation he repeatedly denied. His earliest documented homicides were committed in 1974 when he was 27 years old. By then, by his own admission, he had mastered the necessary skills—in the era before DNA profiling—to leave minimal incriminating forensic evidence at crime scenes.
Shortly after midnight on January 4, 1974 (around the time he terminated his relationship with Brooks), Bundy entered the basement apartment of 18-year-old Karen Sparks (identified as Joni Lenz, Mary Adams, and Terri Caldwell by various sources), a dancer and student at UW. After bludgeoning the sleeping woman senseless with a metal rod from her bed frame, he sexually assaulted her with either the same rod, or a metal speculum, causing extensive internal injuries. Remaining unconscious for 10 days, Sparks survived with permanent physical and metal 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 one per month. On March 12, Donna Gail Manson, a 19-year-old student at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, 60 miles (95 km) southwest of Seattle, 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 at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, 110 miles (175 km) east-southeast of Seattle. 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 brown or tan Volkswagen Beetle. On may 6, Roberta Kathleen Parks left her dormitory at Oregon State University in Corvallis, 85 miles (135 km) south of Portland, to have coffee with friends at the Memorial Union but never arrived.
Detectives form King County and Seattle police departments grew concerned. There was no significance physical evidence, and the missing women had little in common, apart from being young, attractive, white college students with long hair parted in the middle. On June 1, Brenda Carol Ball, 22 disappeared after leaving the Flame Tavern in Burien, near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. 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. The next morning, three Seattle homicide detectives and a criminalist combed the entire alleyway on their hands and knees, finding nothing. 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.
During this period, Bundy was working in Olympia as the Assistant Director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission (where he wrote a pamphlet for women on rape prevention), and later 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, a twice-divorced mother of two who, six years later, would play an important role in the final phase of his life.
Reports of the six missing women and Sparks’ brutal beating appeared prominently in newspapers and on television throughout Washington and Oregon. Fear spread among the population, hitchhiking by yound women dropped sharply. Pressure mounted on law enforcement agencies, but the paucity of physical evidence severely hampered them. Police could not provide reporters with the little information that was available for fear of compromising the investigation. Further similarities between the victims were noted: The disappearances all took place at night, usually near ongoing construction work, within a week of midterm or final exams; all of the victims were wearing slacks or blue jeans; and at most crime scenes, there were sightings of a man wearing a cast or a sling, and driving a brown or tan Volkswagen Beetle.
The Pacific Northwest murders culminated on July 14, with the broad daylight abductions of two women from a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah, a suburb 20 miles (30 km) east of Seattle. Five female witnesses described an attractive young man wearing a white tennis outfit with his left arm in a sling, speaking with a light accent, perhaps Canadian or British. Introducing himself as “Ted,” he asked their help in unloading a sailboat from his tan or bronze-colored Volkswagen Beetle. Four refused; one accompanied him as far as his car, saw that there was no sailboat, and fled. Three additional witnesses saw him approach Janice Anne Ott, 23, a probation case worker at the King County Juvenile Court, with the sailboat story, and watched her leave the beach in his company. About four hours later, Denise Marie Naslund, a 19-year-old woman who was studying to become a computer programmer, left a picnic to go to the restroom and never returned. Bundy told Michaud that Ott was still alive when he returned with Naslund—and that he forced one to watch as he murdered the other—but he later denied it I an interview with Lewis on the eve of his execution.
King County police, finally armed with a detailed description of their suspect and his car, posted fliers throughout the Seattle area. A composite sketch was printed in regional 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 that a clean-cut law student with no adult criminal record could be the perpetrator.
On September 6, two grouse hunters stumbled across the skeletal remains of Ott and Naslund near a service road in Issaquah, 2 miles (3 km) east of Lake Sammamish State Park. An extra femur and several vertebrae found at the site were later identified by Bundy as Georgann Hawkins. Six months later, forestry students from Green River Community College discovered the skulls and mandibles of Healy, Rancourt, Parks, and Ball on Taylor Mountain, where Bundy frequently hiked, just east of Issaquah. Manson’s remains were never recovered.
Idaho/Utah/Colorado
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 “at least a dozen” other women. When he studied the first-year law curriculum a second time, “he was devastated to find out the other students had something, some intellectual capacity, which he did not. He found the classes completely incomprehensible. “It was a great disappointment to me,” Bundy said.
A new string of homicides began the following month, including two that would remain undiscovered until Bundy confessed to them shortly before his execution. On September 2, Bundy raped and strangled a still-unidentified 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 in Holladay, a suburb of Salt Lake City, and dragged her into a wooded area, intending to “de-escalate” his pathological urges, Bundy claimed, by raping and then releasing her; but he strangled her—accidentally, Bundy said—in the process of trying to silence her screams. Her remains were buried near Capital Reef National Park, some 200 miles (320 km) south of Holloday, but were never found.
On October 18, Melissa Anne Smith—the 17-year-old daughter of the police chief of Midvale (another Salt Lake City suburb)—disappeared after leaving a pizza parlor. Her nude body was found in a nearby mountainous area nine days later. Postmortem examination indicated that she may have remained alive for up to seven days following her disappearance. On October 31, Laura Ann Aime, also 17, disappeared 25 miles (40 km) south in Lehi after leaving a café just after midnight. Her naked body was found by hikers 9 miles (14 km) to the northeast in American Fork Canyon on Thanksgiving Day. Both women had been beaten, raped, sodomized, 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.
In the late afternoon of November 8, Bundy approached 18-year-old telephone operator Carol DaRonch at Fashion Place Mall in Murray, less than a mile from the Midvale restaurant where Melissa Smith was last seen. He identified himself as “Officer Roseland” of the Murray 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 pulled to the shoulder and attempted to handcuff her. During their struggle, he inadvertently 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 at Viewmont High School in Bountiful 20 miles (30 km) north of Murray, disappeared after leaving a theater production at the school to pick up her brother. The school’s drama teacher and a student told police that “a stranger” had asked each of them to come out to the parking lot to identify a car. Another student later saw the same man pacing in the rear of the auditorium, and the drama teacher spotted him again shortly before the end of the play. Outside the auditorium, investigators found a key that unlocked the handcuffs removed from Carol DaRonch’s wrist.
In November, Elizabeth Kloepfer called King County police a second time after reading that young women were disappearing in towns surrounding Salt Lake City. Detective Randy Hergesheimer of the Major Crimes division interviewed her in detail. By then, Bundy had risen considerably on the King County hierarchy of suspicion, but the Lake Sammamish witness considered most reliable by detectives failed to identify him from a photo lineup. In December, Kloepfer called the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office and repeated her suspicions. Bundy’s name was added to their list of suspects, but at that time no credible forensic 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 on three separate occasions. She made plans to visit him in Salt Lake City in August.
In 1975, Bundy shifted much of his criminal activity eastward, from his base in Utah to Colorado. On January 12, a 23-year-old registered nurse named Caryn Eileen Campbell disappeared while walking down a well-lit hallway between the elevator and her room at the Wildwood Inn (now the Wildwood Lodge) in Snowmass Village, 400 miles (640 km) southeast of Salt Lake City. Her nude body was found a month later next to a dirt road just outside the resort. She had been killed by blows to the head from a blunt instrument that left distinctive linear grooved depressions on her skull; her body also bore deep cuts from a sharp weapon. On March 15, 100 miles (160 km) northeast of Snowmass, Vail ski instructor 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 ski boots to his car, where he clubbed and handcuffed her, then assaulted and strangled her at a secondary site near Rifle, 90 miles (140 km) west of Vail. Weeks later, he made the six-hour drive from Salt Lake City to revisit her remains.
Denise Lynn Oliverson, 25, disappeared near the Utah-Colorado border in Grand Junction on April 6 while riding her bicycle to her parents’ house; her bike and sandals were found under a viaduct near a railroad bridge. On May 6, Bundy lured 12-year-old Lynette Dawn Culver from Alameda Junior High School in Pocatello, Idaho, 160 miles (255 km) north of Salt Lake City. He drowned and then sexually assaulted her I his hotel room, before disposing of her body in a river north of Pocatello (possibly the Snake0.
In mid-May, three of Bundy’s Washington State DES coworkers, including Carole Ann Boone, visited him in Salt Lake City and stayed for a week in his apartment. Bundy subsequently spent a week in Seattle with Kloepfer in early June and they discussed getting married the following Christmas. Again, Kloepfer made no mention of her multiple discussions with the King County Police and Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office, and Bundy disclosed neither his ongoing relationship with Boone nor a concurrent romance with a Utah law student known in various accounts as Kim Andrews or Sharon Auer.
On June 28, Susan Curtis vanished from the campus of Brigham Young University in Provo, 45 miles (70 km) south of Salt Lake City. Curtis’ murder became Bundy’s last confession, tape-recorded moments before he entered the execution chamber. The bodies of Wilcox, Kent, Cunningham, Oliverson, Culver, and Curtis were never recovered.
In August or September 1975, Bundy was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although he was not an active participant in services and ignored most church restrictions. He would later be excommunicated by the LDS Church following his 1976 kidnapping conviction. When asked his religious preference after his arrest, Bundy answered, “Methodist”, the religion of his childhood.
In Washington State, investigators were still struggling to analyze the Pacific Northwest murder spree that had ended as abruptly as it had begun. In an effort to make sense of an overwhelming mass of data, they resorted to the then-innovative strategy of compiling a database. They used the King County payroll computer, a “huge, primitive machine” by contemporary standards, but the only one available for their use. After putting the many lists they had compiled—classmates and acquaintances of each victim, Volkswagen owners named “Ted”, known sex offenders, and so on—they queried the computer for coincidences. Out of thousands of names, 26 turned up on four separate lists; one was Ted Bundy. Detectives also manually compiled a list of their 100 “best’ suspects, and Bundy was on that list as well. He was “literally at the top of the pile” of suspects when word came from Utah of his arrest.
Arrest and First Trial
In August 16, 1975, Bundy was arrested by Utah Highway Patrol officer Bob Hayward in Granger (another Salt Lake City suburb). 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 and placed on the rear seats. 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. Bundy explained that the ski mask was for skiing, he had found the handcuffs in a dumpster, and the rest were common household items. However, Detective Jerry Thompson remembered a similar suspect and car description from the November 1974 DaRonch kidnapping, which matched Bundy’s name form Kloepfer’s December 1974 phone call. In a search of Bundy’s apartment, police found a guide to Colorado ski resorts with a checkmark by the Wildwood Inn and a brochure that advertised the Viewmont High School play in Bountiful, where Debra Kent had disappeared. The police did not have sufficient evidence to detain Bundy, and he was released on his own recognizance. 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 Thompson flew to Seattle with two other detectives 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, a bag of plaster of Paris that he admitted stealing from a medical supply house, and a meat cleaver that was never used for cooking. Additional objects included surgical gloves, an Oriental knife in a wooden case that he kept in his glove compartment, and a sack full of women’s clothing. Bundy was perpetually in debt, and Kloepfer suspected that he had stolen almost everything of significant value that he possessed. When she confronted him over a new TV and stereo, he warned her, “If you tell anyone, I’ll break your fucking neck.” 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. He kept a lug wrench, taped halfway up the handle, in the trunk of her car—another Volkswagen Beetle, which he often borrowed—“for protection”. 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 Kathy McChesney, and learned of the existence of Stephanie Brooks and her brief engagement to Bundy around Christmas 1973.
In September, Bundy sold his Volkswagen Beetle to a Midvale teenage. 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 “microscopically indistinguishable’ from those of Melissa Smith and Carol DaRonch. FBI lab specialist Robert Neill concluded that the presence of hair strands in one car matching three different victims who had never met one another would be “a coincidence of mind-boggling rarity”.
On October 2, detectives put Bundy into a lineup. DaRonch immediately identified him as “Officer Roseland”, and witnesses from Bountiful recognized him as the stranger at the high school auditorium. There was insufficient evidence to link him to Debra Kent (whose body was never found, though a skeletal fragment found near the school was later identified as Kent’s by DNA analysis), but more than enough evidence to charge him with aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault in the DaRonch case. He was freed on $15,000 bail, paid by his parents, and spent most of the time between indictment and trial in Seattle, living in Kloepfer’s house. 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 November, the three principal Bundy investigators—Jerry Thompson from Utah, Robert Keppel from Washington, and Michael Fisher from Colorado—met in Aspen, Colorado and exchanged information with 30 detectives and prosecutors from five states. While officials left the meeting (later known as the Aspen Summit) convinced that Bundy was the murderer they sought, they agreed that more hard evidence would be needed before he could be charged with any of the murders.
In February 1976, Bundy stood trial for the DaRonch kidnapping. On the advice of his attorney, John O’Connell, Bundy waived his right to a jury due to the negative publicity surrounding the case. After a four-day bench trial and a weekend of deliberation, Judge Stewart Hanson, Jr. found Bundy guilty of kidnapping and assault. In June Bundy was sentenced to one-to-15 years in the Utah State Prison. In October, he was found hiding in bushes in the prison yard carrying an “escape kit”—road maps, airline schedules, and a social security card—and spent several weeks in solitary confinement. Later that month, Colorado authorities charged Bundy with Caryn Campbell’s murder. after a period of resistance, he waived extradition proceedings and was transferred to Aspen in January 1977.
Escapes
On June 7, 1977, Bundy was transported 40 miles (64 km) from the Garfield County jail in Glenwood Springs to Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen for a preliminary hearing. Bundy elected to serve as his own attorney and was excused by the judge from wearing handcuffs or leg shackles. During recess, he asked to visit the courthouse’s law library to research his case. While shielded from his guard’s view behind a bookcase, Bundy opened a window and jumped to the ground from the second story, spraining his right ankle as he landed. After shedding an outer layer of clothing he walked through Aspen as roadblocks were being set up on its outskirts, then hiked southward onto Aspen Mountain. Near its summit he broke into a hunting cabin and stole food, clothing and a rifle. The following day he left the cabin and continued south toward the town of Crested Butte, but became lost in the forest. For two days Bundy wandered aimlessly on the mountain, missing two trails that led downward to his intended destination. On June 10, he broke into a camping trailer on Maroon Lake, 10 miles (16 km) south of Aspen, taking food and a ski parka; but instead of continuing southward, he walked back north toward Aspen, eluding roadblocks and search parties along the way. Three days later, he stole a car at the edge of Aspen Golf Course. Cold, sleep-deprived, and in constant pain from his sprained ankle, Bundy drove back into Aspen, where two police officers noticed his car weaving in and out of its lane and pulled him over. Bundy had been a fugitive for six days and after searching the car, the officers found maps of the mountain area around Aspen that prosecutors were using to demonstrate the location of Caryn Campbell’s body (as his own attorney, Bundy had rights of discovery), indicating that his escape was not a spontaneous act, but had been planned.
Back in jail in Glenwood Springs, Bundy ignored the advice of friends and legal advisors to stay put. The case against him, already weak at best, was deteriorating steadily as pretrial motions consistently resolved in his favor and significant bits of evidence were ruled inadmissible. “A more rational defendant might have realized that he stood a good chance of acquittal, and that beating the murder charge in Colorado would probably have dissuaded other prosecutors … with as little as a year and a half to serve on the DaRonch conviction, had Ted persevered, he could have been a free man.” Instead, Bundy assembled a new escape plan. Bundy 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, Bundy later said, by visitors—Carole Ann Boone in particular. During the evenings, while other prisoners were showering, he sawed a hole about one foot (0.30 m) square between the steel reinforcing bars in his cell’s ceiling and, having lost 35 pounds (16 kg), was able to wriggle through it into the crawl space above. In the weeks that followed Bundy made a series of practice runs, exploring the space. Multiple reports from an informant of movement within the ceiling during the night were not investigated.
By late 1977, Bundy’s impending trial had become a cause of celebre in the small town of Aspen, and Bundy filed a motion for a change of venue to Denver. On December 23, the Aspen trial judge granted the request – but to Colorado Springs, where juries had historically been hostile to murder suspects. On the night of December 30, with most of the jail, staff on Christmas break and non-violent prisoners on furlough with their families, Bundy piled books and files in his bed, covered them with a blanket to simulate his sleeping body, and climbed into the crawl space. Bundy 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 doors to freedom.
After stealing a car, Bundy drove eastward out of Glenwood Springs, but the car soon broke down in the mountains on Interstate 70. A passing motorist gave him a ride to Vail, 60 miles (97 km) to the east. From there Bundy caught a bus to Denver, where boarded a morning flight to Chicago. In Glenwood Springs, the jail’s skeleton crew did not discover the escape until noon on December 31, more than 17 hours later—by then, Bundy was already in Chicago.
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