Throughout the blistering summer of 1974, as the rest of the country followed President Nixon’s impeachment and the removal of US troops from Vietnam, Seattle residents waited for a break in the “Ted” case. It was a time when women feared for their safety, and men professed fear for the women they loved—men including Ted Bundy. Later his mother would remember a night when Ted, while visiting his family in Tacoma, watched his younger half sister, Sandra, get ready for a date. “Ted said to me, ‘You know, Mom, she looks like all those other girls,’” Louise Bundy told Seattle Times reporter Richard Larsen. “‘I hope you know where she’s going and who she’s with.’”
Ted was equally protective of his girlfriend, Liz, and her young daughter. Liz was a 24-year-old single mother when she moved to Seattle in 1969, and she had been in town only a few weeks when she met Ted in a University District tavern. Liz, shy about her secretarial job, said she worked making heart valves in the university’s medical instruments department. Ted, 23 and still years away from finishing his bachelor’s degree, said he was a law student writing a book about Vietnam. Both were pretending to be other people and seemed to find a sense of safety in each other. “It’s as if we knew each other before in some former life,” Liz remembered Ted telling her, after they had been dating for a few weeks. He became not just a boyfriend but a member of the family—and he adored Liz’s daughter, reading to her, baking a chocolate cake for her fifth birthday, and watching Saturday-morning cartoons with her while Liz slept in. “Their favorite was Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties,” Liz wrote in The Phantom Prince, her memoir of their relationship. “Ted could mimic Dudley perfectly.”
The relationship that started with mutual lies soon seemed one in which they kept no secrets from each other. “My story about making heart valves had become a joke,” Liz wrote. “Every Sunday night Ted would say, ‘Well, you’d better get to sleep early so you’ll be rested up for making those heart valves tomorrow.’” And Ted allowed Liz into his life, joking about the sulfurous “Tacoma aroma” that shrouded his working-class hometown, introducing her to his mother and stepfather, and weeping when he told Liz he was illegitimate: he had never known his father, and his mother had given birth to him when she was a teenager, something he said he did not learn until he was a teenager himself.
But Ted had big dreams. He was going to law school. He was going to make a name for himself. Liz supported Ted financially, since, she said, “neither of us doubted wealth was in Ted’s future. He was marked for success.” She was also sure they would get married and start a family. At first, Ted seemed to agree. They got engaged in early 1970, but Ted quickly broke it off. They were too poor, he said. They weren’t ready. Liz got pregnant, and had an abortion at Ted’s urging. Ted applied to law schools, and was devastated when he was accepted only at his last choice, the University of Utah. Their relationship stagnated. Ted saw other women. Liz got jealous. Liz saw other men. Ted got jealous. And gradually Liz saw a new pattern of behavior emerging: Ted would be cold and absent one day, then reappear the next, warm and present, showering her with declarations of his love.
Around the same time, Liz noticed another pattern: young women were disappearing across the Pacific Northwest. One woman, Georgann Hawkins, vanished en route to her sorority house, which was only three blocks from Liz’s apartment. “Like most women living in the University District,” Liz wrote, “I was deeply disturbed by these disappearances. Walking at night from my garage to my front door scared me.” She might have felt safer if Ted had been around to protect her, but he seemed more distant than ever. “I was hurt that he hardly ever wanted to make love,” she wrote. “There had to be someone else. I wished I knew what she was like so I could be more like her.”
Sometimes Liz even wondered whether her Ted was the “Ted” the police were searching for—worries she usually dismissed as quickly as she allowed herself to entertain them. He had a VW, but so did she. She had found plaster of Paris in his dresser—the same kind a person would use to put together a makeshift cast like the one witnesses had described—but he told her he had it in case he actually did break something. And the composite sketch didn’t look like her Ted, but the description sounded like him: the tennis whites; the unusual, almost East Coast–sounding accent; and the story about the sailboat. Ted didn’t have a boat, but he always talked about getting one someday.
When Liz could find no other way to ignore her suspicions, she thought of how they might damage Ted’s future. “I visualized Ted and me married,” she wrote. “He would be campaigning for governor when it was revealed that his devoted wife had gone to the police in 1974, claiming that he was a murderer.” But in October, about a month after Ted left for Utah, Liz finally found she couldn’t ignore her fears any longer. One of her friends went home to Salt Lake City to visit family and learned about the recent murder of a local teenager named Melissa Smith. “I don’t want to scare you,” she told Liz, “but it’s happening in Utah.”
That month, Liz called the King County Police Department’s tip line. Soon afterward, her suspicions again gave way to guilt. She didn’t have to worry: her tip immediately vanished beneath a drift of paperwork about likelier suspects. The Ted Squad wouldn’t begin investigating her Ted until August 1975. By then, he had already been arrested in Utah.
Ted Bundy was arrested for the first time not for murder, rape, or kidnapping, but because he’d gotten lost. One warm night, he was driving around a Salt Lake City suburb when he got disoriented and pulled over to find his bearings. When he got back on the road, he noticed a car tailing him. He would later deny he knew it was a patrol car until he ran a red light and saw police lights behind him. Then, he said, he did what any law-abiding citizen would do: he pulled over and did his best to cooperate. He allowed the police to search his car, where they found an ice pick, a pantyhose mask, a ski mask, several pieces of rope, a pair of handcuffs, and a crowbar.
The tools looked suspicious—like a burglary kit, maybe—but at a meeting three days after the arrest, Detective Daryle Ondrak still hesitated before mentioning the search. “I don’t know if this means anything,” Ondrak said, “but I was involved with a stop this weekend and the guy had a pair of handcuffs in his car.” As Ondrak described the man—well-spoken, apparently educated, and driving a tan VW—Detective Jerry Thompson wondered if this was the same man who had tried to abduct 18-year-old Carol DaRonch from a mall in Murray, Utah, the previous November. The suspect had lured Carol her into his tan VW by posing as a police officer, then tried to handcuff her and bludgeon her with a crowbar before she escaped.
In October 1975, DaRonch identified Ted Bundy in a police lineup. Of the people who were surprised by his subsequent arrest, Bundy seemed the most shocked of all. He said he’d expected to be back on campus in time for a 2L class later that day.
EVEN AFTER TED BUNDY WAS CONVICTED OF ATTEMPTED kidnapping, even after authorities connected him not just to the “Ted” murders of the Pacific Northwest but to at least seven more murders and missing persons cases in Utah and Colorado, and even after he was extradited to Colorado and charged with the murder of a nurse named Caryn Campbell, who had vanished from a Snowmass ski resort, it was still possible for people to look at Ted Bundy and feel not horror at what he was accused of, but shock that anyone so polite and clean-cut—so middle-class—could be suspected of such things. “If you can’t trust someone like Ted Bundy, you can’t trust anyone—your parents, your wife, anyone,” said his former boss Ross Davis, whose two young daughters Ted Bundy had regularly babysat.