“I wouldn’t hesitate to line him up with my sister,” one of Bundy’s friends in Utah told the press at the time of his arrest. With remarkable frequency, men described Ted Bundy’s essential goodness in terms of how much they trusted him with the women in their lives—and as Captain Swindler of the Seattle Police tried to connect Ted Bundy to the “Ted” murders, he found that the department’s new prime suspect had already been close to his daughter Cathy. She had dated Ted years before, and she had trusted him, too. “He was someone,” she said, “who had a great deal of compassion in dealing with other people.”
At the time of his arrest, it was difficult even to describe the crimes Ted Bundy was accused of: the term “serial killer,” coined during this period by profiler Robert Ressler, still existed only in FBI circles. Ressler’s criteria included at least three murders of victims unknown to the perpetrator, with cooling-off periods in between. In the past, killers who fit this mold—the Texarkana Moonlight Murderer, the Austin Servant Girl Annihilator, the Axeman of New Orleans—were colorfully named phantoms who terrorized a region for a few months or years, then disappeared. The public rarely needed to match a human face to a series of seemingly inhuman crimes, and in the rare case where a perpetrator was revealed, he was one of society’s rejects: no one wanted the Boston Strangler to take his daughter on a date. Ted Bundy was different. What did it mean for a man who had succeeded in American society to be capable of committing—or even imagining—such violence? Did it say something about the country that made him? Or did the police just have the wrong man?
The general public had no words for Ted Bundy, and perhaps this was why, when he escaped police custody in June 1977—a feat he accomplished by leaping out the second-story window of the Pitkin County Courthouse law library when the guard stepped outside for a smoke—he became more folk hero than bogeyman. Aspen radio station KSNO announced a “Ted Bundy hour,” and played listener requests including Helen Reddy’s “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady.” A local woman named her quarter horse foal Ted Bundy, because, she said, “It’ll know how to run.” Aspen residents fund-raised for a courthouse plaque reading TED BUNDY LEAPT HERE, and a folk singer commemorated the event in ballad form:
So let’s salute the mighty Bundy
Here on Friday, gone on Monday
All his roads led out of town
It’s hard to keep a good man down
When Ted Bundy was captured after six days on the run—exhausted, starving, freezing, injured, hallucinating, and reportedly twenty pounds lighter than he had been when he’d escaped—he still managed to grin roguishly for the cameras and make sure the headline writers knew he was in on the joke. “He said it was just too nice a day to stay inside,” the police officer charged with questioning him told the press.
In December 1977, Ted Bundy’s former coworker Carole Ann Boone came to visit him in jail. As Ted and Liz drifted apart, his letters to Carole had shifted from friendly to intimate, but Carole still wasn’t prepared to see the man she called her “Sweet Theodore” in custody. “I was shocked to see him in a cell,” she told authors Michaud and Aynesworth. She was positive that Ted was innocent—a position she would maintain, publicly, for the rest of her life.
When Carole described her jailhouse visit with Ted, she spoke of a man who seemed not just physically apart from the wider world, but no longer of it. “It is hard to describe,” she said, “except that in some strange way he was as far away, as far removed, as a person can be. Exiled in the midst.” During Carole’s visit, she noticed a spot on the floor where the gray paint had been worn away, exposing the pink material beneath. It was the place where Ted turned when he paced around his cell. Not long before, Ted had asked his former attorney John Henry Browne which states he thought were most likely to carry out the death penalty following the end of its national moratorium in 1976. “Texas and Florida,” Browne replied.
Carole saw something else that day, something she didn’t mention to the guards: a hole in the cell’s ceiling. Not long after Carole’s visit, on December 30, Ted Bundy climbed up through the hole and into the crawl space above, and escaped through the warden’s apartment. He had pulled his sheets over a pile of clothes, crumpled papers, and law books, so the guards would think he was still in bed. It was the kind of ruse that should have worked only in a cartoon, but it worked for Ted Bundy. It wasn’t until noon the following day that anyone noticed he was missing. By the time the police alerted the public and set up roadblocks, he was already more than a thousand miles away.
Back in Seattle, Keppel informed Liz of Ted’s escape, and told her to contact him immediately if Ted tried to reach her. “As I lay awake that night, listening to every creak in the house,” Liz wrote, “I admitted to myself that I might be afraid of Ted.”
Liz didn’t hear from Ted in the days following his escape, but some part of her knew how to find him. “One morning in mid-January,” she wrote, “I picked up the newspaper and saw a picture of a frightened woman peering out of a gap in the drawn drapes of her sorority house. The story said an intruder had raped and murdered two young women and beaten two others as they slept in their beds at Florida State University . . . Now I had the ominous feeling that [Ted] was in Tallahassee.”
Liz didn’t have to wait long for her fears to be confirmed. A month later, on February 16, 1978, she got a call from Ted. “It’s OK,” he told her. She could tell that he was crying. “It’s OK,” he said again. “I’m in custody. It’s all over.” Unwilling to ignore her fears any longer, Liz asked him if he was a suspect in the murders she had read about.
“I wish we could sit down alone,” Ted said haltingly, “and talk about things, with nobody listening. About the way I am.”
AFTER HE WAS CAPTURED IN FLORIDA, TED BUNDY changed, in the public eye, from an outlaw to a monster. It was no longer possible to separate the man from his alleged crimes, just as it was no longer possible to tell a story about a girl who simply vanished, then reappeared months later as a skull, a jawbone, a broken tooth, or a strand of hair—a changeling offering mute testimony that something terrible had happened not here in our world but in that strange realm called “thin air.” Now there was no such separation. What had happened at Florida State University had happened in our world. It had happened here.
At the Chi Omega sorority house, a man had stolen upstairs in the earliest hours of January 15, 1978, and gone from bedroom to bedroom, bludgeoning his sleeping victims with an oak log. Twenty-year-old Kathy Kleiner and 22-year-old Karen Chandler survived that night, though they were beaten so severely that drops of their blood were later found on the ceiling. Both Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman were strangled and bludgeoned to death, and Bowman was beaten with such violence that her temple was crushed and fragments of her skull were driven into her brain. Levy was raped vaginally and anally with a bottle of Clairol hair mist, and her autopsy would reveal that she had been sexually assaulted with enough force to damage her internal organs. Her killer had bitten deeply into one of her buttocks and nearly torn her nipple from her breast. Contrary to what Liz read in the newspaper, Levy was the only victim to be sexually assaulted, but the manner in which Bowman, Kleiner, and Chandler were attacked suggested a form of domination akin to rape. Someone had wanted not just to hurt or even kill these women, but to obliterate them.