Notorious: Ted Bundy - Part 1

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Ted Bundy raped and murdered countless women between 1973 to 1978.

His brutality devastated hundreds, some of whom never shared their memories until now.

Emotional Day.

I think that's an understatement.

Our stories are the same, but very different because our memories are different.

I'm not ashamed of who I am, and I'm proud and thankful to be a survivor.

How are you?

So nice to see you.

I can't believe it's been 40 years.

Ridiculous.

Long over time.

Here we go.

So much to share.

Why did Ted Bundy choose me?

I still have no idea why.

Ted Bundy is a unique story in American crime.

It's not just one story, it's many stories.

It's the media story.

Bundy is an educated, handsome murderer who charmed women with his looks and sensitive demeanor.

It's the law enforcement story.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

He was a demon.

It's the victim stories.

If you had not called me when you did, I would have died.

They all come together, but at the core of it are people whose lives have been impacted by one person's

evil conduct.

Ted Bundy was one of the most inhuman, vicious monsters that we've ever had in America.

Dealer is too good for him.

He should have some of the same things done to him as he did to all of the girls.

This was certainly the biggest case that had ever been televised before.

Women thought he was a good-looking, well-educated guy.

You're fascinated by him.

Very, very.

Ted Bundy represented himself through his trials.

He didn't know enough about the law.

He just knew enough to get himself in trouble.

He had escaped from prison twice.

He was conning there, but he's not the great sly killer that people thought he was.

He was just a world ahead from a law enforcement perspective.

He did things that a smart person wouldn't do, but handsome Republican law student.

He was not the kind of person that would provoke suspicion.

I'm not guilty.

Does that include the time I stole a comic book when I was five years old?

He got away with these murders not because he was so smart, but because monsters are supposed to look like monsters.

I'm not afraid of him.

He just doesn't look like the type to kill somebody.

They definitely didn't look like Ted Bundy.

January 15th, 1978, was the day a sleepy college campus changed forever.

Cheryl Thomas, Nancy Young, and myself, we lived together back in 1978.

They were both students at the School of Dance.

Cheryl could have been something huge.

Cheryl had a first date that night.

Nancy and I got home around 2 a.m.

Cheryl's light was out.

Then we just went to bed.

That night, a very loud noise woke me up, startled me.

We heard all the knocking around from the middle of the house to the front of the house.

Then it went silent.

A night of terror at Florida State University.

We didn't know at the time that we were so close to dying.

Once Ted Bundy wandered onto the campus,

it was an absolute rampage.

It was a frenzy.

He was smashing them with that log.

FSU was a homicidal boast.

He did something that no one else had ever done.

Assault many women from the same location and on the same night.

I looked at the blood spatter and it was like, what kind of person could do this?

I've had an opportunity to speak with a lot of serial killers, but Ted Bundy was definitely different.

He had a degree in psychology.

He had been a law school student.

Throughout his confinement, he had escaped twice.

He was a standard that other serial killers are compared with in our country.

I'm Bill Hagmire.

I was an FBI profiler and spent probably 200 hours interviewing Ted Bundy.

The date is February 13th, 1986.

This is Bill Hagmire.

The interview is being held at the Florida State Prison.

And the interviewee is Theodore H.

Bundy.

It was not my role to try to investigate or solve any of his cases, but to talk to him and see if he could give us insights on his development and his background.

What brings a person to the point where he acts out of fantasy?

You know, where he goes from thinking about it to doing it, is a puzzle that if you could find a solution to, it might be all you need to unravel with a whole ball of wax.

Ted Bundy was born at a unwed mother's home in Vermont in 1946.

After Ted Bundy was born, they went back home to her parents and her sisters.

My name is Kevin Sullivan.

I'm a journalist, and I've covered Ted Bundy from his birth to his execution.

For the most part, little Teddy, as they would call him, he seemed normal.

However,

it has been reported that one of the aunts woke up one morning and Ted had taken kitchen knives and placed them pointing at her on the bed.

That's the first sign we have that something might be wrong with the child.

As Ted Bundy grew into a teenager, he enjoyed a very violent fantasy world that depicted women being mistreated.

My name is Michelle Wood, and I am an active homicide detective.

I have extensively researched Ted Bundy.

He would later act out his fantasies in real life.

Early in his life, Ted's major literary interest was in detective magazines full of stories of violent crime and how to get away with it.

He takes in a lot of sexual relieving through the fictional stories.

We have a lonely kid and when a person's lonely they have to find something to balance out and give them satisfaction in their life.

And Dr.

Al Carlyle, psychologist, and I evaluated Ted Bundy.

Ted Bundy starts building up the dark side so when he's lonely, angry, depressed, he can shift into it.

It was never that desire to murder that he lacked.

Let's say you're a guy who's just got these fantasies about

going out and abducting women.

See, what brings a person to the point where they say, I'm just ready.

I don't know why.

I'm just ready to go out and kill somebody.

He was bubbling over with aggression,

but he was not yet a predator.

At University of Washington, at the age of 21, Ted Bundy met his first girlfriend.

Diane was wealthy, smart, everything he wasn't.

Ted Bundy came from a lower middle class family, so he felt insecure the entire time about his relationship.

And eventually, Diane did decide to break off the relationship.

He was devastated by the breakup.

Diane's rejection was a huge blow to Ted Bundy's ego.

Despite mediocre test scores, Ted Bundy graduates and enrolls in law school.

He desperately wants to belong to the educated, privileged world from which he feels excluded.

In his mind, it would have been a real prize had he been able to marry Diane.

Diane's rejection triggers Bundy's violent rage toward women.

He would later target the types of women he believes he can never possess on his own merits.

Diane was bright and beautiful.

She had long brown hair, and she was the spitting image of almost every one of Ted Bundy's victims.

In the 70s, Seattle wasn't considered a very safe area to live.

It was a time of sexual revolution.

Women were becoming more and more empowered to express themselves, to be independent, to travel where they wanted.

Young women were just more trusty.

And Ted Bundy exploited them.

My name is Kathleen McChesney.

I was a detective with King County Police and investigated Ted Bundy.

In January of 1974, Karen Sparks was living near the University of Washington and someone broke into her bedroom

and beat her, appearing to have attempted to kill her.

Karen Sparks was attacked in her sleep with a metal object and was sexually assaulted with the same object.

She would survive, but with permanent disabilities.

I'm certain he was convinced he killed her.

He was not going to make that mistake again.

During law school, he was a volunteer on a hotline for sex crimes.

So he had an opportunity to talk to victims, which probably he applied a lot of that knowledge to his own victims.

When I talked to Ted Bundy, he said he wanted them to relax so that he could enjoy them before he would kill them.

While some cite Bundy's interest in law as proof of his superior intellect, others believe it was all part of a con to appear smart and successful, which would later help him deceive both his victims and investigators.

Ted Bundy had an average IQ.

He had a hard time getting into law school, and once he did, he never finished.

He was trying to be something that he wasn't.

He seemed to be a talented, articulate, normal guy.

He had what people call the mask of sanity.

There were two Bundies, the outside Ted and the inside Ted.

And although we cannot be certain when the one ascended over the other, we do know that he was going to live his life of murder.

By spring of 1974, Ted Bundy has dropped out of law school and is working in local politics.

Meanwhile, young women begin to disappear across the Pacific Northwest.

Linda Ann Haley lived about a mile from Karen Sparks, and she was clearly abducted.

Donegale Manson was a student at Evergreen State College and disappeared from Olympia, Washington.

The fourth victim was University of Central Washington student Susan Rancor.

22-year-old Kathy Parks disappeared on May 6th from Corvallis, Oregon.

Brenda Ball was the sixth victim.

George Ann Hawkins in June was the next case to occur in Seattle.

What made it so difficult

was that we had a lot of abductions

and no

bodies.

Ted Bundy prepared himself very well to get away with all these murders.

He got a degree in psychology because he was interested in human behavior.

He went to law school to understand what methods were used to identify and capture suspects.

Is Ted Bundy tailoring his education to get away with this murderous rampage?

He was just a world ahead from a law enforcement perspective.

Or does living behind the mask of an articulate and educated student help him maintain a low profile?

When you were looking at somebody that was considered so normal, handsome law student, he was not the kind of person that would provoke suspicion.

The only people that ever got to see the real Ted happened to be his victims.

With them, the mask came off.

Coming up, Bundy survivors share their harrowing stories.

This very loud noise woke me up.

There was something not right.

Policemen are surrounding the house, jumping out of their cars with their guns out, pounding on her door.

And she's not answering.

By June 1974,

a handsome law school dropout named Ted Bundy is a rising star in the Republican Party in Washington state.

Meanwhile, six college-age women are missing across the Pacific Northwest.

Bundy was a very talented, articulate young man.

Many women would call him handsome, but when he worked for governmental agencies, Bundy was always seeking information about crimes and how much was shared between departments, like would the Seattle PD share with the Olympia PD, and if so, how much information.

Some believe Bundy is a criminal mastermind, gathering knowledge to outsmart the law.

So he prepared himself very well.

to get involved in violent crime and to get away with it.

He had a degree in psychology.

He had been a law school student.

Ted was aware of the then-existent weaknesses in communication between law enforcement.

He was a very bright guy.

Others believe he's simply a con artist whose educated, privileged image helps him avoid suspicion.

Many people looked at Ted as someone that was really going to go somewhere.

He was so normal, handsome, law student.

They're just not the type of people.

who turn out to be vicious killers.

He evaded law enforcement, not because he was so smart, but because people think monsters are supposed to look like monsters.

Ted Bundy didn't look like the monster that he was until Lake Sammamish.

It's July 14th of 1974.

Lake Sammamish is a beautiful lake with a lot of water activities.

This was a beautiful, beautiful day.

And so everyone was out.

40,000 people were at the lake.

It was a packed beach area.

What happened that was so unique was that there were witnesses.

Witnesses saw Janice Ott

leave with a young man whose arm was in a sling.

And it was clear to witnesses that she didn't know the man, but he had approached her for some help.

And that was the last time she was seen alive.

Hours later, a man with the same description, also arm in a sling, approaches Denise Naslin

and asks her for some help in the parking lot.

And she disappeared.

There was a certain type of profile that he liked.

when considering who he was going to attack.

They all resembled the physical description of his first girlfriend.

White women, young, 18 to 25, fairly attractive.

The game with him was a deadly game, but he liked to use his intelligence against their defensive upbringing.

If you look at the murders of Bundy, he did things that a smart person wouldn't do.

Bundy was convinced that no matter what he did, he would escape law enforcement.

But he made a mistake at Lake Sammamish.

He identified himself as Ted.

Not just to the women that he abducted, but to those around them who would hear the conversation.

And also someone saw a car that they believed associated with him, which was a tan Volkswagen bug with some sort of rack on it.

Ted Bundy's ego is what gave police their first lead.

He got off on doing these things in broad daylight and getting away with it.

But now, they knew his name was Ted, they knew what kind of car he had, and they also had a physical description, which they in turn used to make a sketch.

Does that sound like a genius to you?

That sketch was on the news.

It was in the newspapers.

And we received thousands and thousands of tips.

Due to similarities in victimology, timeframe, and methodology, Investigators believe that all eight abduction cases are connected.

People kind of emphasize the fact that these victims had long hair parted in the middle, good looking.

My name is Robert Keppel and I was a detective with the King County Sheriff's Department.

They had at least 100 suspects, but two very important phone calls stood out.

One was from a university professor by the name of Sarazin.

And he told the authorities, he said, I have a weird guy in my class by the name of Ted, and he drives a Volkswagen.

I think you should check him out.

That was their first real lead in the case.

We also received a tip from a woman who was dating an individual named Ted.

A woman named Elizabeth called and said someone had come up to her with a composite sketch and the composite did resemble her Ted and he drove a Volkswagen.

Both the professor and the girlfriend Elizabeth were describing the same person.

His full name was Theodore Robert Bundy.

and he went by Ted Bundy.

Ted Bundy's girlfriend did not want to believe, nor would any woman, that someone that she cared deeply about would be capable of such horrible acts.

You've got two active lifestyles going on in the same mind at the same time.

He outwardly appears very normal, and underneath, he can be doing vicious things.

Ted Bundy was a suspect, but we didn't focus on any one individual at that point.

You don't want to be married to any one theory of who it might be, because to do that would be to

maybe make a mistake.

Unfortunately, we had 3,500 calls and many Teds, not just Ted Bundy.

Despite the strong evidence pointing toward him, why was Ted Bundy not considered a top suspect?

And of course, he was convinced he was smarter than us, and he may have been in some ways.

So many things could have pointed them in the direction of Bundy.

But when you were looking at somebody that was considered so normal, they're just not the type of people who turn out to be vicious killers.

After Lake Samamish, eight women had vanished into thin air.

But there was hope that they still might be alive because no bodies had been recovered.

But in September 1974, there was a sinister turning point in the case.

They found human skulls.

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In July of 1974,

Ted Bundy is implicated in the disappearance of eight Washington women in the past five months.

But history is split on whether Bundy is outsmarting the the law or if his clean-cut image is so different from the preconceived notions of a serial killer that investigators miss incriminating clues.

Homicide investigators this morning have uncovered what they believe to be human remains.

Janice Ott and Denise Nasla

disappeared on July 14th from Lake Samami State Park.

Two months later, their bodies were discovered at what has become known as the Issaquah dump site.

For the most part, departments don't investigate missing persons with the vigor they do when they have a body.

Things changed now when we found bones.

There were jaw bones, teeth, and body parts of victims who were not associated with one another found in the same location.

tells you very clearly that someone brought them there.

They knew that this would be a discreet place to leave them and perhaps murder them.

Of the eight known abductions across Washington state, investigators believe they may have found remains of at least seven women.

But the bodies have been so disturbed that the identities of the victims are not confirmed to this day.

Ted Bundy's motus operande, or MO, was to sometimes choose the dump sites where he would leave a body, maybe days or weeks before he would even choose the victim.

Might leave a body someplace, but the clothing could be 200 miles away.

It was quite a jigsaw.

It was very difficult to put together.

Is Bundy disturbing the crime scenes in an effort to keep law enforcement at bay?

To Ted, a big part of all of the killing was not the joy of killing the person.

It was a possession of the person after they're dead.

Fantasy is a big part of all of this.

The fantasy comes to an end generally when the victim dies.

But Ted would carry on the fantasy after the death of the victim.

When I talked to Ted Bundy, he said when he did things to corpses biting or torturing them, he said, I knew it was time for me to move somewhere else because I'd give in to my primate push.

and I couldn't control myself anymore.

I would make mistakes and I would get caught.

I'm going to talk in the third person.

And the fresher the find, the more likely he'll be back.

I don't think he's going back to see skeletal remains, although I wouldn't say for certain he wouldn't be.

Ted Bundy admitted to doing a lot of gruesome things, keeping the victim's remains, going back to the crime scene to put makeup on his victims after their death.

And engaged in necrophilia, which is sexual activity post-mortem.

If you think about everything that he did, it was all about power and control.

Ted Bundy leaves Seattle shortly after the Lake Sammamish abductions.

Communication between law enforcement at the time was not spectacular, and he knew that he would go hundreds of miles one way, hundreds of miles another.

He was quite a transient person.

It's not long after the bodies are discovered in Washington that reports of missing women in Utah begin to surface.

Melissa Smith was the daughter of the chief of police of Midvale, Utah, and Melissa disappeared on October 18th, 1974.

Two weeks after Melissa Smith disappeared, Laura Aim went missing leaving a cafe.

These are women that disappeared while Bundy was trolling, and they ended up in his vehicle, probably willingly.

He would try to determine what approach he would use to each victim, and he had two major MOs, if you will.

One was his sympathy mode, as he called it, where he would put his arm in a sling or put a cast on his foot and approach people who would normally reach out to help people.

Other ones that if he thought were a little more conservative, he would use what he called his official approach, where he would use a fake police officer's badge.

Both Melissa and Laura's remains were found weeks after they went missing.

There was evidence that they had been raped, sodomized, and strangled using nylon stockings.

DNA evidence would not be used in a criminal investigation until 1986.

So detectives in Utah have nothing to go on.

But then they get an unexpected break in the case.

On November 8th, 1974, in Marie, Utah, Bundy approached a woman by the name of Carol DeRanche and identified himself as a police officer, Officer Roseland.

He's driving this ready little Volkswagen.

She thought that was odd, but she gets in the car.

He goes down the street, stops his car,

and attacks her.

She's flailing.

She's fighting for her life.

He had a crowbar in his hand and handcuffs.

He put the first handcuff on her, but he accidentally put the second part of the cuff on the same hand.

And she was was able to get away.

He's trying to chase her.

There's an older couple driving down the street.

Hysterical.

Carol gets in the car with this older couple.

Mundy takes off.

They take her to the Murray-PD, and so she gives a good description of him, his hairstyle and weight, and said he was well-dressed, well-manicured.

Now, Mundy, he would get into an altered state, and he was not not going to go home that night without a kill.

After Carol Duranch got away, Ted Bundy drove to a local school that was having a play, and there were lots of people around.

He talked to a bunch of women, and he was able to lure 17-year-old Debbie Kent to the parking lot.

That was the last time she was seen.

Of course, when Bundy slipped out of Washington state, the murders stopped there.

And when he went to Utah, the murders began there.

And

the Utah authorities were as puzzled about their missing women as Washington authorities were when it happened to them.

In addition to Melissa Smith, Laura Aim, and Debbie Kent, eight women disappear across Utah, Colorado, and Idaho.

By June 1975, 19 women are believed to have been murdered across five western states.

Utah law enforcement thinks they have two, maybe three cases, and they believe they're totally unrelated to the remains discovered in Washington.

Meanwhile, the investigators in Washington didn't have anything to go on.

But in Utah, a crazy stroke of luck was about to break open the case.

By June 1975, 19 young women are either missing or found murdered across five western states.

Ted Bundy is immortalized as outsmarting the police, but is this the truth?

Or does the simple lack of technology and communication at the time delay his capture?

In all,

we had over 1,000 names of possible suspects.

We narrowed down the thousand names to 100, and we were starting to go through those names thoroughly when Ted Bundy was arrested in Utah.

Ted Bundy was arrested on August 16, 1975, in a small town called Granger, Utah.

An off-duty highway patrol officer saw a Volkswagen bug driving very slowly with its lights off around a residential neighborhood.

In the middle of the night,

the individual identified himself as Theodore Robert Bundy.

And in his vehicle were

things that one might use to commit crimes.

He had a ski mask, an ice pick, an electrical cord, which Bundy would use for choking.

He also had rope for binding hands and feet.

The investigators in Utah knew that we had a serial murder investigation ongoing.

When they saw that Ted Bundy was from the Seattle area,

They called us and told us, we're going to send you a photograph of what was in his car.

We'd like to know what you know about him.

The thing that Bundy thought would never happen, the sharing of all this information, did happen.

It just took time.

Investigators realize that the suspect named Ted, linked to the Washington murders, resembles Carol Duranche's attacker, the same man suspected of murders in Utah.

Ted Bundy's movements exactly matched the timeline of the murder cases and the victims across all five states fit the same profile.

All of the victims were in their late teens or early 20s and had similar physical descriptions.

The bodies that were recovered were all naked, and most showed signs of blunt force trauma, sexual assault, and mutilation.

So they were fairly confident that Ted Bundy was the person responsible for these 19 murders under investigation.

I think what fascinated me the most was what other people thought about him.

The family and his friends really thought that he was a very good stand-up guy.

We still don't believe it.

It just can't be.

Our son is the the best son in the world.

A very normal, active boy.

Ted Bundy himself is often credited with using his intellect and charm to remain at large.

But his family and friends were as conned by his image as everyone else.

When Bundy was apprehended, most people felt that there had to be a mistake.

How can someone in law school who was gaining a name for himself in Washington state politics be a roaming serial killer?

Ted Bundy would say serial killers, you know, are human.

They've got the same fears and desires that everyone else has, but they compartmentalize their life and their behavior because they want to kill.

It's very frustrating when you have someone that you believe has committed a crime, but you don't have the evidence to get a charge and subsequently a conviction.

Ted Bundy left evidence behind, so he really wasn't this mastermind that was evading law enforcement.

But in 1974, there's no DNA database.

There's no surveillance video.

So you are relying on eyewitness testimony.

The Carol Duranch attempt abduction was the sole unique case where they actually had evidence to charge him with a crime.

Ted Bundy stands trial for the kidnapping and assault of Carol Duranche in February 1976 and is found guilty on on both counts.

The judge sentenced him to serve up to 15 years in Utah State Prison.

That was the sentence for someone suspected of killing 19 women.

That's insane.

Sure, I get angry when I look at people walking around and oggling me like I'm some sort of weirdo because I'm not.

Bundy is very offended if people said he was crazy.

He felt that he definitely was not an animal.

I don't like being locked up for something I didn't do and I don't like my liberty taken away.

He was denying any part of any crime, and so many of his friends and co-workers and such said, This is not the Ted Bundy we know.

Dr.

Al Carlisle, Utah prison psychologist, had a very unique opportunity to work with Bundy and to study him.

Since it was not totally conclusive how violent he was, my purpose was to determine: is there a violent streak to Ted Bundy.

At one point during the evaluation, he looked at me and he says, Al, do you think I killed those girls?

I said, well, I don't know for sure, but I think if you did, you'll do it again.

He just looked at me for a minute and turned around and walked back to his cell.

He didn't say a word.

While Ted Bundy is serving time in a Utah prison, investigators from four four states are working together to charge him with murder.

It still was a circumstantial case, and the investigators were hoping for a confession.

But a confession was something they were never going to get.

I'm not guilty.

Does that include the time I stole a comic book when I was five years old?

I am not guilty of the charges which have been filed against me.

Looking at the timeline of his life,

we've seen the progression from a normal kid to quite angry.

I concluded that he is violent enough to have done that type of a crime.

And the important aspect of this is that a person can't have two sides of them.

One, a very social side, easy to get along with, and the other side, a monster bent on and addicted to killing people.

The Carol DeRanche kidnapping trial happened in June of 1976.

It took investigators four months to gather enough information and evidence to charge him in another case.

Based on a gas receipt, a strand of victim's hair from his car, and an eyewitness, authorities charge Ted Bundy with the murder of Karen Campbell, a missing Colorado woman whose nude body was found outside a ski resort in February 1975.

As a result of the charge, Bundy is transferred from a Utah prison to a facility in Aspen in January 1977.

Prior to his being exposed as a killer of women and even after, Bundy did everything that he could to ingratiate himself with those he came in contact with.

And this included the people working in the Aspen courthouse and jail.

He's very nice.

He's polite.

And people began to like and trust Ted.

His attorneys allowed him to assist them, so he was granted access to the law library.

Normally prisoners look like prisoners.

They're shackled, they're handcuffed.

Somehow, Ted Bundy was allowed to bypass this rule, and he was often left alone to prepare for his defense.

They were looking at a man accused of a number of heinous killings, but because of how they viewed Ted, the affable Ted, the handsome Ted, would very often overwhelm any sense of suspicion.

Do you think about getting out of here?

Well, legally, sure.

It's June 7th, 1977.

During a recess, Ted Bundy strolls into the law library on the second floor.

And he jumps out the open window.

He was gone.

June 7th, 1977.

During a recess in court proceedings for the Karen Campbell murder trial, defendant Ted Bundy escapes from the second floor window of the building's law library.

He injured himself, but he didn't break anything.

And he was gone.

But those who knew him disagree on whether his escape is a sign of brilliance or a sign that Bundy's con artistry has escalated to blind not only victims and investigators, but now his own lawyers and jailers to his violent nature.

His escape from Colorado was easy for him.

Conning them into putting him in a room by himself without any shackles or handcuffs on him.

He was convinced he was smarter than us, and he may have been in some ways.

They were looking at a man accused of heinous killings.

But because of the affable Ted, the handsome Ted overwhelmed any suspicion.

That made it easier for him to escape.

ted bundy injured his ankle when he jumped out the window but he still managed to hike to aspen mountain

he broke into a hunting cabin and stole some food some clothes and a rifle a couple days later he was able to steal a car but he had problems driving it because of his ankle he ultimately got pulled over for driving erratically and he was placed into custody After six days, they got him.

Bundy's plan to escape through the wilderness failed.

Back in the hands of authorities, Bundy put on a cocky smile after ted he was back in jail i was the one of the ones he called and uh i recorded it we have the whole conversation and uh he told me about the escape i says were you afraid of getting caught he says no

in your own life what was what was happening what was the reason for

i don't know that day i came there and i'd thought a great deal about escape and i didn't know if i had the guts to do it quite frankly and the guard went outside for a smoke and there's not a one person in the whole courtroom.

The windows were open and the fresh air was blowing through.

And I said, I'm ready to go.

And I walked to the window and jumped out.

He just fit right in.

He spoke well.

He was friendly.

He interacted with people.

But seemingly normal people can still be an absolute monster with no

feeling for the lives of other people.

The law enforcement investigators were able to put together a pretty good timeline of where he was during those six days and felt very confident that he had not committed another crime in that period of time.

So that was quite a relief.

It wouldn't have been his M.O.

to kill someone because he's focusing on surviving.

And so the victim would not have done much for him at that point.

Extraordinary experience because I mean a pretty strong-willed person.

But you know, believe it or not, it was the body that was strong, but the mind that was weak.

I mean, I didn't want to get caught, but I knew it would happen, but I was just so tired and just said, well, let's just see what happens.

And a fluke, actually, they stopped me.

After his escape in June 1977, Ted Bundy is sent back to jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, to wait to stand trial for the murder of Karen Campbell.

Individuals who are flight risks, like Ted,

continue to be flight risks.

So there was always the idea that he might try to escape again.

In Colorado, they placed Bundy in a cell that had a light fixture that needed to be welded.

But they looked at it and they said, no one can get up there.

All right, so you think, okay, that's fine.

So what does Ted do?

He begins to lose weight.

Then the prisoners in other cells, they told the guards, we hear Bundy crawling up above us at night.

And then he's going back to his cell and letting himself back down.

Do you think they did something about it?

Nope.

They did did nothing about it.

It was just after Christmas 1977.

Most of the Colorado prison staff was at home with their families.

Bundy slipped out of his cell through an opening through the broken light fixture.

This is a man who thinks of murder 24-7.

Who to murder?

When to murder, and where he needed to go.

He went up into the rafter area, crawled to a jailer's apartment, put on civilian clothes, and he was out into the night.

Garfield County Jail, Bundy escaped.

Again, the former law student crawled through a loose light fixture in the ceiling of his cell.

He had mentioned many times to me that the downfall of many a serial colour was they would become cocky, they would make a lot of mistakes.

And he said, I was very careful.

Ted Bundy is remembered as the mastermind who escaped not once, but twice from prison.

He had more than basic intelligence, and he knew law enforcement techniques.

But was it brilliance or luck?

Both of them could have been prevented.

The one had been forewarned.

The first one.

Colorado investigators like Mike Fisher had lost their chance.

His flight to freedom from that jail was unthinkable.

So there's no other way you can say this.

Had Colorado done their job, no one would have died in Florida.

After his second escape from jail, Ted Bundy travels 1,700 miles south to keep law enforcement off the scent.

While a massive manhunt is underway in the West, no one is looking for him in Tallahassee, Florida.

Tallahassee and Leon County were generally low-crime areas.

The majority of the crimes that I responded to were stolen bicycles, stolen backpacks, and moving violations.

I'm Dale Dale Hinman.

I was a detective with the Leon County Sheriff's Office.

Florida State was a very peaceful university.

There was people out at all hours of the day or night.

You have to remember that when he had his escape from Colorado, survival was the main thing and getting away from his pursuers.

Once he got settled into Tallahassee and in the University District, he started to feel comfortable.

It was at that time that that desire to murder was going to bubble back up.

He was just never going to stop committing murder.

January 15, 1978, was the day a sleepy college campus changed forever.

The entire street on the southern border of the Florida State University campus was one sorority house after another.

And there was a bar that was next to Chi Omega called Sherrod's, and it was a student hangout.

So a man showed up at Sherrod's, and he didn't fit in.

He'd asked somebody to dance, and she danced one dance and then left.

And things just were not going well for him.

Investigators later suspected that Ted Bundy followed some women out of Sherrod's bar, but lost sight of them.

Chi Omega was a sorority house where the girls were generally two to a room.

There was a lot of trees in the yard, and there was a kind of an area with a lot of chopped wood that was all in a pile behind the house.

He had entered through a door that was unlocked.

So he went in

and then went from room to room to room.

And it was a frenzy.

It wasn't a well-planned attack.

He had taken a log from that yard.

He was smashing them with that log.

It was very rapid.

It was an absolute rampage through the house, as if he was looking for somebody or not knowing what he was looking for.

I think the crime would have looked very differently

if Nita Neary hadn't to come home and let the door close hard behind her.

That's the moment he left.

She was in a darker portion of the house and she sees a man coming down the steps.

And he had like a navy pea coat on and she could see that he was carrying something.

He had a club in his hand that was wrapped with cloth.

And of course she found that to be horrifying and suspicious.

He came down the steps and he just hesitated a moment, did not see her,

and he went out the door.

At that point, one of the victims came out of their room covered with blood.

I think when the perpetrator left the house, he thought that he had killed all four of the victims.

And if he had been allowed to stay there longer, he might have gone to every room in that sorority house that night.

Coming up, Ted Bundy is granted an outrageous request.

He was actually allowed to cross-examine witnesses.

As a 20-year-old little girl, I was scared.

And Bundy's survivors reunite after decades apart.

If you had not called me when you did, I would have died.

It's all a light-hearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid.

We're your hosts.

I'm Alina Urquhart, and I'm Ash Kelly.

And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy.

The stories we cover are well researched.

Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group.

With a touch of humor.

Shout out to her.

Shout out to all my therapists out there.

A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing.

That motherfucker is not real.

And if you're a weirdo like us and love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal, or you love to hop in the Way Back Machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes, you should tune in to our podcast.

Morbid.

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