Inside the Horrific Legacy of Serial Killer Ted Bundy

by

Looking at photos of Ted Bundy now, it’s hard to see what unsuspecting people saw in the 1970s.

Which, according to so many, was a handsome, charming man.

The story of Ted Bundy, the serial killer executed 37 years ago, has always fascinated people. Interestingly, actors who have portrayed him on screen – including Mark Harmon, Cary Elwes, Billy Campbell, James Marsters, Adam Long, Zac Efron, and Chad Michael Murray – have consistently been conventionally attractive. This casting choice seems to highlight how Bundy used his good looks to manipulate and gain the trust of his victims.

In 2019, director Joe Berlinger – known for the film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and the Netflix series Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes – explained to TopMob News that Ted Bundy embodies our deepest fear: the unsettling realization that we don’t truly know the people around us.

We tend to believe serial killers are obviously different, that you can spot them immediately,” Berlinger explained. However, he noted that these individuals were often well-liked by others.

People continued to admire him throughout his life, even after he confessed to killing thirty women and was executed by electric chair at Raiford Prison at the age of 42.

For the first time, Edna Martin, a cousin of Ted Bundy who corresponded with him while he was on death row, shares her story in the new Oxygen special Love, Ted Bundy, premiering Sunday, February 15th at 6 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time.

She described Ted and herself as best friends, then added, ‘It’s hard to imagine someone you love turning out to be a terrible person.’

So, count Edna among the many who could barely believe it.

Ann Rule noted in a 2009 update to her 1980 book, The Stranger Beside Me (later a 2002 TV movie starring Campbell as Bundy), that she still receives mail from young people interested in Ted Bundy. She recalled seeing young women thirty years prior, eagerly waiting outside the Miami courtroom to get seats behind Bundy’s defense table.

“They gasped and sighed with delight when Ted turned to look at them.”

Ted Rule, who passed away in 2015, became friends with Bundy after they met while volunteering at a Seattle suicide hotline. They were both working the night shift when they first connected.

Okay, so true crime is everywhere right now, and it’s all so… polished. It’s not just gritty investigations anymore, it’s these big, award-winning shows and podcasts. Usually, they focus on making the killer seem fascinating, even attractive, but Ted Bundy was different, even back then. I mean, even while he was still on death row, they made a miniseries, The Deliberate Stranger back in ’86, and Mark Harmon played him! He was so good, so…chilling. It was captivating, even though it was about him. He really stood out, even in a genre obsessed with making monsters seem… magnetic.

According to an interview with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in May 1986, the NCIS star explained that playing Bundy didn’t allow for much acting disguise. He described the role as requiring authenticity, portraying Bundy without trying to suggest guilt or innocence. However, the film itself strongly implies Bundy was responsible for the crimes he stood trial for.

When asked about taking the role, Harman, who was previously known for his work on the medical drama St. Elsewhere, said he was eager to work with director Marvin Chomsky. He also explained that he’d never played a villain before and was interested in exploring the full range of emotions the character of Bundy required.

Harman expressed a desire to either visit Ted Bundy in prison or review recordings of him, but Noam Chomsky advised against it. Instead, Harman did spend time with one of Bundy’s attempted victims – a woman from Utah who successfully escaped his car.

Even years after the initial portrayal, the part of Bundy remained attractive to actors wanting to try a drastically different role.

Zac Efron explained in March 2018 to Entertainment Tonight that the movie Extremely Wicked doesn’t celebrate Ted Bundy. He emphasized that Bundy was a truly evil person and shouldn’t be glorified. Instead, the film aims to show how someone so dangerous was able to charm people, and the difficult situation that created for everyone. Efron described the experience of exploring that unsettling reality as interesting.

It’s even more unsettling when the villain appears as someone unexpectedly attractive – like Zac Efron, famous for High School Musical and known for his physique.

Ann Rule argues that Ted Bundy wasn’t as good-looking, intelligent, or charming as popular stories about him suggest. However, she notes that he achieved a strange kind of fame. Rule initially thought public interest in Bundy would fade after his death, but instead, he’s become something of a legend.

Ted Bundy wasn’t a brilliant criminal. Many women saw through his attempts to lure them, often involving a request to go to his car, and these encounters meant he frequently had witnesses. His car and apartment also contained a lot of evidence against him. Despite this, he was attractive and appeared harmless enough to avoid raising suspicion from numerous people – some of whom narrowly escaped a dangerous situation with a seemingly charming man they met in public places.

He was skilled at disappearing into a crowd, and despite driving a distinctive tan Volkswagen Beetle that many people noticed, he freely crossed state lines in it. He was shockingly bold, often driving for hours with the bodies of his victims in the car, and repeatedly returning to the sites where he’d left their remains.

Berlinger explains that while he always understood Bundy didn’t seem as he presented himself, listening to the tapes offered insight into how Bundy could be both convincing and capable of terrible acts. It helped him understand how someone could appear normal while committing such evil deeds.

What he was, any way you look at him now, was a monster.

In 2019, Berlinger stated that Netflix’s decision to create Conversations With a Killer was sparked by two things: the 30th anniversary of Bundy’s execution, and their purchase of taped interviews with the killer. Journalists Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth conducted these interviews with Bundy while he was on death row in 1980. Netflix also acquired the distribution rights for Extremely Wicked after it premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Berlinger explains that the process involves trying to understand the killer’s thought process – how they could be so deceitful and controlling, and what motivated them. He believes audiences will find it completely captivating.

Aynesworth and Michaud described Ted Bundy as “handsome, arrogant, and articulate” in their 1983 book, The Only Living Witness, which has been revised since its original publication. During his 1978 Miami trial for the murders of two Florida State University sorority sisters and the attacks on two other women—plus a separate attack on a student nearby—women of all ages crowded the courtroom to see him. All three of the attack survivors testified against Bundy during the trial.

Bundy faced another trial in Orlando, this time for the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, which occurred on February 9, 1978.

He was found guilty of all three murders and sentenced to death. However, he was officially executed for the murder of Leach, a middle school student who vanished while going to get her purse at school. Seven weeks later, her remains were discovered in a shed near Suwannee River State Park in Live Oak, Florida.

These three murders marked the brutal end of Ted Bundy’s four-year reign of terror across seven states. Though he confessed to 30 killings before his execution, many believed he was responsible for far more—possibly as many as 100 murders, in addition to numerous assaults.

According to Reverend Fred Lawrence, who gave Bundy his last religious rites, even Bundy himself didn’t seem to know how many people he had killed or his motivations. This information comes from David Von Drehle’s 1995 book, Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Death Row.

The long-standing debate about whether innate qualities or environmental factors are more influential has a fascinating example in the life of a man originally named Theodore Robert Cowell.

Born on November 24, 1946, in Philadelphia, he was the son of Eleanor Louise Cowell. She gave birth at a home for unwed mothers, as her deeply religious parents initially decided to raise him as their own to avoid the social stigma of an illegitimate child.

Official records name Lloyd Marshall as his father, but his mother hinted that a sailor was actually involved. Some even believe her own father, a man known for his anger and abuse, may have been his biological father.

In 1950, Cowell brought 4-year-old Ted to Washington and later married Johnnie Bundy in 1952. Though Ted took his adoptive father’s last name, he didn’t feel close to him or his step-sisters. He was upset about being moved and missed the grandfather he believed was his father – and who possibly was. Regardless of the truth, Bundy later felt betrayed when he learned about his real parentage and that he’d been kept in the dark.

Before turning eighteen, Ted Bundy was arrested a couple of times for breaking and entering and stealing cars, but these weren’t violent crimes. When he was fourteen, a young girl who was taking piano lessons from his uncle vanished. Bundy always denied any involvement, and there’s no concrete evidence linking him to her disappearance, but many people, including Ann Rule, suspect she was his first victim.

Initially a shy teenager, Ted Bundy first attended University of Puget Sound before transferring to the University of Washington, where he began dating a classmate known as Stephanie Brooks. He left college in 1968, and shortly after, Brooks ended their relationship, feeling he lacked focus and drive. Bundy then left the area and briefly attended Temple University for a single semester.

After returning to Washington, he began dating Elizabeth Kloepfer, a divorced secretary who worked at the University of Washington’s medical school. Their on-again, off-again relationship lasted for years. Recently, Elizabeth Kendall (her married name) shared her experiences in the Amazon Prime documentary Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, which was released in January alongside a re-release of her 1981 memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy.

Ted Bundy returned to the University of Washington in 1970. In 1971, he met a woman named Rule while volunteering at a Seattle crisis hotline. He graduated in 1972 and, having previously attended the 1968 Republican National Convention as a delegate for Nelson Rockefeller, began working on Washington Governor Daniel Evans’ reelection campaign. This experience helped him gain connections in politics, and he was eventually accepted to law school at Puget Sound.

Rule said he and Brooks reconnected during a 1973 trip to California, but then he abruptly cut off all communication without saying why. When Stephanie called him in early 1974 to ask about it, he simply told her, “I have no idea what you mean,” and ended the call.

After just a few months at UPS, Bundy largely stopped going to classes and instead took a job as assistant director for the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission.

In 1974, Ted Bundy confessed to killing eight college students who vanished between February and July in Washington and Oregon, although the remains of only seven were ever discovered.

Ted Bundy claimed to his final lawyer, Polly Nelson, that he tried kidnapping someone in New Jersey in 1969 and committed his first murder in Seattle in 1971. However, he also confessed to a psychologist that he had killed two women in Atlantic City in 1969, creating conflicting accounts of his early crimes.

He was a murderous liar, after all.

In early 1974, while investigating the increasing number of missing girls, police received several reports about a young man who would ask for help carrying items – either books or a briefcase – to a Volkswagen Beetle. Witnesses described him as having either one arm in a sling or using crutches.

While the search for the missing students was underway, Bundy was employed by the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia and participated in the efforts.

On July 14th, around the same time Janice Anne Ott and Denise Marie Naslund went missing from Lake Sammamish Park in Seattle, five women reported a similar encounter. They each said a young man, wearing tennis clothes and with his left arm in a sling, asked them to help him unload a sailboat. One woman went with him, but quickly ran away when she realized there wasn’t actually a boat.

Kloepfer, Rule, and a psychology professor from UW identified Bundy after police shared details about the suspect, including a profile, sketch, and description of him and his vehicle. Rule remembered that law enforcement initially doubted a seemingly normal law student could be the perpetrator.

I remember when Bundy arrived in Salt Lake City in August 1974 to start law school at the University of Utah. It quickly became clear he wasn’t prepared for the rigorous academics, and around the same time, a disturbing pattern began – young women started vanishing. It was a really unsettling period, looking back.

I’ve been following this case for years, and it still chills me to the bone. He admitted to taking the lives of three young girls that October, and then, just days later, on November 8th, he murdered Debra Jean Kent. But it was even more terrifying knowing how close another girl, Carol DaRonch, came to being a victim. He pretended to be a cop, approached her at the mall, and told her someone tried to break into her car – trying to lure her into going to the station. She was so brave! When he tried to cuff her, she fought back, and managed to escape with only one wrist cuffed. It’s horrifying to think how different things could have been if she hadn’t struggled. She really is a survivor.

Kent was last seen after attending a high school play, heading to collect her brother. Police later discovered a handcuff key near the theater – it was the key to the handcuffs DaRonch had escaped with, still attached to his wrist.

DaRonch recalls thinking it was strange that the man drove a Volkswagen, but she considered he might be working undercover. She got into the car anyway. Once she realized what was happening, she was incredibly frightened – she says her life flashed before her eyes, and she worried her parents would never know what had happened to her, a common feeling in such a terrifying situation.

A few years ago, 62-year-old Rhonda Stapley shared her story on Dr. Phil about how she almost fell victim to Ted Bundy in October 1974. At the time, she was a pharmacy student at the University of Utah and was waiting for a bus at a park when a man driving a tan Volkswagen Beetle offered her a ride.

The first thing I saw was that the interior door handle on the passenger side was gone,” Stapley explained. She wasn’t worried at first, assuming it belonged to a student’s car and things like that sometimes break off.

She admitted she hadn’t been worried at first. He seemed like a typical, well-groomed college student. He then asked for a brief detour, which she agreed to. However, he didn’t head in the direction he’d mentioned, and instead turned onto a road that led into a canyon. “He became quiet and I kept trying to chat,” Staple remembered, but she initially thought he was simply searching for a private place to make a move on her.

He finally parked the car. She recalls thinking he was going to kiss her, but instead, he whispered, “I’m going to kill you.” He then grabbed her throat and began to choke her. For a moment, she thought it might be a joke. But then, she struggled against him, lost consciousness, and he sexually assaulted her. He then woke her up and repeated the assault.

I was drifting in and out of consciousness for much of the evening,” Stapley explained. “When I finally woke up, the passenger door was open and the car’s dome light was on. I could see him – he was the only thing illuminated in the canyon. He was standing over by the back seat, facing away from me, and seemed to be doing something inside the car.

Oh my god, you won’t BELIEVE how she got away! She just described it like, she saw her chance and just went for it. She said she basically leaped and ran into complete darkness! It was so brave! She tripped because, can you imagine, her pants were falling down! But she tumbled and fell right into this river, it wasn’t deep, but it was SO fast. She was bouncing off rocks and getting snagged on branches, but the current actually pulled her away from him, and she honestly thinks it’s what saved her life! It’s just… incredible. I’m replaying it in my head over and over!

Stapley confided in her husband that she had been sexually assaulted early in their marriage. However, she kept silent about a separate incident involving Ted Bundy for decades, until a period of PTSD brought the memories flooding back. She recalled thinking, back in 1974, that no one could ever know what happened, because people would blame her – questioning why she would ever get into a car with a stranger.

Ann Rule’s publisher played a key role in helping her complete her book, I Survived Ted Bundy: The Attack, Escape & PTSD That Changed My Life.

In a 2016 interview with People magazine, Stapley explained there wasn’t a support group specifically for Ted Bundy’s survivors. However, she noted that many people understand the experience of trauma, including the reluctance to share what happened and the feelings of shame and embarrassment that often accompany sexual assault.

In late 1974, Elizabeth Kloepfer, living in Seattle, contacted Salt Lake City police with a troubling thought: she suspected her boyfriend, Ted Bundy, who was also dating other women in Utah, might be involved in the disappearances of several women.

Although people who reported being abducted near Lake Sammamish couldn’t pick him out of a photo array, Bundy was still considered a suspect and kept on the list.

Kloepfer also continued to see him. 

People remain fascinated by Ted Bundy, in part because his charming appearance creates a sense of mystery, explains Rachael Penman, director of exhibits at Alcatraz East Crime Museum, which currently displays Bundy’s car and personal items like a letter to Elizabeth Kloepfer. Penman notes that while the idea of ‘stranger danger’ is important, Bundy’s case is more complex, as Elizabeth Kloepfer stayed with him even after reporting him to the authorities.

As a longtime follower of this case, it’s always struck me how Bundy managed to maintain a relationship with Kloepfer. Berlinger explains it beautifully – Bundy desperately craved a normal life, so he created this separate world. He completely fooled her into thinking he was the perfect partner. Everyone who knew them said he was a charming boyfriend and a fantastic father figure to Elizabeth’s daughter. It’s chilling, honestly, how he could be such a monster to so many while presenting this completely different face to her.

The film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile also focuses on the relationship that helped Bundy maintain his double life, with Lily Collins portraying Elizabeth Kloepfer alongside Zac Efron. Interestingly, the movie’s title comes directly from the judge’s description of Bundy when he sentenced him to death.

On January 12, 1975, a 23-year-old nurse vanished from a ski lodge in Snowmass, Colorado, and her body was discovered the following month. Then, on March 15th, a 26-year-old ski instructor disappeared in Vail, Colorado. Ted Bundy later confessed that he had approached her while pretending to be injured, using crutches and asking for help carrying his boots to his car.

As a longtime follower of this case, it’s chilling to recall how Bundy confessed to murdering at least three more women between April and June. He said he committed these crimes across Colorado, Idaho, and Utah, and it’s something I’ve followed with a heavy heart ever since.

Around mid-May 1975, some former coworkers from his time in emergency services, including Carole Ann Boone—someone he’d previously dated in Washington—came to visit him in Utah and stayed for a while. He and Boone began dating again, but he also continued to see Kloepfer, without revealing that he was seeing other people. Kloepfer, for her part, hadn’t told him she’d been contacting the police several times.

I instantly liked Ted. We connected right away,” Boone said in The Only Living Witness. “He seemed quiet at first, but I sensed there was a lot more to him than met the eye. He was definitely more composed and reserved than many of the other, more eccentric people at the office. He’d join in on the fun sometimes, but it’s worth remembering he was a Republican.

On August 16, 1975, a Utah Highway Patrol officer noticed Ted Bundy driving very slowly through a neighborhood early in the morning. When Bundy saw the patrol car, he quickly drove away, and the officer pursued him.

After stopping and searching his car, the officer discovered a ski mask, a makeshift mask made from pantyhose, an ice pick, rope, handcuffs, and a crowbar. DaRonch’s description of the car, along with Kloepfer’s call to police in December 1974, provided enough evidence to obtain a warrant to search Bundy’s apartment. There, investigators found a guidebook to Colorado ski resorts—including the area where a ski instructor had vanished—and a pamphlet for the school play where Debra Jean Kent was taken.

Although there wasn’t enough proof to hold him, police let Bundy go with a promise to appear in court, but they kept him under constant surveillance.

In September 1975, after Bundy sold his car, police conducted a thorough search and found hair that matched Caryn Campbell, the first known victim in Colorado. They also found hair that likely belonged to Melissa Smith, a victim from Utah in 1974, and another victim named DaRonch.

The next month, DaRonch picked Bundy out of a police lineup, identifying him as the man who had tried to kidnap her. He was immediately charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault. His parents posted his $15,000 bail, securing his release. However, investigators still didn’t have enough evidence to connect him to any of the missing persons cases or suspected murders.

In February 1976, Bundy was convicted of kidnapping and assault after a trial before a judge and received a prison sentence of one to fifteen years in Utah. Later the same month, he was also accused of murdering Campbell in Colorado.

In June 1977, during a court hearing in Aspen, Bundy escaped from a second-story window of the courthouse law library. He was representing himself in court and wasn’t handcuffed. After his escape, he broke into a cabin and stole clothes, food, and a rifle, then got lost in the woods for a few days. He avoided roadblocks and patrols for several days before stealing a car, at which point police spotted him driving erratically.

On December 30th, he escaped from jail by tricking the limited staff working over the holidays. He used a pile of books under a blanket to create the illusion he was still in bed, then crawled through a ceiling space to get away. He later stated that Carole Ann Boone had given him $500 over the previous six months to help with the escape.

After stealing a car that stalled on Interstate 70, Bundy got a ride to Vail and then took a bus to Denver. He managed to fly to Chicago before authorities even started searching for him.

He traveled from Chicago to Ann Arbor, Michigan, by train and watched the Rose Bowl game at a bar. After stealing another car, he drove to Atlanta and then took a bus to Tallahassee, Florida. There, he rented a room and looked for construction work, but when asked for ID, he began shoplifting and stealing from women’s wallets if he saw an opportunity.

In the early morning of January 15, 1978, Ted Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. He violently attacked and killed Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, in separate bedrooms. He bit Lisa Levy repeatedly, and the media later dubbed him “the Love-Bite Killer” during his trial.

Bundy also assaulted Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler, two Chi Omega sorority sisters, leaving them with broken jaws and other injuries, but they both managed to survive.

The entire spree lasted roughly 15 minutes, authorities estimated.

He left the sorority house and violently attacked Florida State University student Cheryl Thomas eight blocks away, inside her apartment. Investigators later discovered semen on her bed.

Ted Bundy evaded capture for weeks. In a recent episode of 48 Hours, Ken Katsaris, the former sheriff of Leon County who investigated the Chi Omega crime scene, revealed that his department didn’t initially link the attack on the sorority sisters to Bundy. They believed the way the crime was committed didn’t match his usual methods.

Ted Bundy often used his charm to trick women into going with him, sometimes offering them a ride as if he were simply trying to help, according to Katsaris in an interview with CBS News. However, Katsaris initially didn’t believe this case resembled Bundy’s methods, except for the fact that young women were being targeted, and therefore didn’t consider it a serious lead at the time.

On February 8th, Bundy approached Leslie Parmenter, a 14-year-old whose father was the Jacksonville Police Chief of Detectives. However, her brother intervened, and Bundy left the scene.

The escaped convict then traveled to Lake City, Florida, and tragically kidnapped and killed 12-year-old Kimberly Leach.

Around 1 a.m. on February 15, 1978, Ted Bundy was stopped by a Pensacola police officer near the Alabama border while driving a stolen Volkswagen Beetle. When Officer David Lee tried to arrest him, Bundy kicked the officer and ran away. Lee fired a warning shot, caught up to Bundy, and managed to subdue him. A search of the car revealed three Florida State University student IDs belonging to women, 21 stolen credit cards, and a stolen television.

As officers took him into custody, Bundy shockingly told one of them, Lee, “I wish you had killed me.” At the time, Lee didn’t know he had arrested a man wanted by the FBI for kidnapping and murder, and who was on their list of ten most wanted fugitives.

After being convicted of murdering Leach, Ted Bundy proposed to Carole Ann Boone on February 8, 1980, during the sentencing phase of his trial. He was acting as his own lawyer at the time. Boone was testifying as a character witness when Bundy unexpectedly proposed. He had secretly arranged for a notary public to be present, and officials confirmed the marriage was legally valid when they exchanged vows in the courtroom.

The same day, the jury recommended he be executed for his crimes.

I remember when Carol Boone announced she was pregnant in 1981. She was adamant that Ted Bundy was the father, but she refused to discuss how it happened, especially since prisoners weren’t supposed to have private visits at Raiford. She was incredibly defiant, telling the Orlando Sentinel Star she didn’t owe anyone any explanations whatsoever.

Boone had two children before marrying Bundy, and they had a daughter named Rose together in 1982. According to a website dedicated to Bundy created by Ann Rule, Boone divorced him in 1986, three years before his execution. Bundy was initially scheduled to be executed that year for the murders at Chi Omega sorority, but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals put the execution on hold indefinitely.

Although he had many fans over the years, a lot more people were relieved when he left on January 24, 1989.

In a recording from the documentary Conversations With a Killer, Bundy admits to Michaud and Aynesworth that he’s never shared this story with anyone before, but he’s hoping to finally have a chance to tell it fully.

He insisted he was a perfectly ordinary person, not an animal, unstable, or someone with multiple personalities. He simply considered himself normal.

Love, Ted Bundy premieres Sunday, Feb. 15, at 6 p.m. ET/PT on Oxygen.

TopMob and Oxygen are both members of the Versant family.)

Read More

2026-02-15 16:20