“ …Old lovers are too often vehicles to the serene, uncomplicated long ago dream world of lost youth, and like old used cars, old lovers too often have too many miles on them to make the trip back…”

   Theodore Robert Bundy wrote the above quote in a letter to long term girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer which she included in her book “The Phantom Prince”

“Girl in Seattle”, Fremont Tavern taken on 2 May 1972 Source: Matt Driscoll 

This detailed timeline lists those who came to be intimate with Bundy during his adult life. 

Ted, Liz & Daugter Molly 

Ted met Liz Kloepfer in the Fall of 1969. Becoming, what appeared to be, a loving family unit, they dated for six years until his incarceration for the aggravated kidnapping of Carol DaRonch in March 1976. Following his death, guards would find in his cell a photo concealed within the pages of a book. The photograph taken in 1969 was of a smiling Liz and on the back Ted had written:

     “You will always be the love of my life. I thank God for your love…”

Previously, just hours before his execution, Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis would speak with Ted of his relationship with Liz and how he had hoped to leave his obsession with stalking females behind him. The following is a passage from Appelate Attorney Polly Nelson’s book “Defending The Devil” which includes a snippet of that conversation, in which Ted recalls falling in love with Liz and looking for some stability in his life : 

In the first months of 1969, Ted said, he felt “the entity begin to reach the point where it’s necessary to act out. No longer just to read books, or to masturbate, or fantasize, but to actually begin to stalk, to look.”

The fantasy, he said,

“ became more graphic each time it was aroused.”

Then after meeting Liz : 

    “Things seemed to be good...I felt like I had myself back together. I was disturbed about what I was doing in 1969… and, yet, I figured that it was in control, really …. It wasn't...I wasn’t.”

  “Did you ever think you were crazy ?” Dr Lewis asked. 

      “ Oh, yes,” he said.

“ There are times I’ve, the rage and the madness was just so strong, I was just so… I’d be screeching, screeching, cursing, you know. That’s when I was, deep down inside I was watching this, I said, ‘You’re absolutely mad. This is just madness.’”

Now let's travel back in time to 1965 when Ted graduates from Woodrow Wilson High 

In March of 1965 Ted graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School with a B average 3.02 out of 4.0. He applied for and received a scholarship enrolling at The University Of Puget Sound in September of 65, but is wholly disappointed with life at this particular institute. Ted would much later recall his displeasure to Dr Al Carlisle :

“I had to break away. I hadn’t found what I wanted.”

Diane Marjorie Jean Edwards 

Feeling somewhat misplaced and disheartened in September 1966 Ted transferred to the University Of Washington to study Asian studies and resided in McMahon Hall. He dated an Asian girl while in his Sophomore year for a while, before meeting and falling for Diane Marjorie Jean Edwards during the spring quarter. Later Diane broke off the relationship having grown tired of Ted’s immaturity. In a later conversation with Dr Al Carlisle Ted was reminiscent of the relationship :

McMahon Hall 1967 PhotoSource: University Washington Campus Photograph Collection

Diane Marjorie Jean Edwards Source: Ancestry.  Com

“ ...We were both interested in intellectual topics and we got along very well. Her father was a vice president of an international company and they had a lot of money. She was an only child. Her parents were part of her everyday life. I got along with them...She was well dressed. Well groomed. She had been a model at one time. She was very impressive and very appealing. I really enjoyed that...She got her feelings hurt easily and the relationship strained over petty matters. I had a busboy job at the Seattle Yacht Club. Marjorie was older than me and she expected more financial security than what I could provide. I had no savings and was often broke. I felt insecure about our relationship...She was the first girl I slept with but we didn’t have intercourse. I don’t think that either one of us was ready for it...I got a grant to go to Stanford University for their Asian Studies program. I went there during the summer of 1967...It was really great. It was warm, the campus was beautiful, and the professors were very interesting...during that summer she (Diane) was still up at the University of Washington. She was finishing up some classes that she needed to graduate...We began quarreling over things...I couldn’t focus on the lectures. I left without taking the final exams. After that summer, I felt I wasn’t measuring up. Everything was just a bit too alien...I went back to the University of Washington to get into the fall semester...I was going to take architecture but I couldn’t get into the program so I went into Urban Studies...I dropped out. I got several incompletes. In January, I went skiing in Aspen and Vale but I got tired of it so I went to Philadelphia to see my grandparents. I also visited my uncle in Arkansas and then came back to Seattle and got a job as a busboy in a Hilton Hotel during the day and I was a night stocker in a Safeway store at night...”

1960’s vintage photo of the Safeway Store located in Upper Queen Anne in Seattle where Ted worked as a night stocker from 12 April 1968 - 26 July 1968. 

Mrs Sybil Ferris 

Someone, who knew Ted reasonably well at this point, was 70-year-old Mrs Sybil Ferris, an elderly nurse who had much to tell Dr Carlisle who was making his evaluation for the court in 1976, as part of the diagnostic process in the DaRonch kidnapping case. Carlisle spoke with Mrs Ferris over the phone :

“...I don’t know if he was high on dope or liquor, but he was sure a peculiar person...He was going with a girl from San Francisco. He would portray himself to be a really big politician to try to get in good with her family. He borrowed Havilland China and Sterling Silver and linen from me, and he had her there for dinner, and he was going to show her what a fine cook he was, and what a man he would be around the house. He got her drunk and they spent the night there...He borrowed my car several times to go out on night trips. I was scared to death when he was gone. There was something up because he just wasn’t running true to form of where he was going or what he was doing. He got him a job at the Olympic Hotel and went through the men’s employee lockers and found some old tuxedos. It was waiter’s clothes: pants, coat, and other things. He got them fixed up and he would dress himself up as if he were a headwaiter in some restaurant. He lived for a short while with an elderly couple and they were going to go to Norway. They finally had to ask him to move...He got a job at Safeway for a short while and just quit, not even going back to work to tell them he was leaving...He borrowed a hundred dollars from me. I tried to get him to pay me back but he always had some reason why he couldn’t pay me back right then. He never did pay me back...One of the men Ted was going around with got some furniture from me to sell for me but I never got the money for it. He is a very, very peculiar boy. He was just kind of sneaking around. He’d be on the telephone when you’d least expect him to be on the telephone. He would tell me he was going to be one place and he would be somewhere else... He left the area on a plane one time. He said he was going to Colorado to be a ski instructor there. Something happened and he came back. He went to Pennsylvania and drove his uncle’s Cadillac and came back flat broke looking for a job. All in all, he’s just a very weird boy. I talked to his mother once. I asked her if she would appeal to him as a man to return the hundred dollars I loaned him. His mother said, “He doesn’t live here anymore and we’re not responsible for anything he does... I worked with him at the Seattle Yacht Club when he was a busboy and I got him a job at the Olympus Hotel. Then he got a job at Safeway. Then he got into politics. I called and told them he was a strange boy and a little on the crooked side... He was six weeks at the Yacht Club and they let him go. He wasn’t supposed to eat the food, but he was always in the pantry eating all the fresh foods and whipped cream he could get and all the fancy foods he could eat. He would grab them and take them to his locker. He was always in trouble with them... Oh, he was distant! He had kind of a running game of his own. He didn’t have too much to do with his family. He borrowed my car a couple of times saying he was going home. Ted never talked about his family or showed much affection for them. I moved him twice using my car to haul his things to a new location. Ted spent quite a bit of time at a friend’s house, an antique dealer who had been in prison. Ted told me he was studying Chinese at the University of Washington. When the draft seemed to get close, he told me he was going to skip out and go to Taiwan... I have been suspicious from the day those two girls were killed at Lake Sammamish with that “Ted.” I remember seeing him in an Albertson’s store in Green Lake with a cast on his arm. I was going to do something about it, but living alone I was afraid to do more than what I had already done...He seemed to have mental problems, although I couldn’t place him in any diagnostic category. He had ways of getting money. He had a very expensive overcoat with a fur collar that came from the Yankee Peddler, one of the men’s best dress shops in the University District. He had a key to the men’s dormitory at the University of Washington long after he left there. He carried the key with him and he used to go in there and sleep on the lounge couches when he didn’t have any place to go and he would take clothing and things from the dorm... I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt because I felt he needed help. I felt there was something very, very wrong in his life. It seemed as if he was quite an unloved child the way that it hit me. I just kind of felt I could help him, but I finally decided I was just knocking my head against a wall and I just had to stop it and I couldn’t have him taking my car and keeping it out until 3:00 a.m. or 4:00 a.m. in the morning and telling me he would be back at midnight and me sitting up waiting...He told me he was going on trips. He would be gone all these hours and would come back all hepped up. He did this two or three times. I thought he might be trafficking dope...”

Ted plays frisbee on the beach.

Source:News article “Her Prince Now Lives On Death Row” By Carol Agus - 28 September 1981 - Newspaper.  Com

Diane speaks with Dr Carlisle 

In 1976 Dr Al Carlisle called Diane and asked if she would be willing to talk about her relationship with Ted. She was most forthcoming:

“...I was caught up by his ability to talk. You know, he could just off the cuff come out with anything and it would sound good. And he wrote fantastic letters... He put a great deal of importance on a person’s ability and intelligence, in their quickness of mind... I didn’t know of anything (illegal) If I had, I’d probably have been real scared. I’m a real chicken...and that was weird too. There were none (friends) that I knew of...He had a bike and he rode around on his bike. He also went skiing every once in a while...he was very athletic...He was athletic and he was brilliant but he was not terribly social. He always had sort of a bowing manner, always trying to get people to believe that he was humble and that he wouldn’t walk on anybody’s toes. Like he was pleased to be in somebody’s presence. He seemed to have a great deal of insecurity and lack of finesse in dealing with other people...He was a very passive person. He had an oddity which I thought sort of went with this lack of confidence. It was a put on. His actions were to make people feel, “poor Ted, sweet little Ted.” Yet I think he had this feeling that he was very… sort of debonair. Like he… Understood the world...I felt he hadn’t had much contact with women until he got involved with me. We pretty much experienced each other together that way...I wasn’t experienced at all with sex and I wasn’t on any birth control methods and I didn’t know if I wanted to do it. We did a lot of playing around but it didn’t culminate in sex...He never made me feel like it was just a physical thing. I believed he was in love with me. I was very turned on but I wasn’t experienced. I didn’t know what I wanted to do... Ted didn’t show a lot of anger when I first got to know him. We were truly in love with each other at that time. It was a great emotional relationship...I was under the impression that he cared about his mother and he felt sorry for her. He felt she was a competent person who got messed up with a nothing of a father. I think that he liked his mother a little bit because he felt that she was sweet. He seemed to adore his little brother, (Richard) his younger brother. That seemed to be the only reason, when we were together, why he went home. It was because his brother was smart...This was my main criticism of him after the year and a half of our relationship. He kowtowed to me. He wasn’t strong. He wasn’t real masculine. If I got mad at him because he did something, he sort of felt apologetic about it. He wouldn’t stand up for himself. There was no use getting mad because the person didn’t react. And the things I got mad for were primarily that he lied. It wasn’t that he out and out lied. He fibbed. It wasn’t necessary that he had to be like that. It wasn’t actually that he had done a bad thing in his mind. It was that he was saying something he knew would sound good to me...Instead of saying his pants came from Sears, he said he bought them at a high-class store. He would make something to appear to be what it wasn’t to impress me. Of course, we came from very different backgrounds. He was very concerned about those things, and about his lack of experience. I had experience in small things like restaurants and the things that would be important to a young coed. In the beginning of our relationship he was always reverting back to the need to sort of beg because he didn’t have anything. He didn’t have a car. He, in fact, would sometimes tell me he hadn’t eaten that day because he didn’t have enough money. It never seemed to bother him that he was using people...He never did off me because I never gave him a cent. Sometimes I felt he was spending his last dime to buy me something...I began cutting it off in letters at first, before it ended. He knew it was coming...I told him it was never going to work, that he wasn’t the kind of person I needed. I loved him dearly but I couldn’t exist with him. I just wasn’t comfortable with the things he did and the way he kowtowed to me. I just didn’t feel he was straight with me all the time. I pushed him away and I cut off my ties with him. This was about 1966 or 1967. It was in my junior or senior year in college...He cried. He cried. He was really falling apart in front of me. That’s when he went out to Philadelphia to run away from the whole thing. It was to go to school. And I would call him when I needed attention...He left. I took him to the airport or something. He called me a couple of times. He sent me flowers and some cards..He floundered around for years and years and years, never completing anything, going from one place to another, getting involved in all the wrong things...The politicking. He was a member of a group in the Republican party that would go around to the opponent when they made speeches. He would tape them and rephrase the speech and use it against the opponent. There was a Black man running for something in the state, I believe. Ted helped him by driving for miles in his VW, and I just didn’t trust any of that stuff. I’m pretty conservative. I got the feeling that he was sometimes associating with people who used drugs. He told me he did that but he said he didn’t try them himself. This, of course, was in the early stage of our relationship...”

Ted, likewise had memories of this point in his life giving an account to Carlisle declaring:

“...I had to regroup. I had saved money from my busboy job. I went skiing at Aspen until I became tired of it. Then I called my aunt in Philadelphia and went there. Then I visited my uncle Jack in Arkansas for a week or so and I came back to Seattle. I was a busboy at the Hilton Hotel and a stocker at Safeway at night. I met a friend who worked in the Art Fletcher campaign. I got involved with it and I became chairman of a youth group in Seattle. I later worked for the New Majority for the Rockefeller campaign. I was still working at night in Safeway. I saw Marjorie a couple of times. I had to sneak into the taverns because I wasn’t yet 21 years old. I was in the process of rebuilding and she was about to graduate and go into a stockbroker’s firm. So, we were worlds apart...I really enjoyed politics but after the nomination of Nixon I went back to the Fletcher campaign. I became his personal driver for him and his wife. I was somewhat of a counselor to him and I would critique his speeches and his political policies...The campaign was a disaster. My social life and political life intertwined. One time we were out of town during the campaign. I went to a party as a representative of Fletcher and I was picked up by a woman and taken to her house. I was very drunk. During the night the girl came down and hopped in bed with me. That was my first sexual encounter. This girl was separated from her husband. She was hysterical. I had slept with Marjorie half a dozen times with no clothes on and we petted heavily but we didn’t have sex since she wasn’t on the pill...She smoked and I didn’t. I liked classical music and she was more into rock... In September of 1968 I went back to Seattle and I went to work in a shoe store. I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to go into law but I wasn’t ready to go back to the University of Washington...It was just the memories of the failures I had there...I went back east again. I went to Temple University in Philadelphia and I majored in political science. I had understood that I could get a degree in law without having to have a bachelor’s degree...There was too much crime and violence. The new buildings had no windows. The playgrounds had barbed wire around them...I took classes on the nature of student populations to find something to get the community involved. I gained an appreciation of law-abiding Blacks...I lived in Philadelphia when I was young and I had some relatives there... I went one semester and I got B’s in my classes. When I learned that I couldn’t get a law degree without getting my bachelor’s degree first I lost interest so I left... I took a transport car across the country to San Francisco. I’d been writing poems to Marjorie. I contacted her when I got there. I was there about five days and we spent a lot of time together. We went on a trip up the coast together...There wasn’t a deep romantic love between us...”

Young Republican

Ted in early 70’s as a young Republican was starting  to make friends with people in high places 

From September 1968 Ted began work as a driver for Art Fletcher who was the Republican nominee for govenor . 

Ted is mentioned in a political News article from the ‘ Oregonian ‘ dated October 6, 1968 . He began work on the Republican campaign of Art Fletcher, a Black councilman who was running for Lt. Governor in the fall of 1968.     

Ted’s entry into the news article reads :

     ‘ … Running late following a morning of campaigning in Lynwood , Fletcher strode into the Rotary gathering accompanied by a campaign aide, Ted Bundy, a youthful white worker …’

As members of the Republican Party Louise and Johnny Bundy, along with Ted’s name, are clearly visible on this news clipping from the TNT dated November 4 1968 

Cathy Swindler

Ted met and dated Cathy Swindler after being appointed Seattle Chairman Of The New Majority For Nelson Rockefeller 

From April 1968 Ted dated teenager Cathy Swindler, the daughter of Seattle Police Chief Herb Swindler who would later investigate the “Ted Murders” in Seattle, WA. Ted managed the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller's Presidential campaign and would later attend the 1968 Republican convention. Cathy joined the team and the pair hit it off. At just 19, Cathy thought Bundy very handsome and was completely charmed by her new supervisor. She would later talk of Ted stating :

   “...He was very well dressed and well mannered …The kind of guy a girl my age would look at and just say wow! Sort of Kennedy like...Ted had control of what he was doing. He was really poised. He was friendly. He was always smiling...He was terribly charismatic. Obviously, he was someone who had a great deal of compassion in dealing with other people...”

Whilst studying at Temple University in Philadelphia from January 1969 for just one Semester, Ted becomes gripped with the concept of the rape and control of a woman. He intensifies his night stalking and tells Dr Dorothy Otnow Lewis, much later in 1989, that he chose to put his fantasies into actions and purchased hair dye, a fake moustache and wig and made plans to attack a young woman whilst in New York on 42nd St visiting the strip clubs. The strategy, crude and not thought through sufficiently, is to pursue a woman to her hotel room, ambush her and then attack with brute force. This falls through as Ted becomes scared of being caught.

42nd Street 1969 

Ernst and Freda Rogers 

4143 12th Ave N.E. University District, Seattle 

Image source: Google Maps

Moving into 4143 12th Avenue N.E. University District at the rooming house of Ernst & Freda Rogers, Ted occupies a spacious room on the second floor. On 30, September 1969, Ted meets Elizabeth Kloepfer and her close friend Marylynne Chino at ‘The Sandpiper Inn‘  and after hitting it off Liz invites him back to her residence at the end of the night. They begin dating almost immediately, after Liz wakes to find Ted has made breakfast for her and young daughter Molly . The relationship, although unstable, would last on and off for six years.

Source: The Phantom Prince

By Elizabeth Kendall 

In a book authored following Ted’s convictions and new life on Florida’s Death Row, “The Phantom Prince”,  Liz wrote about the love of her life declaring :

... I handed Ted my life and said, “Here, take care of me.”

He did in a lot of ways, but I became more and more dependent upon him. When I felt his love, I was on top of the world; when I felt nothing from Ted, I felt that I was nothing...

Liz and daughter Molly 

September 1972 Ted begins work for Govenor Dan Evans’ re election campaign . He also begins to shadow the opposition Albert Rosselini , making notes on speeches. This causes accusations of ‘spying’ and Ted finds himself in the spotlight but denies everything. 

Later in 1973 he told a TV interviewer 

"It's hard for me to believe that what I did was newsworthy, my part of the campaign was so insignificant I'm embarrassed that I should be taking this publicity from it, really embarrassed." 

Much later Ted recalls the whole affair as being remarkable, even disclosing wearing various disguises to blend in undetected. 

Ted can be seen at a Republican Party Function on far right 

Sandy Gwin And Seattle’s  Harborview Mental Health Centre 

In 1972, after starting work counselling mental health clients, Ted started a fling with Sandy Gwinn a colleague at the ‘Harborview Hospital Mental Health Center.‘ They dated only a handful of times before Ted’s mood swings and sexual aggression ended the relationship for good.

Sandy Gwin is last on the far right 

Source: Ancestry.  Com

In a police report dated September 1975, the investigating officer states :

... She (Sandy) describes him as sexually aggressive; that he had several plants in his room and had a great desire to buy a sailboat...

Sandy later illustrates Ted’s sexually aggressive treatment to Dr Al Carlisle, a Utah Psychologist running diagnostic tests on Ted on the instructions of the Utah Court after being found guilty of aggravated kidnap in the Carol DaRonch case :

“…A couple of times when he made sexual advances, it was a real mental and physical struggle about who was going to get their way. It wasn’t that I would tell him I didn’t want sex. It was the timing. It was a putdown to him, an absolute putdown. I really had to do a lot of fast talking because it wasn’t appropriate at that particular time, in that place. That seemed to be more and more of a challenge to him as if he was trying to break down the barriers. To win was sort of a conquest of his…”

Diane Edwards 

Ted and Diane 1973 

Between July and August 1973 Ted and Diane Edwards rekindled their romance and began dating once again. After being wholly enamoured with a new and improved Ted Bundy, the love birds became engaged on Christmas Eve 1973 and cheerily made plans for a future betrothal. Surprisingly, for Diane at least, they parted company for the last time on January 1, 1974, as she left for San Francisco. It's highly probable Ted informed Liz, herself visiting family in Utah, that he was studying for College and required alone time. Thereby, ensuring his cheating remained undetected, he waved goodbye to Diane for the last time as her plane left the airport. After ghosting her completely and ignoring the many letters she sent, they finally went their separate ways following a heated phone call from Diane who demanded answers.

In a police report dated 13 October 1975, Detective Kathy McChesney of the King County Police Department refers to a telephone conversation between Diane Edward’s girlfriend and former roommate at UW, Marleigh Lange. During a previous chat with Detective Roger Dunn, Marleigh stated she was not impressed with Bundy and thought him effeminate with an odd accent she couldn’t place. Furthermore, she said Bundy had a habit of putting Diane down when they got into a ‘beef‘. Marleigh recalled a rich uncle of Ted Bundy's living In Seattle and felt that Diane was uncomfortable with the relationship with Bundy and that he couldn't be trusted or figured out. Marleigh stated that Diane spent her first year of college at the University of Colorado at Boulder and in 1966 she attended the U and met Bundy and they started dating before ski season. Following the 1973-74 Christmas holidays Diane was going to San Francisco until summertime and then she planned to return to Seattle and get a job and firm up plans for the marriage. In early September or late August of 1974 Marleigh received a letter from Diane stating she and Ted had broken off and that she had been living with a man for two months. She stated

“...I escaped by the skin of my teeth... When I think of his (Bundy's) cold and calculating manner I shudder...”

Dr Al Carlisle would later comment on the Diane Edwards relationship :

  “ ... I believe a big part of Ted did want to not kill, and when everything fell apart in December 1973, I think that's when he gave up on himself. You see the killings that started that one girl (Karen Sparks) who was almost beaten to death in her apartment just a few days later and then, beginning in February, you see homicides one after another. Then he comes to Salt Lake and you see homicides in the area. I think Ted did not want to do what he was doing, but he was so addicted to it that he couldn't stop. We talk about drug addiction, pornography addiction, but we don't use the term ‘addiction' when it comes to killing. Yet with serial killers, you seem to have that. I think killing can become an addiction. When a person gets addicted like he was, it's not easy to give up. You have to fight it constantly, and that's hard...”

In a letter sent to Liz with extracts printed in “The Phantom Prince” Ted said of Diane :

“ …Old lovers are too often vehicles to the serene, uncomplicated long ago dream world of lost youth, and like old used cars, old lovers too often have too many miles on them to make the trip back…”

Becky Gibbs 

The summer of 1974 saw Ted dating a young lady named Becky Gibbs. Ted met Becky through mutual buddy Susan Reade who was in a relationship with Ted’s pal and fellow young republican, Larry Voshall. They would frequently socialize together and the romance continued until a disastrous date, rafting down the Yakima, proved to be quite a terrifying experience for Ted’s young gal.

Becky Gibbs 
Photo source: Ancestry.  Com

In Carlisle’s “A Violent Mind” the incident is discussed in length :

   On 29 June 1974 Ted Bundy, accompanied by his date Becky Gibbs, joined friendly acquaintances Larry Voshall and his date Susan Reade for rafting down the Yakima River.  Larry talked to psychologist Al Carlisle about what happened that day in a phone conversation.

“...The thing about this raft trip is I had always seen Ted as a gentleman’s gentleman, rather suave, the type of person that would never step out of line.  As this raft trip progressed his personality went from that to a type of personality that none of us really wanted anything to do with.  As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve seen Ted since. That was about two years ago this summer.  At any rate, there was one incident where Becky was in an inner tube tied onto the raft and he untied her halter top and let it fall away.  It was an embarrassment to her.  It clearly was out of character with his personality. But more than that, we got in a couple of really tight situations which were very unpleasant.  He put his head under a waterfall and almost overturned the raft.  Becky almost went under.  He just seemed to enjoy seeing people frightened.  As the trip progressed we went over a waterfall.  ( At one point Ted let Becky drift in the inner tube over to the waterfall knowing she couldn’t swim ) Then he got in the inner tube and cut himself loose and floated by himself for a while.  He decided he was tired of us and went down ahead of us in the river.  When we got down to where the car was he went up to pick up the other car.  It was only about seven miles and it took him a long time to come back.  His personality went from a very pleasant person to someone who was practically unbearable to be with.  I don’t know whether he was tired of his amateur partners or what, but it was one of the most unusual personality transformations I’ve seen.  I’ve been a reporter for about ten years and it’s one of the strangest things I’ve seen.  I believe he’s got a split personality, a dual personality. It was so strange because he was the kind of person who would come to a party and he was so intelligent and he could easily carry on a conversation and he was so polite.  Then to see the other side of him was so shocking.  His two personalities were so different that after that the three of us really didn’t want anything to do with him. “

Dr Carlisle asked Larry if he had any ideas as to what prompted this strange phenomenon from Ted.

  “ Do you have any idea why he untied Becky’s halter? “

“ No, that has always seemed to be a real strange thing.  I don’t think I was initially looking in that direction. Then I turned and I saw the halter fall. She was a very proper gal. That surprised me.  I’ve taken other trips where that happened and we didn’t think anything of it, but with his personality and with Becky it seemed very strange. “

   “ Had he dated her much? “

    “ I don’t think more than a couple times.  That night after he finally came back we headed back to Seattle, about a two-hour trip.  We wanted to stop to get something to eat.  He didn’t want to and he wasn’t talking to anybody.  Becky said it probably was because he didn’t have any money with him. Becky said she’d buy.  God, he didn’t say a word!  When he’s talkative he’s very talkative.  I always thought that something happened in that hour and a half when he was gone.  He was a completely different person.“

Yakima river 

King County Detective Kathy McChesney

The following is a transcribed passage from a Statement of King County Detective Kathy McChesney dated 22 October 1975 and her interview with Becky Gibbs -

KING COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY - Statement of K, McChesney 10-22-75-

1300 hrs.  Personal contact with Becky Gibbs..... at Hadley Properties, 2200 6 Th Ave Seattle Becky met Bundy at a dinner party given by Susan Reade in March or April of 1974, She was living at 4131 11th NE at the time and as she didn't have a car, Susan told her of someone who might be able to give her a ride. Becky called up Ted and he gave her a ride to and from the party. They were not together at the party and he did not come in after he brought her home. (did stop at Hasty Tasty for a coffee) He had his beige VW at this time. The next time she saw Ted was Sunday morning, June. 23rd, 1974. She was at Susan Reade’s house having brunch and Ted just showed up. They had breakfast and everyone drank and Ted and Becky got together they were dancing and kissing and so forth. Becky had to bring her car to her parent's house and so Ted followed her over there (9612 8th NE) and then gave her a ride home... He came to her house and stayed for about ½ hour. They talked and necked. At 6:00 p.m. Becky had an appointment for dinner and got home around 11:00-Ted had said he'd come back and he did at midnight, He spent the night and they had intercourse and he left the next morning around 8 or 8:30. He was going to be late for work in Olympia she recalled. On Tuesday or Wednesday of that week and asked her for a date for Friday night; On Friday night he was late -getting to Becky’s and he said he was tired and cold... They went to Susan's and waited for Larry Voshall and they all went together in Susan’s car to Bellevue to Diane Barrick's house for dinner. After dinner, they went back to Sues but didn’t stay. Ted brought Becky back to her place and spent the night, having intercourse again. There was nothing unusual about his sexual behaviour either time Becky was with Ted however on Friday night Ted seemed different, withdrawn, colder. She thought something was bothering him-or he was preoccupied, The following morning at about 7 or 8 Ted left to get ready for a raft trip they had planned with Susan and Larry, They left around 10 a.m. and stopped in North end. Becky thought ted was getting -impatient...At this point it seemed to Becky that Ted didn’t want to talk to her or be there, he was ignoring her...She remembers him being gone less than an hour, while going to get his keys and Susan's car, On the way home to Seattle Ted and Becky hardly-spoke.-He, helped her carry her things up to her apt., kissed her goodnight, and left. That is the last time she saw Ted. She also remarked that Ted bit his fingernails all the way down … it stands out in her mind after hearing what a great guy Bundy was...

Pandora Thompson & Margerith Maughan

Margerith Maughan

Source: Ancestry. Com

Late 1974 saw Ted briefly dating Pandora Thompson, a friend of his neighbour and later girlfriend Margerith Maughan , before the duo decide to remain friends. In a 1989 ‘Vanity Fair’ Article, Pandora recalls the relationship and the one time the couple slept together. She recalls being especially delighted by Ted’s sophistication; an excellent wine connoisseur and lover of French restaurants, he simply adored to wine and dine a lady.

     “...I can only recall two instances in the year that I knew Ted when I saw anything cruel or insensitive...”

    They were pals more than lovers; both had opted for friendship. The only night they made love was not especially memorable.

   “If it was terrific, I would have remembered; if it had been weird, I would have remembered. It really has faded from memory."

    What Pandora does remember is being kept awake by Bundy's loud bed-stand radio. She asked him to turn it off and he refused, saying, in a cold voice, “No.”Another time, Bundy kept rubbing his stubble of beard into her face as they danced, hurting her, refusing to quit, until she was forced to stop dancing. The rest of her memories of Ted are fun: talking into the night on the phone, buying a Christmas wreath for her mother. 

By that time, Bundy had already murdered at least eleven women in Washington and had started his spree in Utah. When Pandora's mother learned about the other Ted she threw up...

Author and friend of Ted’s, Ann Rule references Pandora in her book “The deliberate Stranger” using the pseudonym ‘Callie Fiore’ :

“... He still phoned Meg (Liz) often, but he met many new women in Utah. There was Callie Fiore (Pandora Thompson), a fey, almost kooky, freckled girl who lived in the house on First Avenue. Sharon Auer (Ann Swenson) who was a law student (This is incorrect, she was in fact secretary to defence attorney John O’Connel). Another pretty girl, who lived in Bountiful, just north of Salt Lake City. Much later, when I would see him again when he had become the number one suspect in so many killings and disappearances, he asked me,   

‘Why should I want to attack women? I had all the female companionship I wanted. I must have slept with at least a dozen women that first year in Utah, and all of them went to bed with me willingly…’”

  Rule, clearly flabbergasted, admits -

“I didn’t doubt it. Women had always liked Ted Bundy. Why indeed would he have needed to take any woman by force?”

Margerith Maughan Source: Ancestry. Com

During the Fall of 1974, Ted dated Margerith Maughan who also resided at 565 First Avenue, SLC on the ground floor below Ted’s first-floor residence. Ted’s now ex-girlfriend, anonymous in a news article dated February 6, 2019, written by Laura Collins, Chief Investigative Reporter In Salt Lake City, Utah (It appears likely to be Maughan) recalls how the pair shared a bed, watched the nightly news as he made her hamburgers and how Ted never reacted when stories of his murder victims aired !!

• An ex-girlfriend of Ted Bundy has spoken about her relationship with the serial killer after 40 years of silence in an interview with DailyMail
• The 71-year-old woman, who asked not to be named, recalled how she met the serial killer in the summer of 1974 when he moved to Salt Lake City, Utah 
• The pair shared a bed multiple times, although she did not describe how intimate they were, and she admits Bundy actually shared very little of himself
• 'I never saw him cry. His laugh was forced. He never talked about his mother or his family or anything like that. He was very neat,' she revealed 
• Bundy would make hamburgers and the two would 'listen to the news about all of the girls that were being murdered and disappeared 
• One of his victims went missing on Halloween night in 1974 - the same night she said he paid her a visit at her apartment.

      Ted Bundy was a killer who hid in plain sight. That is how one of Bundy's former girlfriends has today described the man with whom she had a relationship at the peak of the spree of violence that would see him become one of America's most notorious serial killers. Speaking for the first time, after more than 40 years of silence, she did not wish to be named but hoped that by speaking out she might loosen the hold of the memories that have haunted her down through the years. Now in an exclusive interview with DailyMail, she has recalled how she met the good-looking law student when he moved to Salt Lake City, Utah in the summer of 1974 and how he remained in contact, though their relationship had long since cooled after he was in prison for the 1975 kidnapping of Utah teenager Carol DaRonch.

In an extraordinary glimpse into Bundy's seemingly normal life, she tells of the dinners he would cook for her as they watched the nightly news report on the killings he had committed. She recalled how she rode alongside him in the passenger seat of his Volkswagen Beetle and how she wondered at the fact that it was never properly fixed in place and would rock forward when he braked. And, perhaps most chilling of all, she revealed that he stopped by her apartment on the very night that he committed one of his murders - Halloween 1974.

    Now, at age 71, she doubts that she will ever be able to put Bundy firmly in her past. Her interview comes shortly after a new film on the killer starring Zac Efron premiered at Sundance and shortly after a Netflix documentary began streaming on the 30th anniversary of Bundy's execution.

“Who would have thought I'd be reading about Ted in the news again after all these years? All of a sudden I'll hear the name and it seems so weird to realize just how long ago it all was because it seems to have not gone away, “

She has no desire to watch the documentary or movie about Bundy's life and admits it took her a couple of years to get over learning the truth about the man she thought she knew. 

“It had an impact. For a couple of years. I found it hard to trust people, if I was out I would be fearful, I'd have another drink to deal with it, “ she said. 

When Bundy was unmasked nothing was ever the same for her again, she explained. 

“ I was very naïve when I met him. But once you've lost that innocence, once it's gone, you can never get it back. “

   Though they shared a bed more than once and lived in the same building, she would not discuss how intimate she and Bundy ultimately were. They dated for several months but she described herself as 'innocent' and at the time of his arrest in Utah any romantic relationship was over and they were, she said, just friends. One of the elements of his crimes that have long haunted her is, she admitted, the fact that he must have got a sexual 'thrill' out of killing.

   “ It must have turned him on.”

Looking back, she realized that Bundy actually shared very little of himself. She said:

“I never saw him cry. His laugh was forced. He never talked about his mother or his family or anything like that. He was very neat. He never hurt me. He was pleasant to be around.“

   She doesn't know what - if anything - she meant to Bundy. But she doubts that there was any sincere feeling or fondness. She reflected,

    “He played the part really well. I think that I was a respectable front (for him) As long as he was with me he was alright because I looked nice, my family was nice. I guess you can never know somebody for sure because who knows what's in somebody's head? He could hide in plain sight in any room. And these little innocent girls have no chance, no chance at all. If he came into this room right now he would sit down and be interested in you and what you were doing. And it was always like that when he was with people (He thought to be on his level) he enjoyed discussing things. “

  On one such occasion, she remembered Bundy telling her, 'there's no difference between right and wrong.'

'I said: "Ted you're in law school. How can you say that if you are in a profession that is always evaluating things for what's right and what's wrong?"

“He never really answered me but that just stuck out in my mind and that memory comes up year after year. “

  She and Bundy lived in the same building and, she recalled:

“ We didn't go out because we didn't have a lot of money, but he would make a nice hamburger and we would sit in his kitchen with a little TV on the table and he would like to make hamburgers and we would listen to the news about all of the girls that were being murdered and disappeared. He wouldn't make any reaction. I said to him one time, ‘If a man ever approached me, I wouldn't let him touch me.’ And he said, ‘You don't have to worry about that.’ And I did think about that later. As well as those low-key dinners... We would go play pool and I would sit as a passenger in his VW bug. I would sit in the seat that would rock forward when he would come to a stop sign or a stoplight. And I wouldn’t think anything of it. “

    Bundy removed that seat to conceal the bodies of his victims.

“ What was interesting to me ( Following Bundy’s conviction ) was that I never saw any blood. I don't know how he did it because the human body is full of blood. “

One who knew Bundy at that time told police that he spent hours cleaning his car - a task that confused the witness given the vehicle's generally poor condition. But Bundy, according to his ex, was a clean freak.' She also remembered that he had a collection of sharp kitchen knives of which he was very proud.

“ He would talk about his collection of knives and apparently that's what he would use (on the women)  …. I'll never forget one night I stayed overnight and I woke up in the middle of the night and I said: ‘Ted, where are you? What are you doing? ‘ And he was through in the kitchen and he said, ‘Oh just looking at my knives.’ I thought about that later and I thought, Wow, I just escaped being killed. Except that he knew better than to do it in his own apartment .”

  Over the decades she has tried and failed to reconcile the pleasant façade that Ted presented to her with the murderous rage that saw him slaughter so many young women. She said:

  “There was a girl who disappeared on Halloween night and was killed (Laura Ann Aime) And on Halloween night he came to my apartment when I was asleep because my door was partially opened because the rug was preventing it from closing. I was in bed and he came in and said, ‘I want to tell you that your door is opened and unlocked.’ He woke me up. And I said, "Oh thanks Ted," you know. He did a good deed and he also killed someone that night and I didn't notice a thing.“

There was one occasion though that she believes she saw a flash of the real Bundy.

   “ One night I parked my car in the driveway and if he had wanted to get out it would have stopped him so I went to tell him I wasn't going to be there long. So I knocked on the door and he answered and he was holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And he had this grin that was plastered, I would say, across his face. He wasn't drunk. It was forced, convivial. And I just wanted to get out of there. Later I wondered if that was how he looked when he worked himself into a murderous rage. “

   But as much as she could not detect anything sinister about Bundy at the time, she admitted, that when all of the hideous allegations tumbled out she knew in her heart that they were true. By this time, she said, she and Bundy were just friends.

Bundy was arrested in May 1975 when a state trooper took a wrong turn and wound up in front of a neighbour's home. He knew they were away on vacation but that their three teenage daughters had stayed home. A VW bug was parked outside the house and when he went to approach it Bundy fled. The officer chased Bundy to a gas station where he finally stopped. Bundy claimed he got lost on the way home from watching the Towering Inferno. But the movie wasn't playing that night and a search of his car turned up a ski mask, pantyhose, ice pick, crowbar and handcuffs. The police questioned his former girlfriend, she recalled, and bit by bit the awful truth fell into place.

“ The officer sat me down and pointed out all these coincidences. He wanted to know if I heard anything because Ted could actually leave our house, jumping off the fire escape and driving out the driveway, so I wouldn't even know it. I could hear him coming down the stairs which were old and creaky and so he could hide his movements a lot by coming out that way. Then the police would ask me if I knew he left town on certain weekends and I did because he would tell me when he went to Colorado. “

Bundy’s mug shot after his Aug.16, 1975 arrest for possession of burglary tools. It was also a little more than a month after the abduction and murder of Susan Curtis, a 15 year-old girl attending a youth conference at BYU.

Bundy’s fingerprint sheet. (Courtesy Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office and King County, WA. archives)

Between January and April, 1975 Bundy shifted much of his criminal activity eastwards to Colorado where he killed three women. Following his arrest, Utah cops could only gather enough evidence to charge him with the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. By the time he went on trial for that crime, not even a friendship existed between him and his former girlfriend. She admitted she was afraid of the man with whom she had once enjoyed those cosy TV dinners. Bundy had been released on bail to await trial and, she said, that same week he came to visit her where she worked. She recalled that all the girls she worked with were taken by the handsome stranger who asked to speak to her in private.

“ I just, you know (by then) I just couldn't relate to it. We went out into the hall to talk and while we were there he said to me, “Do you really think I could do all the things that they're saying I did? “ And I said, '" I can't believe any friend of mine could do that." And that was that. But he knew I think, And I knew  (that I did). “

    After that, she said, she saw less and less of Bundy who immersed himself in the Mormon community that had embraced him and championed his innocence. She said:

“He gravitated towards his friends in the LDS church because they supported him one hundred percent and felt like he was innocent of all charges and he could not have done what they said he did. Whereas I felt that he was guilty of all charges.“

“Thinking of you Ted” Card of support from 30/40 LDS members and friends of Bundy sent to support him whilst on a kidnapping charge of Carol DaRonch. The inscription reads: 

“...Sorry this cards so long getting to you. We want you to know our thoughts and prayers are with you...”

And for the first time, she (Margerith) was truly frightened of Bundy and of the thinly-veiled threats he made against her when he visited her at home during that same period.

   “ I had a chandelier that had some (sharp) points on it and Ted said to me, "Have you ever hit your head on that?" And I said, "No."

“ That was when he became pretty hostile, “ she said. 

“ I had a macramé rope hanger - this was the 70s - hanging over the door and in my dining room and (that same night) he said to me, "That looks like a strong rope."

   To her, they were 'terrifying comments.'

  After Bundy left that night she called her parents, locked up her apartment and fled. 

“I never saw him again really to talk to him or anything. I just followed his exploits around the country. You never knew if he might come back. Where I was I would just lock up and be watchful. I am opposed to the death penalty but I remember when I woke one morning to hear that Ted Bundy was in Florida and was facing the death penalty and that they had finally made the decision to kill him I was glad. I had never said that about the death penalty before. But Ted was such a menace to society and he could hide it. It was a relief to know that he was no longer on this earth.“

DaRonch & Attorney David Yocom

Survivor of aggravated kidnapping attempt Carol DaRonch successfully picked Bundy out of a police lineup on October 3 1975. 

Mug Shot taken on date Bundy identified by DaRonch in police lineup. ( He had his hair cut that morning ) 

Ann Swenson 

Early 1975, Ted meets Ann Swenson at a Mormon social church function in Utah. Secretary to Ted’s Attorney, John O’Connell, they remained friends and she attended Ted’s trial testifying for the defence and later visiting him whilst incarcerated in Utah for the DaRonch kidnapping. Ted’s girlfriend Elizabeth would not be happy. 

Source: Ancestry. Com

Ted & Liz whilst out on bail in 1975 wearing the identical cardigan he would wear on the morning of his first escape from Pitkin County Courthouse Law Library window. 

Leslie Knudson 

June 1975 saw Ted dating Leslie Knudson, a single mother with a young son. They would date for just a few months. Ted would hang around at her house quite often and enjoyed kicking around with Knudson’s young son Josh , frequently taking him and a friend swimming or to the mall. Working nights, as a University Security Guard to make a little extra money, Leslie would recall how Ted would enjoy wearing the uniform and often refused to get changed once his shift was over - even going on dates wearing it, something Leslie found bizarre. The relationship fell apart once Ted began to show signs of being emotionally unstable and his drinking became excessive.

Ted wearing the security guard uniform taken from his University Of Utah student record card. The job would be terminated after just one month due to budget cuts. 

1460 Redondo Avenue , SLC , Utah. Leslie Knudson’s house where Bundy would stay over occasionally . 
Source: Google maps 

Remember Ann Swenson, Ted’s special friend from Utah and his Attorney John O’Connell’s secretary. Well, with Ted now out on bail and still dating Liz back in Seattle, Kloepfer references her as Kim Andrews in “The Phantom Prince” and describes the deep-set jealousy brought about by Ted’s betrayal :

“... One night we were at Aaron and Debra’s, drinking beer and eating chicken enchiladas when Ted got a long-distance call. I knew it was Kim Andrews, his Salt Lake City friend. He went into the bedroom to take the call, and I marched in right behind him. He paid no attention to me, so I went back into the living room and picked up the phone there. It was obvious from the conversation how deeply they cared for each other.

       “When are you coming back?” she wanted to know. “Soon,” Ted answered.

      I stormed out of the house and tried to unlock my car, but I couldn’t get the key in the lock. Ted came out and asked me where I was going. “Don’t talk to me, you asshole!” I shouted. Ted looked around nervously to see if there were plainclothes police listening in. “Come into the house,” he said. “We’ll talk.”

He tried to take me back to the house, but I began hitting and pounding on him. I wanted to break his goddamn jaw.

  “ Leave me alone,” I screamed. “I hate you.”

Finally, I got the door open, jumped into the car, pulled out, and left him standing in the dust...

Liz would find herself overwhelmed as she later discovered Ann’s name on the Jail’s visiting list after Ted had been placed in Solitary confinement at Utah State Prison.

Ted makes his way to court for the trial of aggravated kidnapping of Carol DaRonch 

In Rule’s version of events, the author writes following an escape plot by Ted is discovered at Utah’s State Penitentiary:

“... He (Ted) would be there fifteen days, and Sharon (Ann Swenson) was angry that he had received this harshest punishment possible for such a minor infraction as having a social security card on his person. She wrote that she was trying to write him three or four letters a day.

‘The bastards may not let me visit, but they're sure going to tire of carrying mail to him.’

Reading her letter, I was again bemused and somewhat dismayed at what the denouement might one day be when those two women who loved Ted realized they had been deluded into believing that each was the only one. And me? I made up the third corner of the three-woman network giving Ted emotional support. I had managed to remain relatively unscathed. Torn by conflicting feelings and doubts still - but I was not in love with Ted. Sharon (Ann Swenson) and Meg (Liz) were.”

Rule then recalls a conversation between herself and Ted examining his infidelities and his exceptional skills at gaining a woman's unfaltering loyalty and devotion. No matter what predicament Ted found himself in, he would always manage to glean female assistance. It truly came so naturally to him, like a moth to a flame :

...We talked about Sharon (Ann Swenson) and Meg (Liz) He had known Sharon for more than a year, and she visited him faithfully every Wednesday and Sunday.

“Don't mention Sharon to Meg. Sharon's jealous of Meg, and Meg doesn't really know about Sharon.”

I promised that I would not involve myself in his complicated romantic life, and I marvelled that he could keep two intense relationships going while he was locked up with a possible life sentence hanging over him."

     On October 26 1976 Ann Rule then received a letter from Swenson :

...I received a letter from Sharon Auer (Ann Swenson), who enclosed a brief note that Ted had sent her to send to me, Sharon was still very much a part of his life, even though his letters to me extolled no one but Meg (Liz). Sharon was horrified at the maximum security cell where Ted was being held, although her impressions of the 'hole' were based on Ted's description of it, as he was allowed no visitors. Ted had written to her that he envisioned his cell as something resembling a Mexican prison.

“Eight feet high, ten feet long, six feet wide. Two feet in from the front are steel bars running from floor to ceiling. A solid steel door - with only a peephole for the guard to look in - closes off the front of the cell. The walls have graffiti, vomit, and urine coating them.”

Snippets taken from letters sent to Liz declaring how much he missed her and Seattle. Despite all his philandering, he claimed to love her still.

Bundy’s relationship with Liz ended following his conviction in the DaRonch kidnapping case and the last time they saw each other was around April - May 1977. Yet, finding it near impossible to completely cut off from each other they continued phone contact and wrote one another right up to his arrest in Tallahassee, Florida when a tear-stricken Bundy rang Liz searching out comfort and support!

Even following detention in Utah, as kidnapping charges put Ted behind bars, placing Ann Swenson's name on his visitor list and omitting Liz’s, Ted wrote a passionate letter to Elizabeth saying :

"...I shall love you forever and forever ... I will love you til my last breath...”

Much later In an interview for a New York Journalist in 1981, Liz declared :

  “...I thought back over the years with Ted, trying to find what I might have overlooked before. He was not a violent person. When we argued he was always calm and reasonable; I was the one who lost control and yelled. I could count on the fingers of one hand the times that Ted had lost his temper since I'd known him...”

And Bundy continued to plead his innocence to an altogether bewildered Liz :

“Dammit, I am not grandstanding, Liz. I am innocent, and they are going to frame their little heads off. Please try to believe in me."

Arrested in Florida and brought to Tallahassee from Pensacola, Ted rang Liz in tears 

Frankly not knowing what to believe she quickly changed her mind in January 1979, when Bundy called her from a Florida jail and told her about "something the matter with me."

“ I just couldn't contain it," he told her, weeping.

" I fought it for a long, long time ... it got too strong All the time I could feel that force building within me."

Now, faced with the reality that the love of her life was indeed a crazed lust killer, Liz cuts all ties and tries desperately to move on.

Carole Ann Boone 

Realising he was incapable of existing completely alone, Ted had already sought out someone qualified to sooth his fragile ego and also fight his corner diligently, as court proceedings loomed over him.

Carole Ann Boone 

“ …And again, dearest Bunny...I know you are innocent and I know there’s a way for you to be free...”

Carole Ann wrote these words to her friend Ted before his second escape from Glenwood Springs 

Carole Ann Boone began writing to Ted in 1977, visiting him whilst he was imprisoned in Garfield County jailhouse in Glenwood Springs and sending him care packages and money . It became clear she had powerful feelings towards Ted and she wrote of such in a letter which would arrive on January 4 , 1978 merely a few days after his daring escape through a light fitting in his cell . Their romantic relationship probably started in earnest around March - April 1978. They initially became pals after meeting at the Washington State Department Of Emergency Services in the summer of 1974 and Carole visited him many times whilst Bundy lived in Utah. Attending both trials - the Chi Omega case and later the Kimberly Diane Leach murder trial in Miami, Fla - the pair eventually married in court on February 9, 1980 - precisely a year to the day the Leach girl was murdered. Later bringing into the world a baby daughter born on 24, October 1981, named Rosa. When asked how she became pregnant by an incarcerated Bundy, Carole simply replied “it's nobody's business" how she and the Death Row inmate managed It. Prison officials say physical contact between inmates and their visitors is not permitted but Boone would later admit to Author Stephen Michaud that certain prison guards would look the other way. 

What follows is a Letter sent to Bundy which arrived just a few days after his second escape from Glenwood Springs. 

Source :Pitkin County and shared by A E Nightingale in Ted Bundy - Like An Elk FB Group 

Letter transcription 

Loved One:       Thursday night 

This is just another one of my letters of explanation following a telephone conversation. I am able to joke on the phone, conduct business on the phone, but have some difficulty expressing heart and soul on the phone. My thoughts jam up when I'm feeling intense, and without hands and face to complete the expression, I’m helpless. The things I wish to say sound crazy inside my head.

Tonight I wanted to say so much to you but didn’t know how to get it across without sounding trite or ecentric. So, my most dear friend, I will try now; I understand the solutions you see to your problems-especially the (your) preferred one. But I keep feeling (even when my mood is black or bleak) so very strongly that there is something else. Another way. Something that hasn’t happened yet. Its not a mystical sense that some sort of rightness about the universe will tip the situation over. Of extremely unfortunate set of events and people have put you, most unjustly, into a cell in Garfield County, Colorado. There is a way (one at least) to get you back out of that maze. Finding it, making it happen, hasn’t taken place. Yet. But I am dead certain it is there. And I'm dead certain that it will happen. That being your solution, you and I will be able to go out and have a beer. Just like normal folks. Love, I am so positive that even though I have no idea of when or where or how, I am looking forward to it.

Tonight is indescribably bad. I want to be in GlenWood Springs. Wish so much I could be with you. For both of us. I do worry, get frantic and frustrated. It would help to be closer. And I have thought about relocating. Would up and do so if you were scheduled to be there on a more permanent basis. And I toy with applying for work at the Utah Energy Office, if there is one. At one time a couple of years ago, I planned to pass the Foreign Service Officers test- no education requirements on it. I'm bright enough to make it (given that I could drive myself to acquire a understanding of ECONOMICS) But I've come to such a caring and commitment to you that I don’t want it. I want to be close enough to at least make phone calls, and visit now and then. Be here if I can help. And be in the same part of the world as you, for me. It's hard to explain, but I need you. Don’t need hardly anything or anybody, independent frivulous person that I am. But I need you. The affection that I get and that which I feel. I've been around enough, been upstairs enough, to know that such affection, such caring is a blessed, treasurable thing. The only way I wish to be severed from such a rarity is at your decision. Which I would understand, and learn to live with, naturally.

But the despair that I feel tonight is not the hopeless variety. It is that, at this moment, you have such a heavy load to carry. That I can’t erase it for you. Would that I could. Lord, I do love you, Theodore. And don’t misunderstand - its not out of pity, not that I think you’re helpless. I don’t want you even to think my caring is for the predicament instead of the person. I couldn’t do that. Anyway you aren’t a helpless man-it would be ridiculous to pity or not love you for what you are.

Pit City right now. Enough to overwhelm anybody. No matter how tough or resolute or right. All you can do, all we can do is hang in there. Keep pitching. Ride it out. Hack away at the beast until it falls over dead. And it will. Your freedom is the most important thing in the world right now. I put some stock in Jill’s prediction premonition. And again, dearest Bunny, even without Jill and what she thinks, or anybody else and what they think, I know you are innocent and I know there's a way for you to be free.

Always, all my love

Carole Ann

" I don't have to explain anything about anyone to anybody,"

Carole Ann Bundy told the above quote to a reporter for “The Orlando Sentinel Star” following the news reports of her pregnancy to Ted whilst he is incarcerated on death row 

I think it's most worthwhile to include an Interesting article which I feel especially demonstrates Carole’s emotions concerning Ted’s ex lover Elizabeth Klopefer, in which Carole speaks about a ‘bitter and angry’ girlfriend who called the police about Bundy.  Although the article does not name the girlfriend, I think I'm fairly certain she's talking about Liz which makes me sense it was perhaps Ted himself who called Liz ‘bitter and Angry‘.  Was this done to offer up an explanation for Liz notifying police of her suspicions regarding Ted? Probably, and it's also common knowledge Ted gained tremendous pleasure in playing women off against each other and would himself later send Liz a letter, accidentally on purpose (I'm fairly confident) sending it first to Carole Ann instead!

A pregnant Carole Ann and Ted at Raiford, Fla on Death Row 

The following is an archived news article -  “She left Seattle to stick up for Bundy “ By LAURA KAVESH -” The Orlando Sentinel “ - 27 Jun 1979

    Many of the 65 pairs of eyelids in the windowless courtroom are drooping. The painstaking jury selection is tedious.

Even Ted Bundy, whose life may rest in the hands of these men and women, leans back in his yellow vinyl chair. He is exhausted. He slept for less than five hours on his jail-cell bunk the night before.

  But one person is alert, taking notes, sometimes straining forward to prospective Bundy jurors tentatively approved. Her name is Carole Boone.

She is Ted Bundy's " fast, close, personal friend."

Close enough that she left her job in Seattle with a government agency to be with Bundy throughout what may stretch into a months-long trial. She is known as Bundy's former girlfriend, but she eludes attempts to pin down exactly what kind of relationship she shared with the man on trial, charged with the murders of Chi Omega sorority sisters Miss Lisa Levy and Miss Margaret Bowman at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

“That’s such a d fashioned way of putting it .”  She says sitting in the lobby of a hotel where she registered under a false name to avoid publicity.

  Miss Boone holds out a dark grey pin-stripe suit, size 40 regular, and a white shirt with, a 15'2-inch neck.

"It's from his favorite store in Seattle," says the 32-year-old woman with owlish eyes and dark red hair.

But Bundy who has two suits, two pairs of pants and two sports jackets, wasn't allowed to accept the gift during the 10 minutes Bundy and Miss Boone shared early Tuesday morning. It was Bundy's first visitor, except for his four lawyers, since the Dade County Jail became his new home Sunday. They spoke to each other through a tiny window, a far cry from the " contact visits" they were allowed in Tallahassee after Bundy had been there many, many months. Miss Boone has known Ted Bundy since 1974 when the two worked together for five months in a Washington state government office. Soon after, Bundy moved to Utah to attend law school. Miss Boone says she visited him there. The tall, slender woman is more certain of Bundy's innocence than she is of anything else, except one thing: She is even more certain that Bundy would not be behind bars today if it were not for what she believes is a hysteria about the Bundy case that has swept over news media writers like a forest fire. She says Bundy's image in the news media is that of an "articulate, amusing David Berkowitz (New York's Son of Sam killer).

“The whole problem with saying anything good about Ted is it gets turned around."

Bundy's problems began, she says, when a bitter and angry ex-girlfriend phoned authorities in Washington state, establishing a tenuous thread between Bundy and the murders of two women there.

 The rest is history.

   Bundy gets reams of mail, some of it from adoring women. But Miss Boone says she is not a Bundy groupie.

"My faith in his innocence is based on my familiarity with each case."

   She has a room full of documents, mountains of psychological and legal material, stacks of police reports, and "massive reports on other suspects." She would rather talk about Bundy's innocence than the secrets of his personality. In Utah, Bundy was convicted of kidnapping. The young victim, Miss Carol DaRonch, told policemen her assailant was wearing patent leather shoes.

"I've seen Ted's closet. I've kept stuff in Ted's closet. He doesn't wear patent leather,"

  Miss DaRonch identified Bundy in a police lineup 11 months later only after prodding, Miss Boone says. Earlier the kidnapping victim said the man had dark brown hair, greased back, and a mustache. Miss Boone said that there also are gaping holes in the charge against Bundy in Colorado. The charge is that he murdered a Dearborn, Mich., nurse at an Aspen ski resort in 1975. An eyewitness in court failed to identify Bundy, she said. Further, Miss Boone speaks of massive, unpublicized evidence of another prime suspect in the murder: the man who did odd jobs at the Wildwood Inn in Aspen, but who left the day the Michigan nurse disappeared. There is more of the same much more and Miss Boone convincingly ticks off the evidence that moves the accusing finger away from her friend Ted.

Did Bundy's two Colorado jailbreaks, his admitted thefts of cars and credit cards, tarnish her faith in his overall innocence?

"I know the process he's been through, (in jail, in Colorado and Utah). For one thing, Bundy decided if he got out of jail anyway he'd have to really learn to live like a fugitive. His name was already soiled, his life altered. He'd have to start over anyway like a fugitive."

  She says that Bundy "didn't recognize justice in the Utah court."

  Why did Bundy go to Tallahassee via Michigan and Atlanta after he escaped prison the second time?

"It was wintertime, and Ted wanted to be in the sun."

Miss Boone confers frequently with Bundy's lawyers, and in the courtroom, she passes notes through them to Bundy. She sends him books; most recently Bundy read James Thurber and former Nazi Albert Speer's account of his years in prison. When they talk, it's about "everything but the distant future. There's no way he could handle that. Any wishing would be so disruptive," she says.

As far as Bundy's mood now, "things are up and down. The last year and a half has been a very harsh experience. The indictment (in the Florida coed murders) was a ghastly blow."

Miss Boone says she plans to stay in Miami no matter how long the grueling trial lasts.

  " I'm in it for the duration," she says.

The nagging question, of course, is if the Bundy crusade has become an obsession with this woman on extended leave from her job.   

"At first, friends think it is. It's not. People who know me don't doubt that at all. It might turn out badly, but flimsy as the whole structure is, it's going to come tumbling down," she replies.

-End of article-

Carole Ann said the above quote during the murder trial of Kimberly Diane Leach, when Ted appeared one morning wearing the dreaded bow tie Carole thought she had entirely disposed of. 

Later things certainly did begin to tumble down but unfortunately for Carole Ann, not in the way she imagined.

Carole Ann and son Jamey during an anti death penalty match held in Florida 

Ted, Carole Ann and Rosa 

A friend whom Carole Ann met in Florida whilst campaigning against the death penalty, Diana Smith, shares her thoughts on Ted and his Wife Carole Ann Boone - Bundy :

‘“ʼ… Clinically speaking, he’s a Sexual Sadist Serial Murderer. The interesting question is, how could he be so many different things to so many different people? And be pretty convincing at it…Ted Bundy can be a wake-up call to the fact that these people exist, and they exist among us, and, that it is not my belief that he went totally undetected, and that there were things very early on, that appeared to be significantly wrong in his normal development… He was born in a home for unwed mothers, and he was left there for three months by his mother, and then she returned and picked him up and brought him back to spend the next three or four years with his Grandparents. His Grandfather Sam had a violent temper. One of the stories about him was that he would be able to pick up a cat and swing it by its tail and fling it against the wall. And witnessing that as a child would be significant in later behavior … At some age around puberty, Ted found out that in fact, Johnnie was not his Father, that his Father was unknown. Well, at that point, as a male, you’re forming a lot of your identity, especially your sexual identity. That may have been the clincher for the anti-social behavior … Ted from my experience of his family, came from a very secretive family and in his words '”’ he came from a healthy Christian family ‘“‘ and what that says to me is that Ted, very possibly was sacrificed to this appearance, in that as long as he looked good then he was accepted in the family … Carole (Boone-Bundy) believed from the very beginning that he was innocent. She’s very intelligent, and she could go to the court and understand the complex forensics that was used in convicting him and learn enough about it, to find out there were problems that could account for why he could be innocent … A lot of people know who he is by name recognition alone, and in some ways, that’s what he was trying to achieve. Some sense of who he was. I think he killed for it… “

Smith also revealed details of Boone’s past that could have made her more susceptible to Bundy’s influence. Smith said Boone’s brother, Jon Franklin, had drowned in a swimming pool on 18 July 1960 when he was 15 years old and that Boone had always been plagued by grief. She believes Boone may have seen Bundy as a way to try to save a life after being unable to save the life of her brother.

“… She’s been vilified and maybe rightly so by people who didn’t understand her, but when you learn more about her, she becomes a much more, in my view, sympathetic character…“

But over time, the relationship between Boone and Bundy crumbled.

“… He was exhausting, obsessive, demanding, moody, always needing, as if she didn’t have enough to do,” Smith declared of Bundy, adding that eventually Boone “… was just tired of him… Ted had never admitted to Carole anything but that he was innocent. But just before it looked like there were no more stays of execution, he called her and asked if he should tell them where the bodies were buried. They call it “bones for time”. And that was his way of telling her that there were bodies he knew about and that he had actually killed all those people… That call was just devastating for her. She was really angry. I'm surprised she talked to him at all. And he wanted to talk to Rosa, and she replied “no”… So, there was no goodbye for Rosa…”

Baby Rosa 

Ted and Rosa 

A message written to Ted from his beloved daughter Rosa. 

The Bundy family would see each other every Saturday, in the visiting area of Florida State Prison for six hours each week. 

Sarasota Civil Attorney Diana Weiner 1986 -1989

Diana Weiner

Source: Georgetown University

For reasons that will soon become apparent, I have decided to include Sarasota Civil Attorney Diana Weiner in the list of women most intimate to Bundy in his lifetime. The following clipping details the Attorney-Client relationship and how that transformed over time :

Archived News Article “Spokesman-Review” 11 June 1989

…She is the person who spent more time with Bundy—she visited him some 70 times, according to prison records, in the last two and a half years of his life—than anyone else. She is also the person Bundy named as the personal representative of his estate, charging her with taking his possessions from the prison and seeing to it that his ashes were spread over the Washington Cascade Mountains.

Weiner was introduced to Bundy on Oct. 9, 1986, by Forensic psychologist Arthur Norman, who knew Weiner and her husband, Sarasota attorney Nevin Weiner, socially. Norman says he brought Weiner into the case because he thought a woman would help Bundy open up as Norman tried to establish whether the serial killer had been mentally competent to stand trial for the 1978 death of Kimberly Leach of Lake City.

Norman says he thought Bundy would be more forthcoming with “an intelligent, attractive attorney, (and) a woman who could be very open and would have the personality to open up and would not be threatened by whatever he says.”

Weiner’s presence prompted Bundy to talk more deeply about his attitudes toward women and violence, “things he had difficulty talking about with a man,” Norman says.

                                  End

Although it's not proven Diana was romantically tied to Ted except for the rumours circulated by those close to him near the end of his life, she was, in fact, one of the last people to visit with Ted at his request. Although this didn't go ahead as anticipated by Bundy and Weiner with the Prison Warden denying a contact visit permitting instead the last connection Bundy would have with Weiner to be behind glass. Dr Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a Forensic Psychiatrist who interviewed Ted extensively in the last few years of his life, noticed the close relationship that had developed between the two and writes about it in her book “Guilty By Reason Of Insanity” actually going so far as to label Diana as Ted’s “lady love”! 

Bringing this back to Bundy’s wife Carole Ann Boone-Bundy and her move back to Seattle in 1986, which occurs during a period of great torment as death warrants are signed three times that year. Having to leave Florida to care for her sick Mother Margot back in Seattle, whilst also having a young 5-year-old running about needing lots of love and attention and being a full-time single parent, Carole became increasingly upset at the close relationship being forged between her husband and his Civil Attorney in her absence. The following clipping details her last recorded visit in 1987 :

...Carole Ann Boone-Bundy remains on Bundy's approved visitors list, where she is described as “friend.” Her last visit with him on Death Row was Nov. 28, 1987 according to visitor records at the Florida State Prison. But Washington state acquaintances of Boone say she continues to live there. Prison records indicate that she visited Bundy frequently during 1986. Although Boone was present at Starke when Bundy faced his first death warrant, she was not there at his most recent brush with the executioner in November 1986. Her visits this year have been much less frequent; three in January, two in May and one in November. Her son James, in his early 20s, by an earlier marriage, also visits Bundy frequently.

Carole Ann never divorced Bundy and was named his legal Wife by marriage recorded in his last will and testament.

Polly Nelson 

Appelate Attorneys Polly Nelson & Jim Coleman of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering from 1986-1989 served as appellate attorneys for Ted trying to save his life from the electric chair.

As Ted’s execution draws ever near his Appellate Attorney Polly Nelson, who tirelessly works to save Ted’s life from 1986-1989 attempts to offer some comfort to her Client … this brief passage from a book Nelson wrote following his death, showcases a very complex and intense relationship between attorney and death row inmate ….

      … Ted had laid his head down on his hands, but his handcuffs cut him and he was unable to concentrate. I cupped his head in my hands. I had never been this way with Ted before, touching him, comforting him. But today was ….. very, very different… At nine o'clock I rose to leave. To my amazement, I was propelled against the glass to kiss and hug Ted, as best we could. I didn't know how I got there; it was a force from within, beyond my control. I left him alone with Diana for a final goodbye and walked out the door. I burst into tears ...

        Source: “Defending The Devil” By Polly Nelson 

following her clients execution Nelson would leave her job as appellate attorney. 

Ted with Mother Eleanor Louise Cowell on a New Jersey beach in 1948 

“...I’m so sorry I’ve given you all such grief , but a part of me was hidden all the time...But the Ted Bundy you knew also existed...”

   Ted’s last conversation to his Mother Louise 

Eleanor Louise Cowell 

Lastly i include Ted’s mother In the list of women most intricately linked to Ted Bundy. On the eve of his execution After trying to speak with his wife Carole Ann Boone-Bundy, and being informed she would not be taking his call, Ted reached out to his mother twice in what would be his last phone calls that night. She later told news reporters that her firstborn son Ted had told her he was sorry, sorry for all the pain he had caused. 

The following is an archived news article published after her loss, a loss of a son she once had such high hopes for, Eleanor Louise Cowell told her story : 

Mrs. Bundy

by Dana Middleton Silberston 

 For the mother of a serial killer, a chance to connect with victims on live TV offers a shot at redemption.

       The television camera panned across a field filled with hundreds of people, many waving ugly banners and cheering. Some guzzled beer, others gulped coffee between bites of powdered doughnuts. The unfolding scene exuded a dark, circus-like tone, the disquieting rumble of a happy yet mean crowd. I flinched as a flushed, sweaty man suddenly dominated the screen, shrieking, “Die, Bundy, die!”

      From my perch on a patterned sofa, I was watching fiery rhetoric, while surrounded by preternatural calm. I couldn’t reconcile the bloodlust on the television with my current modest surroundings; oak side tables and fluted lampshades that suggested time had slowed years ago.

       “ If anyone deserved to die, it’s Ted Bundy!” screamed the television.

A woman’s voice broke in, polite but flat: “Would you care for some coffee or tea?”

       Fellini could not have devised a stranger scene. I responded to the woman standing near me as though we were attending a garden party.

“Yes, please, I’d love some tea.”

 “ ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE / GOOD MORNING TED / WE’RE GOING TO KILL YOU!”

 Stone-faced, she returned from the kitchen with two delicate porcelain cups, glancing at the crudely written sign on the TV set as the announcer repeated her son’s last words.

   “ Bundy reportedly told his lawyer and his minister, ‘I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.’”

Never looking directly at the screen, as a clean white hearse passed across the frame, Louise Bundy poised herself on a well-worn recliner near me, blinked wearily, and took a sip from her cup.

   Ted Bundy was one of the most notorious serial killers in American history, murdering so many women and girls that the final count may never be known. Law enforcement would put the number between 30 and 36, with the caveat that there might be more. Bundy stalked and tortured his way through at least seven states across the country, staging attacks in Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Florida from the 1960s to the late 1970s. He left families devastated, colleges on edge, and towns on high alert. One of his own lawyers described him as “the very definition of heartless evil.” Even the national psyche took a hit, squirming in the face of someone who could commit such atrocities for so long without getting caught.

But he finally did get caught, twice, and escaped, twice. It wasn’t until the state of Florida sentenced him to death for the killings of two university co-eds and a 12-year-old girl that the death penalty would be carried out on a January morning in 1989. His demise was a relief to anyone in favor of the death penalty. Though I would never have celebrated his death, he was the one person who’d momentarily shaken my own stance against capital punishment. He was put to death at the State Prison in Starke, Fla., at 4 a.m. Seattle time. My time. 

Six hours later I sat in his mother’s living room.

   My visit that day was highly unusual and what I was attempting was more unusual still. In 1989, television talk shows like the one I hosted were centered primarily on broad political or social themes. Phil Donahue generally aimed more toward journalism while Oprah, at the time, was known as tabloid TV. It’s not to say they never touched personal stories then, but zeroing in on the intimate feelings of individuals was just emerging; the deeply private was rare and only lightly explored. Areas of real intimacy and private thoughts were still often considered insensitive or in poor taste. So I faced an internal dilemma the day Ted Bundy was put to death. I wanted to go beyond the norm, beyond the standard interview, to broaden and intensify what television could convey.

   As a host of a daily afternoon television talk show in Seattle, I interviewed the occasional former US president or gifted author. But as management endeavored to forestall gravitas and low ratings, we gave more and more time to an eclectic smattering of movie stars gushing over their brand of hair conditioner and holders of the world record for the longest fingernails.

 But our scheduled interview on the day of Ted Bundy’s execution was an exception to that trend. This would not be a sideshow. Weeks in the planning, our producers had located Vivian Rancourt, the mother of one of Bundy’s victims. In April of 1974, Vivian’s daughter, Susan, vanished from her college campus in Central Washington. For nearly a year her parents knew nothing of what had happened to her. They may never have known had her skull not been found outside of town. And though Bundy was always suspected, they could not have been sure if he hadn’t confessed to it only two days before his execution. Vivian would appear via satellite from her home in Eastern Washington to share memories of her daughter and her feelings about Ted Bundy’s death.

 It was in the early morning hours of that day, as I prepared for work, that I began to think of Bundy’s mother, of what this day must be like for her. The more I thought about it, the more intense my focus became on hearing from her. Looking back, I think my consideration of Louise Bundy that day came from my own heartache. I had spent the last few months in a state of functional grief after separating from my eight-year-old son as part of a grueling divorce. On the advice of a trusted psychologist, I had sent him back to his father and extended family in the small town my son loved. I’d finally recognized that though having him was good for me, he missed his cousins and friends. It was isolating for him. Though it would fly in the face of cultural acceptance, his yearning for familiar territory trumped my overwhelming desire to keep him with me. No decision in my life had come closer to emotionally bending me such that I never truly straightened. It was through my own distress that I saw Louise Bundy that morning not as a serial killer’s parent but as a mother. I asked myself if a simple connection between her and Vivian Rancourt, as mothers, could possibly ease an ounce of the past and the pain. I had to try.

  I knew Louise Bundy had lived for years near Seattle, in Tacoma, and surprisingly quickly, I found a John Bundy in the phone book and took a chance. So spontaneous was my decision, I did not take a camera crew or even a notebook (later that night, I would jot down notes about much of the experience). I glanced at the clock. It was just before 9 a.m. I told my producers I’d be back in studio before one o’clock. The show aired live at three in the afternoon and I would need time to do makeup and get acquainted with Vivian before we went on the air. I didn’t call the Bundys’ number, I just left to find Louise. It was a 45-minute drive, presuming I could find the place easily. Then there was the sticky matter of not being sure I had the right house or the right people.

 The voice in my head babbled as I drove. What would I say when I got to the door? Why was I really doing this? I could hear my father’s voice admonishing me against being impulsive, responding too quickly to strong feelings. This could all go very badly. I could make a fool of myself. Still I drove, with sweaty palms, steeling myself to get through the phalanx of media trucks and reporters I was sure would be lined up when I arrived.

 After finding the exit off the freeway, I continued through a modest middle-class neighborhood, eventually pulling up in front of a one-story beige home much like all the rest on the street. An eerie quiet prevailed. No media trucks. No onlookers milling around. Not a soul. I sat in the car, staring at the house, taking in how ordinary it was; a flock of burbling robins peppering a bare maple, a garbage truck lumbering away. Utterly lacking in anything sinister.

  It was through my own distress that I saw Louise Bundy that morning not as a serial killer’s parent but as a mother.

   Jittery and a little nauseated, I got out of the car, still not knowing what I would say but, worse still, not knowing what she would say. She might scream at me to leave. I walked to the front door, taking in the peeling trim and rang the bell. Surprisingly, the wooden door opened leaving a screen between me and the most Betty Crocker-looking woman I’d ever seen.

   Louise Bundy stood just above the level of my chin, her head capped with a brunette bob. Her round face housed sharp, tight features. She wore a simple blouse and jacket. The quintessential-looking working mom, were it not for the deep creases and folds that fell around her eyes as if her own skin were trying to limit her view. Gazing at her for what seemed an age, I finally spoke, telling her my name.

   “ I would not bother you at a time like this but…” And to my shock and embarrassment, I convulsed in tears and began to blubber something like, “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what you’re going through.”

I told her I shouldn’t have bothered her, and I turned to go.

  I heard the screen door creak at my back and her soft, kind voice implore me.

“No. Come in. Please. Come in.”

I’ve always wondered if she opened that door to offer me solace when it was I who thought I had come to provide some to her.

   I swiveled and faced her again, divided about whether to actually go in. I stepped toward her and for an instant I thought we would hug each other, but as our eyes met both of us changed our minds. We were already setting adrift the boundaries between media and privacy.

  As I entered the small, tidy living room, the dominant feature was the sound of the endless loop of mocking crowds I’d seen laughing on the TV set back at the station, heckling the death of this woman’s son. I thought Mrs. Bundy might turn it off, but she only turned it down.

 “Please, have a seat,” she invited blandly.

   Louise Bundy had always staunchly defended her son’s innocence and even in the face of recent confessions, even in phone calls moments before his execution, she still referred to him as her “precious son.” The father of that precious son had never been definitively identified and Louise endured rumors for years that her abusive father was also Ted Bundy’s father.

    I knew that Ted Bundy had spent his earliest years with his grandparents, who told him Louise was his sister. I asked Louise what her son was like as a boy.

 She reflected almost wistfully about how he liked to ride his bike and that he had a paper route he loved. The image stood in stark contrast to her son’s own account of how he’d spent hours, as a kid, scavenging his neighborhood garbage cans in search of rough pornography.

  “ He was popular,” she added, sitting up a little straighter. Popular. Ted Bundy had bitten a girl’s nipple off. He had dismembered many of his victims. Did she know that? Had she read it? Maybe she could never believe it. But she was also right. Her son, the former law school student with the dark, wavy hair and blue eyes, was often described as handsome, interesting, and charming. Radioactive material deeply buried. The schism was unfathomable.

   I could not imagine the depth of her inner turmoil. This intelligent, articulate woman had to change her phone number over and over again to avoid threats. She’d held professional office positions of trust and loyalty, including a post at a reputable university while simultaneously becoming the object of repeated invective in grocery stores and at the post office. She had met the devil coming and going.

   The monstrous aspects of Louise’s existence honed my focus. I didn’t need to drag her through these questions. Every detail of her life had been macerated for years.

The unfinished business lay elsewhere, beyond facts, beyond headlines and assumptions. What was left to say was in her heart.

“ Have you ever communicated with any of the mothers?”

       My question felt abrupt and premature. Perhaps, the mere notion would be abhorrent to her. I immediately worried that it was too intrusive. My heart pounded as I reached for my teacup to avoid her eyes. Or was I sparing her having to look at mine?

   “ No,” she responded slowly, staring at the tips of her pumps. But her tone left a tiny opening.

    I asked if she would like to, if she’d ever wanted to. I assumed I must be on very thin ice. At any moment I could cross the line and she would ask me to leave. She stared straight ahead, her eyes wells of sadness. Then, Louise startled me, exhaling as though releasing a breath stored for years and stammered that, yes, she’d always wanted to tell the other moms how she felt.

  Thinking back on it now, I can only imagine her struggling with each murder her son committed, each atrocity laid out in newspapers and on television across the country. Forced to take them, like blows, over and over. I’ll bet she was conflicted.

    I told her that our guest that day was Vivian Rancourt. Louise’s face registered instant recognition, eyes widening, a look away, her gaze flitting into space.

 “If she would like to talk with you, would you want to?”

   She frowned hard and protested that she didn’t think she could. That she didn’t know what she would say. I asked her what she would like to say.

  Her bowed head swayed from side to side in vague uncertainty, as if bearing the question rather than hearing it. In the softest voice, exploring her words, she whispered, “I would tell her how bad I feel.” Her eyes fixed on the floor, her voice catching in her throat, “How sorry I am for…” She trailed off.

   I had to get back to the station. The show was live and our guest had no idea she might be speaking with the mother of the man who killed her child.

   My resolve refined to a knife’s edge. I felt almost cheerful. A question had been answered, a vagueness crystalized. We could do this. She could share this burden, speak freely without fear, so I asked, “Why don’t we do it?” I added that if Vivian agreed, Louise could come to the station that afternoon and talk to her.

    But Louise picked up an earlier part of the conversation as if she hadn’t heard me, remarking that Ted had had a girlfriend, then suddenly turned to me with an alert expression asking if I meant it.

                          “ Yes. I do.”

  She asked if I would do the interview and I said I would.

                         “Well, maybe.”

  I told her I wouldn’t push, that if she wanted to talk to Vivian, all she had to do was let me know. I wanted to give her voice. I wanted this scorned and ridiculed woman to be made human, maybe to humanize all of us or maybe just that crowd outside the prison or maybe, irrationally, just me for not having my son with me.

     I couldn’t bear to have that gleeful seething bunch at the prison represent all that would come of these horrors. I wanted compassion to find a seat at this shadowed bacchanal. But I would not force it and I made it clear that if she decided not to talk I would understand.

  I had to get back to the station. The show was live and our guest had no idea she might be speaking with the mother of the man who killed her child. We needed her permission. She might refuse. We might lose her.

I told Louise I would call her in about an hour, aware of the careful, friendly bent to my speech, as if the wrong tone would crack her delicate resolve.

    I rose from the sofa and headed for the door. She joined me and we stepped outside onto the porch. This time we didn’t change our minds. We hugged each other.

     I thanked her for having me but further words failed me. She nodded, patting my forearm. Looking me straight in the eye, she offered a glimpse of her heart. She told me she understood what I was trying to do and thanked me for it. Not trusting my voice, I nodded back and headed toward my car. We’d taken a tiny step together and I wondered where it would lead. Driving back to the station, I weighed the fine line between overstepping and propriety. And, in the end, would Vivian want anything to do with Louise Bundy?

    There is a space in most theaters or TV stations where guests wait before the show. It’s called a green room because most are painted green, a color considered calming and soothing to guests unaccustomed to being on television. That day I was, perhaps appropriately, alone in that room about 30 minutes before the show, on the phone with Vivian Rancourt. I told her of my visit to the Bundy house. She listened silently. I asked if she would want to talk with Louise and held my breath. I heard her clear her throat and take a deep breath, considering the question. I could only imagine her surprise and uncertainty. Finally, in a soft voice she said yes, that of course she would. I recall being moved more than surprised. I got the impression of an extraordinary person.

     Going back upstairs, the producers and I tried to think through what might now be a completely different program from the one we’d planned. We couldn’t. There was no time. I quickly wrote a new introduction and jotted down a couple of questions for Louise, not really believing she would answer them. I didn’t want to dictate how it would go but I did want to start out slowly, to allow Louise to acclimate. I intended these two people to have the time to say whatever they wanted to say. We left the conference room and headed back to our desks.

     Louise called a few minutes later, before we could call her, her voice filled with doubt. “I just can’t do it. I can’t go on TV.”

    I had promised I wouldn’t push, and before the thought was even finished I asked if she’d prefer to be on the phone. Would that make it easier? I believed that she would regret, in the end, not taking the opportunity to unburden when she had it. Louise asked if Vivian wanted to talk to her and I said, yes, she did.

  “ I don’t know. I’m just not sure if I can.” I told her that we would go on and that if she wanted to join us she was most welcome, adding that I hoped she would. I said we would call her just before we started and she could decide even at the last minute. I added that she would not be alone, that I would walk her through every bit of it. When I hung up, I had no idea if she would really be there when the time came.

     The realities of TV can be ugly even when the intent is honorable. I was well aware of the intrigue Louise’s participation would generate. In my introduction at the top of the show I mentioned that Louise would participate even though I knew she might not. If this exchange could happen, I wanted people to witness it and if, in the end, Louise could not bring herself to appear, I would deal with it then.

      Muttering rose from the audience members, nervous shifting and quizzical looks.

   “ Is Ted Bundy’s mother going to be here in the studio?” asked one woman

 “ No, she’ll be on the phone.”

                       “ Oh, good.”

    I did not respond, only walked back down the hallway until it was time to do the interview. While we waited, Vivian and I chatted again on the phone about the weather but not about her daughter or Ted Bundy or the fact she was about to talk to the mother of the man who killed her child. She asked if I had any kids.

                   “ Yes, one son.”

       “ Ah,” she said gently, “Hold him close.”

   I heard the tears in her voice and I had to catch my own, bidding them back down, thinking, “Good grief. Get a hold of yourself. Yours is alive.”

    When the time came, we got seated and hooked up to microphones, she in her living room, I on the set. The effect was as if she was sitting across from me. And across from me was a woman as ordinary-looking in her own way as Louise was in hers. She had a sweet and solemn face of creamy skin, short ash blond hair and a generous build. She was serious, as though joy had never regenerated in her.

  “ You OK?” I asked her.

    “ Yes, thank you, I’m fine.”

And Vivian indeed appeared to be.

    The audience went quiet, the red light came on over the camera, and we were on the air. As I began describing how one couple in Washington had lost their daughter 14 years before while another had lost their son that morning, the voice of my director came in my earpiece, telling me that Louise had answered her phone but hadn’t said anything else after the connection was made. He wasn’t sure if she was still there or not.

I went on to mention the day’s furor over Bundy’s execution and the fact that “maybe we have lost sight of the fact that he is somebody’s son,” and in a split second I opted to just dive in.

  I tested the waters by addressing Louise and thanking her for joining us on such a fateful day. I thought I heard a response but it was so faint I wasn’t sure, then I was concerned she might be there but that we couldn’t hear her. I persisted gently, making a quick inquiry to again test whether she was there. And I heard her.

    I focused on the fact that Ted Bundy was allowed a phone call to his mother in the wee hours of the morning of his execution. I asked, “Can you share with us some of that call?” My, how she’d found her voice in the hours since we’d talked. Her confidence surprised me but it was her words that were dumbfounding. 

 “ He was just full of remorse,” she said, “…I know Ted well enough to know he was sincere,” adding that he’d also told her he’d hidden much of himself from her. She was a font of painful contradiction.

In spite of our chat earlier that morning or perhaps because of it, I was incredulous at the depth of her denial as it unspooled through the studio. In response to a question asking if she ever blamed herself for his actions, she likened her situation to any other mother who scrutinizes her parenting when her “kids go wrong”; that her son’s explanation was that it was “a thing that just got away” from him. I am struck only now by the blind power of her love.

      At the time, I could not reconcile Louise’s matter-of-fact tone of voice with my own incredulity. I was torn between wanting to ask her how it was possible she might still question her son’s guilt while wondering how Vivian would respond to this minimization.

    I decided it was time for Vivian to speak. I asked her how she felt about Louise and the position Louise was in. She hesitated, faltered.

Inside the studio, everything is magnified, every sound, every second. Her brief pause seemed at the time to stretch forever, the entire fragile assembly at risk. When Vivian found her voice, she surprised us all.

       “ First of all, we send hugs to her, too,” she sighed, closing her eyes several times. “It has to be terrible for her. Our suffering is over, our answers are all there—and I think hers are probably just beginning.”

      I asked Louise if she’d like to respond, if there was anything she’d like to share with Vivian. “I’m glad to be able to say it directly to one of the moms,” she began succinctly, in a controlled voice, and then, like scaffolding collapsing under a delicately crafted structure, her voice shook, then broke. She let out a rush of air from her core, raised her voice, and out it poured

 “We don’t know why this happened,” she said, choking. “We feel so—DESPERATELY—SORRY for you. We didn’t want our son to do these things. We have two beautiful daughters of our own, and we know how we would feel. I am sorry.” And her shaky voice came to a sputtering halt.

Inside the studio, I heard sniffs and sobs. A cameraman dropped his head. Mere seconds seemed to stretch forever. Vivian Rancourt choked and swallowed hard, as if buffeted by Louise’s pain.

      “ I know you are. And we don’t hold any hatred or resentment toward you or your family.” And she stopped. I paused for only an instant, taking in Vivian’s tormented face. I saw her gently close her lips against any more words and I couldn’t ask her for more. She was so clearly at her maximum.

     Their exchange hung in the air like an exhale, the dust they’d stirred falling on us all in a light blanket of healing. A descending forgiveness, a connection between strangers, had been made in a hastily assembled moment of courage. Both women, for the moment were spent, proof of the enormity of their effort.

    A woman identifying herself as a friend of one of Bundy’s victims, phoned in with a heartfelt message about her sympathy for his mother, ending with, “and I feel for her.” Muted, seemingly in disbelief, Louise acknowledged, “We’re so grateful for all these thoughts that we’re getting.”

   The director’s voice came again in my earpiece telling me Louise couldn’t say any more, that she had to go.

      I was disappointed she would leave so soon, as if there were more to say, but hearing her despair, I couldn’t try to convince her to stay. I now see the wisdom in the brevity. There was almost nothing else that needed to be said. “I cannot thank you enough for sharing with us and reminding us that Ted has a family and a mom who did love him very much. We wish the best for you.” And we took a break.

   As we all sat in the studio, waiting for the commercials to end, Vivian spoke up.

“ May I say something here?” Shaking her head in disgust, she mentioned the boisterous crowd at the prison. “No matter how anybody feels about Bundy dying, I certainly didn’t find anything to celebrate today.”

Her words were hoisted in the air of the studio. A few people coughed. There was a light smattering of applause. A couple rose and made an early exit. There were few moments in that studio that carried such galvanizing power, and none of it was on the air but I’ve never forgotten it. It was a prelude to this woman’s depth and complexity that would be further displayed only a few minutes later.

  Vivian Rancourt’s ability to separate her obvious loathing of Ted Bundy from her sorrow for Bundy’s mother, Louise, was incredible to me.

   When we came back from the break, Vivian looked visibly relieved. I believe now that she was glad to have talked to Louise and equally glad it was over. She felt free to talk about Ted Bundy, notably his being put to death. In a stunning contrast to her previous comments, she immediately revealed her reaction to Ted Bundy’s death.

“It’s incredible that our relief should be at the expense of someone else’s life, but I really feel it was necessary in this instance,” adding that as the execution drew near, she and her family filled again with anger, tremendous anger, “but it’s over today.”

  I thanked Vivian for her kindness in joining us and wished her well. Later that evening, I called her to again express my gratitude that she would dab again so publicly at this wound. “You and Louise did a remarkable thing today,” I told her.

 “No, no. We were just human beings. We did what people should do.”

   When I finally signed off the show that day, the credits rolled and the audience filed out. Watching them go, some blotting tears and linking arms, I knew this was why I had become a journalist. This was what I had always believed was possible. My path and Vivian’s would not cross again after that day. But her strength and serenity stay with me. She displayed a graciousness that I not only will never forget but that I have drawn upon many times since. Her grace under such pressure reminds me to never take my son’s health and happiness for granted.

  Though I never saw or spoke with Louise again either, it is her courage I remember most, risking wrath and criticism by making so public, so humbling, a statement. On some levels she was so bereft, on others so present, I do not believe she would ever have let me in had I not wept on her doorstep, and that gave me the measure of the woman.

   I walked directly out of the studio, opened the back door of the station building and stepped out onto the sidewalk. I took a moment to breathe, to take in the skeletal trees standing in a crescent across the street and feel the cold winter air on my face. I let the experience soak through me. Two women with the grace and courage to reach not just inside themselves but way outside themselves, willing to lay bare a bottomless private pain in the most public way for us all to share it, to dilute it. They lifted the medium from its knees to its highest and best level. With so few means to express collective humanity, they had summoned their bravery and created one.

  I turned from the cold and—feeling grateful that I could—walked to my desk and called my son......

On the night of April 17, a Central Washington State student—18-year-old Susan Elaine Rancourt vanished from the campus.Abducted by Bundy her skull was later found on Taylor Mountain. Whilst Bundy confessed to her murder he was reluctant to give any details to LE 

Susan Rancourt’s mother and Ted’s mother Louise talked live via a phone call following the execution