The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers (22 page)

In Murray, Utah, on 8 November 1974, Carol DaRonch narrowly escaped with her life. Bundy approached her, claiming to be Officer Roseland of the Murray Police Department. He lured her into his car, hit her over the head and then attempted to place her in handcuffs. Fortunately, only one wrist was secured. She wrenched her door open with the other hand, rolled out of the car onto the highway and escaped with contusions to the head, still with one of her wrists in the handcuffs. Police were unable to obtain any fingerprints from the handcuffs, but they did find traces of blood on her coat – it might have been Bundy’s, but there was not a sufficient quantity for any testing.

A few hours later, perhaps frustrated by the failed abduction of DaRonch, Bundy abducted Debby Kent, aged 17, who was attending a school play. She had left the play early to pick up her brother, but her car never left the car park. She disappeared, never to be seen again. Residents nearby reported hearing screams from the car park and a handcuff key that fitted the cuffs left on DaRonch’s wrist was later found on the ground of the car park. Debby Kent was never found, dead or alive.

In 1975, while still attending law school at the University of Utah, Bundy shifted his crimes to Colorado. On 12 January, Caryn Campbell disappeared from the Wildwood Inn at Snowmass, Colorado, where she had been on holiday with her fiancé and his children. Her body was found on 17 February by
the side of the road a few miles from the motel. She had severe head injuries and deep cuts on her body.

Four weeks later on 15 March, ski instructor Julie Cunningham from Vail, Colorado disappeared. Bundy later confessed that he used crutches to approach Cunningham, after asking her to help him carry some ski boots to his car. At the car, Bundy hit her with his crowbar and incapacitated her with handcuffs, later strangling her. Her body was another one never found.

On 6 April, Denise Oliverson disappeared after leaving her home for her parents’ house in Grand Junction, Colorado. Her bike and sandals were found under a nearby viaduct. On 15 April, Melanie Cooley, 18, was last seen in Nederland, Colorado. She was found eight days later 20 miles away, dead from head injuries. Her hands had been bound and a pillowcase tied around her neck.

Still the murders continued. On 6 May, Lynette Culver, 13, went missing in Pocatello, Idaho, from the grounds of her junior high school. While on death row, Bundy later confessed that he had kidnapped Culver and had taken the girl to a room he had rented at a nearby hotel. He stated that after raping her, he had drowned her in the motel room bath and later dumped her body in a river.

Susan Curtis, 15, vanished on 28 June. She was abducted from the campus of Brigham Young University while attending a youth conference. She left her friends to walk back to a dormitory and was never seen again. Tragically, Curtis was from Bountiful, Utah, the same town from where another victim, Melissa Smith, had been abducted in November the previous year. The bodies of Cunningham, Culver, Curtis and Oliverson have never been recovered.

Bundy’s luck was about to run out. Sometimes murderers find themselves initially arrested for lesser offences, and this was the case with Ted Bundy. On 16 August 1975, Bundy failed to stop for a police officer in Salt Lake City. A search of his car revealed
a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs, rubbish bags and other items that were thought by the police to be burglary tools. Bundy remained cool during questioning, explaining that he needed the mask for skiing and had found the handcuffs in a skip. Detectives were suspicious, however, and obtained a search warrant for his apartment. The search uncovered a brochure from a hotel in Snowmass, Colorado. Bundy denied having been to Colorado, but the police decided to put him on an ID parade, believing that he was responsible for the Carol DaRonch kidnapping and assault. Carol DaRonch and two other witnesses all picked out Bundy.

Bundy’s girlfriend, Liz Kendall, was interviewed by Utah detectives. She told them about his nocturnal sleeping habits, rough sexual practices and odd possessions, such as crutches, plaster of Paris and a fake moustache. It was becoming obvious to officers involved that Bundy could have something to do with the murders and disappearances in Utah, Washington and Colorado. Bundy soon made bail and, incredibly, moved in with Kendall at her Seattle apartment until his Utah trial for kidnapping.

Following a week-long trial, Bundy was convicted of DaRonch’s kidnapping on 1 March 1976 and was sentenced to 15 years in Utah State Prison.

In the meantime, police knew that Bundy was the prime suspect for the murders of young girls in three states. There had been too many coincidences, but they needed hard evidence. They began speaking to Bundy’s ex-girlfriends to try to obtain more information about him, in an effort to obtain evidence connecting him to the murders of Caryn Campbell and Melissa Smith. Detectives discovered in Bundy’s Volkswagen car hairs that were examined by the FBI and found to match Campbell’s and Smith’s hair. Further examination of Caryn Campbell’s remains showed that her skull bore impressions made by a blunt instrument and that those impressions matched the crowbar discovered in Bundy’s car a year earlier. Colorado police decided
to file charges against Bundy on 22 October 1976 for the murder of Caryn Campbell.

In April 1977, he was transferred to Garfield County Jail in Colorado to await trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell. He sacked his lawyer and elected to represent himself. His trial was set for 14 November 1977. Bundy was granted permission to leave the confines of the jail on occasion and utilise the courthouse library in Aspen to conduct research. What police didn’t know was that he was planning an escape. On 7 June, during one of his trips to the library at the courthouse, Bundy jumped from an open window, injuring his ankle in the process, but still managing to escape. He was not wearing any leg irons or handcuffs, so he did not stand out among the ordinary citizens in the town of Aspen. It was an escape that Bundy had planned for a while. Aspen police were quick to set up roadblocks surrounding the town, yet Bundy knew to stay within the city limits for the time being and to lie low. Police launched a massive search, but he was able to evade capture. Bundy thought he had found a way to escape from the town – he discovered a car with the keys left in it. However, his luck did not last long. While trying to flee Aspen in the stolen vehicle, he was spotted and recaptured.

Almost seven months later, Bundy again attempted an escape, this time with more success. On 30 December 1977, he crawled up into the ceiling of the Garfield County Jail and made his way to another part of the building. He managed to find another opening in the ceiling that led down into the wardrobe of a warder’s apartment. He sat and waited until he knew the apartment was empty, then casually walked out of the front door to his freedom. His escape went undiscovered until the following afternoon, more than 15 hours later. By the time police learnt of his escape, Bundy was well on his way to Chicago. Chicago was one of the few stops that Bundy would make along the route to his final destination, sunny Florida. By early January 1978, Ted Bundy, using his newly acquired name of Chris Hagen, had
settled comfortably into a one-room apartment in Tallahassee, Florida. He stole on a regular basis to survive.

On the night of Saturday, 14 January, his urge to kill manifested itself again. At 3am, a student returning home found the front door open and heard screams coming from inside. She heard footsteps approaching the staircase near her so she hid in a doorway, out of view. She watched as a man with a blue knitted cap pulled over his eyes, holding a log with cloth around it, ran down the stairs and out the door. She immediately ran up the stairs to wake her room-mate and told her of the strange man she had seen leaving the building. Unsure of what to do, the girls made their way to the housemother’s room. Yet, before they were able to make it to her room, they saw another room-mate, Karen, staggering down the hall. Her entire head was soaked with blood. They tried to help Karen and woke up the housemother and the two of them went to check on another room-mate nearby. They found their other room-mate, Kathy, in her room, alive but in a horrific state. She was covered in blood that was seeping from open wounds on her head. They phoned the police at once, who on attending found two other girls dead in their rooms lying in their beds. Someone had attacked them while they slept. Lisa Levy was the first girl who officers found dead. Pathologists who later performed the autopsy on her found that she had been beaten on the head with a log, raped and strangled. Upon further examination, they discovered bite marks on her buttocks and on one of her nipples. In fact, Lisa’s nipple had been so severely bitten that it was almost severed from the rest of her breast. She had also had a can of hairspray inserted into her vagina. Post-mortem reports on Margaret Bowman, the other girl found dead, showed that she had suffered similar fatal injuries, although she had not been sexually assaulted and she showed no signs of bite marks. She had been strangled with a pair of tights found at the scene. She had also been beaten on the head, so severely that her skull was splintered and a portion of her brain was exposed.

Less than a mile from the scene of these horrific assaults, a young woman was awakened by loud banging noises coming from the apartment next to hers. She wondered what her friend in the adjoining apartment was doing to make so much noise at four in the morning. As the banging noises persisted, she became suspicious and woke her room-mate. As they listened, they heard Cheryl Thomas next door moaning. Frightened, they called to see if she was all right. When no one picked up the phone, they immediately called the police. They entered Cheryl’s apartment and walked to her bedroom, where they found her sitting on the bed. Her face was just beginning to swell from the bludgeoning to her head. She was still somewhat conscious and half-naked, but lucky to be alive. Her skull had been fractured in five places, her jaw broken and her shoulder dislocated. She suffered permanent hearing loss and equilibrium problems. A mask made of tights similar to one found by detectives in Utah five months earlier was found wrapped up in Thomas’s bed sheets, which were also stained with semen.

On 9 February 1978, Lake City police received a report of a missing 12-year-old girl, Kimberly Ann Leach, who had disappeared that day from her school. Police launched a massive search to find her. Her friend Priscilla saw Kimberly get into the car of a stranger the day she disappeared. Unfortunately, she was unable to accurately remember anything about the car or the driver. Police found Kimberly’s body eight weeks later in a state park in Suwannee County, Florida. The young girl’s body yielded little information due to advanced decomposition. However, police were to later find the evidence they needed in a van driven by Ted Bundy. Several days before Kimberly Leach disappeared, in another incident, a strange man in a white van approached a 14-year-old girl as she waited for her brother to pick her up. The man had claimed he was from the fire department and asked her if she attended the school nearby. She found it strange that an
on-duty
fireman was wearing check trousers and a navy jacket. She began to feel uncomfortable. She had been warned on many
occasions by her father – the Chief of Detectives for the Jacksonville Police Department – not to talk with strangers. She was relieved when her brother drove up. Suspicious of the man, her brother ordered her into the car, followed the man and wrote down his number plate to give it to his father.

The police had the number plate checked; it belonged to a man named Randall Ragen, and the police decided to pay him a visit. Ragen informed the officers that his plates had been stolen and that he had already been issued new ones. Police later found out that the van the children had seen was also stolen and that they had an idea who it might have been. They took the children to the police station to show them photographs, Bundy’s picture being among them. Both the children identified Bundy as being the man in the van.

By now, Bundy had made good his escape and abandoned the van. He set out towards Pensacola, Florida, in a new stolen car. This time he managed to find a vehicle he was more comfortable driving, a Volkswagen Beetle. A police officer was patrolling an area in West Pensacola when he saw an orange Volkswagen at 10pm on 15 February. He knew the area well, and most of the residents, yet he had never before seen that car. The officer decided to run a check on the number plates and soon found out that they were stolen. Immediately, he turned on his blue lights and began to follow the Volkswagen. Once again, as had happened in Utah several years earlier, Bundy started to flee, but then suddenly pulled over and stopped. The officer ordered him out of his car and told Bundy to lie down with his hands in front of him. As the officer began to handcuff Bundy, he rolled over and began to fight the officer, then managed to fight his way free and run. Just as soon as he did, the officer fired his weapon at him. Bundy dropped to the ground, pretending to have been shot. As the officer approached him lying on the ground, he was again attacked by Bundy. However, the officer was finally able to overpower Bundy and he was handcuffed and taken to the police station.

In the months following his arrest, police were able to obtain critical evidence to use against Bundy in the Kimberly Leach case. The white van that had been stolen by Bundy was found and they had three eye-witnesses who had seen him driving it the afternoon Kimberly had disappeared. Forensic tests conducted on the van yielded fibres of material that had come from Bundy’s clothes. Tests also revealed Kimberly Leach’s blood type on the van’s carpet and semen and Bundy’s blood type on her underwear. A further piece of evidence was Bundy’s shoe impressions in the soil located next to the place Kimberly’s body was found. Police felt confident with the information they had tying Bundy to the Leach murder and, on 31 July 1978, he was charged with the girl’s murder. Soon after, he was also charged with the murders of the two students while he had been on the run. Facing the death penalty, Bundy would later plead in his own defence that he was not guilty of the murders.