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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them.
Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK.
Every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening. She was an innocent Mormon girl. He was America's most notorious serial killer. When their pass crossed on a quiet autumn afternoon, he planned to kill her, But this victim had an incredible will to survive and would live to tell her story. Nearly three decades after he met death in a Florida electric chair, Ted Bundy brutally attacked Randa Stapley in a secluded Utah canyon in nineteen seventy four. She miraculously escaped and hit her dark secret
until now. This compelling real story of triumph over tragedy is both shocking and inspiring and told with the true courage of a victim turned survivor. There's a forward by the late Great and Rule. The book that we're featuring this evening is I Survived Ted Bundy. The attack, Escape and PTSD that changed my life with my special guest author, Rnda Stapley. Welcome to the program and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Randa Stapley.
Wow, thank you Dan for inviting me.
Thank you very much. This is an incredible tale and again just and another incredible perspective that it just amazes me, never ceases to me. Some of the books, and this book in particular, from probably the most infamous serial killer of all time, and this incredible interest never has waned. And this story should be again for everyone that thinks they know everything about Ted Bundy, here's another book that
tells you that that's not so true. So let's get to when we did in the introduction that you were innocent Mormon girl. So tell us where you grew up in Utah and tell us a little bit about your life. Again, we go back to a different time, so for those people that are younger or just again, we always have to put that in a historic perspective. So take us back to where you grew up and the Mormon upbringing that you did grew up and your parents and your
three other siblings. Tell us a little bit about your life before we talk about that Faithful Day in Utah in nineteen seventy four.
All Right. I was born in Richfield, Utah, and my father moved around. We moved around quite a lot. Here was in the potato industry, and I actually went to grade school in Burley, Idaho. And I went to junior high in Othello, Washington, and high school in Connell, Washington. I have relatives in Utah. That's where my grandparents and people were, so when it came time to go to college, I chose to come to the University of Utah. I have two older brothers and one very much younger sister.
She's twelve years younger than me. I was raised in a very conservative LDS Mormon household. We believe in what's called the Word of Wisdom, which is not taking of alcohol, coffee, tobacco, not eating things that are bad for the body, not abusing drugs, and not over indulging in anything. I would you believe in purity and chastity and saving yourself from marriage and all of those kind of things that the world considers virtuous and especially as that time period young women.
Now also at that time, when you talk about the the upbringing that you have, you said your sin was pepsicola. So this is about how lawless or outlandish you ever got was to sneak some pepsicola for yourself, wasn't it.
Yeah, I would, I would drink pepsi. Pepsi wasn't really against the religion, but it was kind of frowned upon because it has caffeine supposed to avoid anything that's the stimulant and stuff like that. So pepsi was my evil sin and my weakness.
Now with your you're saying in the book you talk about that your father died fairly early, and tell us about that and also what your mother did as a result. Especially back in those times, it must have been difficult and that affected the kind of idea that you had about yourself and what your future would be career wise. So tell us a little bit about the event where your father passed away and how that changed your family.
Okay, with us is when I was fourteen, I was a freshman in high school. We had just barely moved
to the town of Connell. My father had put up a brand new potato factory there, and he had flown to Seattle to talk to some patent attorneys, and they are plane crashed into mountainal Quality, and he and the pilot and his business partner were all It took them a week to find that to find the crash plane, and during that time, of course, family members came from all over to help in the search and so forth,
and it was a very very stressful time. Once they found the plane and we had the funerals, I just promised myself that I was gonna not cause my mom to worry. I was going to be the strong one, and I was gonna help take care of my little sister, who was two years old at that time. She of course hated going to the babysitter, and so I would avoid going on very many dates and things just because I either had to take her with or I had to leave her at the babysitter and she would cry.
So my mother had to get a full time job. She worked as a clerk at the hardware store because she didn't have a college education. Those were times when women normally didn't work outside of the home, and if they did, it was kind of mundane waitressing and secretarial and nurses in school teach your kind of jobs. And I decided at that point that I was not going to have that kind of a career I was going to I was not going to depend on marrying somebody to support me. I was going to have a career
that I could support myself if something serious happened. And there was a lady that started there weren't There weren't really many pharmacists who were women in that time. But but there was one lady pharmacist who started coming to our town just kind of as a relief pharmacist. Once a week she'd work in our in our little town, and once a week she'd work in another little town. And just by working three or four days a week, she made far more money than my mother was making
working six days a week. And I decided that maybe I would be a pharmacist. And so that's what I came to the University of Utah to do. Is they have one of the bitter pharmacy colleges in the nation. Plus it was close to my relatives.
Now we talk about the University of Utah, and I just want to add too that you you really had no experience with violence, As you say you said in that regard, you were very naive, and at that time you also point out that most people that you knew, were not aware of any of these attacks associated with what we would find out later as Ted Bundy were they we're not aware of any of this.
Yeah, that's right. At the time that this happened to me, was just that in the beginning of the school year in nineteen seventy four, Ted Bundy course had started killing people as far as really recorded in his history, in January in state of Washington and Oregon. And he killed on about a monthly basis, a little bit off here and there, a little bit of variation, but close to a month, about a month apart, and he had killed eleven women in the first nine months of that year.
And then he moved to Salt Lake City to also attend the University of Utah as a first year law student. People in Utah had not heard about killings in Washington and Oregon. Nobody had even heard of a serial killer. I don't think there was even a word called that. Of course, there's always been serial killers, but nobody called them that until Ted Bundy came around. I believe I think the phrase was coined for him.
Now, you talk about the day in question, but tell us a little bit just before that we're talking. The date is October eleventh, But tell us a little bit about that, about how school was and how casual or how strict it was at that time. I guess I'm alluded to it that was very casual. But tell us the atmosphere and the environment at this University of Utah health safe? Did you feel at this campus?
I felt very safe. And this was a time when everybody tried to help everybody, and nobody was.
That.
There was hardly any such thing as fear. People would walk around l alone at night. You'd go to the library and study till midnight and walk home, and you wouldn't be worried about anything happening to you, and people were looking out for other people. No one locked their doors. I lived in an apartment building, on the fourth floor of a thirteen story apartment building, and people would, you know, ride up the elevators and just party in every room.
And everybody was everybody's friend, whether you really knew them or not. Most of the most of the people that I associated with were lds and part of my my little Mormon ward. We would go to social functions and picnics and intertubing down the snow and stuff as a group of other Mormon people have hot chocolate and chili afterwards.
Life was good now at the same time I got asked this question, unfortunately, but because I remember, you know, I was born in nineteen fifty nine, so I remember how casual it was where I was in terms of hitchhiking, women or men or people picking up hitchhikers. Are people willing to take rides from people? So what was sort
of the rule at that time? Just to point out for audience, exactly sort of the again, the sort of care free atmosphere we were still in at that time, it seemed like, so what exactly was the rule about hitchhiking?
A lot of people hitchhiked. I never hit shiked because I heard it wasn't safe, and I believed that what I felt about my experience was that it was not hitch hiking. Nobody knew that hitchhiking was dangerous, but it wasn't so dangerous that people still didn't dare to do it. Probably the year before, I had picked up a ticket from the bulletin board in the student lobby that I
just had little tear tags on it. If you wanted to ride to Washington I needed to go home for Thanksgiving the year before this, and I just tore off a ticket and rode home in a van full of hippie kind of students heading back to Washington State. Everybody chipped in twenty bucks per gas and nobody knew anybody. But it was the time that you could do stuff like that.
Now, as you writing a book, you talk about October seventh, nineteen seventy four, with a young girl named Nancy Wilcox, which is sixteen years old and from Halliday, Utah. He was a Mormon girl as well. She disappeared and friends had reported that she may have been driving in a light colored VW. So then for that, tell us what was happening on October eleventh with you personally in your personal life that.
Day, mkay, with my personal life. I hadn't heard actually about Nancy Wilcox disappearing the week before because people had thought that she was a runaway and her story didn't even really make the news. On the eleventh, it was a Friday afternoon, uh fall kind of weather, uh sunny but kind of kind of nippy cold, and and I had a dentist appointment at a downtown Salt Lake city
dental place. I had gotten a brand new car recently, but I was kind of chicken to drive it in city traffic, and so I left it home and rode the bus cause that's what I'd been doing my whole college career, the three years that i'd been at the university. Already, I'd been uh a bus rider person. And so that day I took the bus downtown. And then after the dental appoint I had on brand new shoes, so I decided I would walk over to a park.
Now.
While I was at that dentist's office, something went wrong in my mouth and my whole face became swollen and red and sore, and it ended up that the dentists had to cut all along my gum line and rinse out inside of my cheek because I er, I don't know, I think he had made some kind of an error. He told me some story about it was because I had been a premature baby and my job wasn't completely formed, so when he injected something, it went into the wrong
part of my mouth right. But regardless, when I left,
I had stitches in my mouth. And that's kind of significant because there are a lot of ted Bundy victims and other victims who have had something distracting them, either they'd had a fight with their boyfriend, or the parents were sick, or they were sick, or they had tests coming up, or you know, some kind of stress that there weren't really as focused and probably as concentrated and as as as paying attention as they normally would have been, not as cautious right.
Now, d The one thing that was again is very significant, is that you said you had brand new shoes, but you had on hiking boots. And tell us about what was significant about those hiking boots and what you did with them.
Hiking boots. Just about every pair I've ever boughten have been the same way. The laces are long enough for about three pairs of hiking boots. So these boots had laces that just went on forever, and so I laced them up. These were high top over the ankle kind of boots, and I'd laced them up snug, and then wrapped the laces that were way too long around and around my ankle three or four times, and then tie them in a bowl and then double knotted them so
they were really on my feet well. And then I'd walked to the park to kind of break them in and just take a break from school and classes.
Now, when you went near the park to explain this, you know, it's always amazing to me that when I look at a photo of Ted Bundy, he looks like to me, great canear the All American US actor, you know. But that's just me. But tell us what you did see. Of course you didn't see the serial killer Ted Bundy. But why again, we said you had a strict rule,
you wouldn't have hitchhiked. So tell us about this circumstance and what is it that you saw that seemed to formulate in your mind a sense of security or no apprehension. We'll say.
Okay, Well, after I had wandered around the park for a while and done about everything there is to do, looked at birds in aviary and watch people picnicking, and walk with my boots through the yellow and gold leaves and stuff from falling off the trees in the autumn, then venumbness in my mouth from the dell surgery had started to come off, and I could tell I was going to be in pain and that I better find
a bus stop and get back up to campus. I lived on campus, and that's where I needed to be going. So I found a bus stop and I waited and waited. Buses usually come every ten to fifteen minutes, and I must have waited thirty five minutes or so, and no bus had come. Even if I had missed the first one, I was way too long for the next one to have come. My mouth was getting sore, and I was discouraged, and I was trying to think of where another bus stop would be that would have the same route that
would get me back up to campus. And then down the road came a tan Volkswagen and it just drove by really slow. This was in nineteen seventy four. There was not a lot of traffic, and it drove by really slow, and then it stopped and backed up. The cute driver leaned over and rolled down the passenger window and asked me where I was going, and I told him I was going up to the university, and he smiled and said me too. Hop in, and so I opened the door and got in. He did not seem scary.
I knew that hitchhiking was not a good idea, but this did not feel like hitchhiking. This felt like a friendly college student helping a fellow college student. He was not scary, and it didn't feel wrong or dangerous.
Now a conversation ensued. So in the beginning of the conversation, again, you didn't seem to be apprehensive. So tell us what you guys talked about. And then you talk about a different route, So tell us what happened.
H Yeah, So I tell him, you know, my name's Ronda and I'm a pharmacy student at the U. He tells me my name's Ted and I'm a first year law student. We've talked about cars. I told him that I had a new car and I was scared to drive it. And he hadn't only gone just a couple of blocks when he turned east, and you could get to the University of that direction, but it wasn't the
normal direction. It had a really steep hill to go up, and Volkswagens have a stick shift with a clutch, and I never would have dared drive up that hill with a with a stick shift. And I kind of joked with him about that, said, why are we going this way? This is kind of a scary way to go because we could like roll down the hill backwards and he says, no, he's used to that car and they'll be just fine.
But he very very politely said, I hope you don't mind, but I have a really short errand to run up by the zoo. And I didn't mind. The zoo is just kind of one canyon over from the from the university and almost on the way, and I would still be home faster than if I had waited for the bus.
So then we drove up towards the zoo, started going up the canyon where the zoo is located, and we went right on past the zoo and I said, hey, I thought you were taking me to the zoo, kind of joking with him, and we were just just chatting. It just seemed like two college kids chatting. And he said, no, I didn't say it's taking it to the zoo. I said I had an errand to run near the zoo.
So we kept going through. There's you go through a little town and over hill, and then you're in Parties Canyon, which is the main highway coming back into the city, and at that point the sun is setting. We're going west into the sunset, and you see this beautiful city and it's beautiful, and we're just kind of chatting as stills, no warnings going off, and no bells and whistles. It's obvious that there was no errand to run, but I thought he's just flirting with me and has just taking
me for a car ride. Then when we got to the bottom of that canyon, he should have turned right to take me to campus, and instead we turned left and started going up another canyon. And that was when the the trip started to feel awkward and not quite as safe, and.
The conversation changed. Yes, said his mood changed too.
Yeah, he'd been talking to me the whole way, just just you know, about about books and about professors, and about buildings on campus and road construction and just you know, whatever people who don't know each other very well kind of talk about. And then all of a sudden, when we started up that canyon, he stopped talking to me and just had both hands firmly planted arms steering wheel,
and it's just driving. And then every time he goes around a corner he kind of slows down, and he's looking at side roads and turn offs and picnic areas, and I'm feeling awkward, not really frightened, but just kind of uncomfortable. So I'm thinking in my mind that he's looking for a place to pull over and park and
make out. And I'm not a makeout kind of girl, and I don't really know him, and my mouth is sore from the dentist, and I just kind of want him to take me home, but I don't want him to think that I'm a prude, and I don't want to embarrass either of us. I want this to just I want to get out of this situation gracefully, and trying to think of a way.
To do that. And you say he's trying to find a a suitable place to park. When he finally does that, he then he turns, and you think he's gonna kiss you. And what does he say?
Yeah, he parked the car and he kind of turned in his seat so he's almost facing me, and he leaned in really close, and course I thought that he was gonna kiss me, and I'm my mind is going, how can I get out of this? And then he very quietly said, do you know what, I'm going to kill you? And he put his hands on my throat and started squeezing, and then a million things went through my mind. You know could he be kidding? Is this a joke? Is he got a bad sense of humor?
Is this real? And why would he want to kill anybody? And why would he want to kill me? And panic sets in about that time when you realize that he's squeezing way more tightly than it could be a joke.
Yeah, And how do you fight with every bit of How long does it take you to finally realize he's killing me? And what do you do as a result?
Well, I realized that pretty right away. This just was a couple of seconds before I realized that he wasn't joking around. And there was a big kind of a battle in the car.
But.
I lost he I went unconscious, lost consciousness in the car, and then he moved me out of the car to like a picnic table and the assault continued there.
Now you initially talk about waking up after this brutal sexual assault, and we will talk about later why you We won't talk about exactly what he said at that time, but he thinks you're dead, at least that's what it seems. You wake up face down in the dirt, and what can you see from that vantage point? And then what does do you instinctively.
Do okay, this was pitch dark by now, there's no light anywhere. I don't remember a moon or stars or anything, but there was. The car was parked about thirty feet away, and the car passenger door was opened, so the dome light is glowing, and in that light I can see that he is over there by the car, fiddling around something in the back seat or doing something in the car, facing away from me, and I just jumped and ran
the other direction into pure blackness. I didn't know if I was going to into the woods or whatever, but it turned out I was going into the river. There was a fast moving mountain river right there, which I stumbled into, and the river swept me away from him, and is essentially what saved my life.
Now. What's important, too, is we talked about those boots and the three wrap around laces that you used, and when you got up to run, of course, you didn't pay attention to anything. You thought I have an opportunity to run. You recognize that you had just woken up from You remember being choked out, so at least you remember that and the sexual assault as well. So what is it that happens that you get up what happens. You say, you fall into the river, but tell us.
Yeah, I hadn't. I hadn't noticed, but my pants were in a wad around my ankles, and so when I ran, of course I tripped. But fortunately I was right next to the river when I tripped and fell into the river. Maybe it hadn't been for those shoes, the story might have been kind of all different because when I was able to climb out of the river, I still had my boots on, and because of that, I still have my pants on. I could still kind of rearrange my
clothes and walk home. Whe if I'd have had different kind of shoes, I wouldn't have been able to walk the twelve to fifteen miles home that the trip was, and somebody would have known what had happened to me.
Well, let's go backwards a little bit, because you're just downplaying how amazing this story is. Is that you go to run away, you don't know if you're running into a forest or off a cliff, and you end up your pants are around your ankles. Your boots he couldn't get them off because of the laces. So you're in the water. Now you're floating violently down this stream. It's not like it's a pleasure cruise down this stream. And tell us what saves you from just being battered by
going downstream at this pretty good pace. So it's a little more it's a little more dramatic than you're saying. So tell us a little bit about it.
Yeah, this river is a fast moving mountain stream. So there are rocks and boulders and not really waterfalls, but water tumbling over the top of boulders and swirling around boulders. And I'm being smashed into rocks and under tree limbs that are going across the river. And eventually what stops me is I come to seemed like it was a like a metal grate that's set up there to stop
debris from going further downstream. And I ran into this kind of little kind of like a little dam and got stuck in the in all this debris and was able to climb out because of that.
Now, people might ask, and people might think that somebody people might want to try to flag down a motorist, but you still fear this assailant, and so as a result, what do you do? And again, you have these great hiking boots on so it's not. Luckily you're not naked and barefoot, and we'll see why that's especially apparent. Other than the obvious. You can escape much better with these
boots on. But tell us what your strategy is. Once you get out, you're pretty clear thinking that maybe this guy is still on the look for you, and that he hasn't just forgotten about you and written you off. He maybe still be looking for you. So how do you proceed from there?
Yeah, there's only one road out of the canyon, and if I was going to flag down a car, it might be his car. And I was afraid to go anywhere near the road, So I stayed in the river or right alongside of the river, and just kind of walked in the weeds and the rocks, and in the alongside of the He's splashing along in the water, pitch dark and see. So I stumbled a lot, and I'd come to trees that had fallen over the river that
had to climb under or climb over. And the place where the attack happened was about four miles up the canyon, and so there was about four miles by the time I got out of there. I was pretty much tired of hiking by then, and decided that, you know, maybe I would find a ride home. I didn't really have a plan, but I thought. The first thing that I thought when I climbed out was nobody can know this happened.
But at this point, I'm out of the canyon and I'm thinking, I'll just find somebody who'll give me a ride home. And I saw some There was a ski rental shop at the end of the canyon, and the shop was closed, but there was a couple of cars parked. There was a bunch of men who were drinking beer and laughing, and I decided that was not going to be my ride. I would just have to walk, and so I sucked it up and walked back to campus.
I took side streets and tried to stay off the main roads and panicked every time a car would turn towards me, because I thought it's going to be that guy.
So your priorities just and you capture this very vividly in the book, is that your priorities are that number one, you want to get back to your campus. Two you want to clean up. Three nobody you know, or this is maybe the number one nobody is to know because you're embarrassed, you're you're you're somewhat to blame, you believe
in terms of this happening, and you just don't. So tell us what this complex sort of emotional situation is for you, instead of what people might think as they watch TV that people would just normally pick up the phone and nine to one one, and so tell us where you are emotionally here, that that doesn't happen, and what does happen.
When I was a young woman, probably like junior high in high school, in our in our church, the teachings were about being chased and virtuous and that that was the most important thing that a woman could have, and that if if you were being attacked, and that it's better to give up your life than it is to give up your virtue. And I had and I had lived, so I kind of had guilt that I had lived, and I felt like embarrassed that I had let this
happen to me and ashamed. I felt stupid or haven't gotten myself into such a stupid, dangerous situation in the first place. I thought that people that knew me would treat me differently and it would be awkward and weird. I thought that if my mother found out, she'd make me drop out of school and come home. I thought that people would point at me and say, that's her,
that's that girl that was raped. And I just decided that I was just going to suck it up and pretend it never happened and go on with my life.
Now, you had some visible injuries and other injuries. How how did you get around those injuries? How do you excuse yourself from certain things where people might know or might ask questions? How did you do that?
Well? Fortunately, when I got home early the next morning, my roommates were gone, so I had the place to myself, and I bathed and cleaned up and found all my long sleeve shirts with the high neck collars, and I wore a baseball hat and pulled the brim down over my kind of shading my forehead so people couldn't see my eyes so much. They were kind of blotchy, like
happens when you're strangled. And then when people would ask me what happened, I would use the dental excuse, because the dentist had told me that your face will probably be swollen a little bit, and you might even get a black eye just from the dental surgery that he'd done so, and I have these stitches. So I would tell people if they really asked, I'd say, you know, I've been to the dentist, and I'd lift up my lip and showed them the row of stitches, and they
would say, whoa A dentist did this to you? You should get a liar. But nobody had reason to not believe me because I was an honest person.
And now to add to your apprehension, though, is that you realize that you left your backpack and your ID with Ted Bundy. Is that correct?
That's correct. It was probably still in the car as far as I know. It had my student ID and had my driver's license, but I had recently remember not really recently, but my driver's license and my ID went to an old address that I had lived at previously, so I didn't really have my address. But I was kind of worried that he still could find me, because
it was that it was a big university. First girl, it was a small university as far as universities go, and if he had wanted to find me he probably could have.
Now as a direct result of this, before any of the other talk of PTSD. The immediate result of this is that you are not really eating, and you're not really sleeping, and you're stopping again. Before you were gregarious and outgoing and socially active, you're not going out so much, not socially active as much. Is that the way?
Yeah, I kind of gave up all social functions, and I wasn't eating right, and I wasn't sleeping hardly at all. And in the nighttime I would wake up just shaking and in a panic, and all I wanted to do is run, And so I would go outside at night and run. And you know, as the time went on, they were more and more young women disappearing, and more and more he's being found in canyons. And my roommates were not happy that I was running around in the middle of the night, and one of them would insist
that she comes with me. She would first tell me, you can't go out there because it's not even safe, and I tell her I have to go, and so she would say, well, wait a minute, and I'll come with you. She would run with me in the rain and the snow, and.
You talk about other attacks. It happened shortly after yours October eighteenth. Melissa Smith was seventeen Midvale from Midvale, Utah, near Salt Lake, and Melissa's father was Midvale's police chief. Now you say you don't know the rules that Ted used to lure Melissa, but she disappeared, and you were watching the news coverage and interviews with Melissa's father pleading with the public define his daughter, and nine days later
someone stumbled on his remain. So tell us about what it felt like what you were watching, and what was it. What was your reaction to what you were watching? What did that do to you? What was your reaction to that?
In the very beginning when he first then the father first went on TV and was saying, please, public, you know, help look for my daughter because she's missing. We have no idea where she went. She's not the kind of girl who would run away. I was worried, but I wasn't really connecting them because she was younger than me, and she was from out in the valley and about
the university, and so I didn't really connect it. Plus I didn't want there to be a connection, so I was kind of denying that, you know, just thinking the world is getting to be wicked and there's you know, something else has happened somewhere. And then they found her body, and that made me feel really sad, especially since she was in a canyon and I had been in a canyon, and I was starting them to kind of connect it a little bit, but still refusing to believe that one
person could do all that damage. And then a week after that, there was a Laura aim from another nearby town that disappeared, and people thought she was a runaway too, so it took a little while for her story to get on the news. And then when they started talking
about her, they started connecting all three of them. The newspeople were saying, there was Nancy Wilcox disappeared, and Melissa Smith disappeared, and Laura am Now has disappeared, and one of them has been found dead, and you know, something is going on. And I'm starting to think, well, something is going on, and I was thinking about going to the police and working my way up to that when the next week, Ted Bundy attacked two more women. One was Carol Durranch, who he tried to kidnap from a
nearby mall, and she managed. He pretended to be a police officer and told her that he'd seen someone break get into her car and would she come with him to the police station. And so she got in his Volkswagen and he tried to put handcuffs on her. She managed to escape and gave the police a description of him and his Volkswagon. And right after she escaped, he had gone a couple miles I think it was like twelve miles to another little city called Bountiful and taken
Deborah Kent from a high school parking lot. And she has never been found. But they found a key in the parking lot where Debora was taken that fit the handcuffs. It was the off brand, strange brand of handcuffs that had been used on Carol de Ranch, and the handcuff key found by where Debora was taken fit those handcuffs. And that's how I knew that exactly. My bad guy was a very bad guy.
Now, you said you were sick with guilt at that time and thought you were racked with guilt. Why were you racked with guilt? And why didn't you come forward.
Guilt? Because I thought that if I had come forward, he would have been caught sooner, or people would have at least been warned to stay away from nice looking guys in volkswagens. And I was thinking that probably not so much Nancy Wilcox, because she happened before me, but everybody after me was maybe my fault that they had died,
and so I had that guilt. I thought about going to the police, but then they already had they had a description of him in his car from Carol, and I didn't think that I had any other information to offer. And there's still all of those reasons I had that were still important to me, about not letting my mother find out and people would treat me weird, and I would have to tell police details that I was unable to do at that time, and it's still just was too hard to come forward.
Now this Like I say, these hikers found Laura Ames's body on Thanksgiving, beaten beyond recognition. You were having a very hard time sleeping at that time. You talked about Carol Laurent and her making an app description of Ted Bundy. Tell us about the doctor examination you know you didn't
have right after the incident at all. Tell us what this doctor does and that experience for you when you finally get examined and he talks about your last pelvic exam and this is incredible, So tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, I wasn't eating ride, and my roommates could tell that I was not feeling good and I was unhappy, and I was having stress and running in the middle of the night and things. And one of my roommates convinced me that I should see a doctor. And I was having some urinary kind of track related issues. And I'm wondering, if you know, I'm very naive. I don't know. Maybe I could be pregnant, or maybe I have some terrible sexual disease, or maybe I've been injured some way,
but maybe I ought to see a doctor. And so I found a doctor just in the yellow pages, and I went to him. And this was in the days when you didn't have medical assistance and things. That little doctor's clinic was just ran by the doctor and his
office lady. So the doctor did all the tests himself, and he asked me if when when my last pelvic exam had been and I told him that I have never had a pelvic exam, and he says, well, if you're if you're sexually active, I would recommend that you have one, especially because you're having symptoms in that area. And I wasn't really sure if being raped equal to being sexually active, but I told him, yeah, we probably, we probably should do it. So he did the examine.
He told me that I had some vaginal tearing that's usually caused by too rough up intercourse. And he told me that maybe in the future you might want to be a little less exuberant.
And still you didn't reveal to this doctor this horrible truth, did you. You just took it as a insensitivity.
Yeah, I thought he's insensitive and I'm out of here. Show me the way to the door now.
With this as well, you do seek medical aid in terms of you discover this sleeping aid name placidel. So tell us about your dalliance with Placidyl.
As a pharmacy student, you have to do an internship. And the summer before this had happened, I had just begun my internship at a little independent Rexall store. The boss there very nice to his customers. People come in with broken watches and things, he just would replace them. And you have this one customer that brought back a bottle of sleeping pills, and he was scrouchy at saying, you know, I pay a whole bunch of money for these pills and they don't even work, and I don't
want them. I want my money back. And so the boss refunded his money and made the customer happy. And then what pharmacists do with returned pills is controlled subtences. They have to be destroyed. But instead of destroying them, he knew that I was having trouble sleeping, and he offered them to me as a gift, and I was afraid to take him, so I just put him in my sock drawer. Okay, thanks, I'll try him someday. But I was really not ever planning on trying, am I.
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Ended up in my sock drawer, and they stayed in my sock drawer all the rest of that summer while I was interning, and for the first part of the school year after I was back in Salt Lake, and they stayed there even after my attack until Carol which and Debora Kent had their experience, And that's when I knew that my bad guy was a really bad guy, and when the guilt really hit that I was probably responsible for all of those other attacks, and that's just
feeling so awful. And I haven't slept for a month anyway, and I'm studying pills, and I know that just one pill isn't going to kill me. And I'm going to try this sleeping pill and just see if I can get some rest and so and study it at the same time. So I waited again until my roommates were all out of town, and I sat in the bean bag chair and I moved the clock so I could see it, and I wrote down the time that I
took the pills. I'm going to do this scientifically and study this this little pill and see if it helped me go to sleep. And I swallowed it, and I'm sitting there watching the clock, and I totally really just expect to gradually start getting sleepy. Instead, what happened was just amazing. The third first thing that happened is at the very same time, my hair started tingling, my head started feeling kind of bubbly and light and silly, and all of that care and worry and stress just evaporated.
I felt better than I felt for the whole month since my attack. I felt wonderful, euphoric. I was an instant addict to Placidil.
Now Placidyl. Despite this, I said, I guess facetiously called it the dalliance. But it was working to do something that nothing else could do for you, at least temporarily when you took that pill. Right.
Yeah.
Now, at the same time, placidal doesn't get in the way of your pharmacist career. Your career is flourishing, especially in the beginning, and despite the attack from mister Bundy. Tell us about that and how successful you get, and it seems like you've in some regards, been carried on and you're carrying on with your life.
Yeah, I think that I'm managing the placidal use. Well, I don't have to take it all the time, and I just take it, you know, when my roommates are out of town, and mostly managing to get to class and passing my tests. I managed to graduate, and I managed to get a job in my field. So now I'm a licensed pharmacist. I'm making good money, and placidal is becoming less and less troublesome, and I'm becoming a
professional pharmacist. And I've moved to a new community and have a new job and a new apartment and a new roommate, and life is going good. I'm starting to make friends and becoming a little more outgoing again.
Now you talk about in the book about January twelfth, nineteen seventy five, Bundy moves to another jurisdiction, which again is important to this story, Colorado Ski Lodge Carolyn Campbell, twenty three years old. This is a bizarre story. She is with her husband and families, and she excuses herself to go up to the room just to get a magazine and she disappears.
Yeah, she did.
He remains are found gohead.
Sorry, yeah, that's I'm just repeating you.
And her remains are found in February eighteenth, nineteen seventy five, and is a few miles away from the hotel. Again, she was beat on the head as well, and he continues March third, Taylor, Washington for women's remains Brenda Ball, Linda and Healey, Susan Rancourt, and Roberta Parks. And this is ten miles from where Janis ought and Denise Naslin were found in September seventy four. Again, what's the connection at that time and how much do you know at
that time? We'll say what's more important? What do you know? What are you aware of that time in terms of the extensiveness of Ted and what he is doing? Are you able to follow? Are you tell us what you know and what you think you know at that time?
I know about the Utah women, and I know about Karen Campbell in Colorado, and now they've found a bunch of bodies in Washington, and it's just kind of that hasn't been proven. He hasn't even have been charged with those crimes, but it's kind of rumored that they suspect that the same person that's taken all old Utah women might be responsible for the ones in Washington and Oregon. And now all of these bodies are found and the world is starting to connect the dot and I was connecting dots.
Too, And you're Placidel. That has been working for a long time. Now, what are you experiencing with Placidel?
And I it's I I need a bigger and bigger dose.
Are you doing it more often?
I'm doing it more often, and I'm being less cautious sometimes I'm Sometimes my roommates are home, I find that one time, somebody, somebody from our church gave me a phone call, and I just barely taken the pill, and I thought I had ten or fifteen minutes before it took effect and nobody would notice that I was kind of spaced out. And so I talked to this guy for just a little while. I thought I was just talk to him really fast and get him off the line and then lock myself in my room and enjoy
my placidal. Instead, the pill kicked in, and I talked with slurred speech and prey. Soon he hung up and called the Bishop of our Ward, who called me to see if I was suicidal. My roommates by then had been telling him that I was acting weird and taking medication and running around Minilanide and being depressed, and he suspected that I might be suicidal, so he had phoned to kind of check on me. So my secret was
not staying a secret. It was getting a little bit out of my control, and it was no longer a hidden, super secret part of my life.
Right. And as well that people intervening at that time, they did recommend some things like changing your workload at school and so that you could cut down the drug use. And so you did say at that time that you were accepting and you were receiving a lot of help from people, and it did do help.
Yeah, it did help. And it kept me thinking that people are still nice in the world. The whole world is not murderers and rapists, that there are really nice people on the planet.
But speaking of the murderers, Lynette don Culver twelve years old, May sixth, nineteen seventy five, Pocatello, Idaho, went missing, Susan Curtis, fifteen, and she was from Bountiful. That's the same neighborhood as Deborah Kent. Four days later, Shelley Robertson twenty four and then July first, nineteen seventy five, Golden Well, that was July first, part of me nineteen seventy five, Golden Colorado.
Three days later Nancy Baird twenty three years of age, and that was the fourth of July, and Layton, Utah. So this guilt that we talked about initially, is this guilt gone away or is it more intensified? What is your sleep patterns?
It's off the wall and I am not sleeping except you know, with the with the help of Placidel and all those people who were murdered, even the ones by Bundy, weren't They weren't all connected to him right away. He was like a suspect, but not the only suspect. And he wasn't all with me. He wasn't even the only murderer. They would find bodies that were, you know, in canyons,
murdered by somebody else. But every time that the body was found someplace, I would assume that it's my fault, it's my killer.
And yeah, now, as your chronicle in the book, on August sixteenth, nineteen seventy five, Sergeant Bob Hayward made history in Granger, Utah. And he was just finishing his shift and again the ten Volkswagen. And so tell us a little bit about how he does this again makes history, and how he just notices this ten VW which wasn't so out of the ordinary in those days. But why was it? Why would why did he notice it?
Well, because I guess he just finished his shift and he was sitting in his in the car and in his parking lot, in his driveway, riding up his daily log or whatever police guy's ride up, and he saw this Volkswagen drive by, and it just wasn't in his wasn't he hadn't seen it in his neighborhood before. It's kind of a little side, quiet street, and so you kind of know who your neighbors are, and he hadn't recognized it, so he wasn't really concerned. He just kind
of volkswagen. And then he got a call from to help another officer do need assistance, and he was going to be back up, and so he leaves his driveway and he goes down another little side street and there's that same Volkswagen that has pulled over and parked in
front of one of his neighbor's houses. And he knows that the neighbors are on vacation and that they have two teenage daughters and those two teenage daughters are home alone, and this Volkswagen has parked in front of that house, and so that kind of makes him wonder what's going on. And when he pulled up, the Volkswagen sped off and resulted in a little chase, and when he finally caught him, Ted Bundy lied to him, told him he was he
just ran because he'd been smoking marijuana. And he was found with some burglary tools and arrested for possession of burglary paraphernalia.
Well, you do talk about a couple of things that were very interesting, he says. He asked him, what are you doing this are he says, well, I was just at the drive in at the Towering Inferno movie, which everybody knows about, and then Sergeant Hayward knew that the movie wasn't playing there, so he happened to know that. That's how well he knew that neighborhood. But he also at the front seat was unbolted, and he thought that
was suspicious. So when Bundy agreed to search the car, then he saw that, as you say, with which would he thought was consistent with a burglary kit. But as we know, as you point out, it's a satchel with a ski mask, a crowbar, some rope, and some wire. So he's placed under arrest. So what happens He's placed under arrest. But what happens? Does he get bail? How do they proceed?
Yeah, he gets gets down on bail and he's just kind of under surveillance because they kind of suspect him of I guess. The next day after he's released, the
officer that's was handling the Carrol Durant, kidnapping. Was looking through the through the records of what happened the night before, and he kind of noticed that there were handcuffs in that bag that Bundy had had in the back of his car, and because Carol assault had included handcuffs, he started connecting the two that maybe this is the guy
that you know. He's Volkswagen. He's a young, dark haired, nice looking guy, and so he was suspicious that Bundy could be the one that had assaulted Carol the Ranch and possibly be responsible for Deborah Kent. That's kind of the the piece that started the puzzle getting to the finishing point.
Now, what does it get to the point you do talk about and again you wouldn't have been privy to this about the lineup? Would you write about this in the book that Carol the Ranch and another the other witness, Gene Graham from the drama teacher from Debora Kent's school, they look at a line R photo lineup and then they look at the lineup and so what do they conclude from those lineups?
They conclude that Ted Bundy is the one that was seen both at the school where never was taken and also the one that had assaulted Carol Daranch. So then he's arrested for kidnapping and he goes to trial and he's found guilty and put in jail in Utah, where he tries to escape once. Public doesn't really know about that, but he was put on a special watch out for him because he's trying to make escape plans from Utah.
And then they transferred him to Colorado to stand trial for the Carol Duranch murder, Eric the Karen Campbell murder.
Is it October third that you see his photo? You see your perpetrator's photo, and again, tell us when that is and what is your reaction when you see video of him.
I'm not sure what day that is, but it was when he was arrested for before he's charged, but when he was before he actually went to jail, but he was charged with kidnapping Carol. And they showed him being
marched into the police station. So there were some detectives on either side of him, and he's just, you know, dressed like a college student, and they're addressed in casual street clothes and and they're just kind of walking down the hall together as a little group in the police station, and it's saying TV is talking about that a fellow has been arrested for in connection with the kidnapping of
Carol deranch and I recognized him right away. That's when I saw him and I thought, yes, they've they've got the right guy. Most people watching it probably couldn't have decided which of those guys walking down the hall was the was the prisoner, because they were just kind of walking in the group they had that that was Ted Bundy. That's when I heard his last name and knew who he actually was.
And what was your reaction when you had Did you feel more secure that he was captured? What was what was your reaction in terms of what did you feel?
Yeah, I was. I was believed that he was captured because then he couldn't be hurting anybody else. And I had a pretty good clue that he was just going to one of those He's just going to keep on killing people, because that's kind of kind of how his history has been going. With all of the talk about the Washington, Oregon people and all of the Utah people that I knew about, and all of the Colorado people that were just kind of starting to be discovered. I was always got away.
In nineteen seventy six, you graduated college. He said it was a major milestone you in But in June nineteen ninety seven, Bundy is, yes, so is that what does that do for you?
When he escapes, that totally dipped my buggy over. I had graduated, and I was on my way to starting my life, getting it back together, and I was starting to become active and starting to have friends, and life was going good. And then he escaped, and I had all kinds of I could see him finding me. You know, if he's smart enough to escape, he's smart enough to track me down. And I thought he would find me and kill me. And I knew he was going to kill more people. And I still felt guilty that I
hadn't gotten Hi arrested years before. All of that guilt and all of those dead girls started their pictures coming into my face, and I found the placidale again. Then I overdosed on the placidal took far too many, and then I felt even more self loathing after I had done that, because you know, we're taught that you're not supposed to commit suicide and things. You're supposed to stay here and take whatever kind of trials life has for you. And so then I phoned a suicidal hotline and talked
to a young psychologist named doctor David. And doctor David I passed out during that phone call, and he had to call trace and sent paramedics and police to my rescue. Then I came to before anybody got there and figured it out and decided i'd ever get out of bear and kind of collided with them as I was leaving my apartment. And then just as they were leaving and decided that I wasn't really in physical danger any longer.
Doctor David showed up and wanted to talk to me, and I was just so angry at him because I thought that now the police know about my drug use, it's going to ruin my pharmacy career, and my whole life is down the tubes now. And I aimed all of that anger at doctor David, told him it was his fault and to get out of my life.
It's a very fortunate meeting, and we'll talk. We'll talk about the importance of doctor David a little bit more. At the same time, you were worried about your boss and whether you be fired. Were you fired from your your career as a result of this.
No, I wasn't that. The police came and talked to my boss, and my boss came back and I said, so, am I do I still have a job? And he says, yeah, there's no problem. People around me were just going out of their way to do nice things for me. Or I was being blessed in ways that were kind of unusual because I didn't get fired and didn't lose my job, didn't lose my pharmacy license, kind of got another chance.
Now you take us to December thirtieth, nineteen seventy seven, and two weeks after bun Yes, he escaped again. I can't believe the anxiety you'd have there. And he makes it to Florida, and as you say, he had to kill. January fourteenth, nineteen seventy eight, the chey Omega sorority house attacked four women in their beds, fractured skulls, jaws and broken teeth, strangled one girl with a nylon stocking, and bit Two of the victims, Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy,
were killed. Kathy Cliver and Karen Chandler were totally were badly injured and with minutes within minutes Bundy broke into Cheryl Thomas's home and bludgeoned her, fracturing her skull and leaving her death in one ear and destroying her career as a ballerina. And then on February ninth, he abducted twelve year old Kimberly Leech from her high school in
Lake City. Finally he was arrested February fifteenth. They stopped him in a stolen Orange VW tell us about this last bit of frenzied murderous killing of Bundy, and how much you knew and how much was reported and how did you feel about what you did here? Of course he's on the run and you know who he is and knew what he's capable of, So how did you feel?
Yeah, Well, no, I knew who he was until after Kimberly Leach had been killed. So the time period between the Kylemega people and Kimberly Leach that was clear in Florida, far far away. We hadn't really heard too much about it, other than there had been an attack of the school and some students had been had been murdered in their
in their rooms. But we didn't really I didn't really connect it to ted Bundy until Kimberly Leach had died and they had been arrested, and then the whole thing kind of came out that it was all of those people, and again they brought back all of that, all of that old guilt and all of that old pain and all that old anxiety, just kind of every time he would get on the news, even farther down the road, when when all of his trials would come up, I needed to watch his trials and make sure he was
really there and hadn't escaped again.
And now in the midst of all this, you know badness, You're you're continuing in your career, but something really good happens in your life, and you meet your future husband, Barry, and and you did have to tell him that you had been raped. And so tell us a little bit about meeting Barry and how you opened up to him and what was his reaction.
Yeah, I met I met Barry, and I was kind of sick how that per respiratory infection, and he wanted to come over and bring me soup. I'd talked to him on the Sebee radio, the Sebee radio kind of crazed days, and my handle was trash pile Annie and his was spark Plug and we started talking on the radio, and then he wanted to meet me in person, and so he gave me his phone number and I called him and I told him where I had lived, and he came over and met me and brought me soup.
How can you not fall in love with somebody who comes and brings you soup? And then we talked and we were talking about, ma'am, we should just get married because we're so much alike and when we liked the same things, and why can't we get married? What would be stopping us? And I said, well, I don't know, but you should. You should probably know that I've been raped just as part of the he was sharing things of his past and I was sharing things of mine.
He said it doesn't matter, and he'd never asked any questions, and I didn't offer any any other further information, and we just kind of never ever talked about it for years until the PTSD started coming.
You were married in nineteen seventy nine, and two months after the wedding and Ted Bundy was on trial for Margaret the murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy and you watched that trial, and tell us about a little bit about that experience of watching that trial and what was Ted's behavior like, what was his demeanor like at that trial and your reaction to that.
Ted was acting as his own attorney. So he wasn't looking like a prisoner. We wasn't didn't have handcuffs or prison outfit on. He had nice suit, just like a lie. He was acting as his own lawyer, and he would talk to the judge and talk to the witnesses, and smile at the jury members and flirt with the ladies in the audience.
Now you talked about as well that he was. You were watching this and with great attention, and nobody you know, again, nobody knows your secret, No one at all. You've never shared this secret with anyone at that time. And so at February seventh, nineteen eighty, oh pardon me, in well in in the end of nineteen seventy nine, he's finally given his sentence, which is the death sentence in the Kyomega case in February seven, nineteen eighty and the kimberly leitch.
He receives his third third death sentence and after numerous delays, July twenty second, there's a stay of execution. So you say you have feelings on the death penalty, and the reason one of the reasons you have that position on the death penalty at least is that was one moment in the interviews that you watched it stood out where they had asked Ted Bundy a question on why did
he kill? Tell us about your feelings about the death penalty and that interview and what you deduced from that, what your take on that was okay?
In most cases, I don't believe in the death penalty. I think that things can happen, you know, there could be rage or jealousy, or drugs or alcohol, or violence or self defense. It doesn't look like self defense or or something can happen and somebody who ends up dead
and somebody goes to jail for murder. But I think that you know, I'm not the same person I was twenty years ago, and probably most of those people are not the same person that they were twenty years ago, and probably the death penalty is wrong, I think in most cases. But for Ted Bundy, he needed to die. There was an interview towards the end, not the very last interviews, where he talked about pornography being the reason for his his killing, but the interviewer was asking him, so, Ted,
why did you kill? And Ted kind of raised one eyebrow and cocked his head a little, made a little half smile and said, cause I liked it. Just killed cause I liked it. And I knew that he just has to die. Every time he would get out of jail or every time he would escape from jail, he just kept killing, and he would still be killing if he was not put to death.
Now you had some closure with this guy's death, I would say, to a certain degree. But this is certainly not the end of the story, not the end of your or deal. But another really bright spot in your life is, besides your marriage to Barry, is Jennifer was born and Amelia your daughters. So what did that do for you? And again it's an interesting wet the end of this book, But what did that do for you? And how did that help you in your life at that time?
Well, it gave me responsibility, and it gave me somebody to really care for. That was important, More important than Barry, who was an adult and could take care of himself. I needed to take care of these little girls, and that made it so important that I stopped Placidale altogether. So I got that completely out of my life and focused on raising the kids and teaching them right from wrong.
I'm sure I was more cautious than most parents were and stranger danger and things like that, even if I didn't let them ride school buses and city buses and kind of a strict mother.
Now that the what you talk about too, is that despite all of this, your pt PTSD is something that comes and emerges. And this gentleman that intervened on your behalf when you were reluctant to have anybody intervene on your behalf, is doctor David emerges in your life again at a time when your life is not good. Despite Ted Bundy being put away, besides Ted Bundy being dead,
you still have not shared your secret with anyone. So tell us about doctor David and what he recommends and what you go through to be able to finally deal with this incredible that you kept secret for all those years and kept a part of your own. Felt it it was your fault that so many of these women died. And tell us about doctor David and the remarkable work that he had you do with him for yourself.
Yeah, I got kind of overwhelmed with PTSD. And this was like thirty seven years after my attack with Bundy, when I thought I'd put it all together, and I'd raised my family, and I'd had a wonderful career, and I thought that I had put all that Bundy stuff so deep inside that I hardly ever even thought about it. And then I was some things happened at work and all of those memories just came flooding back, and I thought I was going crazy because PTSD is just horrible.
And someone talked me into seeing a psychologist, and so I was trying to figure out, how will I find a psychologist. You can't just tell somebody things that you've never told anybody, you know, How do you pick somebody that you can talk to? And I looked in the in the on the computer, and a psychologist just jumped off the page at me. It was doctor David from
all of those years ago. And I wondered if he would remember me, and and I thought, if he does, then I don't have to explain all of it because he knows I was a little bit nutty. And so I sent him an email and started seeing him, and he did remember me, and we talked about him coming to my apartment and talking to my roommate and me yelling at him and hating him, he says, He says, I, I do remember you. I went to your apartment and talked to your roommate. You didn't like me very much.
He says, You're right, I didn't like you very much, but I'm giving you one more chance. And he helped me, first of all, just explain and put into words what had happened, and doing that caused all of the emotions to cause actual physical symptoms of uh things that had happened with Bundy. I. I got rashes, and I got pneumonia, and I UH bleeding gums and noses and things that were just kind of bizarre psychosomatic things that had happened.
But he also more importantly took me on a trip back to the canyon, to the exact spot where that attack had happened, and let me kind of feel whatever there was to experience there, and and that kind of helped make a closure to the PTSD staff, helped seal it up and let me feel like it really was not my fault. I realized that if I had come forward and gone to the police, he probably would have just moved and packed up his Volkswagen and sold it
and moved to, you know, some someplace else. Other people still would have died, maybe not the Utah people, but my my coming forward would not have stopped him. And I need to feel guilty about that.
And it took you that long because we know too much time with it. But you Bury in the beginning didn't ask any questions. But when you did bring up Bundy, he wasn't as sensitive. At least that was your take on it, and at least that's what it looked like that he just didn't know how to interpret. He thought you were in harm's way, and doctor David told him, no, you did not put yourself in harm's way. It is
the fault of Ted Bundy and no one else. He stalked people, he picked people, He knew when people were vulnerable. So again doctor David brought you to the point where you went back to the scene of the crime. He got to the point where he knew exactly where that
was and brought you through that. But it was even more profound, And this is the most amazing part of the portion of your book, which is incredible in its entirety, is that he gets you to recall all before you go to the scene, the things that are missing in what we talked about, the things that exactly Ted Bundy said to you that I think were even worse than the assault itself, in this psychological terror that this person
imposed upon you. And so before we go, I just want to for our audience, and I'll read it if you don't mind. Is that he said some things to you as he was he was straddling you on the ground, smashing your thighs, smothering you, smiling and watching you die. You say, finally he let you breathe he said, so tell me how was that for you? Did you like that? Huh? Do you like it when I pinch your nose and mouth shut like this? And you say? Cut your air
supply until you ached for air? And he said, is it better for you like this again, stopping you from breathing? Would you prefer to suffocate? And he put his hands around your throat and started squeezing. So doctor David is correct in telling you very forcefully that he couldn't believe the courage rather than the shame you should have felt us the courage and the strength that you had to even carry on period, let alone feel any guilt about things you didn't do, or didn't do soon enough, or
didn't say so. Ah. Again, an incredible journey that you went through to be able to meet this doctor David, and this is the person that helped you through this. It certainly wasn't the justice being with Ted Bundy, was it.
No, it wasn't. And the book is not really about Ted Bundy. The book is really about victims and and the way victims are are treated and remembered. And you know, people remember the Ted Bundy's and the Jeffrey Dahmers, but they don't remember the victims. And then and to remember that, you know, the the the crime isn't over just because the assault is over. It could go on and affect people forever.
It is all those and with sorry go ahead.
There's all those things going on in the world now where girls on college campuses are being assaulted and they're still not daring to come forward even forty years later. And I hope that my book would kind of inspire people to dare to come forward and know that it's it's you feel better when you come forward, and the only way to break that stigma is to have more people coming forward.
Absolutely, and as well. You this really is a story of coming together in your own family as well. Because your daughters didn't know this secret. I can't even imagine keeping any kind of secret like this at all, how hard it would be, and how it affected your behavior and your treatment of your daughters. And they didn't know and realize that till you would revealed the secret to them.
So tell us just as you do. It is a story of love and unconditional love and understanding once everybody gets the the you know, the assistance of doctor David and other people into the family realizing what you have gone through in its entirety.
Yes, so how's a happy ending?
Yeah? And your this book is tell us about the sort of the genesis of this book. How did it come to be that a rule was involved in writing the forward? And just tell us a little bit about the book itself.
The book itself wasn't intended to be a book. I never ever thought I would write a book. I thought I was doing really great just by telling the ten people on my list of close people that I finally ended up telling doctor David, and my immediate family. I still hadn't told my mother until the book was ready to come write out and was already printed and real
before my siblings and my mother found out. But the thing about it was that thought I talked to different people about should I publish this book or not because I had a feeling that it could help somebody else, because part of the PTSD experience is such a feeling of loneliness, like you were the only person on the entire planet that can possibly feel the way that you're feeling.
And I thought that I'm not, and if I can help other PEO people to feel like they're not the only person who can feel is feeling that way, that would maybe help somebody somewhere. And so I started talking to some people saying maybe i'd have published this book. What happened is I was journaling. Doctor David had me start journaling. I thought, maybe if I just write down what happened to me, then maybe I don't have to even tell anybody. I can just write it down and
throw it away and I'll feel better. But that journaling became the book, and some people told me, you know, don't expect to sell very many, because who really is going to be interested in a forty year old rape. I'd be kind of like, how many people would want to hear about somebody who survived Jack the Ripper, And I'm thinking I would tell me, I want to know how they found Jack the Ripper and how they ought of way, and what they told their family and all
of that stuff that I would be very interested. So I was thinking that maybe I would publish it, and then the publishing process is so complicated and so ridiculously difficult, just plain difficult. And someone told me that maybe I would have a better time selling my book to a publisher if I wrote it as fiction, and kind of just what if this had happened? And I thought, no, you know, I spent my whole life pretending this never happened, and now I've got the courage and decided to tell it,
and they want me to pretend it didn't happen. So you know, it's been a secret for forty years. I'll just keep it being a secret for forty more years. And who cares. But I spent so much time and energy on it that I thought somebody on the planet should read this book, and if only one person could read it. That person should be Anne Rule because she knew Ted Bundy and she wrote The Stranger Beside Me and she's been my kind of my low secret hero,
and so I tried to contact her. I couldn't, but I contacted her daughter, and her daughter offered me a contract. She said, you know, we have a publishing company. He said no, I didn't know that. He says, we're going to do all kinds of good stuff and going to get my mom to write your forward. And she did. It was probably the last thing that that sweet lady did before she passed away last year.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's tragic, tragic. Yeah. I got to speak to Anne Rule in two thousand and five and just just an amazing honor to be able to speak with her. And she's so important to not only the true crime genre, just to justice itself and victimology where the victim is recognized. I mean, that's Anne Rule's hallmark was to have the victim stories told before that it really wasn't, I mean really, And so anyway, I want I want to say, yeah, that's very interesting that Anne Rule got so involved and
rightfully so this book is just incredible. And of course she would be again, there's something that Anne Rule would be interested in hearing and reading was your book itself too, So I think it was very interesting for Anne Rule to be reading about it survivor of again after she had told the story, and there was so many other people that came forward claiming that they were they met
Ted or they escaped Ted narrowly. So again a very very good testament of how important this story is and what you had to say.
And it's so good that she'd validate me absolutely. Part of the reasons to not tell is because you think people won't believe you. Anyway, she believed me, and I liked that.
And I think more importantly too, Doctor David was another guy that gave you a lot of validation to again your story being so incredible. And again he wasn't sort of a fan. He was there to help you out,
but he knew the story. And it's how profound it was as well that we're dealing with this kind of person Ted Bundy, the most again, most notorious infamous serial killer probably ever, and the story he had and the dilemma he had with somebody that had repressed this story for so long, like yourself, and then it had come to him, and so it is an amazing story of this actually working this psychology stuff and counseling, and it's a pretty amazing story. I want to thank you for
coming on. I want to thank you for coming on and talking about this.
Now.
Do you have a Facebook? People communicate with you a Facebook? Do you have a website? How would people contact you or look for more information if so desired?
I am on Facebook under Ronda Stately. There's also a website I Survived Ted Bundy dot com. I have some purchase information and link to Amazon.
Well, that's great. I want to thank you very much of Rhonda for coming on and talking about I Survived Ted Bundy, the attack, escape and PTSD to change my life. It has been a very big pleasure. Thank you very much. Incredible book, and thank you for taking the time to come on and reveal all those things that only you could have known about one of the most incredible killers in all time. So thank you very much. You have a great evening.
Okay, Thank you Dan, thank you Ronda.
Good night, Okay.