A Washington state institution for well over a century, the Seattle Yacht Club is located at 1807 East Hamlin Street in the Montlake neighborhood of Seattle, WA. Where it was technically established in 1879, the club remained slow-growing and mostly uneventful until 1909, when it joined forces with the Elliott Bay Yacht Club. Like most businesses, it has experienced both high and low points over the years, including the Great Depression, both world wars, and societal/economical changes. 

The yacht club really came into its own after WW I when the Lake Washington Ship Canal was completed and it was relocated to a beautiful new location on the eastern shore of Portage Bay, where it remains to this day (as of August 2024). Founded by the city’s social and financial elite, it now has over 2,500 members and is constantly evolving and striving to get better as time goes by. I will say that its absolutely beautiful, and luckily when I visited in April 2022 it was on a lovely day and I was able to walk around a bit while I took my pictures.

Ted Bundy was (briefly) employed at the yacht club beginning in the fall of 1967, however nobody seems to be exactly sure of when he was there: per the ‘TB Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ he started there as a busboy sometime in September (that part appears to be universally agreed on) but was fired after a brief period for stealing food. Now, the discrepancy mostly lies in when he was let go: his friend (and the clubs ‘elderly’ pastry chef) Sibyl Ferris said that he was fired after only six weeks, however true crime author Ann Rule said that the position lasted for six months. Additionally, in Robert A. Dielenberg’s ‘TB: A Visual Timeline,’ the author states that Bundy parked cars at the establishment until January 1968, and police files report that he left on January 13, 1968, which means he worked there for anywhere from four to five months.

Ted’s one-time coworker Mrs. Ferris described him as a ‘peculiar boy’ that always seemed to be ‘sneaking around.’ After he was let go the two maintained their ‘friendship,’ although she suspected that he only did this so that he could ‘borrow’ things from her: on multiple occasions she let him borrow her car, and despite him promising to return it by midnight, he often wouldn’t get back until 3 or 4 AM.

The following are excerpts from the Seattle Police Department archives (courtesy of archives.org) with information related to Bundys ‘relationship’ with the Seattle Yacht Club. For whatever reason there are a TON of spelling errors, and I tried to clean it up the best I could but despite my best efforts there are still parts that are unclear. Remember that’s not my fault, and please be gentle. I’m a sensitive snowflake.

‘Mrs. Ferris is 69 years old but has a good memory of her dealings with Ted Bundy. She advised that she met him about 5 years ago when he was working as a bus boy at the Seattle Yacht Club. Another person that knew him well there is Kenny Gilman, who is now the chef at the Moose Club by the Seattle Center. Mrs. Ferris recalled Bundy taking men home who were drunk and other employees suspected him of trying to ‘roll’ the customers after hours. She also remembered a young secretary whom Bundy took up into the ‘Crow’s nest’ for sexual purposes, Bundy is a schemer and a sneak according to Mrs. Ferris, and would befriend older people like herself and live with or off of them. He had little or no money and would borrow money and fail to repay it. He would often borrow Mrs. Ferris’ car and be gone into the night, Mrs. Ferris later thought Bundy might be robbing but was afraid of him at the time and still is and requests her name not be used. She got Bundy a job at the Olympic Hotel as a busboy and he worked there for a few months as he did at the Yacht Club. Persons at the Olympic suspected Bundy of brewing into the employees lockers and on one occasion Bundy showed Mrs. Ferris a waiter’s uniform (new) that he said he had taken from the Olympic, It was around this time Bundy borrowed some of Mrs. Ferris’s China and silver to put on some special sort of dinner for his girlfriend who was a high class girl from San Francisco, Bundy had showed Mrs. Ferris how he planned to prepare and serve an excellent dinner to the girl and put on a British accent for Mrs. Perris, During this time Bundy had borrowed a car from someone but later got a VW in Tacoma which needed a good deal of work, Bundy also had a job at a Safeway store on Queen Anne Hill, stocking.’

‘Ted had a friend who lived on Sunnyside Ave. Pi. who owned an antique.. whose in his home and also worked in a prison. Bundy lived with this man for a while, Bundy had a black wig that he showed Mrs. Ferris and Mrs. Ferris also saw a picture of him during the Rosellini-Evans campaign wearing a wig. On it one occasion Mrs. Ferris drove Ted to Diane’s (the girlfriend’s) house of Greenlake, and another time she. went to the ocean on business and Ted went with her. They also made a trip to Mossyrock, and at other times Bundy would take the car to “visit his parents”. He borrowed’ Mrs. Ferris’s, phone to make a lot of calls… ‘The last time Mrs. Ferris saw Bundy was in the Post Office on the Ave. before he left for Salt Lake. They had small talk at that time.’

‘Earing the time she knew him best he never talked about going, to law school. She also vaguely remembers seeing Ted at the Albertson’s store in Greenlake with a cast on his arm. Mrs. Ferris remembers Ted going to Ellensburg frequently and to meet friends from there to go skiing. He would ski at Snoqualmie Pass or Crystal Mountain, When he went to Aspen Ted had new, imported ski equipment – something he could not well afford. She has no idea where he got his money and recalls him mentioning he had a strict home life. Mrs. Ferris took r/0 to locates the places she knew Ted lived in. She was unable to locate, the address on 17th but will look again and call this office. She also showed K/O Bundy’s residence by the Seattle Yacht Club.’

Kathy McChesney from the King County Sheriff’s Department also commented that: ‘Mrs. Ferris recalls about four years ago Bundy coming to her house on a rainy day in a grey VW, He had a 6-10 year old boy with him and said they were going horseback riding in Issaquah and borrowed an umbrella. Bundy told Mrs. Ferris his father was a chef.’

The following are excerpts from Ann Rule’s controversial true crime classic, ‘The Stranger Beside Me’ regarding his time at the Seattle Yacht Club (Beatrice Sloan is a pseudonym for Sibyl Ferris, in an attempt to protect her identity): 

‘Ted worked a series of menial, low-paying jobs to pay his way through college: in a posh Seattle yacht club as a busboy, at Seattle’s venerable Olympic Hotel as a busboy, at a Safeway store stocking shelves, in a surgical supply house as a stockboy, as a legal messenger, as a shoe clerk. He left most of these jobs of his own accord — usually after only a few months. Safeway personnel files evaluated him as “only fair,” and noted that he had simply failed to come to work one day. Both the surgical supply house and the messenger service hired him twice, however, and termed him a pleasant, dependable employee (Rule, 13).’

‘Ted became friends in August of 1967 with sixty-year- old Beatrice Sloan, who worked at the yacht club. Mrs. Sloan, a widow, found the young college student a lovable rascal, and Ted could talk her into almost anything when they worked at the yacht club together for the next six months and then for many years after. She arranged for his job at the Olympic Hotel, a job that lasted only a month; other employees reported they suspected he was rifling lockers. Mrs. Sloan was somewhat shocked when Ted showed her a uniform that he had stolen from the hotel, but she put it down as a boyish prank, as she would rationalize so many of his actions (Rule,13-14).’

‘Several years ago when Ted was out of the University of Washington he took a trip to Philadelphia to visit an uncle in politics. Mrs. Ferris took him to the plane and gave him $100 which she later tried to get back and called Mrs. Bundy looking for Ted, Mrs. Bundy said that Mrs. Ferris was a fool to give Ted that money, and she’d never get it back and Ted was a stranger around there.’

‘When Ted returned from Philadelphia Mrs. Ferris took him to the airport again: he was going to Aspen, Colorado to be a ski instructor. Mrs. Ferris was going to knit Ted a ski hat but he already had one, possibly white, that fit over the face. She also recalled mention of his seeing his girlfriend from San Francisco at Aspen, Bundy had a key to McMahon Kali and sometimes would go inside and sleep when he had no other place to sleep. He went for some time with this girl who attended Stanford and had a desire to go to Taiwan to get out of the army.’

‘Ted also called Beatrice Sloan, his old friend from the Seattle yacht club. She found him the same as he’d always been, full of plans and adventures. He told her he’d been to Philadelphia, where he’d seen his rich uncle, and that he was on his way to Aspen, Colorado, to become a ski instructor (Rule, 18).’

While editing this article in August 2024 I did some digging (just a little bit) into Ted’s friend, Mrs. Ferris, and the first thing that jumped out to me is that her first name is frequently spelled wrong: it’s spelled Sibyl and not Sybil. Born Sibyl Templeton on February 6, 1906 (which means when Bundy befriended her in September of 1967 she would have been sixty-one years old), she was a widow at the time that she met Ted at the Yacht Club (her husband Steve died on November 8, 1961). She passed away on August 2,1980 from cardiac arrest, and interestingly enough, on her death certificate physical therapist is listed as her occupation, which is a far cry from being a pastry chef (this isn’t meant to be judgmental, I admire people who are talented at multiple things).