Gayle Elizabeth LeClair was born on January 26, 1951 to Donald and Barbara LeClair in Gold Beach, Oregon. Mr. LeClair was born on June 4, 1930 and was employed as a car salesman, and Barbara Jean was born on July 8, 1930 in Redondo Beach, CA and worked as a bank teller at Western Bank. The couple were wed on February 10, 1950 and had two children together (Gayle and her younger brother Cleve*), but sadly divorced in September 1970. After his marriage ended he had a daughter named Leah with a woman he only dated for a short period of time. The woman put her up for adoption and Mr. LeClair wasn’t aware of her existence until around 2000. He went on to get remarried in December 1970 and had a son named Frank; the couple remained together until the early 1980’s. On September 22, 1985 Mr. LeClair remarried for a third time to a woman named Leola Wilson, who he remained with until his death.

Gayle LeClair was a petite, attractive young woman, with blue eyes and light blonde hair that she wore short while in high school but according to her mother grew out in college, and often wore it tied up with a leather barrette. After graduating from Gold Beach High School in 1969 LeClair went on to attend Southwestern Oregon Community College for two years. While at SWOCC she was active in the schools theater group, and during her first semester there was on the crew  during a production of ‘Don’t Drink the Water.’ According to her mother, Gayle was a studious young woman that excelled in math and had dreams of continuing her education and becoming a teacher one day. When she lived at home she would (on occasion) attend service at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Coos Bay. LeClair moved to Eugene in January 1972 after she graduated from community college and got a job at the Eugene Municipal Library as a clerk-typist.

After Gayle failed to come in for her scheduled shift at 10:30 AM on August 23, 1973 (or answer multiple phone calls) her supervisor went to her house to check on her. Upon arrival, there was no sign of forced entry and the front door was unlocked, and after walking towards LeClair’s bedroom the unidentified supervisor discovered her deceased from multiple stab wounds shortly after 11:00 AM; upon the discovery she immediately went next door and used a neighbor’s telephone to contact police. Gayle had a date with a known acquaintance the night before; they went to a drive-in movie then went back to her apartment for a nightcap. She was last seen alive by him at 1:30 AM, and after a conversation with detectives the young man was quickly cleared as a suspect.

Lieutenant Donald Lonnecker with the Eugene Police Department said the LeClair was dressed for bed when she was murdered and a ‘preliminary autopsy indicated no evidence of sexual assault.’ Before moving into the house she was killed in, from January 1972 to May 1973 she resided at 3760 Concord Street in the Bethel-Echo neighborhood of West-Eugene; she lived by herself in both residences. Mrs. Duane Brown lived next door to the victim on Concord Street and said where they weren’t close and didn’t talk often she said she was a ‘nice, pleasant person.’ Miss LeClair seemed to have a healthy relationship with her family, and before she was murdered her brother Cleve visited her (he lived in North Bend with their mother), and Barbara said of her daughter ‘she would pick up the phone in the evening just to ask how our day had been.’ Neither Gayle’s mother nor father could come up with any reason why anyone would want to hurt their daughter.

Members of law enforcement were immediately baffled at the motive behind the murder of LeClair. Lieutenant Lonnecker said that the victim ‘spent a lot of time socially with people’ and ‘had a lot of friends,’ and those that knew LeClair said she was ‘both outgoing and moody, depending on who knows her and in what way;’ he also said that she was ‘pleasant, and socially active,’ had a lot of friends, and a busy social life. Despite this, neighbors of LeClair didn’t seem to know her at all, and one of them even thought the house she lived in was vacant. According to an article published in The World on August 30, 1973, the small home that LeClair rented had lots of trees, shrubs and other greenery on the property despite being in a residential neighborhood, which would make it very easy for someone to hide in her yard and look through her windows. Her landlord, J. Sidney Armstrong, was a former Lane County District Attorney that moved into private practice, and at one point even dated the victim (although not recently). Armstrong told investigators that his ex ‘had a lot of boyfriends’ and was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. On August 24, 1973 Lane County DA J. Pat Horton said they never recovered the murder weapon, but did clarify they think it was either a ‘knife or some other sharp instrument.’

At the time of her murder in August 1973, Ted Bundy seemed to be in between jobs: from February to April of that year he worked for King County Program Planning then took a break from employment until September 1973, when he got a position as the Assistant to the Washington State Republican chairman. Although it wasn’t as intense as their first few years together he was still in a relationship with Liz Kloepfer… but he was also seeing his ex-girlfriend Stephanie Brooks on the side as well (they rekindled their romance earlier that year). He was also getting ready to start law school at the University of Puget Sound (which he started the following month in September 1973). According to the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ on the day of LeClair’s murder Bundy got into a car accident in Kloepfer’s eggshell blue VW Beetle.

Now, it’s widely accepted that Bundy’s murder rampage began in January 1974, when he brutally assaulted (and most likely left for dead) fellow University of Washington student Karen Sparks in her basement apartment. But, most people in the true crime community strongly suspect he started well before this (some people think as early as 1961 with little Ann Marie Burr in his hometown of Tacoma). I feel it’s worth mentioning that during his final death row interviews with Dr. Bob Keppel, Bundy confessed to starting his murder spree in 1972, not 1974:

Robert Keppel: ‘There’s a gal in 1971, Thurston County.’
Ted Bundy: ‘No.’
RK: ‘Not that far back. Nothing that far back?’
TB: ‘1972.’

Additionally, after Bundy was executed forensic psychologist Arthur Norman told New Jersey based news magazine ‘The SandPaper’ that the killer once told him that he murdered ‘two women in the Philadelphia area’ (most likely Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis), which he suspected were his first two homicides. Dr. Norman even notified Atlantic City Prosecutor Jeffrey Blitz about his confession, who immediately shot down the story, calling it inconclusive. He never investigated it.

Ted confessed to abducting Roberta Kathleen Parks from Oregon State University on May 6, 1974: he drove her over 250 miles away to Taylor Mountain, where he raped and killed her. She is his only confirmed Oregon victim. In interviews with law enforcement, Bundy confessed to murdering two additional women in the ‘Beaver State’ but refused to elaborate any further; according to most law enforcement, Vicki Hollar and Rita Jolly are the best candidates. On June 29, 1973 seventeen year old Rita Lorraine Jolly left her family home to take a walk, something she did every night before bed. She never returned home. Not even two months later on August 20, 1973 twenty-four-year-old Hollar disappeared without a trace after leaving the Bon Marche in Eugene, where she had just gotten a new job as a seamstress two weeks prior. Detectives tried but were unable to question Ted regarding Vicki’s disappearance before his execution in 1989, eliminating the chance of closing the case in relation to the serial killer. I was not able to find anything from the Hollar family in regards to Bundy, however I did find a quote by Jill Jolly: ‘as I recall, my mother told me that the local detectives managed to get a direct question about Rita through to him before his execution, and his reply was ‘No. No more in Oregon.’ Bundy withheld many secrets in the end in hopes to parlay them into yet another stay of execution, and even told detectives that ‘there are other buried remains in Colorado’ (then of course he refused to elaborate any further).

Regarding how close the Bon Marche in Eugene was compared to LeClair’s residence, WebSleuths user BlueJean40′ points out that ‘both of these locations are relatively close on the same side of our city. Just wondered if anyone had read anything about them possibly being connected.’ Not even three months after LeClair was killed on November 5, 1973 twenty-three year old Suzanne Justis most likely hitchhiked from her home in Eugene to Portland, as her car was found left behind at home. She spoke to her mother from a phone booth located outside of the Memorial Coliseum. Justis told her mother she was planning on coming home the following day to pick up her young son from school but never showed up. No trace of her has ever been recovered.

Now, when I say this I’m in no way implying that Ted Bundy was responsible for every single murder that took place in the state of Oregon in 1973… but I am surprised that after two years of very intense research I’m still coming across names that I’ve never seen before. During my research into Gayle LeClair I learned about a young women named Faye Robinson (her high school yearbook spelled her first name ‘Fay’), who was found deceased from multiple stab wounds in the upper part of her body not even six months before LeClair in March 1973. Like Gayle, Robinson was educated and worked in county government: she graduated from the University of Oregon in 1970 and was employed by the Lane County Welfare Department.

Another girl I want to mention is 17 year old Susan Wickersham, who disappeared on July 11, 1973 after dropping off the family car at her mom’s POE in downtown Bend after joyriding around town with a girlfriend (some conflicting reports say she was at a party). Her remains were found on January 20, 1976 and her skull had a bullet hole behind the right ear with no exit wound. Lastly, a 15 year old girl named Alison Lynn Caufman disappeared out of Portland sometime in 1973 (I was unable to find an exact date or any more details about her) as well as eighteen year old Laurie Lee Caniday from nearby Milwaukie (yes, that’s spelled correctly).

Now, I want to (briefly) talk about the May 1969 Garden State Parkway killings separately from the other missing/murdered girls for a moment, just because I feel that they share some (very) general commonalities with the murder of Miss. LeClair (even though I personally don’t think Bundy was responsible for the murder of Susan Davis and Elizabeth Perry): like LeClair, both victims expired as a result of multiple stab wounds, and even though none of Ted’s other victims (that we know of, anyways) ever suffered from any similar types of injuries we do know that he used a (dull) knife to cut the throat of little Kimberly Dianne Leach in Florida on February 9, 1978.

Aside from Ted, another name that came up in relation to the murder of Gayle LeClair is Dayton Leroy Rogers, an American serial killer that has been linked to the slayings of at least eight ‘street’ women (which is code for sex workers/addicts/runaways) across Oregon. He was convicted of the murder of his final victim in 1988, and two years later in May 1989 he was sentenced to death after being found guilty of six additional homicides. Rogers was actually sentenced to death on three separate occasions, but all three times the Oregon Supreme Court vacated the decision and remanded the cases for a new trial; he was sentenced to death for a fourth time on November 16, 2015. According to Roger’s defense attorney, the killer said that he would have waived all future appeals and allocated to his atrocities in exchange for a life sentence rather than receiving the death penalty. His death sentence was overturned for the fourth time on November 12, 2021 partially thanks to a new law signed by Governor Kate Brown limiting the amount of ‘aggravating factors required for seeking the death penalty.’ Governor Brown commuted the death sentences of everyone on Oregon’s death row to life without parole on December 13, 2022. Dayton is still alive as of June 2024, and will live out the rest of his days behind bars.

Now, nothing in my research told me that Ted Bundy was ever considered a suspect in LeClair’s murder, despite her living in a fairly accessible area to him and fit neatly into his preferred age range, as he killed young females anywhere from 12 years old (possibly even as young as eight if you throw Ann Marie Burr into the mix) up to 26 years old (ski instructor Julie Cunningham). Miss. LeClair also fit the physical description of one of Ted’s victims, as she was beautiful and slim and had long hair and a petite build. But these superficial details are pretty much where any possible link to Bundy ends.

Mr. LeClair died at the age of 74 on January 27, 2009 due to a ‘smoking related illness.’ He was an avid outdoorsman, loved racing, and was a member of the Fraternal Order of Eagles. Gayle’s brother Cleve died of heart failure on May 9, 2009. He was active in a local HAM radio club and was trained to help run a radio station in the event of an emergency. Frank LeClair was able to tell me that Barbara LeClair passed away on December 11, 2024.

* Edit, January 2025: I would like to thank Gayle’s brother Frank, who was kind enough to reach out to me and point out a few mistakes I made and give me some updates about his sister’s case. He shared with me that a detective from the Eugene PD Cold Case Squad had been in touch with him in recent years, who shared they had uncovered a piece of evidence in relation to the murder that unfortunately at the time had not been properly processed into evidence, therefore there was no chain of custody and it wouldn’t hold up in court. But they did however send a piece of the sample to a laboratory that specializes in recovering DNA and they were able to uncover two partial but separate genetic profiles from the blood evidence. The detective shared with him that they needed a blood sample from an immediate family member in order to determine which portion belonged to Gayle, and unfortunately since Frank was only a half-sibling he didn’t qualify, as it needed to come from a ‘more direct relative.’ He helped them get in touch with Ms. LeClair’s mother Barbara, who happily volunteered a sample. After receiving it the lab was able to isolate the suspected killers DNA from the sample taken from the crime scene, however because of the age and the fact that the sample was degraded they weren’t able to obtain a full set of genetic markers.

But Frank did tell me that recently they were able to get genetic samples from every person of interest in relation to the case, and if they were deceased they got one from one of their children. So far investigators have been able to clear every suspect except for one, who died several years ago; his child has refused to voluntarily give up a DNA sample. The detective told Frank the names of a few different suspects that were eliminated after the DNA evidence was analyzed, but he forgot most of them. The ones that stuck out the most were Gayle’s date that night and the landlord, John Sydney Armstrong.