An interview between Ted Bundy and Dennis Couch that took place only thirty-six hours before he was executed on January 22,1989.
Ted Bundy Interview with Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Detective Dennis Couch, January 22,1989.
Author: Another Bundy Blog.
FBI Files: MP3 File of Dr. Robert Keppel and Ted Bundy.
Twenty-one minutes of audio taken from four hours of recordings from a 1989 interview at Florida State Prison between Dr. Robert Keppel and Ted Bundy that is used in training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. During the interview Bundy brags about slaughtering eleven women across the state of Washington.
Ted Bundy, FBI Files: Court Documents, Confession-Interview Recordings, Research Documents.
Includes 339 pages of files that were copied directly from FBI headquarters, the 1992 FBI TB Multiagency Investigative Team Report, 71 pages of a FBI Report Serial Murder Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for investigators (from 2005), 79 pages of FBI Report Serial Murder Pathways for Investigations (from 2011), and over 1,000 pages of information over seven appellate court cases from Florida and Utah, as well as some Bundy-related Congressional Hearings, Reports, and Transcripts
Deborah Kathleen Tomlinson, Case File.
Some documents related to the murder of Deborah Kathleen Tomlinson that took place on December 27, 1975, courtesy of the Grand Junction Police Department. Tomlinson was definitely not a Ted Bundy victim, but she was killed at roughly the same time that he was active (in a state where he was active). Her murder was possibly part of an ongoing crime spree in Grand Junction that targeted individuals that may have known too much about the area’s drug activities in relation to corrupt law enforcement, such as police Chief Ben Meyers. Not to be confused with Deborah Lee Tomlinson from Oregon.
Possible Suspects, SLC.
Courtesy of the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department.
Theodore Robert Bundy vs. State of Florida, May 9, 1985.
Denise Lynn Oliverson: Case File.
I paid the Grand Junction police department $240 for this, I hope it’s useful to somebody.
Marjorie ‘Margie’ Sue Fithian.
Background: Marjorie ‘Margie’ Sue Fithian was born on June 4, 1952 to Robert and Elizabeth ‘Betty’ (nee Talkington) Fithian in Greeley, Colorado. Robert Warren Fithian was born on November 23, 1920 in Bayard, Nebraska and after graduating from high school he joined the Army and served in WWII; when he returned home from the war he enrolled at Colorado State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts and graduated in 1946. He was employed as an ‘Assistant County Agent.’ Elizabeth May Talkington was born on May 4, 1923 in Belfield, ND, and according to her Ancestry page, after graduating from Fryberg High School in 1941 she attended North Dakota State University in Fargo, where she earned a BS with a focus in Home Economics in 1945; she went on to get a job as a home service director at a gas and electric company. The couple were married on September 19, 1948 and had four children together: Christine (b. 1949), Virginia (b. 1957), David (b. 1960), and Marjorie. They divorced on June 3, 1970 and Mr. Fithian got remarried to a woman named Erma on July 15, 1977 in Reno, NV. After separating from Robert, Betty went back to school at UNC and earned her education degree, and began her career at a local HeadStart Program; she later taught elementary school in district six in Greeley (primarily focusing on Kindergarten).
A petite woman, Margie stood at a mere 5’0” tall and weighed only 108 pounds; she had auburn hair, green eyes, andwas described as a ‘free spirit’ and a ‘hippie chick’ by her loved ones. She was very trusting almost to a fault and no one could think of any reason why anyone would ever want to hurt her. At the time of her death in June 1975 she was enrolled at Aims Community College in Greeley, and according to the local newspaper she was employed there as well. At some point after graduating from high school Fithian married Vietnam War veteran James Patrick Reese, who was born on June 24, 1945, but the couple divorced on April 5, 1971. After separating from her husband she moved into a trailer in her hometown of Greeley with her 18-month-old son, Dylan Sage (who eventually dropped Dylan from his name), and where no source ever came right out and said that her ex-husband was his father some articles gave the child the last name of ‘Reese;’ Sage’s Dad wasn’t ‘in the picture,’ and lived outside of Colorado.
June 1975: On Friday, June 20, 1975 Marjorie and Sage, along with a single suitcase, made their way to the bus station in Greeley; the twenty-three-year-old single mom had a fun, family-oriented weekend in Denver planned with her aunt and uncle and had intentions of returning early Monday morning. Mother and son arrived safely at their destination and enjoyed some quality time with family, and when their visit was over at around 7 AM on Sunday, June 23rd*, her uncle dropped them at a bus station in Denver to return home on a bus that departed at 7:30 AM (one report specifically says they parted ways at 7:20 AM); the two never boarded. The Greyhound bus driver was later tracked down and interviewed by detectives, and he said that Marjorie and Sage had not been on his bus that morning. *I did see it incorrectly reported that Fithian was dropped off at the bus stop on June 23 but wasn’t found until the 24th, but that doesn’t seem to be accurate, as they went for a weekend and the 24th was a Tuesday (and every other report says that she was found later the same morning).
Marjorie’s cousins, who were with her the weekend before she was killed, were also interviewed by investigators, and they said that nothing unusual had occurred during their brief visit and they had no idea what could have happened to her. When he returned home after dropping the two off at the bus station, Fithian’s Uncle realized that she had dropped some change and had left it behind at his residence, so there is a chance that she may have not had enough money to have been able to purchase the tickets (remember, this is well before the time of cell phones, and a bunch of quarters was a decent amount of currency in the 1970’s). Because of this, some people wonder if maybe she had been forced to hitchhike due to lack of other options.
Discovery: At around 9 AM roughly two hours after Fithian’s uncle dropped her off at the bus stop a twenty-four-year-old ranch hand named Terry Furnish was making his way from the eastern part of ‘The Painter Ranch’ to the west side on Weld County Road 386, located between Interstate’s 76 and 35, about four miles north of Roggen. As he was making his way down the gravel road he noticed a car barreling towards him that was moving at a high rate of speed, which was unusual due to the lack of activity in the area: the driver had been in an early 1960’s model two door car (possibly a Ford or Chevrolet) that may have had a broken window and a yellowish/brown body with a black roof that was possibly ripped in one spot. As Furnish got closer to the entrance of the I-76 he came across a ghastly site: a woman lying in the middle of the road covered in blood; sitting with her was a little blond-haired boy, calmly holding her hand. Responding investigators strongly felt that Terry stumbled upon them only moments after they were left there.
Furnish moved the child out of the glass, got back in his truck and flew down the road to a company vehicle that contained a CB Radio. After sending a message out with his location and a description of what happened he raced back to Sage, where he picked up him up and tried to soothe him the best that he could before help arrived. A Colorado state Trooper was the first to arrive on the scene, and after determining that Marjorie had a faint pulse he called for a medic; unfortunately she died on the way to the hospital. According to Weld County Sheriff Don Bower, the child wasn’t harmed and that Fithian was found ‘within a matter of minutes’ after the shooting took place.
Terry’s family had managed The Painter Ranch in Roggen since 1955, and he had only been there visiting from South Dakota, where he was working as a field man (in a newspaper I also saw it called ‘The Two-Bar Ranch’). The stretch of road where Fithian was found was desolate and surrounded by empty fields ‘as far as the eye could see,’ as there were only two ranches in the area at the time and the road wasn’t heavily traveled.
Unsure of what to do with Sage, the officer put him in the back of his patrol car, and it wasn’t long before more state troopers, Weld County Sheriff’s deputies, and a handful of ranch hands that heard the announcement arrived. Looking back at what happened so long ago, Furnish said: ‘I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know whether to put him in the pickup, but I set him just out of the glass. You just don’t know what would have happened to the little guy, and his mom, too. It’s just so unfortunate, it was so remote then, the ambulance took a long time, over an hour if I remember right.’
Investigation: First responders immediately secured the scene and began canvassing the area, and even though the roadway had very little traffic LE still shut it down. Tire tracks close to Marjorie and Sage showed the suspect drove their vehicle to the scene from the Interstate-76, pulled a U-turn, then went back towards the highway. As the hours ticked by the investigators had no choice but to take Sage back to the police station while they tried to find someone to claim him. Close to where her body was found, investigators found her coat and a blanket (both of which were placed over her) and up the road they found her suitcase: in it were clothes for mother and son as well as a slip of paper with a phone number scrawled on it that belonged to her Betty Fithian, her mother. This was incredibly helpful, as Marjorie was not carrying any identification with her. Jack Van Arsdale, who was the only detective with the Weld County Sheriff’s Department at the time of the murder in June 1975, said that she told him that her daughter and grandson had traveled by bus to Denver to visit with family.
Elizabeth was able to identify the young victim as her daughter, and told detectives that the young child that was with her was her grandson. Detectives told her to come to the police station to pick up Sage and upon learning the news about Marjorie’s death was ‘absolutely devastated.’ Because the body was still at the morgue being autopsied, investigators were unable to show her the remains when she arrived but decided not to wait for its findings to start investigating the case as a homicide.
Before Betty left with Sage she sat down and spoke with investigators about what may have happened to her daughter: she told them that she had known that the two had gone to Denver to visit with family and were due to return home later that morning because she had classes the next day. At the time she expressed concern regarding the fact that so much was still unknown and what happened and that she was afraid for her grandson, and wasn’t sure if he would be safe.
After speaking with Betty, investigators contacted Denver police, who immediately sent detectives to interview Marjorie’s Uncle. He said the usual things: that they had a nice visit and that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, however he did share that while in Denver his niece had gone on a date with a man that she had been casually seeing. He had taken Margie and her son to the zoo and said that it ‘seemed as if they all had a really good time.’ After learning this the Denver detectives knew they had to track this mystery date down…. But according to Ashley Flowers they had no luck, and there’s no mention that they ever found him in Fithian’s case file (more on this later). However, they did manage to track down Sage’s father, and he had an alibi and was nowhere near Colorado at the time of his ex’s murder.
Marjorie was shot twice in the face execution style, and a spent .25 caliber casing was found near her body that investigators felt was most likely discharged from an automatic pistol. She had been wearing jeans, a blouse, and brown leather sandals, one of which had been kicked off to the side of the roadway; her auburn hair had been cut into a classic 70’s shag, and her feathered bangs were saturated in blood from what appeared to be a gunshot wound to her forehead.
Investigators took samples of the broken pieces of glass that were found at the scene and determined that it most likely came from a car headlight or window, which made them suspect that a struggle had taken place before Kithian was shot; additionally, according to her autopsy she had not been sexually assaulted. Notably missing from the scene was any sort of weapon, and as of July 2025 one was never recovered in relation to the murder. Responding officers asked Furnish if the woman had said anything in the moments before they arrived on the scene, but he told them she had been unconscious and actually had thought she had been deceased.
Clues point to the idea that Fithian had been shot elsewhere and had been brought to the dirt road where she was recovered. In an interview with ‘The Deck’ podcast creator Ashley Flowers, Detective Van Arsdale said that as he was making his way to the crime scene he passed the ambulance, and when the EMT briefly stopped he asked if he could hop in and sit with the victim just in case she woke up so he could take a statement, but the paramedic told him that she had just expired. About the incident, Van Arsdale said: ‘I proceeded on down to the crime scene, it was a pretty confusing mess. State patrol cars, a couple farmers, couple of ranchers… a couple of our guys. There was a lot of stuff going on, on the dirt road.’ Afterwards, instead of taking her to the hospital EMT’s took her to the local mortuary, which at the time was owned and operated by the Weld County Coroner’s Office.
Almost right after the murder, Weld County Sheriff’s brought Terry Furnish in for an ‘official’ sit down interview to get the specific details of what happened down in print while they were still fresh in his mind. He told them that he still couldn’t’ recall any specific details about the driver of the yellowish sedan, one thing that did stand out to him was that the cloth on the top part of the vehicle was ripped, that he was ‘100% certain of.’ After learning this, Detective Van Arsdale immediately radioed dispatch and put out a BOLO on the vehicle. Investigators used every single possible option that they had at the time to locate the oddly specific car with the very particular visual flaw, and according to Van Arsdale, ‘they did a lot of work on finding vehicles like that through the Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles. They got a long list of license plates for vehicles that matched that description and looked into who these vehicles were registered to. But ultimately it didn’t come up with any leads, but not for a lack of trying.’
After he arrived on the scene, Detective Van Arsdale realized that if the crime had taken place shortly after they arrived then they had to act quickly, as it meant the assailant was still somewhere nearby. One of the ranch workers told investigators there were some ‘unusual tire tracks nearby,’ which they determined ‘looked fresh’ and were very close in proximity to the shooting. The Weld County Sheriff’s also reached out to the public and asked for their assistance and requested if anyone had seen anything suspicious the morning of June 23, 1975 to please reach out to them immediately. According to (current) Sheriff Steve Reams, ‘where this crime occurred, is not easily accessible off the highway. You don’t just take an exit ramp and turn, you kinda hafta go out of your way to get where they ended up at.’
On June 25, 1975 Detective Van Arsdale and the Weld County Sheriff returned to the scene of Marjorie’s murder, this time on horseback: the two law enforcement officers rode up and down Weld County Road 386 looking for more evidence that may have missed immediately after the murder… but all they found was more broken glass. Later that same day investigators also searched Marjorie’s residence in Greeley, but they didn’t find anything helpful. It’s also worth mentioning that at her residence detectives found only a small amount of marijuana residue, and there was no indication at all that pointed towards heavy substance use.
On June 26th news of Fithian’s murder hit the local newspaper, and in addition to publishing her obituary The Greeley Daily Tribune also announced the establishment of a memorial fund for Sage. A handful of locals contacted police and reported that they had seen mother and son at a nearby cafe eating breakfast earlier in the morning before she was killed; another tip claimed that several men had witnessed someone picking them up from the parking lot of ‘The Picadilly Restaurant’ in Denver. In the weeks following the murder detectives across multiple police jurisdictions in Colorado investigated hundreds of Fithians friends/family/acquaintances/and classmates, but didn’t learn much useful information.
Police also began getting tips about some seemingly low-level criminals, specifically four men named Robert Davis, Vern Hudson, Jerry Walker, and Larry Hernandez, who were all investigated for Fithian’s murder. They were already aware of the four men after having multiple run-ins with all of them, and from the beginning didn’t think that any of them had anything to do with the case.
Around mid-July investigators were notified that two of the men, Jerry and Robbie, had been arrested in a neighboring town for burning down Vern’s garage, which made them even more suspicious in their eyes. This also hinted that there had been a sort of falling out with the members of the friend group, and wondered if it had possibly had anything to do with Fithian’s murder.
An Arrest: Just a little over two months after Fithian was murdered an arrest was finally made: on August 27, 1975 the Weld County Sheriff’s Department arrested thirty-four year old Jerry Eugene Walker on first degree murder charges based on information provided to the office from a CI. According to Greeley Police Officer Chris Clinton, a local confidential informant reached out to him and shared that Walker told him that he ‘shot the bitch in the face,’ and bragged about killing the young mother; he had also shown him one black and white photo and two color ones of a wounded Marjorie that had ‘gunshot sounds to her face’ and was ‘suffering from wounds.’ After he was taken into custody detectives went to his house armed with a search warrant with hopes of finding the murder weapon, ammo, or any photos of Fithian; they didn’t find anything.
When Walker was arrested a story ran in the local newspaper, which included a picture of him being led away by detectives in handcuffs. The day after Mrs. Fithian called the Weld County Sheriff’s Department and told them that ‘something weird had happened,’ and according to Detective Van Arsdale: ‘she called me and said that the strangest thing just happened: Sage just looked at the picture and said, ‘oh, that’s Jerry.’ It’s the only person that he’s ever identified, or said anything about.’ It was the first thing that Sage ever said about his mother’s death, and it gave the investigating officer chills, and he wondered if maybe the boy recognized Walker because she had a relationship of some kind with him. Until then, the detective had been unsure of Walkers involvement with Fithian, but that made him question things.
Walker told investigators that he picked up Fithian and her son from the Denver bus station because she was supposed to be transporting drugs for him, but when she failed to produce the substances or money he killed her. On September 30, 1975 the murder charge against him was dismissed due to a ‘lack of evidence,’ however because he was being still being charged with the misdemeanor crimes of arson, criminal mischief, and assault he was released on $5,000 bond; the charges were ‘dismissed without prejudice’ indicating that they could be refiled again in the future if sufficient evidence was found. According to The Greeley Daily Tribune, Walker and a co-defendant were accused of the burglary and theft charges of entering the apartment, assaulting, and menacing Karen Logan and stealing money in an amount over $100 belonging to Randy Mitchell. Additionally, he is charged with causing intentional bodily harm to that of Ms. Logan and of damaging real and personal property of the woman in the amount of $100 or more.
Two weeks after his release, Walker died of an accidental drug overdose while sitting at home in a living room couch: Weld County Coroner Ross Adamson said that Walker died of an ‘unintentional overdose of barbiturates,’ and put his estimated time of death at around 6 AM on Sunday, October 12, 1975. When police and paramedics arrived on the scene they found ‘lots’ of empty pill bottles, and the coroner ultimately ruled the death as an accidental overdose. A Captain with the Greeley PD told the local newspaper that letters found in Walkers house brought up suicide, however according to those that knew him he hadn’t brought it up recently. Captain Richard McNamara of the Greeley PD said that investigators were also looking into a rumor that two of the deceased friends had recently died of unnatural causes in Colorado Springs, and another had passed in Greeley earlier in the year but nothing ever came of it. According to Ashley Flowers, some informants told police that Walkers death wasn’t accidental and was actually ‘tied to Marjorie’s death.’
The investigating detectives got word of a ‘drug party’ that some of the suspects would be attending on October 1, 1975 and they were able to secure a search warrant and raided the event; they arrested everyone present. Jack spoke to Robbie later that night, who said that he ‘was in the car with Vern and Larry when Vern shot her in the face.’ It was at this moment that investigators realized they didn’t know who was telling the truth, as they all seemed to have a problem with one another. Detective Van Arsdale said that at the end of the day he didn’t really believe any of the men’s stories, because every last detail they talked about was public knowledge and was published in the local newspaper: they didn’t give any information that only the killer would have been privy to.
After Jerry died Fithian’s case completely stalled and a year went by with little movement: Weld County didn’t have concrete evidence that linked Walker or Vern Hudson to the murder, and the men kept changing their stories and going back and forth on what happened. In early 1977 the Sheriff’s Department brought Larry Hernandez in for a lie detector test, and before talking with detectives, he allowed himself to be administered sodium pentothal (or truth serum). During the interview he told them that he had made the entire story up about Marjorie’s murder and knew nothing about her death, but he did admit that he sold her weed a few times and the two had gone to the local community college together.
As it turned out, he barely knew her: when he was initially interviewed about the murder in 1975 he was briefly left alone with her case file, and he took it upon himself to read through it and learn intimate details surrounding her murder. Hernandez also volunteered that he fabricated the entire thing because he was angry at the man he previously claimed was Fithian’s killer for ‘ratting on him.’ According to Byron Kastilahn, an investigator with the Weld County Sheriff’s Department: ‘he said he did this because he was mad at the other drug dealer who he’d named as Fithian’s killer. They had a criminal history between them and they’d been narking each other out to the police.’
After that, investigators tracked down Vern, who by that time was in prison in Wyoming state and was facing drug trafficking charges. He spoke with them, but like Hernandez he denied having anything to do with Fithians murder. They even gave him a chance to rat on his former friends, but he admitted that the entire thing had been a lie and none of them had anything to do with her death. Hudson died in 2006. In 2020, Kastilahn tracked down Hernandez, who maintained the exact same story that he told in 1977.
After talking to Hernandez, detectives were aghast at the thought that the entire year and a half they spent investigating had been for nothing, and started looking into other possibilities, including the idea that Fithian had been killed by a random person and the murder was a crime of opportunity and not one with motive. They also wondered if perhaps her killer had tried to ‘put the moves on her,’ and when she turned him down he got angry and attacked her. Additionally, they were almost certain that robbery wasn’t the reason for the homicide, as she didn’t have any money and all of her possessions were found at the scene. According to Detective Van Arsdale, ‘I think somebody picked her up… her dad said that she was a pretty friendly gal, I think somebody realized at the bus station that she didn’t have any money and offered her a ride.’
But, Sheriff Reams said that two gunshot wounds to the face execution style didn’t sound like a random crime: ‘to me, it always seemed like it was a very personal thing, I guess the circumstances surrounding Marjorie’s death. Someone knew that she was going to be traveling with her kid… now, could they have just picked them up at a bus stop? Yes, but to kill her and leave her son behind. That’s almost as if there’s a personal relationship that was formed there, with anger involved… that’s what it came across as to me. But, we just don’t know. Obviously, it doesn’t really take that many shots to kill someone, typically we would call that an overkill. It’s not necessary, and again, just taking her out to a remote location, and she trusted whoever enough to at least travel with them.’
But if Marjorie and Sage did take a stranger up on an offer for a ride home to Greeley, how did they wind up in Roggen? After a certain amount of driving in the wrong direction wouldn’t she have said something (or maybe she did, we’ll never know)? According to Sheriff Reams, ‘she was trusting enough of someone to not even try to get out of the car at a stop sign or anything like that, which tells me that there was some kind of relationship that was probably there. And then the two shots then the dragging her out of a car and leaving her on the side of the road with her kid with her kid, then driving off. That speaks to me as a stranger killing, but I can’t rule that out.’ There is a slight chance that when Margie and Sage were left on the dirt road that she was already fatally wounded, however detectives strongly feel that it was the location where she was shot, as there is no other way to explain the glass found on the ground. According to Detective Van Arsdale, ‘I think she was shot inside the car. He went around, he took her out, then shot her a second time on the ground.’
To Detective Van Arsdale, it all came back to timing: there was only a two-hour window in which Fithian could have been killed, and it took roughly an hour and a half to get to Denver from Greeley; from there, it was (almost) another hours drive to Roggen, which means it would have been highly unlikely that she would have called Walker (or one of the other three men) for a ride, and they wouldn’t have been able to pull it off unless they were already in the area. According to Detective Van Arsdale, ‘I don’t believe any of them. I keep coming back to: 7:30, she got on the bus, or the bus was there. And she didn’t get on it but her uncle dropped her off there at 7:30, and then at 9:30 she’s on a dirt road out in Roggen. I don’t think she could have called Jerry Walker to come and pick her up and give her a ride home, or Vern Hudson. And I don’t know if they would have been at the bus station. And I don’t think anybody knew because she was just coming home from her uncles from spending the weekend there.’
Drugs?: With no real leads in the investigation, theories began to swirl about what may have happened to Marjorie. One that detectives considered was that she may have been transporting drugs from Greeley to Denver, given she had what the Weld County Sheriff’s Department called a ‘history of marijuana use,’ and according to Detective Kastilahn: ‘they thought (Fithian) might have acted as a drug mule, transporting drugs from Denver somewhere else.’ Other theories included that she may have been hitchhiking or had been purposefully ‘targeted by an unknown assailant,’ which Detective Van Arsdale called ‘unlikely.’
Ottis Toole: Months then years went by with almost no movement on Marjorie’s case. In 1982 a serial killer came onto investigators radar after he admitted to committing some murders in the state of Colorado in the 1970’s: Ottis Toole. According to a 1984 article published in The Daily Sentinel (which is a newspaper based out of Grand Junction), Toole confessed to a 1974 murder in Colorado Springs, which he later recanted. Despite this, investigators were able to find evidence that helped prove that he was in fact in the state of Colorado in the summer of 1975, so they went to talk to him while he was in prison, but he wasn’t very helpful. There is no actual evidence that Fithian was killed by Ottis Toole, and as we all know he would often confess to murders that he didn’t commit. He died at the age of forty-nine while in prison.
Detective Kastilahn suspects that because Toole knew he was going to die in prison he had nothing to lose, and that is probably why he confessed to so many homicides that he had nothing to do with: ‘he claimed to have killed people in Colorado, but he was so vague in his statements that to my knowledge, he wasn’t really linked to anything in Colorado. He claimed to have been in Colorado, and claimed to have killed people in Colorado, but that wasn’t verified.’ … ‘He said, you know, he really couldn’t remember… um, the detective was trying to describe where the murder happened, north of Denver, northeast of Denver. He was just, non-committal. Like, ‘yeah, I’m not sure if I was there. I might of killed her,’ is what he basically said.’
Ted Bundy: At the time Marjorie was killed in late June 1975 Ted Bundy was still out in the community living the good life and wasn’t arrested until later that August. He was residing in his first Utah apartment located on First Avenue in SLC and was attending law school at the University of Utah; he was towards the end of his multi-year, long-distance romance with Elizabeth Kloepfer, who he was not even remotely faithful to.
In a Reddit group called ‘r/CrimeJunkiePodcast,’ a user going by the handle ‘Awakeningosiri’ posted about Fithian’s murder and whether or not Bundy could have been responsible for it, and she brought up a lot of good points: ‘Bundy was in the right region, at the right time, with a known victim type and vehicle match. This case has more circumstantial alignment than many others tied to him. His geographic range and risk profile by 1975 make him a strong person of interest.’
Roggen is only about an hour and a half away from Vail, where Bundy abducted 26-year-old ski instructor Julie Cunningham on March 15, 1975, and as we know he was known to drive long distances when stalking his prey and often did it in public places (like a bus station). For example, he drove over 262 miles to Sackett Hall at Oregon State College to abduct Kathy Parks while he was living at the Roger’s Rooming House on 12th Avenue in Seattle. However, Fithian was killed with a gun, and where it isn’t confirmed that Ted used such a weapon Carol DaRonch said that when he tried to kidnap her on November 8, 1974 he pulled out ‘a small pistol’ (its also worth mentioning that most of his victims weren’t recovered so we’ll never really know how he killed them). Additionally, it was reported that the suspicious vehicle fleeing the scene was a 1960’s yellow/brownish car with ripped black roof, and as we all know Bundy drove a solid-colored beige 1968 VW Beetle.
This is also fairly obvious, and if you’re a seasoned reader you don’t need me to point out that Marjorie also fit very neatly into Bundy’s typical victim type: she was slim, young, and beautiful, and had light brown hair that she wore long and parted down the middle. She was also traveling alone and was in a public place, however I’ve never heard of him going after a woman that had a child with them. Like Toole, there is no evidence linking Ted to Fithian’s murder.
Recent Years: In the early 2000’s Fithian’s case was reopened, and detectives hoped that a fresh set of eyes on the investigation (as well as modern day forensic techniques) would help them, however that wasn’t exactly what happened. According to Sheriff Reams, who was a detective at the time, ‘in 1975 in Weld County the resources just probably were not as available to work a case like this. And the manpower that would have been necessary to track down those leads and find people in Denver and various other areas and it seems simple now, I wish we could go back and try again. And every year that goes by you realize it’s just that much farther from probably having that likelihood. I worry about all that stuff, and to be honest with you when I went back and looked for this case file I was able to find a certain amount of information that was stored on-site. And then once I got back from the FBI Academy I went out to a place where we used to store archives and I found another box of documents or evidence related to this case: photo and what not that were in a place where those items should have never been. And so, yeah I worry about what steps were done and not properly documented or not or were properly retained. I hate the idea of potentially saying, ‘hey, basics steps weren’t taken, and if they were they certainly weren’t done in a way that was documented that we would have expected by today’s standards.’’
Even Detective Van Arsdale said that looking back, if he could do it all over again, he would have handled the case completely differently and would have done a much better job at documenting what happened: ‘We didn’t have our act together very well. We had not gotten our crime scene techs trained yet, they weren’t in place. So we had those patrol officers trying to do their job but they didn’t really know what they were doing.’
Sage: Marjorie’s son is now in his fifties and agreed to speak with Ashley Flowers and her team of investigators for a podcast about his mother: ‘my first name is Dylan, and I’m named after Bob Dylan. And then Sage I think after Sage Brush. So, you know, that’s definitely from that era of time, I think. She was a painter, she wrote poetry and I have a couple scrapbooks of some of her work. And we all have pictures or paintings as well.’ He went on to tell Flowers that he has some of his mom’s vinyl albums and where none of his kids got her red hair he wonders if perhaps they got some of her talents. He also said that his aunt and grandma did a good job of protecting him from the brutal details surrounding her death when he was a kid, and about it he said, ‘you know, I think about my children at that age, and to tell them… yeah, that would be difficult for them. I had a good support system around me.’ He also said that over the years he’s tried not to obsess about the investigation or why his life was spared, but he would still like to know who did it, if only for his family: ‘I don’t think you can lose a daughter or a sister or a mother and not be traumatized by it., especially when it’s the way that it happened. So, you know, kind of putting the pieces together, again, just to bring closure for everybody.’
In March 2020 Detective Kastilahn began working on Weld County cold cases full time, and he knew there was a lot of pressure to get this murder in particular solved. So, he immediately got to work reading through all the case notes and began reinterviewing everyone that was still alive from the original investigation. The following month he tracked down Robbie, who was the only one of the four original men that were investigated for Fithian’s murder: he admitted that he lied about everything and had completely made up the story about Vern shooting Fithian because he was mad at him about something at the time, and said that was why they had burned down his garage.
In the spring of 2020, Detective Kastilahn was able to track down the young man that Marjorie had gone on a date with on the day before her murder, who told him that he was in fact interviewed by police back when the crime took place in 1975 despite there being no record of it anywhere in the case file (even though he was never considered a suspect). The detective did admit that one thing stuck out to him about the man that made absolutely no sense to him: he said that he was the one that dropped Marjorie and Sage off at the bus station in Denver the morning she was killed, which completely contradicts what police thought was the truth. Fithian’s uncle has since passed away so there’s no way to confirm this, however Kastilahn suspects it’s a simple memory mix-up and that he was confused. Ashley Flowers asked the detective what kind of car he drove at the time and if it matched the sedan that was seen speeding away from the scene on the morning of the murder, but he said he has no idea.
Detective Kastilahn also tracked down the cousins that Fithian had visited with in the days prior to her death, and they all maintained that they don’t remember anything out of the ordinary about the visit: ‘It’s an unfortunate case as far as leads go. Nobody had threatened her and her family and friends didn’t know of anyone that had a problem with her.’
The last significant event in relation to the case happened in the fall of 2020 when Weld County Sheriff’s received a phone call from a woman who had a strange encounter in June 1975 around the same time that Marjorie was killed: according to Detective Kastilahn, ‘she said that she was walking north of UNC, maybe on 13th Avenue on 12th Avenue or someplace around there. Back around this time in June 1975 there was this guy in a van slowly following her, and she’s walking down the road. And she’s looking back and he’s just staring at her. And she looks super creepy. And she’s not liking this at all. So the van finally goes ahead and turns right, so she keeps walking and then as she’s walking she sees the van is parked on that cross street, like it was waiting for her. And so she starts walking up to this house, like maybe he’ll think that I live here and he’ll leave me alone. Well, the van starts up and comes over and parks in front of the house so she goes into the house and she’s freaking out now and she thinking ‘thank God the door was unlocked. So she goes into the house and closes the door. And then there’s this old couple in their sixties that were sitting in their chairs reading the newspapers going, ‘what is this lady doing?’’
‘And she locks the door and hides behind the door, and the guy comes up and starts banging on the door and he tries to open the door. Like, thank God she locked it. So, that’s a crazy story. She didn’t get a license plate or anything but she wanted to give this information to us.’ The detective said that he couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps there was a man stalking young women in June 1975 in Colorado and wishes there was some DNA to work with, but none was collected at the scene and that ‘it’s going to take either a confession or somebody to get implicated. A confession is probably the best thing that’s going to get complete closure and a conviction.’
Sheriff Reams told Flowers that he has worked some nasty cases, but never one quite like this one: ‘It’s only by the grace of God that kid is still alive, and his life was spared. I can’t imagine what went through someone’s head or how they could sleep from that day forward, knowing what they’d done. Even if we never solve it, I hope that they burn in hell for the rest of their lives for what they did.’
Conclusion: Thankfully about his mother’s murder Sage doesn’t remember anything, and only knows stories about her secondhand through her family and friends memories. He now resides outside of Colorado with his wife and children.
PFC James Reese died at the age of 71 in Phoenix, CA and according to his meager obituary, he ‘passed away on June 29, 2016 and if you have any information regarding this person, please call Legacy Funeral Home.’
Marjorie’s father died at the age of eighty-four on February 27, 2005 in Greeley and he is laid to rest at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver; his wife Erma passed away on November 2, 2001. Her mother passed away at the age of eighty-six on December 12, 2009 in Greeley, and according to her obituary she retired from teaching in 1987 and afterwards became a Peer Counselor for North Range Behavioral Health for five years; Betty was a life long student, reader, artist, and strong Christian woman. As of July 2025, Marjorie’s sister Virginia Lynn is 68 years old and lives in Elizabeth, Colorado, and her other sister Christine is still residing in their hometown of Greeley; David Warren Fithian also currently resides in Greeley with his wife.
About the murder, in 2002 Terry Furnish said: ‘as long as it’s been, it’s hard to say. I wish I knew more, I really do. I’ve thought about it a thousand times. Had I come up on it right when it happened and the people would have been there you wonder what you would have done then because there’s probably a good chance you would have been shot at, also. It’s a sad thing and you’d like to see closure but with it being so long ago it’s a hard thing, but they do that every once in a while.’ As of July 2025 it is unknown if Marjorie’s DNA was ever tested with modern forensic techniques, however it is known that no sample was collected at the crime scene back in June 1975.
Works Cited:
‘Cat Leigh.’ ‘Toddler Found Holding His Dying Mother’s Hand On The Side Of A Road.’ (August 5, 2023). Taken July 8, 2025 from medium.com
Ashley Flowers, The Deck Podcast: ‘Marjorie Sue Fithian – Wild Card, Colorado.’ Taken July 10, 2025 from thedeckpodcast.com
Gabel, Rachel. ‘Rural Colorado murder from 1975 sparks national attention.’ (August 19, 2022). Taken July 7, 29025 from thefencepost.com
Hudson, Edward. ‘City Detective Held As a Slayer for Hire.’ (February 15, 1976). Taken July 11, 2025 from theNewYorkTimes.com
Moylan, Joe. ‘A look at more of Weld’s most heinous crimes.’ (May 28, 2020). Taken July 10, 2025 from GreeleyTribune.com
‘Segura, Daniella. ‘Toddler found holding dead mom’s hand in 1975, CO cops say. Now, push for answers.’ (June 25, 2025).
‘TaraCalicosBike’ on Reddit, post titled: ‘In June of 1975, twenty three year old Marjorie Fithian was found dead on a desolate gravel road in Colorado. She had gunshot wound to her face, and her 18 month old son was sitting beside her, holding her hand. Who killed Marjorie?’ in the hub, ‘UnsolvedMysteries.’
Worrell, Georgia. ‘Greeley woman killed for unknown reasons.’ (April 22, 2022). Taken on July 8, 2025 from http://www.longmontleader.com
Greeley, Colorado. Technically, it’s where he died as well.
Amanda ‘Mandy’ Lyn Steingasser.
Introduction: Amanda ‘Mandy’ Lyn Steingasser was born on July 5, 1976 to Richard and Loraine (nee Huffman) in North Tonawanda, NY. Richard (who was affectionately called ‘Carp’) was born on October 11, 1944 in Buffalo, NY and was employed as a millwright for Fedders Manufacturing Company, which is known for its contributions to the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning industry. Loraine Huffman was born on November 29, 1950 and worked as a customer service representative at CCMA, LLC, a global supply chain for users of metals whose primary business is the marketing and distribution of alloying metals and ores to the iron, steel, ferro-alloys and aluminum industries.
Background: In the fall of 1993 Mandy was a senior at North Tonawanda High School, and upon completion had plans of attending Niagara County Community College (but for what exactly, she was unsure). She was 5’5″ tall, weighed 135 pounds, had blue eyes, and wore her blonde hair long and midway down her back; she hung out with an eclectic group of people, and had some friends that were classified as jocks and others that were considered ‘freaks.’ A passionate environmentalist and animal enthusiast, she especially loved turtles and adored her family’s sheepdog, Sam. Like most young women her age, Mandy loved music, especially classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Janice Joplin, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.
Mandy was her parents’ only child and the apple of her dad’s eye, however the Steingassers were definitely aware that their daughter wasn’t perfect: she didn’t get straight A’s, and at times didn’t always follow the rules. When she was fifteen, she had started to party and had begun dabbling with drinking and marijuana… but, for the most part she was a typical teenager and didn’t push the boundaries too much. Her parents were aware of her extracurricular activities and accepted them, knowing she wasn’t experimenting with anything ‘too hard,’ always made her curfew, and her grades didn’t slip. A middle to working class city, at the time in 1993 North Tonawanda was made up of roughly 33,000 people and their citizens prided themselves on how safe it was, especially when compared to nearby Buffalo and Niagara Falls.
September 18, 1993: On the evening of Saturday, September 18, 1993 Mandy told her parents that she was going out with some friends, and in response to this, they told her to be home at midnight. When she left the family home she met up with some friends: her best friend, seventeen-year-old Stacie Blazynski, Brian Frank, and Wayne Mielcarek, who was over twenty-one and had his own apartment. The friends first stop was at the liquor store, where they purchased some cheap whiskey and rum, and from there they went to Mielcarek’s place and had a few drinks. At roughly 9:00 PM they got into Eric’s car and drove to a club in nearby Buffalo with hopes to see a band, but because the girls were underage they weren’t allowed in. From there they went to an unnamed friend’s apartment in Buffalo and hung out for a bit, then went back to Wayne’s apartment, where they continued to imbibe.
That evening Stacie had plans of sleeping over at the Steingasser home, but midnight came and went and the girls realized they had missed their curfew… perhaps if had they been sober and in the right frame of mind they would have thought to call Mandy’s parents to let them know they’d be late… but the Steingassers never heard from their daughter. At some point earlier in the night the friends had learned about a house party just a few doors down from Mielcarek’s apartment, and they decided to check it out. At around 1 AM they began their short walk down Ironton Street, and that’s when a car with several men pulled up beside them and accused Mielcarek and Frank of harassing a local woman in the neighborhood. The boys told them that they must have mistaken them for someone else but they were relentless, and two of them got out of the car and jumped Frank, and kicked him after pulling him onto the ground. The other man grabbed a nearby broken glass bottle and cut Wayne’s arm, and as this was happening Mandy and Blazynski were forced to helplessly stand by and watch.
At around 1:30 AM they heard sirens wailing in the distance and everyone scattered: Steingasser’s three friends headed towards Mielcarek’s apartment, but according to them she went the other way and headed toward First Avenue, where the house party was. According to Brian Frank, ‘we screamed her name five or six times, ‘Mandy, Mandy.’ We were all in shock.’ As they were parting ways Blazynski said that Steingasser told her that she didn’t want to be taken home by the police, and Frank later testified that he noticed an unknown male that happened to be walking in the same direction as she was.
After they parted ways that night Mandy most likely began to make her way home and was roughly a mile away when a woman at a nearby payphone said that she saw her walking and that a man driving a black 1984 Pontiac 6000 that was moving in the opposite direction quickly made a U-turn at Sixth Avenue and pulled up beside her. She said that she observed Steingasser speak with him for a few minutes through the passenger’s side window then eventually got in and it drove off. It was the last time Mandy Steingasser was seen alive, and Rich and Loraine reported her missing the following day; they offered a $5,000 reward for any information that led to the return of their daughter.
In the month after her disappearance more than 5,000 flyers with Mandy’s face on it had been passed out across the Western New York area, and according to Loraine: ‘we have one done up in English, and Spanish, or the Puerto Rican section of Buffalo. Because there was a fight that night, a ruckus , and it involved Puerto Ricans. And nobody really saw Mandy after that, except for this one kid that gave her a ride.’ … ‘ We put (in the flyer) out to the Puerto Rican section, not to say that they took her, but somebody might have seen something.’ About the street fight Mandy witnessed the last night she was seen alive, the NT retired Chief of Police Lloyd Graves said that ‘the girls weren’t’ involved at all. There were some kids in a car, and evidently, they had a little altercation with some other boys there. But I don’t know if that had anything to do with her disappearance. I kind of doubt it, because that was quite a while before she disappeared.’
The Days After: On September 19, 1993, Loraine Steingasser filed a missing persons report with the North Tonawanda police, who initially regarded Mandy as a runaway. Because of that, a few days afterwards she reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation: ‘I know she didn’t run away because she would have called. I wanted somebody who would take it a little more seriously.’ In the early days of Mandy’s disappearance there was some back and forth in regards to the FBI possibly getting involved, however when Mandy’s remains were later uncovered they completely backed out, which makes sense as no crime took place across state lines. Those that knew Mandy said it was completely out of character for her to disappear, and immediately knew that she hadn’t run away or left on her own free will. In their search efforts investigators used bloodhounds, helicopters, and hours upon hours of searching on foot, with absolutely no luck.
In the days following Steingassers disappearance the young man that picked her up came into the Tonawanda Police station: in a conversation with detectives on September 22, 1993, 18-year old Joseph H. Belstadt said that he knew Mandy because they went to the same high school and that he picked her up and started to drive her home. A few minutes into their drive he claimed that she changed her mind and told him to drop her off at a nearby house party instead, so he turned around and dropped her off at Holy Protection Orthodox Church at roughly 1:30 AM (which was only a few blocks away from where the street fight took place). He said that when Mandy got out she walked up to ‘a young man of Puerto Rican descent’ that was sitting on its front steps; it was the last time he saw her, and he told investigators that afterwards he went to Canada with some friends. When NT detectives later investigated his story, they immediately found that it had several holes in it: no one saw him drop Mandy off at the church close to a local mini-mart, and no one knew the identity of the young man that she met up with that night. Despite this, at the time they said they had no reason to doubt Belstadt’s story.
Some portions of Belstadt’s story were confirmed by eyewitnesses who saw Mandy get into his car: sisters Tanya and Rebecca Coughlin lived in an apartment at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Oliver Street, and in the early morning hours of September 19, 1993 Tanya was outside of the residence and Rebecca was looking out their front window. Both young women confirmed that they saw a car drive past her then quickly make a U-turn so it could pull up beside her at the intersection; Steingasser and the driver spoke for a few minutes before she eventually got in and it drove away, turning around to drive in the direction that she had originally been walking in. The sisters both recognized Joseph Belstadt as the driver because they knew him from their old neighborhood where he had also lived, and Rebecca identified Steingasser as the young woman who got into his car because she recognized her from school.
There was, however a key part of the sister’s story that differed from Belstadt’s: after they drove away Rebecca remained in front of the window that was looking out onto the street for another five to six more minutes, which means he hadn’t ‘quickly turned his car around’ like he claimed he did to drive Mandy back to the intersection of Oliver and First, because if he did she would have seen his car drive by her apartment.
Detectives in North Tonawanda soon discovered that Belstadt had asked his friends Jerry Miller and Sherry Carrazzolo to lie about his whereabouts on the morning that Mandy was last seen alive. Miller, who was actually his best friend, told investigators that he, Joe, and three other friends were cruising around earlier that evening, and Belstadt was pulled over and given two tickets for traffic violations; afterwards, they went to the City of Tonawanda Police Department, where he unsuccessfully tried to fight the citations. Afterwards, the five friends sat in his car and thought about what they wanted to do for the rest of the night. Miller suggested a trip to Canada, but Belstadt said he didn’t want to and ‘just wanted to drive around,’ so his four friends went across the border without him.
Miller said that the friends returned home to NT later that morning, and when he drove by Belstadt’s Mother’s house a few hours later he noticed that his car wasn’t in the driveway. He also said they saw his friend two days later and that was when he asked him to lie for him, and if questioned to tell the police he should say that he went with them to Canada on September 18/19, 1993. Detectives in North Tonawanda also said that a man that knew Belstadt reported that he saw him that same morning at roughly around 2 AM and noticed that his car was wet, and when asked about it he said that he had ‘just had it washed.’ Additionally, two eyewitnesses came forward and said they saw him at a coin operated car wash at roughly 2:15 AM, which was about an hour and fifteen minutes after Steingasser was last seen alive.
Belstadt did agree to a polygraph examination, however got upset because he didn’t like the ‘tone’ of the questions he was being asked and stormed out. He eventually came in for a second exam where he was asked only two things: ‘are you involved in the disappearance of Mandy,’ and ‘are you withholding any information.’ He said ‘no’ to both questions and the administrators of the polygraph determined that Belstadt was not telling the truth, however because due to a lack of evidence nothing could be done. At the time of the examination detectives still had no idea what had happened to Mandy, and her family was still holding onto hope that she would be found. Her boyfriend Christopher Palesh had moved to Florida on September 17, 1993, which was two days before she went missing, and her parents were hoping that she had just taken off to be with him.
During her daughter’s murder trial in October 2021, Mrs. Steingasser testified that she told her to be home by midnight, mostly because she had spent the night with Chris about a week before; she also said that ‘anytime she went anywhere, she had to call me and when she came home, she had to wake me up.’ But it never came, and the only two telephone calls Loraine received on September 18 and 19, 1993 were a hang-up and one from an unknown male who ‘asked if Mandy was home;’ she later testified that she recognized her daughter’s friend Stacie’s voice in the background saying, ‘ask if Mandy’s home.’
In early October 1993 about two weeks after their daughter disappeared Mr. and Mrs. Steingasser were out grocery shopping when they happened to overhear one of the store’s employees talking about Mandy, and that she had been found in NT. Loraine said: ‘I kind of like, lost it, because it sounded like they knew what they were talking about. I thought, ‘oh my God,’ are the police lying to me?’ I came home and called the police station.’ The former mayor of North Tonawanda James A. McGinnis said of the incident ‘somebody seems to be getting joy out of the NY high school senior, and somebody seems to be getting joy out of spreading false rumors. And it puts a really terrible stress on the family. The story started on a Friday about them finding a body on the Roblin Steel site. It’s absolutely not true.’ According to Police Chief Lloyd C. Graves, ‘we went over the whole area originally, and we’ve been back over it a couple of times, and other places. Anytime we get a tip, we follow it up.’ It’s speculated that the rumor may have started because of the return of NY police to the Roblin Steel Plant, and it greatly upset Steingassers friend group, who according to her mother were ‘crying, and they’re taking it so bad. We’re just trying to nip it in the bud. Because people are taking down the flyers, And we don’t want that. Everybody tends to believe the worst.’
About Mandy, retired North Tonawanda detective chief Gabriel DiBernardo said that her disappearance was ‘totally out of character. We’re appealing to anyone and everyone to call us with any information.’ About her daughter’s disappearance, Mrs. Steingasser, ‘I still feel that there are people out there who saw something and haven’t come forward. Please give us the information. You don’t know what we’re going through.’
Discovery: On the afternoon of October 25, 1993 thirty-six days after Steingasser was last seen alive, two men were out scavenging for mushrooms near Bond Lake Park in Lewiston, and as they were walking along a trail they smelled something pungent and decaying: when they peered down into a ravine they discovered a body on a steep embankment leading to Meyers Lake. The spot is described as a ‘lovers lane,’ of sorts, and police would frequently find kids parked there, partying and ‘being intimate.’ Charles Keith Shepherd, one of the men that spotted Steingasser’s remains at the park that day, said he was walking along the crevasse with his brother-in-law when they saw denim on the edge, and when his BIL got closer he realized what they found, and immediately left to call the sheriff’s department.
When police arrived on the scene they discovered the remains of a young woman, whose pants had been pulled halfway down and her bra was wrapped around her neck; there was a pint sized liquor bottle in the pocket of her jean jacket. Because of the body’s advanced level of decomposition investigators were unable to immediately make a positive identification on the scene, however the victim had on the same clothes that Steingasser was last seen wearing. What detectives surmised had happened based on the crime scene was: her killer had taken her to a secluded, out of the way place and tried to put ‘the moves’ on her. When he started to pull her pants down she stopped him, and he got angry and he hit her on the head; he then ripped her bra off and strangled her with it. When the victim was deceased, he pushed her remains down the embankment in the park with the hope that it would roll into the lake, however some bushes stopped it.
An autopsy was performed the following day by Dr. Sung-Ook Baik, and dental records were used in making a positive identification. She had been strangled, and her blue bra was still tied around her neck; she also had a hairline skull fracture in front of her left ear. According to a MD during her trial, the skull fracture occurred while Mandy was still alive, because there was bleeding under her scalp at the left temple. Additionally, she had a brain bleed, a chip in the fingernail of her left pinky finger finger, tearing on her jeans and bra, was not wearing any shoes, and all of the hooks on her bra were broken; she had not been sexually assaulted.
Not only did investigators have a theory regarding what happened to Steingasser, they also had a prime suspect in mind: Joseph Belstadt. Their biggest hindrance was a lack of evidence proving guilt. Police obtained a search warrant and seized his car, and when it was examined they found a pubic hair in the backseat, but further testing proved it belonged to neither Steingasser or Belstadt. After her remains were found detectives questioned him again, and that was when he admitted that he had lied about going to Canada with his friends because he thought he needed an alibi or he would have looked guilty. In reality, he told them that he had just gone to a donut shop after he dropped Steingasser off at the church and knew nothing about her murder. He also said he had never been to the area where her remains were uncovered, but once again detectives learned that he had lied to them: during his trial, a woman named Stephanie Bartlett-Landes testified that Belstadt took her to the ‘park-like setting’ in Lewiston twice in the summer of 1993 when she was only 15-years-old, and they had parked a few dozen feet away from where Mandy’s body was eventually found.
A Case Gone Cold: In the first few months of the investigation detectives conducted interviews with dozens upon dozens of Steingassers friends/family/acquaintances/schoolmates, but every lead dried up and it wasn’t long before the investigation went cold. There was some renewed buzz in the case in August 2000 when The Buffalo News published an article about the murder, and in it the writer didn’t name Belstadt as the suspect due to the fact that he had not been officially identified. In the nearly seven years since the murder, five detectives that worked on the case said they all thought that he was the killer, with one even saying that the ‘whole city of Tonawanda knew who killed Mandy,’ but there was nothing they could do about it due to lack of evidence.
The public accused the police of covering up Mandy’s death and of not doing their jobs properly, and said it wasn’t right that they let Belstadt skate. The Niagara County DA on the other hand did feel that there was enough evidence to charge him, and that after DNA testing it turned out that a hair that had been found on Mandy’s body could have belonged to him, but it was not conclusive. Belstadt was interviewed for the article, and he claimed that he didn’t kill Mandy and they parted ways when he dropped her off outside of North Tonawanda church.
In the years since Mandy’s murder Joseph Belstadt served some time in jail for auto theft, and claimed that her friends and family had continuously harassed him, and as a consequence he ended up dropping out of high school about a month after her remains were discovered; additionally, he was forced to move out of state because he was ‘afraid for his life.’ He also claimed that shortly after the homicide someone fired a gun outside of his home in what he thought was an attempt to intimidate him. In 1999 while drinking at a bar one of her friends came up to him, called him a murderer then proceeded to get into a fistfight with him. He also felt that the investigation was ‘biased against him’ and he wanted the North Tonawanda police department to leave him alone, and he was certain that one day detectives were going to come out with false evidence to arrest him.
As it turned out, Belstadt’s family had at one point taunted the police in relation to Steingasser’s murder: in 1997 the lead investigator in the case was working PT as bouncer at a music venue, and one night a country band was playing and when he looked out into the crowd he made eye contact with his brother, Jamie. A few minutes after he began shouting out a song request, and immediately the detective knew he was taunting him: it wasn’t a country song, it was ‘Mandy’ by Barry Manilow.
In a test performed in 2002 by retired Erie County Central Police Services lab technician Paul Hojnacki, Belstadt’s sperm was found on a piece of material taken from his car seat, however the female DNA profile that was also found did not belong to Steingasser. He also said that none of his DNA was on any of Mandy’s clothes or on her body, and that he looked for sperm or semen but ‘didn’t find any.’ Mark Henderson, a retired forensic chemist and serologist for the Niagara County Sheriff’s Department, didn’t attend Steingassers autopsy in October 1993, but he did take over custody of the clothing and tissue samples that were taken that day. For over twenty-five years the materials were tested and retested as technology improved: ‘I swabbed anything that looked like possibly a stain,’ including the jewelry that was found on Steingasser’s remains, a pint bottle of Southern Comfort found in the pocket of her jacket, underneath her fingernails, and her underwear; Henderson clarified that he took five small pieces of cloth from the underwear she was wearing. In 2017 he said he used a small vacuum on the clothing from Steingasser’s remains after spraying them with a special solution in hopes of turning up more DNA.
In the years after their daughter’s murder the Steingassers had a tough time coping: they left her room just the way it was on the night they had last seen her. All of her clothes still hung in the closet, and the Led Zeppelin posters were still affixed on the wall. About the tragedy Mr. Steingasser said that ‘I tried not to think about it. I know we’re never gonna get her back, you gotta get on with your life. I try to keep it out of my mind, but there are twenty things that happen every day to remind me of her. The memories keep coming back.’
2018: The years kept ticking by. Sadly Mandy’s father passed away on March 14, 2015 without her murder being solved. Police did more testing on the pubic hair that was found in Belstadt’s back seat, and once again it came back ‘no match found.’ In 2017 the case was officially reopened, and in the twenty-four years since the murder forensic technology had greatly improved, and there was finally some progress that was made in relation to the investigation. Amongst the debris that was vacuumed up from the back seat of Belstadt’s car, forensic technicians were able to find a second pubic hair, and in early 2018 they did testing on both hairs: a forensic expert noted that on the root of one of them there was some tissue that was left behind, which suggests it came out with force. On March 10, 2018 detectives finally got the answers they had waited so long to hear: the pubic hairs found in Joseph Belstadt’s car belonged to Mandy Steingasser. They also determined that fibers that were found stuck to her body belonged to carpet from the vehicle as well.
Arrest: On April 24, 2018 Joseph Belstadt was arrested for the murder of Mandy Steingasser, and he was released on $250,000 bail. After he was arrested the NT police continued to investigate and collect evidence against him, and one thing they uncovered was that male DNA that was found in Mandy’s underwear wasn’t his, and instead belonged to her boyfriend, Chris Palesh.
In the decades since Steingassers murder Palace had been arrested on three separate occasions for domestic violence as well as animal cruelty charges, and when the North Tonawanda PD asked him for a DNA sample he initially refused. In 2019 they went through his parents’ trash and collected two used plastic forks, and upon learning this he came forward and ‘willingly volunteered’ a sample of his DNA, which lab techs compared to the sample taken from the crime scene; it was a match. Palesh told detectives that he did have consensual sex with Steingasser roughly a week before she was last seen alive, however it is important to keep something in mind: according to Senior Forensic Criminologist Keith Paul Meyers with the Niagara County Sheriff’s Department, ‘studies have shown that DNA can survive up to three laundry cycles.’
Trial: Belstadt’s trial began on October 25, 2021 at the Angelo DelSignore Civic Building in Niagara Falls, which happened to be the 28th anniversary of the day that Mandy’s body was found. The prosecution didn’t have a ‘magic bullet’ piece of evidence, and instead argued that nearly every piece of circumstantial evidence pointed to Belstadt being the killer. When shown a picture of her daughter in court, Mrs. Steingasser pointed out that in it she was: ‘wearing the same vest she was found wearing. She’s wearing the same ring she was found wearing. She called it her lucky ring. It was mine.’
The defense argued that none of the evidence that had been presented proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Belstadt killed Mandy: the pubic hairs were the most damning thing against him, and his lawyers argued that they could have been on the outside of her clothes and had fallen off while she was in his vehicle. They said that ultimately, they only proved that Steingasser was in his car at some point before she disappeared, which is what he had maintained since the beginning.
Belstadt’s attorneys argued that after the initial stages of the investigation (remember that on night he was first questioned he lied about where he was when Mandy disappeared) their client was cooperative with investigators, and told jurors that no evidence existed that proved he made any sort of advance towards her, and that quite a few of the samples that were tested actually excluded him. The defense also said that the prosecution was relying on eyewitness testimony that was twenty-six years old, and they would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt when, how, or where Steingasser was killed; according to Belstadt’s attorney Michele Bergevin: ‘most importantly, the government, after you hear all of the evidence, will not be able to prove to you beyond a reasonable doubt who, if anyone, intentionally took the life of Mandy Steingasser.’
In an article published on November 8, 2021 by The News Niagara Reporter, during the trial Mandy’s first cousin Carolyn Steingasser-Tucker testified in court that she, along with Jennifer Zuhr, confronted Belstadt in a hallway at North Tonawanda High School in October 1993, and they ‘asked him, ‘what did you do with Mandy?’ She went on to say that Zuhr did most of the talking, and at one point she grabbed him by the shirt and shoved him against a wall outside the school cafeteria in front of many witnesses: ‘the hallway was full. He said, ‘I didn’t do anything with her,’ and that he only planned on taking her to her house but when they got to the Memorial Pool on Payne Avenue she decided she didn’t want to go home; so he turned around in a Burger King parking lot and took her back to the church where he originally picked her up.’
Michele Bergevin asked Tucker if she remembered taking ‘a lynching party’ to his house, and in response she said she knew nothing about that. When Bergevin pressed her about the incident in the hallway she said she was never interviewed by police about it, and that Belstadt didn’t fight back, and he ‘cowered’ instead, like ‘the little, scrawny, pimply-faced kid he was’ (those were his attorney’s words).
In court, Mandy’s friend Stacie admitted that she made the hang-up call to the Steingasser residence that night, and that Mielcarek made the second one, however Frank said that Wayne made both calls. Mielcarek said he doesn’t remember calling anyone that night, but said that he did remember Joseph Belstadt knocking on the door to his home on the morning of September 19 to ask if he knew where Mandy was. Wayne, who barely knew Belstadt, said that ‘he said she was missing,’ he later testified, which he said was news to him: ‘I said, ‘How do you know she’s missing?’ He said he gave her a ride.’ Mielcarek said he told Belstadt to take his information to the police, and about the encounter said ‘he came over out of the blue. I didn’t know how he knew where I lived. I hadn’t seen him since high school. He said he gave her a ride that night, that morning. I said he should go to the police station.’ He also said that Belstadt seemed ‘just kind of worried, jumpy. He seemed worried about her. Maybe they were friends.’
There has been a long-standing dispute regarding the exact date that Belstadt went to Mielcarek’s residence: in 1993 Wayne signed a formal statement with detectives saying it took place on September 21, and not on the morning of September 19. Michele Bergevin pointed out that if that was true then Mielcarek already knew Steingasser was missing when Belstadt had visited him.
According to a Buffalo News article published in November 2021, Christopher A. Grassi of Endicott, who served time with Belstadt at the Cayuga Correctional Facility in 2000 and 2001, testified during the trial that he confided in him that ‘he strangled a girl during a three-person sexual encounter in his car.’ He also said that the defendant went by the nickname ‘Squirrelly’ while serving time for arson after he got caught torching a stolen car; Christopher was there for hiring a man to burn down his nightclub for the insurance money. Grassi said he told him that he was driving his car while a friend of his was having sex with the female in the back seat. In response to this, Michele Bergevin called him ‘nothing but a fraudster’ and said that he didn’t even know her client in prison.
Bergevin also accused Grassi of paying another inmate on the prison buildings and grounds crew to feed him information about Belstadt so he could relay it to the North Tonawanda police, who had visited him at the prison looking for information related to Mandy’s murder: “Isn’t it true you actually paid Christopher Bennett for information about Joe Belstadt, just like you paid somebody to burn down your nightclub?’ Grassi denied it but did admit that his memory of the event wasn’t very good: ‘I don’t even remember 90% of it. Whatever is in my statement is what I remember.’
Neither side placed the statement in evidence, so the jury never will get to read it and decide for themselves what Grassi told the North Tonawanda detectives in June 2001. Bergevin said that Chris Bennett died in January 2021, which she said was, ‘lucky for you, huh?’ directed towards Grassi. The DA went on to say that Bennett ‘researched this about Joe Belstadt and this young girl that went missing, and he made up a story,’ and to this Grassi said: ‘I am not aware of that.’
Retired North Tonawanda detective William Carosella was one of the officers that was tasked with collecting items from Belstadt’s car a few days after Steingasser was last seen alive, and when questioned by the defense if he recalled collecting any cigarette and/or marijuana butts, he replied that he couldn’t recall from memory if either of items were recovered. He admitted to the court that where he couldn’t remember every single item collected, he did remember that they collected into evidence a tire iron, a piece of wood with a nail sticking out of it, carpet from the trunk of the vehicle, and other miscellaneous debris. Additionally, from Belstadt’s vehicle, forensic experts collected three carpet fibers from the trunk, debris from the side panels, various items that had miscellaneous hairs on them, dirt from the tire treads, and several other miscellaneous items, which were all listed individually in the search warrant inventory.
The defense suggested a different suspect completely: Christopher Palesh, and argued that his semen was found on her underwear and he had a history of violence. In response to this, the prosecution said that may have exonerated Belstadt if it had had been a rape case, but Steingasser hadn’t been sexually assaulted. Also testifying in the trial was Christopher’s mother Carol Pelesh, who said she remembered her son for Florida leaving ‘on a Friday,’ which would have been September 17, 1993. Also, Mandy’s friend Jennifer Chiaravalle testified that she remembered taking her to Palesh’s house on September 17, 1993, and it was the last time they saw each other, as he left later that day: ‘he was leaving for Florida that day and she wanted to say goodbye.’
Guilty: The trial lasted three weeks, during which sixty-five witnesses testified to the jury, which was made up of six men and six women. After both sides said their peace and the jury went back to deliberate, it only took them ten hours over two days to come to a determination: on November 17, 2021 Joseph Belstadt was found guilty of second-degree murder; he was immediately remanded into custody. According to Niagara County DA Brian Seaman, the death of Steingasser was: ‘a horrendous and violent crime. He fractured this girl’s skull and strangled her with her own bra. That kind of calls for the maximum sentence.’ … ‘For 28 years, the murder of Mandy Steingasser has been an open wound in the community of North Tonawanda and Niagara County. She has not been forgotten by her family, her friends, her loved ones. Not by the North Tonawanda police. Today, finally, twenty-eight-years later, her killer has been brought to justice. He will now suffer the consequences of his heinous actions.’
Belstadt was sentenced to twenty-five years, and has maintained his innocence this entire time; during his sentencing, he said: ‘I would like to say to Mandy’s family and friends how sorry I am for the pain they’ve gone through, but I am not the person who killed Mandy. I’ve been saying that since day one, and that’s not going to change. I did not kill Mandy Steingasser.’ To this, DA Seaman disagreed and said: ‘my response to that is we put out the evidence before a jury, that jury found this defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and the jury’s verdict stands and they found the proper verdict in this case.’ About the verdict, Loraine Steingasser said that ‘during the time Joe Belstadt has been living his life, my daughter did not.’
It Runs in the Family: According to an article published in The Buffalo News on April 28, 2018, when it comes to Joe’s brother Jamie Paul Belstadt, his attorney Barry N. Covert said that he ‘has always indicated that he is willing to cooperate with authorities about the murder case. He’s always maintained that he has no information to give them about the Steinhasser case. He simply doesn’t know anything.’ Jamie also said that he was questioned about the disappearance in mid-April 2018 and although he provided investigators with a sample of his DNA he also told them that he wouldn’t be able to provide them with any additional help because ‘I don’t know anything about it. I have cooperated with them every time I have been asked. But I’m not involved in the case, not charged and have never been a suspect.’
On April 11, 2023 the younger Belstadt brother was arrested and booked in Niagara County Jail on felony drug charges following an investigation by the Niagara County Drug Task Force. According to Sheriff Michael Filicetti, he had been charged with felony criminal possession of a stimulant with intent to sell plus misdemeanor charges of weapons possession, obstructing firefighting efforts, possession of a forged instrument, and unlawful possession of marijuana (this is according to federal court documents). When police searched his home they found a loaded Glock handgun and $93,700 in cash (with an additional $18,294 in a backpack on his boat); as of July 2025, he is in Niagara County Jail. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has owned a debt collection agency for the past seventeen years called ‘Vision Credit.’
Conclusion: At the time of his death at the age of seventy on March 14, 2015 Richard and Loraine Steingasser had been married for thirty-nine years; he now rests next to his daughter at Acacia Park Cemetery. According to his obituary, Mr, Steingasser was a member of the Renaissance Club and in his spare time he enjoyed playing euchre, going fishing, and doing carpentry work. Loraine is alive and residing in North Tonawanda with her dog, Bruno.
As of July 2025 Joseph H. Belstadt is serving out his prison sentence at Attica Correctional Facility; he will be eligible for parole in November 2046, when he is seventy-one-years old.
Works Cited:
Aradillas, Elaine. ‘NY Man Strangled High School Girl with Her Bra and Dumped Her in Ravine in 1993.’ (January 17, 2022). Taken June 17, 2025 from https://people.com/crime/ny-man-strangled-high-school-girl-with-her-bra-dumped-in-ravine-sentenced-25-years-to-life/
Elliott, Madison & Goshgarian, Mark. ‘Opening Statements Held in Niagara County Cold Case Murder Trial.’ (March 12, 2020). Taken June 20, 2025 from https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/buffalo/public-safety/2020/03/12/opening-statements-held-in-niagara-county-cold-case-murder-trial
Green, Kayla. ‘Jury shown photos of Mandy Steingasser’s Remains.’ November 3, 2021). Taken June 16, 2025 from https://www.wivb.com/news/local-news/jury-shown-photos-of-mandy-steingassers-remains-from-day-they-were-recovered-from-bond-lake-park/
Prohaska, Thomas J. ‘After North Tonawanda street fight, Steingasser’s Friends say she Parted Ways.’ October 26, 2021.
Prohaska, Thomas J. ‘Jailhouse informant says Belstadt told him girl died during sexual encounter.’ (November 9, 2021). The Buffalo News.
Prohaska, Thomas J. ‘’Steingasser friend, cousin confronted Belstadt: ‘What did you do with Mandy?’’ News Niagara Reporter. (November 8, 2021). Taken June 29, 2025 from https://buffalonews.com/news/local/crime-courts/article_cf3b3634-40ca-11ec-8fa4-1390d3d02d1c.html
on May 5, 2018.
on May 5, 2018.
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Lynda Ann Healy.
Background: Lynda Ann Healy was born on July 3, 1952 to James and Joyce (nee Strickland) Healy in Portland, Oregon. James Russell Healy was born on August 1, 1926 in Logan, Utah, and after graduating from Grant High School he went on to attend Notre Dame University, where he earned a degree in military sciences. At some point he went to the University of Oregon, where he met his future wife. The daughter of a prominent physician, Joyce Ann Strickland was born on August 17, 1927 in Forest Grove, OR and after high school attended the University of Oregon, where she was a member of the Alpha Phi sorority and graduated with a business degree in 1949. James and Joyce were married at her parents’ house in Oregon City on August 14, 1949, and in their early years as husband and wife lived in a house on Siskiyou Street in the northwest part of Portland. Before her kids were born, Mrs. Healy was employed at ‘Meier & Frank’ (a prominent department store chain that operated primarily in Oregon, Washington, and Utah) for several years before she left the workforce and became a dedicated stay at home mother. The couple had three children together: Lynda, Robert (b. 1954), and Laura (b. 1957).
In 1962 the Healy’s moved to Washington state and bought a house in the Newport Hills area of Bellevue, located just five miles away from Seattle and Lynda grew up in a happy, middle-upper class home. According to those that were close with her, she was a talented musician, excellent singer, and was ‘full of life’ as well as self-confidence, and was looking forward for her future. Lynda stood at 5″7″ tall and wore her brown hair long and parted down the middle; she had blue eyes and had a 1/2 inch long scar on the bridge of her nose. An above-average student, she enjoyed school and had dreams of one day working with children with disabilities. After she graduated from Newport High School in Bellevue in 1970, Healy went on to attend the University of Washington in Seattle, and during her first few years lived in residence halls on campus (she even resided in McMahon Hall at one point, which is where Bundy lived years prior) before she eventually moved to a house off campus towards the end of her education.
University of Washington: In early 1974, the 21-year-old psychology major lived in a pale green house that wasn’t very far from the University of Washington campus on 12th Avenue Northeast in the northern end of the ‘U-District, with four other women: Joanne Testa, Ginger Heath, Karen Skaviem, and Monica Sutherland. Lynda shared the basement with one of her roommates, their designated spaces separated only by a thin piece of plywood, and she worked part-time for ‘Western Ski Promotions’ broadcasting the ski condition report that was played on twenty different radio stations across Washington and Oregon; she concluded each sixty-second spot with her catchphrase: ‘this has been Lynda with your Cascade ski report.’
January 31, 1974: The day started out like any other normal day for Lynda Ann Healy: in the morning she woke up to her alarm at 5:30 AM, got dressed, then hopped on her bike and rode over to the ski report office, located just a few blocks away. After work she went on to spend the day in class, and attended chorus practice on campus sometime in the afternoon.
At one point in the day Healy wrote a quick note to a good friend, describing how she was going to make what her mother called ‘company casserole’ for dinner for her parents and brother the following evening on February 1. It was an upbeat, happy letter, and in it she shared with her girlfriend how happy she was with life lately and how great things were going for her.
According to Ann Rule’s true crime classic, ‘The Stranger Beside Me,’ at 5 PM that evening her roommate ‘Jill Hodges’ (which is a pseudonym, and really Joann Testa) picked Lynda up on campus and and they went home and ate dinner with their other roommates; when Lynda was finished eating she borrowed one of the girls cars and ran to a nearby Safeway, returning home around 8:30 PM. From there, Lynda, along with Joanne, Ginger, and a young man named Pete Neil, went to Dante’s Tavern, which was only a five-minute walk away. Because Pete had to catch the 9:41 bus home, the friends shared some beers and called it an early night and left shortly after 9:30 PM. When the group of friends arrived back at Healy’s house, Neil grabbed some of his records and left to catch the bus.
At some point after Pete left Heath’s brother and one of his friends stopped by for a visit, and as everyone settled down in front of the TV Lynda left the room to call her boyfriend, and the two talked for about an hour. Even though everyone hadn’t returned home yet the atmosphere in the house was beginning to settle down, and the girls started to get ready for bed.
According to Kevin Sullivan’s 2009 book, ‘The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History,’ in an odd foreshadowing of events, it has been reported that one of the young women saw a ‘shadow’ that night which ‘moved’ just outside a window on the side of the house, but apparently thought little else about it. Karen Skaviem, who had been out studying at the library before she went out with her boyfriend for a few drinks, returned home around midnight, and noticed that ‘a single living room light was on,’ When she got inside Karen notices that Joann’s light was still on and stopped by her room for a chat, and around 12:45 PM the two women said goodnight and Skaviem went to the basement, where she had the room next to Healy’s. As she walks down the steps she didn’t check to make sure the door leading out of the basement was locked, and noticed that the only light that was on was in the storage area, and as Karen walked by, she noticed that Healy’s lights were off and she assumed she was asleep. She would later tell detectives that she had some problems settling down that night and didn’t fall asleep until around 1:30 AM; she heard nothing out of the ordinary the rest of the night.
In the time that the girls lived in the mint green house on 12th Avenue Northeast, they had lost a few sets of keys for their front door, and although they intended to get replacement sets made they usually just left it open ‘as a courtesy to those coming and going late at night. This would prove to be a fatal mistake, for the killer of young woman, long before anyone had gone to bed that evening, would place his hand on the doorknob and turn it ever so gently until the door gave way and he was free to enter the house, something he chose not to do. No, he reasoned, he could return later when everyone was in a deep sleep and explore the dwelling at that time (Sullivan, ‘The Bundy Murders, 17-18).’
At 5:30 AM on February 1, 1974 Skavien woke to her roommates alarm going off, but stayed in bed until her own clock went off at 6 AM. This was unusual. Karen got up and turned off both alarms and immediately noticed that Lynda’s room had been cleaned and was near spotless and that her bed was made, which was unusual as it was something that she usually waited to do when she got back from work. Even though the partition between the girls rooms was thin, Karen said that she hadn’t heard any disturbances during the night.
Skavien said ‘I got up, Lynda’s alarm was still going. I went past her room and heard the radio but thought she was lying in bed listening to it and didn’ have to go to work. At 6:30 the phone rang, it was Northwest Ski Promotions asking why Lynda wasn’t at work. I went to her room and called her. When she didn’t answer I turned on the light and went in. Her radio was still going and her bed was made, perfectly. I was concerned she hadn’t slept in it because there were no wrinkles and the spread was ticked neatly under the pillow.’ As Karen slowly began to assess the situation she realized that the back door was left open, which was out of character for Lynda: typically she would leave her bicycle parked inside of the house in the hallway just next to the side door ‘on the landing,’ and would make sure the door was locked behind her.
Skavien said she then called up the stairs to see if any of the other girls knew where Lynda may have been, but they told her that no one had seen her. Monica responded that perhaps she was out somewhere with her boyfriend, a suggestion that was immediately shot down by the others because it was atypical of their friend, as she wouldn’t blow off her responsibilities like that. Around 6:30 AM the Northwest Ski Promotions called and asked where Lynda was, as she never made it into work. They quickly realized that her bike was still in the basement, which caused fear and panic among the girls who were beginning to suspect the worst, as Lynda was very dependable and had never missed a day of work. One of the housemates said that the last time that she saw her was at midnight on Thursday before, and ‘it just isn’t like Lynda. She was just 15 minutes late once, and she felt terrible about it.’’
At around 4 PM Joann started calling around to Healy’s friends and acquaintances to see if anyone could provide an explanation as to where she may have been. No one had heard from her, and she hadn’t been seen around campus all day. When Jim and Robert arrived for dinner at 6 PM on the evening of February 1st (Joyce was supposed to meet them shortly after) they were told that Lynda was missing, and right away the family knew that the situation was serious. Mr. Healy called his wife and told her their daughter was gone, and where Jim wanted to wait a little longer to see if she would eventually show up, Mrs. Healy immediately called the police.
Two members of the Seattle PD showed up shortly after 6 PM and spoke with the roommates and Mr. Healy, and took down some general information about Lynda and took a brief look inside of her bedroom. When the officers and the Healy’s left Monica said they received a strange telephone call with nobody on the other end, clarifying the ‘line was open but the caller ‘refused to speak’ and she could hear only the faint sound of breathing.’ After that incident the roommates received two more phone calls of a similar nature, and despite telling police nothing ever came of it.
A few hours later around midnight a Seattle homicide detective stopped by the house and did a walk through of the residence, and when he pulled back Lynda’s bed sheets to the girls horror they found a blood soaked pillow and blood soaked sheets; missing from the scene was her pink satin pillowcase, house keys, and red backpack (that possibly contained a yellow ski cap and some random books). When they looked in her closet, they discovered the nightgown she had been wearing earlier, which had dried blood on the neckline. They also noticed that the clothes she had worn the day prior were missing, which included a pair of jeans, a blue-trimmed white smock, waffle stomper boots, a belt, several turquoise rings; this suggests her abductor took off her pj’s and dressed her before he stole her away into the night. One of Healy’s roommates also commented that her bed was made up in an unusual manner, and that she never ‘tucked the blanket with the pillow underneath,’ and always placed it on top. According to Joann Testa, she ‘a policeman pulled back the spread for the first time. I saw that the pillowcase was gone and that there were blood stains on the pillow as well as one fairly large blood stain on the sheet near the pillow. As far as I know, Lynda always kept a pillowcase on her pillow.’
In the early stages of the investigation it was briefly suspected that maybe Lynda had gotten a nosebleed, and had taken off her nightgown, changed back into her clothes then ran to seek medical attention. According to Lieutenant Pat Murphy with the Seattle Police Department: ‘the room was very neat. There was no signs of foul play in the rooms except some blood on the pillow and head area of the sheets of Lynda’s bed;’ he also noted that her bed had been ‘made up neatly.’
According to Kevin Sullivan’s book, ‘Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries: The Many Victims of America’s Most Infamous Serial Killer,’ in the weeks prior to her disappearance, Healy had talked to her roommates about some acute stomach pain she was having that were so bothersome that she scheduled a Doctors appointment for… but that night they said she was ‘lively, talkative and feeling good. Their conversation was light, from psychology to music, not focusing on any specific subject.’
The police searched every inch of Lynda’s room, but came up with no explanation as to where she could have gone. Several days after Lynda was last seen alive on February 4, 1974 a call was received by 911 from an unknown male caller that told the operator, ‘listen, and listen carefully: the person who attacked that girl on 8th last month and the person who took Lynda Healy are one and the same. He was outside both houses. He was seen.’ When the 911 operator asked who was calling, the man said, ‘no way are you going to get my name,’ and immediately hung up; nothing further came from the incident.
In the days that immediately followed, Healy’s disappearance barely made the news: the very first story about her was buried on the 35th page of the February 4, 1974 edition of The Seattle Times. Almost immediately after their daughter disappeared Jim and Joyce Healy hired a private investigator to look into the case, and the family initially wondered if maybe she ran off to live with family in Oregon. After some time, the PI came back to the Healy’s and told them that all the leads he received hit ‘dead ends.’ A reward was offered for information leading to her safe return, and it didn’t take long for Seattle investigators to strongly suspect foul play.
‘The Seattle Eight’ (or nine, officially):’ Before Lynda Ann Healy vanished Bundy’s first confirmed, ‘on-the-record’ victim was Karen Sparks, who had been asleep in her basement bedroom when he attacked her in the residence that she shared with three male friends located near the University of Washington campus. According to Sparks, who was a dance major that miraculously survived the attack and went on to get married and have a family: ‘he took some metal thing and he rammed it up my vagina and it split my bladder.’ In the days prior to the assault, she told detectives that she remembered seeing an older man staring at her in a nearby laundromat, and ‘I’d look at him, he’d look away. I didn’t really think too much about it.’
Sparks lived on 8th Avenue Northwest, which was only eleven blocks away from 12th Avenue NE where Lynda lived. After Karen fell asleep, Bundy attacked her and relentlessly beat her in the head with a metal rod from her bed frame, which he also used to penetrate her vagina so brutally that she experienced severe internal damage: ‘he took some metal thing and he rammed it up my vagina and it split my bladder.’ I’ve also seen it reported that her assailant used a speculum and it is worth mentioning that Ted did at one time work as a delivery driver for Pedline Supply Company (which is a family-owned medical supply company), however one was not found left behind at the scene of the crime.
Sparks lived on 8th Northwest, just eleven blocks away from Lynda Ann Healy. After Karen fell asleep, Bundy attacked her and relentlessly beat her in the head with a metal rod from her bed frame, which he used to penetrate her vagina so brutally that she experienced severe internal damage: ‘he took some metal thing and he rammed it up my vagina and it split my bladder.’ I’ve also seen it reported that the assailant used a speculum, and Bundy did at one time work as a delivery driver for Pedline Supply Company, a family-owned medical supply company, however one was not found behind the scene of the crime.
Thankfully, before Bundy could take the attack to the point of no return he got spooked and fled Karen’s bedroom. Sparks was left beaten, unconscious, and bleeding until around 7:00 PM the following evening when one of her roommates checked on her: ‘Bob came down and he saw blood on my pillow, and he called 911 right away and then called my mother.’ The attack had been so severe that she was unconscious for ten days, and when she came to, she had no memory of what happened and was not able to give detectives any details about her assailant. When Lynda disappeared less than a month later Karen’s father immediately connected the dots between her and the attack on his daughter, although LE was much slower to make the connection.
A little over five weeks after Healy vanished into thin air nineteen-year-old Donna Gail Manson was last seen waving goodbye to her roommates early in the evening on March 12, 1974. The Evergreen State College student had plans to attend a jazz concert on campus, and had changed her outfit a few times before eventually settling on a red/orange/green striped top, blue or green slacks, and a black fuzzy maxi-coat.Manson was a highly intelligent young woman, but not great at school and only a ‘better-than-average’ student, however she was incredibly creative and was an accomplished flautist, that always had her camera with her (just like Lynda Healy did). Donna never made it to the concert, and as the months passed by more and more young college aged women around Washington state began to go missing.
After Donna, on April 17, 1974 eighteen-year-old student Susan Elaine Rancourt was the next to disappear. Rancourt was a straight-A student at Central Washington University in Ellensburg where she studied biology, and in order to afford school she worked full time hours over two different jobs. From the get-go, the Rancourt’s knew that something terrible had happened to their daughter, and according to her father, Dale: ‘she always knew what she wanted, and was a very logical person, very predictable.’
After Sue Rancourt the next to vanish was Brenda Carol Ball, a recent college drop-out that was last seen leaving The Flame Tavern in Burien after seeing band play late on May 31, 1974. The 22-year-old seemed to be at a crossroads in her life, and roughly two weeks before had stopped attending class at Highline Community College. Her sister told reporters that her family hadn’t given up hope after she went missing, and when her remains were eventually recovered they: ‘thought we were prepared for it, but we weren’t.’
Less than two weeks later on June 11, 1974 eighteen-year-old Georgann Hawkins disappeared from an alleyway outside of her Kappa Alpha Theta Sorority house on the University of Washington campus. She had left a party early (and by herself) but before returning home had stopped by her boyfriend’s frat house to pick up some Spanish notes for her final that was the next day. In the days that followed, Warren and Edith waited by the phone waiting for word that their daughter was safe, which never came, and according to her father: ‘it doesn’t look very good.’
After George was the two infamous Lake Sammamish murders that took place on July 14, 1974 in Issaquah, WA: Twenty-three-year-old newlywed Janice Ann Blackburn-Ott lived in Issaquah and worked as a caseworker for King County’s Youth Services Center, while her husband Jim was away attending graduate school in California. In the early afternoon before she left her shared house on her yellow Tiger bicycle, Jan scribbled a note for her roommate letting them know that she was going sunbathing at Lake Sam, and at the bottom had drawn a sun. Two eyewitnesses that were at Lake Sam that afternoon reported seeing her at roughly 12:30 PM leaving with an attractive young man whose arm was in a cast.
Only four hours later that same young man returned to Lake Sammamish, and abducted eighteen year old computer programming student Denise Marie Naslund, who was enjoying an afternoon at the beach with her boyfriend and another couple. She had had a few beers and taken a few valiums, and disappeared after she went off to the restroom by herself at roughly 4:30 PM; her mother Eleanore Rose said Denise had the kind of ‘helpful nature’ that would directly place her in the line of danger. Just as with Ott, witnesses that were at Lake Sam that afternoon reported that they saw a young man with his arm in a cast at roughly the time that Naslund went missing.
(Now deceased) Seattle Police Captain Herb Swindler was assigned to work the Healy investigation and eventually the other missing Seattle women. In July 1974 he publicly stated that there was no evidence that pinpointed any of the disappearances with the others, however he did admit that there were some similarities: ‘but, the real connection between the cases is not in the hard evidence, but in the lack of evidence. Usually in a series like this, bodies start to show up. There have been no bodies, none at all, and that is very unusual.’ About the disappearances, Captain Swindler said there were many theories about what may have happened to the young women, and that they ‘get people calling in to tell us ‘the flying saucers took them’ and ‘they’re being spirited away to white slavery’. Everybody’s got a theory, but no evidence.’
Well over a year after Healy was last seen alive, on March 1, 1975 two Green River College students found human remains in a thick wooded area on Taylor Mountain, located just outside of Seattle. A skull uncovered by detectives would later be identified as belonging to Brenda Ball, which is a tad ironic because police initially were hesitant on linking her to the other missing women because she was a bit older than them, was not (technically) a college student, and was abducted from a bar and not an academic type setting. A further search of the area uncovered more bones, and just two days later on March 3, 1975 they came across Lynda Healy’s lower mandible as well as parts of Susan Rancourt and Roberta Parks.
Upon further examination by the Medical Examiner, it was noted that Healy’s skull bore marks that hinted that she had suffered a brutal beating in her final moments of life; Sue Rancourts decapitated skull was also found to be severely fractured.
Third-Person Confession: While Ted was on death row in Florida on April 4, 1980 he had his first sit down with journalists Hugh Aynesworth and Stephen G. Michaud, and during their time together they discussed the abduction and murder of Lynda Ann Healy: Bundy said that earlier in the afternoon on January 31, 1974 the killer had stalked the young coed and followed her to a Safeway store, and even claims that he broke ‘into her home whilst she was out running errands.’ He also told them that the killer had plans of returning later that evening, unsure if she would be home and what situation he would walk into. During this pseudo-confession, Ted clarified that Healy was ‘battered unconscious’ in her bed then carried out of her bedroom and placed her in his waiting Volkswagen; he also volunteered that he had already taken out the front passenger seat of his car so he could better transport his ‘cargo.’
From 12th Avenue NE, Bundy took the unconscious Lynda to Taylor Mountain, located roughly twenty miles east of Seattle, where he forced her to remove her pajama’s (not clothes?) and raped her. When he was finished, he bludgeoned her to death and left her body only partially buried, where scavengers quickly dispersed it throughout Taylor Mountain. Both journalists said Ted briefly appeared to show some remorse over killing Healy, but it didn’t last very long. He then tried to justify the murder by telling himself. ‘well, listen you, you fucked up this time, but you’re never going to do that again. So let’s just stay together, and it won’t ever happen again.’
Ted told the journalists that he was stuck in a position where he couldn’t just let the young woman go out of fear of getting caught, and told them that he had to kill her; both men later said that although he was ‘mostly confident,’ he did stutter a few times when he got nervous, which was something they noticed happened when he talked about aspects of the murders which made him feel uncomfortable.
However, Ted said that he eventually HAD to do it again, and after a brief period of inactivity his urge to possess, to control and kill another young woman would soon come back to him and he would begin to think about killing another victim. He also explained that with each murder, he would feel less confusion, fear, and apprehension and the dormancy period in between victims would become shorter and shorter as he got over the feeling of remorse and self-loathing over what he had done at a faster rate as time went by.
Dr. Bob Keppel, who at that time was a fresh faced detective with the King County Sheriff’s Department, said that the crime scene related to the disappearance of Lynda Healy was ‘unique,’ and stood out in his memory for a long time: ‘I had never seen a crime committed before and that’s where I got my start.’ … ‘We couldn’t do anything except sit and man a telephone. It was pretty bad.’ He elaborated that it almost seemed that someone had broken into Lynda’s residence, brutally bludgeoned her, took her pj’s off then put her street clothes back on her, neatly made the bed, then carried her off into the night without leaving behind a trace. In the days after she vanished, detectives spoke with over sixty-five of her friends, acquaintances, family members, schoolmates, and former boyfriends, but didn’t come up with anything helpful.
In January 1974 Bundy had been living in a second story room at the Rogers Boarding house located on 12th Avenue NE, which was only three blocks away from where Lynda Healy lived. At the time of her disappearance, Ted had been attending night law school at the University of Puget Sound, and according to his schedule he had class late on Monday’s, Wednesday’s, and Friday’s, however on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s things wrapped up for him early. Lynda went missing after midnight on a Thursday night, so Bundy wouldn’t have been tied up with school. Also, according to his long-term girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer, he often went to the bar that Healy went to with her friends the evening she was last seen alive. Additionally, Ted was in between jobs at the time: his previous position as the Assistant to the Washington State Republican Chairman ended in September 1973, and he remained unemployed until May 3, 1974 when he got a job at the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia (he was there until August 28, 1974).
A Frightening Incident: According to Lynda’s roommate Monica Sutherland, roughly two months before she disappeared she was alone in the laundromat on the avenue close to their home when she noticed a man in an orange pickup truck stop and begin to stare at her. He then parked the truck and came in without any clothing and briefly fooled around with a washing machine before proceeding to check the back door of the building as he was leaving. He never said a word to Lynda, but the incident was unusual and she said that it frightened her.
Sutherland also told detectives about another incident that took place only a month before Lynda vanished: she had come home and was by herself inside the residence when suddenly she heard the neighbor’s dog start barking, and when she looked outside the front door she saw a young man standing on the bottom step. He had been holding a little dog firmly around the neck, and had been roughly shaking it. Sutherland remembered that she ran outside and heard neighbors yelling at the man, who had claimed that the dog had attacked him, put it down, then fled from the scene.
A coincidence that is not widely discussed (and only recently made public with the release of the book, ‘Dark Tide’) is that Ted’s cousin, Edna Cowell had once lived with two previous roommates of Lynda Healy while she was attending the University of Washington; it is unknown if he ever had been introduced to Healy through these channels. Also strange: in 1972, both Ted and Lynda were both Psychology majors at the University of Washington, however no evidence exists proving that they had any sort of class or seminar together.
Jim Healy passed away at the age of 72 on June 22, 1998 in Bellevue WA, and Joyce Ann Healy died from complications of COVID at the age of ninety-three on December 27, 2020 in Redmond, WA. According to her obituary, Joyce loved the beach, and the family would often vacation in Ocean Shores, WA where they spent their time beachcombing, riding dune buggies, and roasting hotdogs. After her children flew the nest she went back to school and got a BS in Computer Science from Bellevue College; she learned Cobol (or Common Business Oriented Language) and Fortran (Formula Translation) and went on to have an incredibly successful second career as a computer programmer.
Joyce enjoyed ballroom dancing, and when her husband was alive the two often took cruises together and went just about everywhere; they even became ‘Gold Members’ on several Cruise Lines. In 2012, Mrs. Healy moved into the Emerald Heights Retirement Community in Redmond, where she made lots of new friends and continued to have many adventures while living there.
Lynda’s siblings Robert and Laura Healy-Friedman both still reside in Washington, along with their spouses and children. In the days prior to his execution in January 1989, Ted told Seattle detectives about quite a few unsolved murders across Washington, Utah, Oregon, Colorado, California, and Idaho, and he finally claimed responsibility for killing Lynda Ann Healy, who he said was his ‘first victim.’
Works Cited:
Pasqualini, Kym L. ‘Ted Bundy’s First Victims: Lynda Ann Healy’ (December 16, 2020). Taken June 12, 2025 from https://kympasqualini.medium.com/ted-bundys-first-victims-lynda-ann-healy-9bdb3177c3c4
Sullivan, Kevin M. ‘The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History.’ (2009).
Winn, Stephen. ‘Ted Bundy: The killer next Door.’ (1979).
Another Bundy Blog. 