This is a rare occasion I was unable to find out any background information about the woman I was writing about: typically, I can come up with some helpful tidbit that helps me dig up more information about them, however I was unable to do that with Ms. Griswold. If anyone knows anything more than what I have here and would like to reach out to me about it, I will give you credit for your help.
While I was driving to Michigan with my husband last week I stumbled across an article posted by another true crime Facebook Group called, ‘TB: I was Trying to Think Like an Elk’ that included an article published in February 1989 from The Oregonian discussing an encounter that Nellie Griswold may have had with Ted Bundy: Griswold, who lived in Halsey, Oregon in the early part of 1974, worked as a waitress in the restaurant part of The Pioneer Villa truck stop, located right off the I-5 in the southern part of Linn County.
In early 1974 (she wasn’t sure if it was January or February) Griswold was twenty-four years old, and one evening as she was working she noticed a man that matched Bundy’s description lingering around her POE: she told her boss ‘this guy kind of gives me the creeps,’ to which he replied, ‘don’t worry, that’s just Teddy’ and went on to tell her that he had been hanging around The Pioneer Villa’s bar semi-regularly for about a week and a half. Nellie said that she was going through a bad time in her life and at the time was newly divorced with an infant and was having relationship issues with her current-boyfriend (they eventually broke up); that night, she left her daughter with a friend so she could talk with her significant other about their relationship problems after she got out of work.
But as Nellie’s shift went on her worry only grew: the stranger kept trying to hustle her and repeatedly asked her out on a date (an offer that she politely declined) and stood in the hallway near the front door, just watching her. Before her workday ended at 9 PM she ‘told the manager I was going to leave by the back door because I didn’t want this guy to give me a hard time.’ A little after nine she left out the restaurants back door and got her 1964 Thunderbird and began the five mile drive to her apartment…. but as she made her way to Halsey she noticed a yellow VW Beetle trailing behind her: ‘I sped up and it speeded up. It was a race to my apartment. My car was faster. I got out of the car and unlocked the door and went inside. There were stores across the street from us and stores on both sides of us. Nobody was around. I made it inside and I shut the door.’
During an interview with reporter ‘John Painter Jr.’ with the newspaper ‘The Sunday Oregonian,’ Griswold said the strange man parked his car in front of her apartment building and stood out there a long time, just staring towards her residence: ‘I became afraid he would still be there when my boyfriend got off work at 11 PM. We already had been fighting, and I didn’t feel I needed to deal with a stranger at my door on the night that I was trying to put our relationship back together.’
According to Nellie, when she arrived home: ‘I watched him through the window. I didn’t turn any lights on. He sat there for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. He tried to start the car, and it made some sort of sound and he got out of the car. He lifted up the back end and did something and put down the back end and it slammed the end of his hand.’
She went on to say that the next thing she remembered was the stranger frantically knocking on her apartment door: ‘he was banging the door, begging me to let him inside, (saying) that he was cold from sitting in the car, very cold, and he was bleeding and needed something to cover his hand, ice or something. I was stupid enough to fall for it and went and got some ice and handed it to him through the door. I became afraid. Like I said, I’d been trying to get rid of him… My boyfriend’s due home anytime and I wanted him out of there. So at this time I’m going to do anything just to get rid of him.’
Griswold went on: ‘I have no phone and anyway it took thirty-five minutes for the police to get to Halsey when you called them. I stepped outside and he made a statement that he knew my boyfriend was seeing somebody else. This really triggered me because this is what I basically had been arguing about with him.’
She also clarified that she was aware ‘Teddy’ had been drinking at bar most of the evening. “I figured he’d picked it up talking to some of the help in the bar; the girl who was tending bar was a friend and she pretty much knew what was going on.’ Intrigued, she agreed to go with him while the ice was on his hand: ‘he said he couldn’t drive because it hurt too much. We opened the car door. He sat in the driver’s side and closed the door. I sat on a pillow. There was no seat on the passenger’s side.’
Griswold went on to say: “I said, ‘What kind of a rig is this?,’ to which he replied that he didn’t have a job at the moment and it was the only option he had to get around: ‘I sat there on a pillow with the door open and my feet on the ground. I wouldn’t close the door. It became cold.’ When she announced that she was going to go back inside the stranger tried to stall her: ‘he asked where I was from and I told him I was from the Seattle area, which I was, and he knew different places. He was real interested in Golden Gardens Park and especially Carkeek Park on the sound and Green Lake. He seemed to know the Green Lake area where a lot of us girls used to hang out quite a bit.’ At the time in the 1970’s both Green Lake Park and Golden Gardens Park were popular hangouts for college kids.
Nellie continued: ‘I didn’t feel that uncomfortable at that time. He had something to drink and wanted me to drink some of it but wouldn’t. And then he was smoking something… I thought it was marijuana.’ After that, the man immediately appeared to become inebriated, and even nodded off periodically: ‘he was real in and out. He said he was too drunk to drive. I kept saying you’d better get out of here and he saying, ‘nope, I’m hurt and I’ve been drinking much.’’
Finally, the attractive young mother made the choice to finally leave, and ‘started to get out of the car and he reached out and tugged at my hair. I turned to him and said, ‘don’t do that,’ and at that time another car came around the corner and the lights flashed inside the car and I said, ‘that’s Alan (her boyfriend), let me go. And he let me go. He literally said, ‘get out of the car.’’
Griswold quickly ran to into her apartment and locked the door behind her, and after the other vehicle drove by, the man returned to her apartment and began pounding on the door, saying loudly, ‘I’m cold. Let me in.’ Thoroughly spooked, she went back to her bedroom and got her boyfriend’s large semi-automatic pistol that he had also taught her to shoot: ‘I told him I had a gun and knew how to use it and would shoot him if he did not leave.’ The pounding immediately stopped.
Looking out the window, Nellie said that the man went back to his Bug and just sat there for a while then circled the block a few times before he eventually disappeared for good; she never saw him again, and he never returned to The Pioneer Villa. Because of how much time had passed her story was impossible to corroborate, however investigators in SLC and Seattle said the man’s actions were consistent with Ted’s behavior. According to Dr. Robert Keppel, ‘you haven’t said anything to me that doesn’t sound like Bundy. She’s lucky she’s alive.’
It would be fair to say that at the time of Nellie’s attack Bundy had a lot of spare time on his hands: he was taking a break from school (he didn’t begin law school for the second time until later that September) and happened to be in between jobs at the time (in September 1973 he was the Assistant to the Washington state Republican chairman, and remained unemployed until May 3, 1974 when he started at the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia). He was still in a (fairly) committed relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer at the time and was residing in the Roger’s Rooming House on 12th Avenue NE in Seattle.
As we know, Ted’s first confirmed attack took place on January 4, 1974 when he brutally assaulted Karen Sparks in her basement apartment near the University of Washington in Seattle. Additionally, he abducted and killed Lynda Ann Healy not far away on January 31, 1974… so its safe to say Bundy was definitely active at the time Griswold claims she was hassled by him.
According to Dr. Keppel, Bundy’s habit of roaming across the Pacific Northwest had always been ‘one of the biggest problems about the guy,’ and despite there being a trail of credit card receipts for gas there were many times that he paid for fuel in cash: meaning, he could travel across multiple state lines and investigators ‘never even know he’d been there.’ As for the yellow VW that Griswold so vividly remembers, Keppel said two witnesses from Central Washington University in Ellensburg told police about a man that drove a similar vehicle that tried to pick them up; also, on May 6, 1974 Roberta Parks vanished without a trace from the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, which is only thirty miles northwest of the Pioneer Villa. I know there’s a lot of back and forth as to EXACTLY what color Ted’s car is… but I don’t think it’s a coincident that Death from Family Guy drove a bright yellow Beetle.
When showed a picture of the serial killer, Nellie was unable to ID Bundy, but she was able to identify a photo of him taken in 1973 that was released after his arrest two years later in Granger, Utah for the aggravated kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. She said that Ted’s ‘longer, curly hair’ was the most important part of her identification. Griswold told Painter that she felt ‘for the other victims. I just don’t understand why I’m still here.’ At the time of the interview in February 1989 Griswold said that she was a happily married mother of two and was living with her husband and kids in Southwest Washington.
