In May 2025 I reached out to King County to see if there was a chance I could visit their archives to look at their information related to the Ted Bundy investigation. Where visiting didn’t work out they were kind enough to send me a link via Dropbox that contained tens of thousands of pages of information related to the investigation. Here is everything I could find related to Lynda Healy.
Caryn Eilene Campbell was born on September 20, 1951 to Robert and Audrian (nee Merryman) Campbell in Garden City, MI. Robert Campbell was born on on July 23, 1917 in Pana, Illinois, and Mrs. Campbell was born on April 16, 1918 in Kansas. The couple were married on October 22, 1937 and went on to have four children together: Sandra (b. 1938), Sandra (b. 1938), Caryn (b. 1951), and Robert ‘Bob.’ A petite woman, Caryn was 5’4” tall and weighed s mere 105 pounds; she had brown eyes, and at the time of her death wore her brown hair at her shoulders. She graduated from Dearborn High School in 1969, and according to the bio underneath her senior year picture, she was in ski club, choir, and ‘intramurals.’ Ms. Campbell went on to attend nursing school, and eventually became a RN.
In early 1975 Caryn was working as a registered nurse at Hospital and was engaged to a co-worker named Ray Gadowski, a divorced cardiologist with two children, Gregory (eleven) and Jenny (nine). Dr. Raymond Francis Gadowski, DO was born on June 19, 1943, and despite the nine year age difference between the couple Caryn got along well with both children, and the couple seemed happy. Ray and ‘Car,’ as he called her (or on occasion ‘Cams’) had been living together for around a year when she was killed, and were residing in Farmington, MI (Winn, 63).
On Saturday, January 11, 1975 Caryn, along with Dr. Gadowski, Gregory, and Jenny, traveled from Michigan to The Wildwood Inn in Snowmass Village, Colorado for a medical conference turned impromptu ski vacation. Friends of the couple told investigators that she was looking forward to getting some skiing in, however other reports said they were arguing about their wedding date as well: unlike her, Gadowski was not particularly in any particular rush to get married, which upset her. Despite arriving with a slight case of the flu, she was still able to take the kids skiing and sightseeing the following day. According to an article published in The Ann Arbor News on January 25, 1975 the couple had ‘purchased five days worth of ski passes.’
On the evening of January 12, 1975 the quartet went to dinner at a restaurant down the slope from the lodge called ‘The Stew Pot,’ along with some other medical professionals they met at the conference (including Campbell’s one time boyfriend, Dr. Alan Rossenthal). At dinner, Caryn ordered beef stew, and while everyone else imbibed on beer and cocktails she was still feeling ‘queasy’ and stuck with milk. The meal ended around 6:30/6:45 PM, and despite the frigid temperatures they decided to walk back and forth from their hotel to the restaurant, leisurely walking the busy street window shipping on their way home, and the group stopped at a Walgreens to browse their magazine section, and according to Kevin Sullivan’s ‘The Bundy Murders:’ ‘apparently Brinkman (a pseudonym for Dr. Rosenthal) had a Playboy to keep him company on the trip, and as he and Caryn were joking about it, Caryn offered to switch with him what she insisted was a much better magazine, her current issue of Viva. With a laugh, Brinkman agreed to the offer.’
When they arrived back at about 8:30 PM everyone settled in front of a large fire in the front lounge: Dr. Gadowski read the evening paper, and it was then that Dr. Rosenthal reminded Caryn about the copy of Viva up in her room. With a sigh, and a small hope that her fiancé would offer to run up and get it (he declined), Campbell announced that she was returning to their room and would return shortly, taking with her the family’s only room key. Greg and Jenny trailed behind her and tried to tag along, but she left them at the elevator and told them to stay by the fire. As she left the lounge, so did Rosenthal, as he returned to his room to get that Playboy. It was the last time Dr. Gadowski ever saw her alive.
After getting off the elevator at the second floor, Campbell briefly chatted with several physicians that she’d met up with at the convention, including a nurse that she worked with at the hospital, and at the time, she had been wearing blue jeans, a light brown ‘wooly jacket,’ and boots. Two of her friends that were staying in the inn that night told investigators that they saw her walk out of the second-floor elevator going in the direction of her room, and was last seen in an open corridor overlooking the pool. According to court records (and Kevin Sullivan), a couple named Dr. and Mrs. Yoder ‘observed Caryn Campbell, with whom they were familiar, exit the elevator on the second floor of The Wildwood Inn. Miss Campbell told the Yoders that she was going to her room to get a magazine and that she would return immediately to the lobby, and they watched her walk down the hallway towards room 210.’ There may however, be some discrepancy as to the extent of the interaction that the couple had with Caryn: according to an article published in The Daily Sentinel on April 5, 1977: ‘Ida Yoder, whose husband is a Physician in Littlejohn, commented that she only saw Caryn and that they didn’t speak, and didn’t know what floor she got off of.’
Dr. Gadowski and the kids waited for Caryn to return in the lounge, and in the first few moments he wasn’t immediately concerned, however as the time passed by with no word from her he decided to go looking for her and returned to their room. As he didn’t have a key, upon arrival he knocked on the door, wondering if perhaps she was in the bathroom, as he knew that she wasn’t feeling well. After running to the front desk and getting a duplicate key, upon entering Gadowski found no signs of a struggle, and the room looked exactly as it did when they’d left earlier. Caryn’s purse was nowhere to be found, however the magazine that she’d intended to get was still on the nightstand next to their bed. Gadowski called the Aspen Police Department shortly after ten PM, and two Pitkin County Sheriff’s deputies arrived roughly an hour later.
When police arrived, they interviewed Dr. Gadowski, and almost immediately began searching the inn, inspecting elevator shafts and crawl spaces, but found no trace of Caryn. On January 13, 1975 uniformed members of the sheriff’s department conducted an extensive search of the buildings and grounds of The Wildwood Inn, including all 140 rooms. They came up with nothing. According to Kevin Sullivan’s ‘Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries,’ ‘background information was obtained on all the employees of The Wildwood Inn and checked against the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) network for reported criminal records locally and out of state. No leads were developed (Sullivan, 158).’
In addition to staff, investigators obtained complete lists of registered lodgers in the general Aspen area around the time Campbell was last seen (starting on January 10), as well as the passenger manifests from Denver to Aspen (then back again) on the only two commercial airlines that served the area at the time. Chief Criminal Investigator for the Ninth Judicial District of the state of Colorado Michael Fisher and the other detectives did extensive background checks on Dr. Gadowski and Alan Rosenthal, as well as all of Campbell’s old boyfriends and male friends/co-workers/acquaintances, and came up with nothing (Sullivan, 158). Ultimately, Investigator Fisher interviewed more than 100 people in relation to the Caryn Campbell case, and he came across no evidence that would indicate that anyone was involved in her disappearance.
When Campbell disappeared it was well past sunset, and weather conditions had dropped significantly: according to historical records, the temperature in Snowmass Village on the evening of January 12, 1975 hovered around -2, therefore it stands to reason that the lot where Bundy parked his car was pretty deserted and absent of any people lingering. Additionally, in the days following her disappearance conditions were below freezing, and by January 15th detectives were fairly certain that the young nurse hadn’t left Colorado by any form of commercial transportation (plane, train, or bus). They also had checked out all of the area’s medical facilities and hotels/inns/resorts, and no unnamed young woman that matched Caryn’s description had been admitted or checked in. Airports and bus companies around the general Aspen area were notified of the missing young woman, and were given photos and a description of her (Sullivan, 159).
While staying in Colorado the couple did not rent a vehicle, and Caryn’s skis were found left behind in her room. It is strongly believed by those that knew her that she would never have never wandered away on her own, and because of the harsh weather Investigator Fisher said that ‘most people couldn’t walk more than 30 feet’ from the road.
In the early part of the investigation detectives focused on Dr. Gadowski, but he was quickly cleared. Additionally detectives did an extensive look into Dr. Rosenthal’s background as well, and he was also cleared of any wrongdoing. Both Gadowski and Dr. Rosenthal was polygraphed by Investigator Fisher (Raymond twice), and both men passed. According to Mike Fisher, ‘I’ve seen some gals take a quick walk on their boyfriends when they’ve got a beef, but this is another thing altogether.’ … ‘I’ve ruled out gypsies, flying saucers, occult people, and cattle rustlers.’
After Caryn disappeared, Dr. Gadowski stayed behind at The Wildwood Inn for a week with hopes that she would somehow return to him, but sadly that never happened and he returned home to Michigan. After weeks of combing the general Aspen area investigators determined that there was no evidence pointing towards Campbell having met with foul play, and called off their search. Almost immediately after her disappearance Investigator Fisher reached out to Campbells dentist and got a copy of her dental records and x-rays, a Dr. Richard H. Mentzer of Dearborn, MI.
Looking at the layout of The Wildwood Inn and its surroundings, at the time of Caryn’s abduction there were a number of smaller parking lots on the western side of the building, and when you consider Ted’s modus operandi (specifically the murders of Georgann Hawkins and Susan Rancourt) it is likely that he purposefully parked his Bug in the most out-of-the-way spot that he could find. After Bundy (somehow) convinced Campbell to come with him, he got her in his 1968 VW Bug and drove the 3.1 miles away to Owl Creek Road, which was (at the time) covered in snow and was most likely why he didn’t put a lot of effort into hiding her body. Although her body had been somewhat disrupted by scavenging animals, Caryn’s autopsy showed that she had died about two hours after she was abducted due to the level of digestion of the stew and milk in her stomach.
A little over a month since she was last seen alive, on February 17, 1975 Caryn Campbell’s frozen remains were found face down on a dirt road just outside Aspen on the south side of Owl Creek Road, just west of Sinclair Divide. A passing recreational employee stumbled upon her remains when the weather began to warm and he noticed birds of prey flying above her. The young victim had suffered extreme decomposition and damage to the upper body, most likely the result of animal predation (probably coyotes), which made immediate identification impossible. There were no footprints or tire tracks found at the scene, however according to Kevin Sullivan,’approximately three and a half feet from the south shoulder of the road was a deep depression which perfectly matched that of a body, which had laid on its side, head pointing west. It was also apparent that the body laid facing the open field (????) both earrings, small gold earrings for pierced ears, were found where the head had been positioned. Surrounding the depression were several coyote tracks. Leading from the depression were several coyote tracks. Leading from the depression (head position) were drag marks (Sullivan, TB’s Murderous Mysteries, 161).’ An extensive search of the area by law enforcement failed to locate Caryn’s clothing.
Upon arrival at the crime scene, Investigator Fisher spoke with Pitkin County DA Steve Waters, who told him, ‘Fish, you’ll never find out who did this. You’ve got nothing to work with’ (Sullivan, 124). According to her autopsy, Ms. Campbell had been badly beaten, and the back of her skull had sustained three heavy fractures. She had also suffered from deep cuts from an unknown sharp weapon, and her hyoid bone had been cracked; her left earlobe was slit. The ME was unable to determine if she had been strangled or sexually assaulted due to the advanced level of decomp, however the nude condition of her remains pointed to sexual gratification as a motive. Additionally, the pathologist was able to find phosphorus on the remains, however when interviewed Gadowski said that he and Caryn had sex on the evening of January 11th.
Almost immediately after her body was discovered Dr. Gadowski was interviewed by a reporter, and regarding the tentative identification, he said, ‘that’s kind of what we expected. We’ll have to wait and see what happens… This endless waiting has been very difficult for everyone involved. But I hope it’s not her.’ After a positive identification was made, Caryn’s remains were flown to Detroit for burial. In February and March 1975 Pitkin County investigators traveled to Michigan on multiple occasions in order to dig into Campbell’s background (as well as Dr. Gadowski and Dr. Rosenthals’).
The day after the discovery was made the remains were taken to Denver General Hospital, where Pathologist Dr. Donald Clark performed an autopsy and a positive ID was made thanks to dental records.* Also, Caryn’s dentist determined that ‘in his unqualified opinion, after comparing the dental charts and x-rays with the dental work on the body, that the body is in fact Caryn Eilene Campbell.’ *Just as a side note, Kevin Sullivan reported that she was flown to ‘Howards Mortuary,’ located in Denver.
After allowing the body to thaw out for roughly 24 hours, Caryn’s autopsy revealed that ‘the cause of death was blows to the back of the head with a blunt object combined with exposure to sub zero elements.’ She also had a cracked tooth, and suffered extreme tissue damage in her face, head, and one of her arms due to exposure to wildlife, and had bite marks on her cranium. She also had ligature marks on her wrists, which pointed towards her being tied up at one point. Based on the contents of her stomach, it’s strongly suspected that Campbell was killed within two to five hours after she disappeared, and according to (retired) Colorado DA Frank Tucker, ‘all indications are that this is a homicide.’
For some of the detectives that were familiar with the large amount of recent homicides in the general part of the US, it was suspected that Campbell had possibly fallen victim to a violent predatory killer who by that time had already claimed the lives of (at least) twelve other young women in the west. However when pressed about a possible connection in the cases Frank Tucker said that he was ‘interested in convicting someone of this crime, not in hearing someone’s pipe dreams. We have no evidence to tie this murder to any other we’ve had in the West at all at this point.’
Seven months after the murder of Caryn Campbell, Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward arrested twenty-eight-year-old law student Theodore Robert Bundy after a brief police chase. Inside Ted’s VW (which they were given verbal permission to do, a fact that Bundy later denied), officers found several items that commonly doubled as burglary tools, including a pantyhose mask, crowbar, (off-brand) handcuffs, and an ice-pick. While searching his apartment later that same day, detectives found a list of Aspen ski resorts with an x next to The Wildwood Inn, as well as a program from the play ‘The Redhead” that was performed at Viewmont High School, which is the school that Deb Kent was abducted from on November 8, 1974. Credit card receipts from January 12, 1975 seem to point towards Ted buying gas in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, which puts him in close proximity to The Wildwood Inn.
According to the ‘1992 TB Multiagency Team Report,’ on October 2, 1975 Bundy stood in a lineup in SLC for the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch (which occurred earlier in the day that Deb Kent vanished), and after she picked him out he was arrested two hours later. Additionally, Ted’s Volkswagen matched the description of the vehicle that was used by the kidnapper.
At the time of Caryn’s murder in January 1975 Ted was a full-time law student at the University of Utah, and was living in his first SLC apartment located at 565 1st Avenue. He was unemployed at the time, and remained that way until June 1975 when he got the position of night manager of Bailiff Hall at the University of Utah (he was fired for showing up intoxicated). He was also in a long term relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer, even though they were on the down swing of their romance.
Ted was bailed out of jail on November 20, 1975, and his trial for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch began on February 23, 1976. During the trial Bundy decided to act as his own attorney, and openly admitted to having no accountability for his whereabouts on November 8, 1974, when DaRonch was abducted. Despite being adamant that he never met Carol DaRonch, he was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to between one and fifteen years in prison.
With a possible suspect behind bars, detectives in Washington and Colorado began to piece their cases together, and hunted for more proof that linked Bundy to the homicides in their state. Ted’s tan 1968 Volkswagen was impounded and picked apart by forensic technicians, and despite multiple deep cleanings he had missed important pieces of evidence. On January 29, 1976 investigators were told that a hair sample that was found in the vehicle matched that of Caryn Campbell, as well as three additional suspected victims. It was also determined that the wounds found in Campbell’s skull matched the pattern made by the crowbar that had been taken from Bundy’s vehicle on the night of his arrest.
On October 21, 1976 Ted was officially charged by Pitkin County for the murder of Caryn Campbell, and on January 28, 1977 he was transferred from custody in SLC to the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs to stand trial. Once again, he decided to act as his own attorney, which allowed him access to the make-shift ‘law library’ located in the back of the second story courtroom, which he escaped from on June 6, 1977, and the rest is history… (in reality, I’ve already written about it a half dozen times before).
According to Kevin Sullivan’s 2016 book, ‘The Trail of Ted Bundy,’ a woman named Elizabeth Harter (who I’ve also seen called Lisbeth) was staying at The Wildwood Inn at the time of Caryn’s murder, and she said the evening she disappeared she happened to notice Ted standing next to a ‘outdoor service closet’ and across from an elevator because he looked so out of place, saying that he: ‘certainly wasn’t dressed for it (meaning the cold temperatures), as he was wearing dress slacks and a shirt. His appearance looked so odd that Elizabeth Herter noticed him and immediately wondered why he would be doing such a thing. He stood out, she later told police investigators, and she thought it was weird.’
In a way there’s a lot of parallels to the Campbell murder and the disappearances of Georgeann Hawkins from the University of Washington in June of 1974 and Sue Rancourt from Central Washington University on April 17, 1974 in Ellensburg. Both young women were most likely approached by a man that was using an injury ruse looking for help, and were lured away to a secondary location that involved his waiting vehicle. Did Ted lure Campbell from the second-floor hallway of The Wildwood Inn, perhaps pretending to have a broken appendage…? But why would anyone be at a ski resort with a broken arm or leg? I guess it would have made for an interesting conversation starter.
According to a 1979 KOMO news report, in the early portion of the investigation there was another suspect that was looked at for the disappearance of Caryn Campbell: an individual Ruth Walsh dubbed ‘Jones’ (a pseudonym), who happened to be in the Aspen area for at least eleven days prior to her murder and one day after. After about thirty seconds of investigating (reading through the documents related to the case that were recently released by the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Department), Jones’ real name is Hugh Joseph Michael Temos.
Temo had been employed (and fired) as a maid/dishwasher at (at least) four hotels/reports in the general Aspen/Snowmass Village area, specifically at the Holiday Inn (for three days), The Pomegranate Inn (for three days), The Plum Tree Inn (for seven days), and ‘The Top of the Village’ (for one week). His former coworkers testified that he was disruptive, weird,’ a sexual deviant, athletic, ‘physically attractive,’ hyperactive, scary, not playing with a full deck, crazier than hell, and hostile towards women.’ On January 13, 1975, Temos picked up his final paycheck and walked out, leaving the Aspen area for good. The next time he surfaced was at the city jail in Roseburg, Oregon, where other inmates described him ‘bursting into spontaneous laughter at empty space,’ and drinking his own urine, with one man even admitting he was ‘terrified of him.’
Chris Haper, one of the managers at ‘The Top of the Village,’ told Pitkin County investigators that the day before Campbell’s disappearance on January 11, 1975 he had tried to fire Jones, who had consequently became aggressive, and turned into an incident that made him ‘fear for his life.’ On the 12th of January Haper said that when Jones left work at The Top of the Village he announced that he was going to go watch cross-country skiers, and perhaps it’s worth mentioning that the TotV is only one block away from The Wildwood Inn. A maid at The Wildwood testified that she saw Temos near the pool on the night Campbell vanished, and it was because of this tidbit that detectives brought him in for a polygraph. The results found no indication that he killed the pretty young nurse and he was officially cleared, however it was determined that the test was administered without a blood pressure cuff, which may have affected the results.
Seattle polygraph expert Lieutenant Joe Nicholas, while not directly commenting on Temo’s test specifically, took a ‘dim view’ in regards to the validity of a polygraph test administered without a blood pressure cuff, and when pressed by Walsh he admitted that if any one of the three key elements were omitted, it would definitely affect its accuracy despite there being other things to look at (breathing, for example).
Walsh also mentions that there was ‘a postscript’ in regards to this Jones individual: she said that he was living in Seattle during Bundy’s heyday in 1974, and on September 8, 1974 (a day after the discovery of Ted’s Issaquah dump site) he was arrested by the King County Sheriff’s on a charge of indecent exposure (he flashed a cops wife), and went on to serve 180 days in jail. After getting out, he made his way to Colorado, and it was around this time that he developed a reputation for violence, largely towards the opposite sex, and exhibited a large amount of mental instability. In an on-air interview with King County Sheriff Lieutenant Jim Harris, Walsh asked him about Temos and if he served time in the King County Jail on the dates she provided him with, which he did confirm.
In another report conducted by the FBI, Sergeant Ivan Beason commented that ‘in checking records, the Seattle area was having almost one missing girl per month, but after the suspect (Jones) was incarcerated, the missing girl stopped. In the opinion of the reporting detective, Jones looks good as a suspect.’ The missing girls referred to in this report are of course the eight confirmed Bundy victims from 1974.
But wait, it gets even weirder: Temos lived only two blocks away from the alley that Georgiana Hawkins disappeared from in June 1974, which is a murder that has a lot of parallels with Caryn Campbell. He also lived within two blocks of Lynda Ann Healy, who vanished without a trace in the early morning hours of February 1, 1974. At the end of the segment Walsh reported that at the time of the broadcast in July 1979 nobody knew what had happened to Jones, and he had seemingly dropped completely off the radar.
Another person that was investigated for the murder of Caryn Campbell is Pitkin County undersheriff Ben Meyers. The true crime website ‘CAVDEF’ pointed out something odd involving the eyewitness Lisbeth Harter took place at Bundy’s pretrial hearing, an event that Ann Rule detailed in ‘The Stranger Beside Me:’ ‘this time, the eyewitness was the woman tourist who had seen the stranger in the corridor of The Wildwood Inn on the night of January 12, 1975. Aspen Investigator Mike Fisher had shown her a lay-down of mug shots a year after that night and she’d picked Ted Bundy’s. Now, during the preliminary hearing in April of 1977, she was asked to look around the courtroom and point out anyone who resembled the man she’d seen. Ted suppressed a smile as she pointed, not to him, but to Pitkin County Undersheriff Ben Meyers (Rule, 230).’
The creator of the ‘CAVDEF’ web page seems to write around conspiracy theories, and the idea that Ted Bundy (at the very least) either had help with his murders or he wasn’t responsible for all of the ones that he is (or both). In a blog post written about Caryn Campbell, they creator mentions that at first Harter’s identification of Meyers was quickly dismissed as a mistake, however when one considers his rumored connection to several murders in Grand Junction later in 1975 it almost makes you wonder if he was the man that she saw at The Wildwood Inn on the evening of January 12, 1975. As the Grand Junction murders (including Denise Oliverson) seemed to center largely around local organized crime, this suggests that if Meyers was somehow involved, Campbell’s murder was then most likely a targeted hit. On that note, it is worth mentioning that Caryn’s brother Bob is a retired Fort Lauderdale police officer, which is an area that remains a major center for drug trafficking activity to this day.
Denise Oliverson was the first of many young women to either disappear or be murdered in Grand Junction in 1975. All of these crimes were suspected of revolving around the drugs and prostitution activity in the city, in which many officers including police chief Meyers were complicit. Oliverson was known to be a fairly heavy drug user, which put her in at least some contact with the local drug scene.
Vail Colorado ski instructor Julie Cunningham, who disappeared on March 15, 1975, also may not have been just a random victim: she was reportedly good friends with the daughter of Salem Oregon chief of detectives Jim Stovall, who worked directly under Ben Meyers when he was Salem’s chief of police. In fact, Stovall was the very first officer of the department that Meyers nominated for a national law enforcement award, and the two traveled together to Atlantic City in New Jersey for the ceremony. Eagle County, where Vail is located, was also a known center for the nationwide drug trade: Allen Riverbark, a known trafficker that operated in the area during the 1970’s until he died in a plane crash in November 1981, owned the Black Mountain Guest Ranch, which was located thirty miles outside of Vail. It doubled as a hideout for East Coast mobsters, and served as a distribution point for Rivenbark’s network of drug dealers, a ring that was based in Fort Lauderdale. FL (CAVDEF, 2022).
Harter was obviously the foundation of the state’s case, and they had no other ‘proof’ that placed Bundy inside of The Wildwood Inn on the evening Caryn disappeared, and that evidence disappeared with her identification of somebody other than him. The only things that the prosecuting attorneys had left in their arsenal was the gas receipt linking him to the general Snowmass Village area on January 12, 1975, an inconclusive (and since-discredited) DNA analysis conducted by the FBI that placed Campbell’s hairs in his VW, and an attempt to introduce cases in other states that he was only suspected of but never even stood trial for.
In an old audiotape that had been recorded by Bundy on February 2, 1980 for journalists Steven Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth (provided by Maria Serban on behalf of Dr. Rob Dielenberg), the killer talked about Mike Fisher’s dedication to his conviction in regards to the murder of Caryn Campbell: ‘And while this doesn’t have anything to do with Fisher, I think it’s interesting if you read the transcript of the preliminary hearing in the Campbell case, how thoroughly he was discredited as an investigator. This is chiefly with respect to the rather amateurish way in which he handled Elizabeth Harter who was allegedly the kingpin of the case: she was a woman who said she saw a man or men standing by elevator one evening at Snowmass, Colorado, on the evening that Caryn Campbell disappeared. It was a year later, when she returned to Snowmass for the same type of convention they have, that a photo display was shown to her and she picked up my photo as being the man standing by the elevator.’
‘You have to compare, to really appreciate how badly Fisher handled this situation… you must compare the language and the information in the Campbell case with the testimony which actually came out at the preliminary hearing. Basically, unusually, I guess, Fisher grossly exaggerated the statements made by Mrs Harter with respect to her photo identification and the set of circumstances which gave rise to that identification. Of course, when Mrs Harter was called in Aspen to make an identification, she failed to identify me… She also said that she had never told Michael Fisher that she was sure of what she was seeing and what she had seen, it was dark, she never got a good look at the man she had seen, that she was some 40 ft away from the man she had seen, and that the photo she picked out, she picked out as only remotely resembling the man that she had seen and she could not form an opinion that the man in that photo was exactly the man she had seen…’
‘Of course, the representation Fisher must have made toward getting the information in the first place is far different.’ … ‘The embarrassment suffered by the prosecution at that preliminary hearing as a result of Fisher’s half-hazardous, vague investigations, is the worst I’ve seen in any case that I’ve been the object of. Plus the bottom line of that handling of Miss Harter was that she not only failed to identify me in the courtroom – that is she did not identify me in the courtroom, but in fact identified the under-sheriff who had accompanied me from Utah to Aspen just a few weeks before. The name of the under-sheriff was Ben Meyers by the way.’
‘Anyhow, a law enforcement official of questionable character, he had held a number of jobs, he had been in a variety of law enforcement agencies throughout his career, and there were a number of rumors, most probably unsubstantiated of course as far as I can say, concerning his conduct in the various agencies that had employed him.
‘Interestingly enough, the last position he held before coming to Aspen was… before coming to the Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office as under-sheriff… was of chief of police in Grand Junction, Colorado, where there had been a series of murders of young women… And my understanding is that it took a great deal of pressure… and there was a failure of his department to solve these murders… I don’t believe that was the sole reason of him leaving.’ … ‘Ben Meyers himself was not effective in the investigation in the prosecution of my case, other than the fact that he was identified as most resembling the man that Mrs Harter saw the night of Caryn Campbell’s disappearance.’
‘I saw Fisher on numerous occasions: most in the courtroom, in Aspen, during the many months that I attended the pre-trial hearing there… The only occasion when he testified that I can recall was the occasion of the preliminary hearing. But it seems as though he was always present, whispering in the ear of Frank Tucker, the district attorney delegated to try the case for Fisher… Or sitting somewhere in the front row of the courtroom. It was clear he had a personal interest in this case. And I had been told, although I can say this from personal experience, that he had developed something of a close friendship with the former fiancé of Caryn Campbell. I always got the feeling that despite his rather laidback manner, his rather non-law enforcement demeanor, that he was deeply, deeply devoted and dedicated to obtaining a conviction of me in this case.’
‘After the preliminary hearing in Aspen, of course, there were numerous contacts with Michael Fisher which I will relate to you as I go on this tape… In many ways… I don’t know… certainly I had something of a dislike for him, because obviously, from where I stood… he did not seem to be equipped to handle the job that he had taken on for himself. It’s hard for me to describe that feeling any further… I wouldn’t call what I felt for him as a form of pity… that’s just not what I’m trying to say, but I just felt when I looked at the man and listened to him and watched him, I couldn’t believe that he was actually someone who had been delegated with the serious responsibility of a serious investigation of a serious criminal case. Certainly appearances are deceiving, but in Fisher’s case, his appearance, I think was reflected in his ability…’
‘After the day that I arrived in Aspen, Fisher asked me if I wished to talk to him. He and I never spoke directly again until I had been captured after my escape from Aspen jail in June 1977… I never saw him back in the jail area at the Pitkin County Jail where I was being held. I rarely saw him in the sheriff’s office. Mainly because the prosecuting attorney’s office where he worked was in a building maybe 15 yards away from the courthouse itself. But there is no doubt that whether he was experienced or not, whether he had the ability or not, or whether he was a policeman or a law enforcement officer or just someone who fancied themselves as a law enforcement officer… There is no doubt he had an active and major role investigating the Caryn Campbell case.’
‘I believe he was present… a peeping-tom policeman… No, I believe he was present at the autopsy of Caryn Campbell, although I can’t say for sure… I wish I’d known if he was present at the scene shortly after her body was discovered… I know that he examined a number of items in evidence or trace materials… One time a vehicle rented by a friend of Campbell’s fiancé was examined for dirt and other debris, which may have indicated whether Campbell was in contact with that vehicle. I know for instance that he tried to track down a number of suspects other than myself, and this would be reflected in the reports that you’ll find.’
And Ted seemed to be concerned with the things Fisher was doing during the period of time before Ted became a suspect in the Campbell case: ‘I know that he took a hair sample, sat in my car… As far as I know he came to take my statement…’ ‘He did a great deal of investigation, specifics of which I’m not familiar, but I believe that one time he represented to me that he and another investigator checked every hotel and motel in the Aspen vicinity to see whether there was someone like me who fit my description who registered there.’ … ‘I wish I had known everything he had done and that might be of some value to me in that case.’
Bundy then also says that he knows that Fisher traced down his credit cards and came up with a credit card that Fisher believed placed Bundy in Glenwood Springs, Colorado on the day when Caryn Campbell was last seen [according to press reports, police had discovered that Bundy used a credit card on Jan. 12, 1975, in Aspen, the day Caryn Campbell disappeared from her hotel room].
And Bundy then says that he believed Fisher also traveled back to Michigan, to the area where Caryn Campbell was from, and that Bundy’s discovery records indicated that Fisher sent out hundreds of letters to different law enforcement agencies inquiring about the Campbell case… ‘Many many letters to agencies followed up the lead on different suspects. No question he was chief investigator and he engaged in enormous amount of work in that case, both before and after the time I became a suspect. This portion should be reflected in many of the documents I collected in Colorado. So one cannot fault him for being diligent, being amateurish but diligent in pursuit of solving the Caryn Campbell murder.’
Bundy is then also heard saying that Fisher had no substantial case in the Campbell murder, and Fisher had ‘expectations, the unrealistic belief that given enough pressure of some sort, that I’d give him the easy way out, that I would confess to whatever it was that he wanted me to confess to. I think it’s interesting to know that following my arrest in Pensacola, Florida, in February of 1978, that he and Milt Blakey, special prosecutor from Colorado assigned to the Campbell case, immediately flew to Pensacola and were present while I was being interrogated by the police in Pensacola. But he [Fisher] never showed his face, I never knew he was there… or whatever made me aware of his presence there. Later when I was transferred to Tallahassee he too went to Tallahassee and was present during…’
Bundy ends the tape by saying that Fisher was absolutely convinced, in his own mind, that he was responsible for Caryn Campbell’s murder. And he is also heard, right before the tape ends, teasing that the real him would not be captured on those tapes… I received this tape from Rob Dielenberg, who had obtained it from David Von Drehle’s archive.
Before Bundy was executed in January 1989 Investigator Fisher flew to Raiford Prison in Starke and spoke with him regarding his Colorado murders, and according to ‘Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries,’ he did a news conference in Aspen the following day to go over his findings: according to an article published in The Aspen Times, ‘Bundy told Fisher that he drive around Aspen several hours before the murder and then headed up to Snowmass Village carrying ski boots… Bundy told Fisher he stopped at the edge of The Wildwood’s pool and was hoping a woman nearby would help him carry his ski boots to the car. But the woman ignored Bundy and he waited for several minutes until Campbell, his second choice, walked across a balcony and asked Bundy if he needed some help.’ As the article continues, Bundy admitted to Fisher that it wasn’t long before he hit Caryn ‘with the boots’ (just incapacitating and not killing her) then ‘stuffed her into his vehicle (Sullivan, 163-164).’
The final thing that Investigator Fisher was asked by reporters was whether or not Campbell had been sexually assaulted, which was a question he briefly hesitated on then refused to answer (probably for the sake of the Campbell family and Dr. Gadowski). It wasn’t until he was being interviewed for Kevin Sullivan’s book, ‘Ted Bundy’s Mysterious Murders’ in 2009 that he finally admitted that he told him that he took her life ‘just like the others (hitting her in the head) just once,’ before mentioning that he ‘did his thing right there in the car (Sullivan, 124).’ Fisher also mentioned that Ted did confirm that he did kill Caryn away from The Wildwood Inn.
Raymond Gadowski remarried a woman named Marvelyn (née Moser) in 1979 and died at the age of 69 on February 20, 2022. According to his obituary, he graduated from Southfield High School in 1961 then went on to attend Michigan State University, graduating in 1965. He attended medical school at Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine, and after completing his cardiology fellowship in 1978 he went on to practice medicine for 44 years in the Greater Detroit area. He had another child with his second wife and his son Gregory went on to become a Doctor. In addition to working as a physician and teaching Dr. Gadowski had a very active life, and enjoyed fishing, skiing, and playing golf at his beloved Oakland Hills Country Club. He loved spending time with his grandchildren and always shared his ice cream with his dogs.
The day before the execution of his daughter’s killer, Robert Campbell did an interview with The Free Press, saying: ‘you never really forgive something like that. You just try to put it behind you… the thing I’d like to have back, I can’t.’ He went on to say that despite Caryn’s senseless murder that he didn’t feel strongly one way or another when it came to capital punishment, and that he was ‘not a vindictive person, but certainly you can’t go around killing people… reluctantly, but I don’t think executing Bundy will be a deterrent. People will keep killing.’
Audrian Campbell passed away at the age of 67 on March 10, 1986 in Detroit, and Mr. Campbell died at the age of 79 on July 28, 1996. Caryn’s sister Sandra Lee ‘Sandy’ Leabo died on September 27, 2017 in Northport, MI and Nancy Ann passed away at the age of eighty in Wyandotte on January 5, 2023.
Works Cited:
Sullivan, Kevin, ‘The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History.’ (2009).
Sullivan, Kevin. ‘Ted Bundy’s Murderous Mysteries: The Many Victims Of America’s Most Infamous Serial Killer.’ (2019).
Winn, Steven. ‘The Killer Next Door.’ (1979).
Margaret Elizabeth Bowman was born on January 6, 1957 to Jack and Runelle (nee Karnes) Bowman in Honokaa, Hawaii. Jackson Harrison Bowman III was born on October 26, 1930 in Chattanooga, TN and Mrs. Bowman was born on May 19, 1932 in Denton, TX. Margaret is also the great-great-granddaughter of Pinellas County pioneer Daniel McMullen and the great-niece of Donald C. Bowman (a prominent attorney). The couple were married on December 27, 1954 in Dallas TX and had two children together: Margaret and her younger brother, Jackson H. Bowman IV (b. May 12, 1961).
Mr. Bowman attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he was a ROTC cadet. He joined the Air Force and became a pilot, and flew Trans-Pacific routes from bases in California, Hawaii, Utah and Japan; he also served his Country as an Operations Staff Officer in Saigon Vietnam where he flew combat missions, earning a Bronze Star. While ‘getting his wings,’ in 1953 he went on a blind date with Runelle, who was a Braniff Airways flight attendant at the time and the pair were together ever since. In December 1973 Jack retired from the US Air Force with the aeronautical rating of command pilot and the rank of lieutenant colonel. The following year he began his second career in the real estate business in St. Petersburg, where he served as president of the local Realtor Association and was an officer of the Florida Association of Realtors.
Always Margaret from the first grade on (never Peggy or Maggie), she always requested to be called by her full name. Tall and willowy, with chestnut hair and warm brown eyes, Bowman had her mother’s strong features as well as her delicate nose. As a little girl, she would sit in her father’s lap while he read her Peter Rabbit, and if he stopped for any reason she would pick up where he left off, reciting the book completely from memory, and when her grandparents gave her a copy of ‘The Secret Garden’ at the age of ten, she devoured it, and read it over and over again.
In Margaret’s early years the Bowman family moved around a lot, but in 1973 they settled down in St. Petersburg, FL during her time in high school and college. During her junior and senior years in high school Bowman was a member of the drama club, the Civinettes service club, the scuba diving club, and the tennis team, and in her senior year she served as the president of the French Club and the French National Honor Society, ‘Le Cercle Francais;’ she also enjoyed playing chess with her brother.
At the time of her murder, Bowman was 21 years old and a junior art history major (she had a deep love for classical civilizations) at Florida State University in Tallahassee and was a member of the Gamma Chapter of the Chi Omega sorority. She joined the Chi Omega’s because her grandmother (who was also named Margaret) had pledged there as well. She lived in room number nine in their house on West Jefferson Street, and was described by her sisters as ‘very religious’ but very sweet and easy to get along with. Margaret was rush chairman for the Chi Oh’s and was a member of the schools senate, and in January 1978, she was learning to sew and was working on making a green velveteen dress.
On the evening prior to their murders, both Bowman and her sorority sister Lisa Levy had been at Sherrod’s, a disco-like bar that was located right next door to their house, but whether Bundy saw them there is unknown. According to The Tallahassee Democrat on January 17, 1978, Margaret was invited to go out for a late night burger at an all-night diner on the evening she was killed but she turned them down, deciding to go to bed instead.
In the early morning hours of January 15, 1978, Bowman was attacked as she was asleep in her second story bedroom as well as three other coeds: Lisa Levy, Karen Chandler, and Kathy Kleiner were found brutally attacked in their beds. Kleiner and Chandler survived, but Margaret and Levy did not. Using blood samples from the four women, forensic serologist (which is a scientist that studies bodily fluids) Richard L. Stephens proved that Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman were bludgeoned before Kleiner and Chandler.
According to author Steve Winn, responding Tallahassee police officer Bill Newkirk went into Margaret’s room first and he assessed the damage: the young coed laid on her bed in a limp, awkward pose and she had a pair of panty hose cinched around her neck (knotted at the windpipe); her lifeless eyes stared blankly in front of her, and her mouth was gaped open. She had experienced a substantial blow to the head and had a large puncture on the left side of her cranium as well. There was blood everywhere, which had largely accumulated around her shoulders and head and there was also a bloody palm print on the wall that had already started to dry. Despite the massive head wound that Bowman had, the medical examiner concluded that both her and Levy died as a result of strangulation.
According to Officer Newkirk: ‘Ms. Bowman was lying on the bed in the south-west corner of the room with her head and feet pointing in the south-north direction, respectively. The bed spread was covering Ms. Bowman’s entire body with the exception of her head, which was tilted to the right lying on her pillow. Her face was facing the west wall. This writer pulled back the cover bedspread and observed Ms. Bowman had been strangled with a pair of nylon panty hose. Her legs were bent outwardly slightly and spread open. Ms. Bowman was lying on her stomach. Her right arm was extended down her side and her left arm was bent with her elbow facing east and her left hand resting on her back. Both palms of the hands were turned upward. This writer turned Ms. Bowman over onto her right side to check for a heartbeat or pulse and discovered neither. This writer looked at Ms. Bowman’s head and observed where Ms. Bowman had received a crushing blow to her right forehead coupled with what appeared to be puncture wounds in the same vicinity. Massive bleeding occurred from both the forehead and the right ear. Additionally Ms. Bowman’s neck appeared to be disjointed leading this writer to believe there was a possible neck fracture. Ms. Bowman’s body was relatively warm to the touch and her eyes were glassy with pupils dilated.’
As we all know, Margaret’s killer would later be identified as Ted Bundy, who was first arrested in Granger, Utah in August 1975. After being found guilty of attempted kidnapping on March 2, 1976, Bundy escaped (for the second time) from Glenwood Springs jail in Colorado on December 31, 1977, and over the course of a few days he slowly made his way to the sunshine state, arriving by bus on January 6, 1978. He secured housing at ‘The Oaks’ rooming house the following day, and was seen next to the Chi Omega house late in the day on January 14, 1978.
At 2:00 AM on January 15, 1978 Bundy left Sharrod’s Bar and approximately a half hour later entered the Chi Omega house and began his assault on the four sleeping coeds. It’s strongly believed that Margaret was attacked while in her bed at about 2:45 AM; she had been sexually assaulted and beaten with a piece of firewood, then strangled to death with a Hanes stocking. At 3:17 AM Nita Neary arrived home from a date when she heard unusual noises coming from the upstairs, and suddenly a man came running downstairs then out the door; police were immediately called and nine minutes later they arrived on the scene.
After fleeing the Chi Omega house Bundy made his way about eight blocks over to Dunwoody Street, where at 4:37 AM he broke into the basement apartment of Cheryl Thomas. He brutally attacked the 21-year-old dance major and left her for dead; her skull was broken in five places and she suffered from a dislocated shoulder and fractured jaw. Thomas survived, but due to the permanent loss of equilibrium that she suffered from the attack essentially ended her dance career.
Thankfully before the media broke the news the families of the victims were notified of what happened in the early morning hours of January 15, 1978. The attacks at Florida State shook the Tallahassee community, and the perpetrator remained unidentified for nearly a month. Bundy was arrested for the final time at 1:30 AM on February 15, 1978, but not before he killed 12 year old Kimberly Diane Leach in Lake City, Florida; he was identified two days later. On July 7, 1978 he was indicted for the Chi Omega attacks and after standing trial was given the death sentence for the murders; he was executed on January 24, 1989.
Margaret was one of the few victims whose murder Bundy was ever charged with, and in the days before his execution he confessed to thirty murders, including hers. After their daughter’s death the Bowman family found peace within their church, St. Thomas Episcopal on Snell Isle. Mrs. Bowman said: ‘We decided that the only acceptable way to continue on with our lives was to live life to the fullest and not become bitter old people that no one wanted to be around.’
If Margaret Bowman were alive in December 2024, she would be 67 years old. Her parents thought she would have found happiness working at a museum, possibly involving art or archaeology and would probably be married with children of her own. In 1987, Jack and Runelle Bowman donated a cross in their daughter’s name at St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in St. Petersburg, where Margaret once belonged. Runelle said that God blessed her with ‘a non-feeling’ when it came to the man that killed her daughter, and she didn’t hate him or even think about him. Instead she turned to her faith, and went to church every Sunday, where she would look at the cross dedicated to Margaret and remember her memory. According to Mrs. Bowman, ‘we decided that the only acceptable way to continue on with our lives was to live life to the fullest and not become bitter old people that no one wanted to be around.’
After Margaret was murdered Runelle Bowman went back to school and earned her Bachelor’s degree in business from the University of South Florida in 1982. After graduating and getting a job in her field she never missed an opportunity to cook a good meal for someone she loved, and her ‘food offerings’ helped serve as a great reminder of how much she loved her family and friends.
On the morning of Bundy’s execution Jack Bowman couldn’t sleep, and as dawn crept near he and Runelle turned on their television set. As seven o’clock came and went, somewhere inside of Florida State Prison the last person to see Margaret alive was being strapped into the electric chair. According to an article published by The Tampa Bay Times, at 7:18 AM they were notified by Paul Freeman from the attorney general’s office that their daughter’s killer had finally been put to death. Freeman’s position had only recently been created mostly due to the efforts of Diane Cossin, a Chi Omega sorority sister who held Lisa Levy as she died.
Following the call, the couple heard horns and fireworks going off in the distance, and on the news saw crudely made signs supporting Bundy’s death and felt a little sickened. About the execution, Mrs. Bowman said: ‘I don’t understand. You don’t see any of the victims’ families acting that way.’ As they watched their TV they saw an eyewitness to the execution describe Ted as looking scared, but that he had managed to retain a sense of dignity. Jack Bowman was glad to hear that, saying: ‘I didn’t have a motivation of vengeance. I had a motivation of justice.’ In the days following Bundy’s death, someone asked about his feelings regarding the execution, to which he replied, ‘I wanted him punished, This was not hard for me,’ and when asked to talk more about Margaret, he began to cry then shut his eyes, saying ‘I don’t think I can.’
After retiring Jack and Runelle decided to stay in Florida because of the kindness they had received from the community when they were on deployment. According to his son, Mr. Bowman was someone that never forgot a face or said an unkind word about anyone, and enjoyed a good meal at a fine restaurant with loved ones. About her husband, Runelle said ‘I was so blessed to have Jack as my husband. He made me a better person. He could connect with people and people loved him.’ The couple were married for over sixty years when Jack died of esophageal cancer at the age of 84 on May 31, 2015. Runelle Bowman passed away peacefully at the age of 88 on March 13, 2021.
Laura Ann Aime was born on August 21, 1957 to James and Shirlene (nee Tolton) Aime in Lehi, Utah. Mr. Aime was born on August 10, 1928 in Fairview, Utah, and after completing high school he joined the US Navy; after getting out of the military he went on to attend the University of Utah. Shirlene was born on April 12, 1934 in Orem, and the couple were married on January 14, 1951. According to the Aime’s marriage certificate, Jim worked as a steelworker for Geneva Steel. Laura was Jim and Shirlene’s second child, and she had four younger sisters (Evelyn, Michelle, Denna, and Tommi lyn) and an older brother named John. Mrs. Aime filed domestic abuse charges against her husband in April 1966, but they must have worked out their issues because they never divorced.
According to her autopsy, Laura had blue eyes, medium length blonde hair, was 5’10” tall, and weighed around 140 pounds. Before Aime dropped out she was a student at North Sanpete High School, and was at one-time a member of the Laurel Class in the Fairview North Ward. She loved animals, and one time a wild deer wandered out of the canyon and she began feeding it, and eventually was able to convince the creature into becoming a family pet. When Laura was eleven she was thrown into a barbed wire fence by her horse, injuring her ring finger, forearm, and upper arm. Jim Aime liked to take his daughter hunting, and she even helped him bag the first prize deer in a Utah hunting contest at the age of ten. Before she was killed Aime somehow seemed to show awareness that she knew her life was going to end soon in a tragic way: Mrs. Aime said one day out of the blue just a few weeks before her daughter died she told her: ‘at my funeral, I don’t want to be buried in a dress.’ Additionally, Evelyn Aime said that her older sister mentioned that she wanted the 1974 Terry Jacks classic, ‘Seasons in the Sun’ to play during the service as well.
Immediately before she disappeared Laura had been staying with her girlfriend Marin Beveridge, who didn’t live far from her childhood home. Despite being raised in a Mormon family, after leaving home she quickly fell in with the latter-day counter-cultural life, and with her long blonde locks and ‘hippie look’ she already had the stereotypical appearance of a runaway. Although the Aimes didn’t care for their daughter’s choice in friends they were just beginning to come to terms with her ‘nomadic’ lifestyle. Often teased about her height, Laura was given nicknames like ‘Wilt the Stilt,’ which greatly upset her, and her Aime’s suspected that the relentless mocking was what made her leave school. She was used to tough work as the family at one time lived in an old farm house in Mount Pleasant, where they kept a plethora of animals, including chickens, cows, peacocks, turkeys, hogs, goats, sheep, dogs and ‘dozens of cats.’ She was also a tomboy (especially during her early years), and she loved playing softball, and played on competitive teams as well as her families LDS ward, even going so far as to winning the 1972 state championship. Growing up, Laura loved horses and was an experienced rider; she even spent several of her teenage years in an all-girls horseback riding club called ‘The Silver Spurs,’ and participated in several competitions with them at different fairs and parades across Utah.
Before she disappeared Laura had been staying with her girlfriend Marin Beveridge, who didn’t live far from her childhood home. Despite being raised in a Mormon family, after leaving home she quickly fell in with the latter-day counter-cultural life, and with her long blonde hair and hippie look she already had the appearance of a runaway. Although the Aimes didn’t care for their daughter’s friends they were just beginning to come to terms with her ‘nomadic’ lifestyle. Often teased about her height, Laura was given nicknames like ‘Wilt the Stilt,’ which greatly upset her, and the Aime’s suspected that the relentless mocking was what made her leave school. Laura was used to tough work as the family at one time lived in an old farm house in Mount Pleasant, where they kept a plethora of animals, including chickens, cows, peacocks, turkeys, hogs, goats, sheep, dogs and ‘dozens of cats.’ She was also a tomboy (especially during her early years), and she loved playing softball, and played on competitive teams as well as her families LDS ward, even going so far as to winning the 1972 state championship. Growing up Laura loved horses and was an experienced rider. She spent several of her teenage years in an all-girls horseback riding club called ‘The Silver Spurs” in SanPete County, and participated in several competitions at different fairs and parades across Utah. Those that knew her remember her as a kind and loving person.
Laura Ann Aime was seventeen when she was abducted by Ted Bundy on Halloween night in 1974: the party she was at never really got going, and she left by herself around ten to get some cigarettes. About a half hour later she was picked up by an acquaintance named George Alley, who later told investigators that he dropped her off at The Knotty Pine in Lehi just after midnight (although according to Captain Borax, Browns as it was called by the locals closed at eleven, so perhaps it was closer to 11:00 versus 12:00). Quick Lehi factoid: ‘The Knotty Pine’ as it was once called was referred to as ‘Mo Browns’ because the gentleman that owned it was named Leon Brown and he reportedly had ‘a huge mole on his face’ (very clever). Alley also shared that Aime complained that before he picked her up a bunch of ‘cowboys’ ignored her outstretched thumb and drove right past her. From Browns, Aime again got bored and walked to Robinson Park. She was last seen wearing silver cross shaped earrings, a tan sleeveless turtleneck-style sweater with white horizontal stripes, a Navy Pea coat with a hood, light brown lace up shoes, and blue Levi’s with ‘patches on the rear;’ various sources report her wearing a halter top as well. Laura was wearing a ring with a yellow stone and had a rubber band around her wrist; her nails were adorned with black polish with silver flakes.
Although it’s (mostly) agreed on that Laura was last seen trying to hitchhike, there’s a few different possible narratives when it comes to where she was right before she disappeared. The most common theory I’ve seen is that she attended a house party at a mobile home in the suburbs of nearby Orem; a second says the party was in Lehi. The third possibility is that the party took place at the Knotty Pine Cafe in Lehi… (although there’s a FOURTH that says there was no party at all). BUT… every single one of these possibilities consistently placed her at the Knotty Pine Cafe for some period of time before she left to hitchhike to Robinson Park. One eyewitness came forward and shared with investigators that they saw Laura at the park in American Fork at around midnight, which is the last time that anyone reported seeing her alive. Robinson Park is about a 3.2 mile drive from the (former) Knotty Pine Cafe, and if she did walk it would have taken her roughly an hour (give or take) to do so. Due to the dropping temperatures (dipping as low as 45 °F) and the distance involved, it’s very likely that she tried to hitchhike back to Lehi after she was done hanging out at the park. Did Bundy see her there then pull up and offer her a ride? There’s also a possibility that he spotted Aime from a distance then crept up behind her and blitzed her, much like he did to Nancy Wilcox. As I mentioned earlier, Laura was in regular contact with her family after leaving home, and at first they weren’t too alarmed when they didn’t hear from her and figured it was only a matter of time before she got in contact with them. It wasn’t until Laura didn’t come home for a planned hunting trip with her father that the Aime’s knew that something was seriously wrong, as that wasn’t something she would miss without a good reason. After she disappeared her story didn’t make the news until her remains were discovered (like so many of the other case’s I’ve written about, for example Brenda Joy Baker out of Maple Valley, WA), which may have partially been due to her transient nature and nomadic lifestyle.
The remains of Aime were found less than a month after she vanished on Thanksgiving Day next to a stream in American Fork Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains by two BYU students that were looking for fossils for their Geology class (Raymond Ivins and Christine Shelly). Fearing that the murderer may still have been lurking in the area, the couple immediately went to the nearest ranger station and reported their discovery. Aime’s body was covered in leaves, twigs, and brush; she had been raped, sodomized, beaten then strangled to death with a pair of stockings. According to her autopsy report done by former Utah State Medical Examiner Dr. Serge Moore*, Laura had depressed skull fractures on the left side and back of her head and the necklace she was last seen wearing was tangled up in the pair of nylons that were cinched around her beck. She had numerous facial wounds (almost too many to count), and her body had deep wounds from where it had been dragged. LE deduced that the weapon used to inflict such brutal injuries was most likely either a pry bar or metal crowbar; her face was incredibly swollen and her tongue was hanging from her mouth. Aime had also suffered a vaginal puncture that may have been made by a weapon of some sort (perhaps an ice pick, and some have also wondered if it was a speculum which is what it’s thought Karen Sparks was assaulted with). Tire patterns that were found in the immediate area were said to be a match with Bundy’s Volkswagen Bug. *Just as a side note (per Kevin Sullivan), Dr. Moore never properly investigated either the temperature or the level of snow during the period that Smith and Aime were abducted. After complaints of sloppy work from Utah law enforcement Moore was investigated, and he officially lost his license in 1979 after he failed to produce any proof that he graduated from a University in Mexico City.
Laura’s cause of death was listed as multiple head injuries with a skull fracture and strangulation. Also, I do want to point out that I’ve seen the date incorrectly listed as both November 26 and 27th, but according to my research, Thanksgiving Day in 1974 was on the 28th. About the discovery, Ivins said: ‘I looked and I thought, you know, it was a deer or something and … it was a girl … It looked like she had been …she was dead. It was really grotesque. There was blood around her neck and breasts and she was naked and lying on that hill and it was a freak-out and I lost it. I thought maybe the guy was still somewhere around and I just panicked, worrying about my girlfriend . . . and we ran down the trail …Came down and ran right through the creek and got in the car and just drove like a maniac, I guess as fast as I could, down to the ranger station and I reported it.’ Swabs taken from Aime’s vagina and anus showed the presence of non-motile sperm, and blood tests showed no signs of substance use aside from alcohol. In the early stages of the investigation it was suspected that her remains belonged to Debra Kent, who had gone missing from Viewmont High School in Bountiful nineteen days earlier.
Several days before she was killed Laura spoke with her mother on the phone: Mrs. Aime begged her daughter not to hitchhike, and told her that she was afraid that she would meet a fate like that of Melissa Smith from nearby Midvale, who had recently been brutally murdered. She assured her she would be ok and told her mom not to worry; it was the last time they would ever speak. After Laura disappeared Mrs. Aime said that ‘she was missing and she had no purse coat, no nothing. I called the sheriff’s office and they said, ‘What do you want us to do about it?’’ On Sunday, November 3 Shirlene reached out to Judy Olsens’ mom, who was confused by her call, saying ‘isn’t she with you? We haven’t seen her since Thursday when she and Judy and Mark left for the Halloween party?’ Two days later on November 5, 1974 Mrs. Aime called the local police to notify them that her daughter was missing, and when she pleaded with them to look for her she told that there were too many ‘young runaways to pursue each one, and after a couple of weeks I just knew she was dead.’ After the remains of a young woman were discovered on a nearby river bank Shirlene reached out to the sheriff’s for a second time, and was again told ‘there’s no way it’s her, it couldn’t be her’ and that the victim was closer to twenty-five and wasn’t as tall as Laura. However the next morning a story in the newspaper mentioned the young woman was wearing a ‘ring with a green stone,’ which happened to be a peridot, which was Laura’s birthstone. Mrs. Aime immediately ran to look in her daughter’s jewelry box, to see if her peridot ring was still there. It was, however, the rest of the coincidences were just too much for her to bear.
Within an hour both Mr. and Mrs. Aime were on their way to the University of Utah morgue, accompanied by Sheriff Mack Hollet and a copy of Laura’s dental charts. Jim said that she had been beaten so severely that he ‘didn’t even recognize her,’ was only able to positively ID her by the scars on her forearm from the horse injury that I mentioned earlier. When he realized that he was looking at his precious little girl, he let out a loud, gut wrenching wail. Shirlene said that she ‘couldn’t believe it had come from a human being.’ Additionally, the dental records that the Aime’s brought with them further verified that it was Laura. Her autopsy revealed a broken jaw, a fractured skull, bruises and lacerations to her head and shoulders, a deep cut to the back of the head, and injuries to the vagina and anus. The ME determined that she had died on November 20, which was roughly twenty days after she disappeared. Many years after his daughter’s murder, Mr. Aime was driving near the spot where her remains were discovered with a friend, and he shared: ‘my little baby was up there all by herself and there was nothing I could do to help her.’
Captain Borax was able to locate a copy of the Lehi Free Press from the night Laura was abducted, and it was apparently an election period in local county government: Mack Holley was running for Utah County Sheriff, and Noall Wootton was running for County Attorney. Wootton was busy promoting his stance on crime prevention while Sheriff Mack Holley was preoccupied with communicating his belief in strong family values, but both men openly discussed the need for increased protection against the dangers that lurked in the night. Together, Wootton and Holley wrestled with a real, live boogeyman that slithered through the shadows of Lehi and American Fork, but at the same time they had no problems with hiding information away from one another. Mack Holley was known to keep information to himself and refuse to share it, and about him Jerry Thompson said ‘all I kept getting was a runaround, so I basically said, ‘to hell with them.’ As early as December 3, 1974 (which is only six days after Aime was found), retired Utah County Sheriff’s Sergeant Owen Quarnery wrote to the FBI crime lab in DC about the case, saying: ‘The MO is similar in many respects to the Smith case. The victims in both cases were beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled. Also many of the wounds were similar in appearance.’
Despite Laura disappearing on the last day in October it was determined she had only been dead for roughy a week when her body was discovered. According to Kevin Sullivans book ‘The Enigma of Ted Bundy,’ her remains showed a very small decomposition, which strongly hints that her killer may have kept her alive after abducting her. Looking into SLC temperatures during November 1974, it was a relatively warm fall and wasn’t very cold meaning the body wouldn’t have preserved because of low temps. Less than two weeks before Aime disappeared on October 18, 1974 Melissa Anne Smith disappeared from nearby Midvale after leaving a pizza parlor at around 9:30 PM. Nine days later her naked remains were found in a nearby mountainous area, and just like with Aime the only thing found on her body was a cross on a delicate chain necklace. One strange commonality I wanted to point out is that unconfirmed Bundy victim Sandra Weaver was also found the same way.
According to David McGowans book ‘Programmed to Kill,’ Melissa Smith’s body was found almost entirely drained of blood, and revealed a somewhat strange abnormality: like Laura, she had not been murdered immediately and had been kept alive for possibly a week after she was abducted. Additionally, her make-up was applied neatly and none of her nails were broken. Strangely there were no signs of restraints or ligatures, so if she was held against her will before her life was taken, there was next to no signs of it (perhaps he kept her in a locked room of sorts?). Retired Colorado investigator Mike Fisher strongly felt that Bundy brought both Smith and Aime back to his first SLC apartment (located at 565 1st Ave), and further elaborated that on occasion other tenants would hear him going down to the cellar in the middle of the night and making noise.
Sullivan feels that Bundy could have kept Aime alive in two possible scenarios: the first one being he kept her in the basement of his rooming house, which was in the rear of the building and that he could keep locked, and because he was the apartment manager he had a key for the area. The second involves him pulling what he calls a ‘reverse Lynda Ann Healy,’ and he carried her into his room in the middle of the night when no one was awake to see (then down and out again when he disposed of her remains). Thinking about it, carrying the body of a young woman out of your room in the middle of the night sounds awfully bold (even if she was alive), but by that time he had lived there for a few months and had most likely gotten familiar with the behaviors of his fellow tenants. We know he didn’t admit to anything related to Laura Aime during his confessions however he did admit to keeping Deb Kent alive in his residence for a period of time before he took her life, so it’s fairly likely that he did the same with Aime (and Smith). Laura’s autopsy report states that in the middle of November 1974 two or three of her friends told LE they think they got phone calls from her but weren’t 100% certain if it was actually her or not.
In the summer of 1974 Sheriff Mack Holley created Utah County’s first Detective Division, and Laura Aime’s murder was their first investigation. Strangely enough, in an interview between (retired) Chief Investigator for Utah County Brent Bollock and True Crime blogger and creator Captain Borax, Bollock said that (former) Utah County Sheriff Mack Holley never believed that Bundy was responsible for Aimes murder, and even wrote about it in one of his books (which I was unable to locate online). In fact, Holley strongly felt that another man was responsible for her murder, one that was later convicted of killing his girlfriend, even going so far as telling a member of the team of investigating detectives: ‘Bundy had nothing to do with our case, so forget him. That man didn’t do our case. I wish you’d get that through your head.’
A little over a week after Aime disappeared on November 8, 1974, Bundy tried (but failed) to kidnap Carol DaRonch from the Fashion Place Mall on South State Street in Murray. After the 18-year-old telephone operator escaped, Ted quickly realized that he needed a new victim, so he drove roughly 25 miles away to Bountiful and abducted 17 year-old Debra Kent (this will also be important later). The family was attending a showing of ‘The Redhead’ at Viewmont High School that went later than expected and Deb volunteered to take the family car and pick up her two younger brothers at a nearby roller skating rink. On her walk out to the parking lot, Bundy abducted her, then killed her and dumped her body roughly 50 miles away in American Fork Canyon.
In 1977 investigators took a second look into Aime’s murder, and they spoke with her girlfriend Marin Beverige, who positively identified Bundy as an individual that was at Brown’s on the night she disappeared. In fact, Marin’s sister worked at the establishment and even claimed to see Ted pull up and pick up Laura the night she disappeared. Beverige told detectives that she first noticed him one day in September 1974, and remembered that he drove a Volkswagen and told her he was a student at the local university. She also recalled one occasion where she was sitting in the sunshine with Laura and a group of friends near a local high school and the man joined them. When a young guy teased Aime by putting some grass down her halter top, he objected, and ‘this guy came unglued and told him Laura was his. He was really weird.’ Marin said that the attractive young man kept randomly showing up all around Lehi, and always seemed to be looking for Laura. She recalled an event that took place one night at The Knotty Pine, where: ‘he came in and was sitting there talking and I got up…..When Laura said, ‘I’m ready to go,’ this guy said, ‘You can’t. I’m going to rape you.’ Laura just laughed and pushed him away.’’
Beverige informed detectives that she had seen the man on multiple occasions, and one evening he even knocked on her front door and asked to speak to Aime privately. She agreed and after the two went outside to speak alone: ‘Laura was really shook up. But she wouldn’t say what happened.’ About the events surrounding her friend’s disappearance, Marin had a completely different account of what happened that night, one that differed greatly from the one gathered by the Utah County Sheriff’s Department: according to Beverige, her, Laura, and a bunch of their friends had gathered at her house for a Halloween party, and some guys had brought a large amount of vodka and Laura had gotten pretty drunk: ‘It was about midnight or so, and she was pretty well drunk. And she wanted me to walk downtown with her to get some cigarettes.’ She said no, and as Aime walked away into the darkness it was the last time Marin ever saw her friend. ‘Around three or four o’clock some of us went to town to look for her, but we couldn’t find her.’ When Beverige was shown a lineup she immediately picked out Bundy; a female clerk employed at Brown’s picked him out as well. She was also asked to take a polygraph test which she agreed to, and passed.
Mrs. Aime called the early stages of her daughter’s murder investigation ‘damned frustrating,’ and said it was filled with ‘blunders, omissions and political jealousies,’ elaborating that two of the detectives working the case were incredibly uncoordinated: ‘one would come and ask me a question, and a couple hours later the other would come and ask me the same thing. Neither of them would tell the other anything.’ On one occasion a political rival of the (then current) sheriff came to speak with the family to ask them questions for his own personal investigation, and because the Utah County Sheriff’s Department was so unwilling to share information the Aimes would frequently receive phone calls from other police agencies, asking for information about their daughters murder. Not satisfied with how local LE were handling Laura’s murder, the Aime’s desperately wanted the experienced homicide detectives in Salt Lake City to help with the investigation, but they were turned down and told by (local) officers, ‘if we can’t solve it, no one else can.’ Mr. and Mrs. Aime felt that Laura’s murder had become somewhat coveted politically, and that whoever was able to solve it ‘could have written their own ticket politically.’ But unfortunately it went unsolved, and months went by without investigators learning anything new, and it wasn’t until August 1975, when a handsome young law student was arrested that everything started to come together, and Ted became the first decent suspect in her murder. It was at that point that a highly skilled investigator became involved in the case, Brent Bullock of the Utah County attorney’s office, who the family was incredibly pleased with, and was impressed and encouraged by his ‘professionalism, his relentless search for evidence, and his questioning of witnesses.’
When Bundy escaped prison for the first time in Aspen on June 7, 1977, Jim Aime ‘exploded in anger,’ and he ‘would have gone down there and searched for him myself, if I could have afforded to lay off work.’ Thankfully the father of five remained home with his family (he still had four daughters at home), but because Shirlene was so afraid for the safety of their other girls he bought her a .38-caliber pistol. As we all know Bundy was recaptured just a few days later on June 13, 1977, but he escaped for a second time later that same year on December 30 from the Garfield County jail in Glenwood Springs. By this time in the year they had ‘hocked’ the weapon as they were reportedly ‘hard-pressed financially,’ and by his second escape Jim had become even more angry and bitter, and said that his wife was ‘just scared to death. She quit her job so she can stay home and watch the kids. She won’t let those girls out of her sight.’
Laura’s murder wasn’t the only time that the Aime family had to deal with the ‘keystone cops:’ After graduating from high school John joined the military and became a radar specialist in the Army, but after his sister was killed it was as if the entire family’s lives fell apart. After leaving the service he began working in construction in Tacoma, and on April 28, 1975 at around 10 PM he reportedly approached a young woman on a street, briefly spoke with her, then physically accosted her. She testified that she was ‘grabbed by Aime and dragged toward a brushy area and that the defendant ran when she fell to the ground and screamed,’ (she also said that he tried to ‘drag her’), and after letting out an ear piercing scream he fled, but a passerby caught him and held him at gunpoint until police arrived. Aime later said that he had no intention of harming or molesting the young woman, and his wife Lynn was completely puzzled by that incident and couldn’t provide any explanation for her husband’s actions. John was taken to jail and investigators began digging into his past; a probation officer wrote: ‘he and his family have suffered as a result of his sister being raped and killed in Utah.’ While in jail in Tacoma Aime got married to a medical technician and an Air Force vet; it was an unusual ceremony that took place without the guards’ knowledge. After a two-day trial in June 1977, he was convicted of a misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to a five-year term at Washington’s Western State Hospital at Steilacoom for the rehabilitation of sex-offenders. For obvious reasons, this devastated both of his parents, and about the incident Mr. Aime said that he ‘was just a scared kid from the country.’
Before Bundy was put to death in Florida, he confessed to killing Laura Ann Aime on January 22, 1989 in a 90-minute confession with (retired) SLC Detective Dennis Couch. The following is an excerpt from Dick Larsen’s ‘The Deliberate Stranger:’ ‘Y’know, there’s always been something about that Laura Aime case, that one in particular, that’s really bothered Theodore. When several case files were given to Bundy in his jail cell, under the discovery procedure …. the first one he went for … and really tore into … was the Aime case…. ‘ When asked about his involvement in Aime’s murder, Ted lowered his head and refused to talk about it. Strangely enough, I’ve heard that he washed some of his victims’ hair and manicured some of their nails as well, but this is the first time I’ve written about a woman that he actually did it to. After Aime’s remains were found, law enforcement determined that her hair had been recently shampooed, making them believe her killer had returned to her corpse on multiple occasions to engage in acts of necrophilia. About this act is a passage from Michaud and Aynesworths book, ‘The Only Living Witness:’ ‘Bundy also indirectly touched on some old mysteries, such as Laura Aime’s freshly-washed hair, and Melissa Smith’s make-up: ‘If you’ve got time,’ he told Hagmaier, ‘they can be anything you want them to be.’’
According to an article published by The Salt Lake Tribune right before Bundy was executed, investigators had to exhume Aime’s remains in order to get another hair sample because the first one they obtained after her remains were initially discovered were misplaced. Jim Aime wept at the mere thought of it, but relented, saying ‘why not? They can’t hurt her any more. It seems like these things just couldn’t happen.’ About her daughter’s disappearance, Mrs. Aime commented that ‘there’s no way of putting it out of your mind…’
According to Ann Rule’s true crime classic, ‘The Stranger Beside Me,’ Laura’ toxicology report came back just over 0.1, which is obviously an indicator of impairment (at least from a legal standpoint), but at the same time wasn’t so extreme or outrageous that she wouldn’t have been able to defend herself (or at the very least scream or try to run away). Now, if she really was kept alive up until a week before her death, and she wasn’t murdered immediately after the Halloween party… Was Bundy plying her with alcohol up until her final moments? Another thing that is jumping out at me as being weird is… if Laura Aime was kept alive until roughly a week before her body was discovered, that would put her murder date sometime in between November 17-20 (roughly, give or take)… Did he somehow keep multiple victims alive at the same time (somewhere)? Were Aime and Deb Kent somehow kept alive together in an unknown location for a period of time? Did he kill the one in front of the other, like with the Lake Sammamish murders of Denise Naslund and Jan Ott?
Despite the way she was killed was very similar to Bundy’s MO and she fit the physical description of one of his victims, he initially denied any responsibility for Aime’s murder and refused to talk about her when he was questioned. However, (most likely) in an attempt to delay his execution in the days leading up to his death Ted finally confessed to the murder of Laura Ann Aime.
Mr. Aime died at the age of 59 on November 26, 1987. It appears that in 1980 Shirlene Aime adopted her granddaughter Danika, who was given the middle name of Laura after the aunt that she never had the chance to meet. Mrs. Aime died on November 1, 2011 in Reno, Nevada at the age of 77. Laura’s only brother John died at the age of 56 on November 29, 2010 in Gunnison, Utah but it appears that all of her sisters are still alive. Because it’s’ strongly suspected that Bundy kept her alive for a period of time after abducting her, the Aime family chose to list ‘November 1974’ as her official date of death on her gravestone.
Denise Lynn Oliverson (née Nicholson) was born on August 10, 1950 to Robert ‘Bob’ Dale and Nina Marie (nee Jackson) Nicholson in Missouri. Mr. Nicholson was born on June 12, 1927 in Saint Joseph, MO and served in the US Navy during WWII. Denise’s mother was born in St. Louis, Missouri on August 15, 1923 and after graduating from high school enlisted in the US Navy. When the war ended, Nina enrolled at Denver Art Institute, where she met her future husband. The two got married on June 29, 1949 and had two daughters: Denise and her younger sister, Renee. The couple eventually relocated to Colorado and Robert got a job as a commercial artist at The Daily Sentinel. The family settled down in Grand Junction in 1963 after moving from Colorado Springs; after Denise was murdered Mr. Nicholson said he regretted moving there and said that it was ‘a mistake.’
Oliverson had blue eyes, brown hair that she wore long and parted down the middle, and stood at 5’4” tall. She had some lingering facial acne, pierced ears, and a discolored lump on the back of her right hand; she was petite, and only weighed around 105 pounds. After graduating from Grand Junction High School in 1968 she got a job with a company called Ultronix (at least, according to her engagement announcement published in The Daily Sentinel on May 20, 1970). Looking into them, Ultroni was a manufacturing plant that produces electronic resistors, components and log converters but they have since left the Colorado area and moved out of state.
In 1969 Denise was charged with a misdemeanor after being arrested in GJ for marijuana possession, and at some point in the early 1970’s she lived in Spokane, WA with an individual named JC Harrison. Described by her friends and loved ones as being a ‘great, kind person,’ she married Joseph Franklin Oliverson on September 26, 1970. Joe was born in March 1950 in Idaho but his family relocated to Alaska; he was a 1968 graduate of Dimond High School in Anchorage, where he grew up. Oliverson attended Mesa College and when the couple first got married he was employed in Alaska; he eventually relocated to Grand Junction to be with his wife and got a job in insurance and real estate. After going through a rough patch the couple divorced on March 13, 1972. When she was killed Denise was in a new relationship with a man named Raymundo Esteban Romero (who simply went by ‘Steve’). According to her dad, Denise was a frequent drug user and in the early stages of her disappearance he suspected that she may have imbibed in some sort of illegal substances and taken off. Despite a history of running away (she would always return after a few days), Oliversons history in the year prior to her disappearance hinted that she changed a lot and didn’t participate in that behavior anymore. In a letter to Denise dated March 27, 1975 sent from her behavioral health counselor, Lois Kanaly shared that the young divorcee was accepted by the Division of Rehabilitation for services because of her disability, and her anxiety diagnosis was considered ‘a handicap to her employment.’ From there, the letter stated that she had an upcoming therapy appointment on March 31 at 1 PM. At the bottom was a postscript that read: ‘I am pleased. Come in very soon as you can start school this quarter. Enclosed is the Mesa College application.’ Kanaly also advised Denise to look into the schools J.E.T. program. So, obviously Oliverson was in the process of making some big changes in her life, and seemed to be in the process of applying to go to college.
Denise and Steve weren’t together for very long, and seemed to have a healthy relationship at first, however cracks were beginning to show and according to Oliversons friend from high school Marie Parish she wanted him out of her house. At first it appears that she lived at her one bedroom house located on LaVeta Street in GJ alone, but was pressured by Romero to move in with her as a ‘safety precaution’ because of a dangerous former flame. It appears that he was a very jealous and controlling boyfriend and it’s speculated that his motives weren’t entirely gentlemanly and he did it more to get in her house so he could keep an eye on her versus doing it for her safety. Oliverson had a dog named Toma.
On Sunday, April 6th, 1975 Ted Bundy abducted Denise Oliverson at the South 5th Street Bridge in Grand Junction, Colorado. According to the missing persons report dated April 8, 1975, Mr. Nicholson said that the day that his daughter disappeared she stopped by his house with Steve at roughly 1:00 in the afternoon, and from there they went to Lincoln Park. They were taking advantage of a beautiful spring day and were enjoying being outside. Denise saw a friend at the park named Fred Gallegos, but the two didn’t interact. The couple then explored Grand Junction for a bit before returning home. That’s when they got into an argument and around 3 PM Denise said that she was going to ride her bike to her parents house. She left with no coat or personal possessions and Steve said that it’s possible she went back to the park to see her friend. Detectives strongly felt that she was biking down a short path on the east side of the South 5th Street Bridge in Grand Junction when she encountered Ted, which was about 1.7 miles away from her home on LaVeta Street. According to Kevin Sullivans ‘The Encyclopedia of the Ted Bundy Murders,’ several stories about what Denise was doing before she was abducted have emerged or the years since she disappeared, but authorities are certain that she had an argument with her boyfriend and left the one bedroom home she shared with him to go to her parents house, on her a yellow Coast to Coast 10 speed bicycle, serial number 2C174568 to go to her parents house. She never made it.
When Oliverson didn’t come home that night Romero just assumed she spent the night at her parents, as that was a typical occurrence when they had a disagreement. But he immediately became concerned the next day when he called her parents’ house to talk to Denise about coming home and he was told she wasn’t there. Consequently, Mr. Nicholson contacted law enforcement at some point early on April 7, 1975 and reported his daughter as missing; Denise’s parents gave them pictures of her but let them know that they wanted them back. Police didn’t wait to investigate and immediately sprang into action, mapping out the route Oliverson most likely would have taken and searching the road along it. They spoke with members of her family, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances and were told nothing of value. Oliverson’s Dad contacted the FBI for further assistance but was told that they wouldn’t be able to assist in the case unless there was indication that she had been kidnapped or was killed as a result of foul play. At the time she disappeared Denise was employed with Dixson Inc. as an assembler; she wasn’t there for long and only got the position the year before.
On April 7, 1975 an unknown caller from the Denver and Rio Grande Railroads got in contact with the Grand Junction Police Department and told them about an abandoned yellow bicycle that was leaning against a pillar underneath the 5th Street viaduct near the railroad tracks. Retired GJ police officer Lew Fraser was dispatched to the scene at 8:48 AM, and upon arriving he met up with railroad engineer Wilbur M. Class, who shared with him that it had snowed the night before and he had seen what looked like sandals as well as some additional things sitting on the bike’s seat. According to a second railroad employee, the items were scattered haphazardly all over the tracks before he neatly set them out of the way (more on that later). According to Officer Lew there was nothing strange or unusual about the scene that jumped out at him, and it was just another lost bicycle to him. He made a property report, tagged it with a ‘lost and found’ sticker then turned it into the Grand Junctions ‘Old City Shop,’ classifying it as abandoned. When it was eventually determined that the items belonged to Oliverson, LE immediately suspected that foul play was involved but were unable to come up with much else. According to a deep dive by Bundy archivist Tiffany Jean, the investigating officer said in his report that ‘as I was checking it an engineer in a passing locomotive hollered at me and said it had been there since yesterday and that there were some clothes on it and it could have been stolen or something. I checked the immediate area and all I found was a light brown rolled up women’s belt. I checked the bike for stolen and it had not been stolen. Brought the bike to old city shop and filed an abandoned property report and put a found property tag on bike. No further investigation at this time.’
In the early stages of Denise’s disappearance the Grand Junction PD considered Romero a suspect due to his strange and suspicious manner, but nothing conclusive tied him to her disappearance and he was never charged. Law enforcement deemed that he was an unbalanced person but gave him the benefit of the doubt and said that maybe he acted that way because of his girlfriends disappearance. Unfortunately for Oliversons family they were forced to sit back and watch as her case grew cold, and there don’t seem to be any reports of any tips or leads until Bundy confessed on death row in 1989.
After Bundy was thrown into the spotlight because of his arrest in Granger, (retired) GJ Police Chief Ed VanderTook admitted that he was hesitant at first to acknowledge that Bundy was responsible for Oliverson’s disappearance, however after it was proven that credit card receipts placed him in the area he quickly changed his tune. I mean, thinking about it logically, it wasn’t like he could have easily hit her over the head with a crowbar and dragged her away: she was abducted in the middle of the afternoon. I’m leaning towards him using some sort of ruse to lure her back to his car and then he pounced. It’s strongly speculated that Bundy parked his VW underneath the overpass on South 5th Street, as it was a relatively secluded spot in the mid 1970’s. Did he fake a broken arm and tell her he needed help carrying something back to his car? Or perhaps a broken leg, somehow? Did he ask her to place his briefcase in his car then whack her over the head, shove her in then sped off? Or, was he fearless and blitzed her by the bridge, then dragged her back to his Bug, which was waiting nearby? The possibilities are endless, and we’ll never know what actually happened. There’s yet another theory that maybe Denise was experiencing mechanical problems with her bike and that Ted may have come to her assistance.
Oliverson was last seen wearing a long-sleeved green Indian-print blouse, a pair of Levi’s, sandals and a silver ring on her right pinky finger. According to (retired) GJPD Homicide Investigator Doug Rushing and his then partner Jim Fromm, many of Denise’s personal possessions didn’t make it to the evidence file: her purse, a light brown rolled up belt, and additional personal items were stolen by a Grand Junction officer, who gave the items to his girlfriend because of their high market value and the fact that they were considered ‘nice items.’ In addition to her personal things and handbag, Denise’s bike was taken to Grand Junctions ‘Old City Shops’ with the intent of being stored under ‘unknown owner,’ but unfortunately (according to journalist Steven Winn and multiple other sources), it vanished from police custody; it was also never dusted for prints. About it disappearing, a Grand Junction LEO commented that ‘kids had access to those racks,’ and in response to this, Denise’s father snapped back that it ‘was ‘the only piece of evidence that they had’ (I will discuss this in depth more later). Also according to Winn, shortly after Oliverson disappeared retired chief criminal investigator for the ninth Judicial District in the State of Colorado Mike Fisher received a call from police in Roseburg, OR about a man named Jake Teppler who he was interested in speaking with about her disappearance. After multiple interviews and a polygraph examination, it was eventually determined that Teppler had nothing to do with her case, and his alibi’s were successfully verified.
At around 11:00 AM on July 16, 1976, a sergeant from the Grand Junction PD was contacted by Robert Nicholson, who told him that he and his wife wanted their daughter’s bicycle returned to them, if at all possible. After some back and forth between internal departments in the Grand Junction PD, it was determined that the bike had been removed from the ‘City Shops’ and it was seemingly common knowledge that it was missing (and most likely had been stolen). After it vanished Mr. Nicholson was never informed of the incident nor was a report ever written and upon further investigation the theft took place sometime between April 7 and May 25, 1975. At approximately 4:00 PM later that same day the sergeant reached back out to Mr. Nicholson and shared with him that his daughters bike was missing and had been for some time. After hearing this Robert became very depressed and said that he should have been told about the theft immediately after it happened. He was given a formal apology from the GJ Chief of Police for not keeping him informed and in the loop and was promised that if the bicycle was ever found it would be immediately returned to him.
Early in the morning a few weeks after Denise disappeared on April 19, 1975 an officer from the GJPD was dispatched to Oliverson’s residence to look into a noise complaint: when they arrived at 5:18 AM, he spoke with the complainant, another resident of LaVeta Street (a Mr. Jeff Burns), who said he heard what sounded like a loud gunshot roughly 15 to 20 minutes before reaching out to LE. Upon first hearing the unusual noise, Burns looked out the window but saw nothing out of the ordinary and went back to bed. A few minutes later he heard a voice whimpering and groaning, and when he looked out his window for a second time he saw a man lying in Romero’s driveway, rocking back and forth while groaning; it was then that he decided to call 911. When arriving on the scene, the responding LEO first checked out the driveway as well as the yard in front of the residence but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. When they peered in the front door and looked in, he noticed a light on and a dog that immediately got up and started barking at him; it was then that he noticed a man of Spanish descent sleeping on the floor.
The policeman knocked on the door several times and it took a couple attempts to wake Romero up. When he finally opened the door he appeared to be crying and distressed, and the officer explained that he was investigating a reported gunshot as well as an individual lying in his driveway. The man replied that he didn’t know anything about a gunshot but that he was the crying man that was lying in the driveway. When the officer asked if there was anything he could do to help he said no, because the police were unable to find his girlfriend, who was missing and he feared might never be found, and was even possibly dead. The LEO asked why he felt that way, and he replied that it was just ‘a feeling he had.’ Throughout the entire conversation Romero was upset and crying, and overall seemed very disturbed. After being given permission to look around the residence the policeman walked around; he saw nobody else and nothing out of the ordinary. Despite being allowed admittance on this occasion, in a separate event on a different day detectives reached out and asked him if they could look through the house for something that might help aid them in their investigation, but he refused them admittance. Although the LEO did feel that it was most likely Romero that shot off the gun they didn’t see a weapon in the house or feel that he was a threat in any way.
On May 25, 1975 that same officer was requested to do a follow-up visit with Romero after Denise’s father called the department asking if there was any movement on his daughters case. Investigators also spoke with a good friend of hers named Marie Parish, who last saw Oliverson on April 4, 1975. Parish told detectives that she reached out to Romero on April 27, 1975 and asked if there was anything she could do to help with the investigation. She reported that he got angry and said that it was none of her business but if she did learn anything new that she better get in contact with him, and not the Nicholsons. On May 18 she saw Steve riding a yellow boys 10 speed bike roughly three blocks from his house but he refused to look at her; she wondered if it was the same bicycle that Oliverson was last seen riding. She also shared that Romero seemed very possessive and jealous of her friend and the few times they did interact he seemed very angry and had a bad temper. Parish told investigators that Denise was recently hung up on by the young man named Fred that she ran into at the park earlier on the day she disappeared. A few days before she disappeared Oliverson had learned that he had recently gotten married, which greatly upset her. Marie also shared that she had mentioned his name a few times in front of Steve, and it made him very upset.
On May 29, 1975, Grand Junction investigators sat down with another one of Oliversons friends Lynn Kaufman, who shared that on occasion Denise would take off for a while but always came back after a few days. She said at the very least she would contact her mother to let her know she was ok. When asked if she knew where Oliverson might have gone to she replied that she didn’t know why but thought it possible that she may have wound up in California, and she had been there once before and enjoyed it there. Kaufman also said that she never learned how to drive and didn’t have a driver’s license.
On May 27, 1975 investigators spoke with Mr. Nicholson, who shared that his daughters friend Marie would probably be the best person to speak with about details regarding her life. By the time Denise disappeared she hadn’t lived at home for quite a few years and he wasn’t always aware of what she was up to, although she did have the habit of coming to visit every Friday and Sunday. He further told investigators that on the day his daughter disappeared it was on a Sunday and she got there after seeing ‘Tim and Fred Gallegos at Lincoln Park.’ After her sister disappeared Renee Nicholson turned herself in to Pueblo State Hospital ‘for treatment of an unknown ailment’ (I got the impression it was most likely mental health and/or depression related due to Denise vanishing without a trace). The officer reached out to Parish and asked if she knew if Oliverson showed up at the hospital to visit her, and was told no (Jean, 2019). I got the impression that Mr. Nicholson and Steve didn’t get along but it appeared that he was friendly and in contact with Renee. Thanks to Captain Borax (Chris Mortenson) I was able to find a copy of a letter he sent her which was basically just generic, filler sentences (you know, like ‘how are you. I hope you’re doing great, I don’t have a lot to say but I’ll write to you again soon’), but he did attempt to offer her some reassuring words and let her know that he would take care of her house and cats while she was away (it looks like it was sent while she was in the hospital).
On May 28, 1975 law enforcement sat down with Steve Romero, who volunteered that by that date in time Denise had been missing for 52 days. He told investigators that the afternoon she vanished they had gone to a local park and he witnessed her acknowledge a man that he didn’t know and became upset when he refused to talk to her. Oliverson appeared to have developed feelings for this individual, as she became visibly upset when she learned he had gotten married. At one point in the past the two apparently had a sexual relationship, but I don’t know if it went beyond that or if they dated at all. Romero said when they were done at the park (I’m not sure if they were walking or biking) they moved onto exploring the downtown area of Grand Junction before returning home. After the couple got home from their excursion Denise told Romero that she was going out for a bicycle ride and was going to stop at her parents house before coming home; He said it was the last time he ever saw her alive.
The following is an interview that took place on June 3, 1975 between former Grand Junction Police Officer James Fromm and Oliverson’s boyfriend at the time she disappeared, Steve Romero:* (I went ahead and put the important parts in bold).
Officer Fromm: Steve the day that Denise disappeared do you remember what day of the week it was?
Steve Romero: It was Sunday.
JF: It was definitely a Sunday?
SR: Definitely… at 3:30, about 3:30 pm.
JF: There was no possible way it could have been a Saturday?
SR: No sir, it was a Sunday.
JF: Did she take any money with her when she left?
SR: She might have had about $8, cause we went to go get her some shampoo for her hair, but that’s all if anything, that’s all, no identification at all.
JF: Was she wearing earrings?
SR: No she wasn’t, she was wearing only… all the jewelry that I can think she was wearing and maybe I’m not for sure, she was wearing a small band ring. It’s a silver ring. She was wearing it on her… I think it was her right hand. And she might have had a St. Christopher medal on.
JF: Around her neck?
SR: Yeah, she might have, I don’t know. She had a long shirt. She might have had it on, because it was mine you see and it had my name on it. It was gold. The whole thing is gold, the chain and the St. Christopher medal.
JF: It is my understanding that you and Denise were living in the same house is that right?
SR: Yes we were.
JF: Did you ever go to bed with her?
SR: No.
JF: Did you ever make a pass at her?
SR: Sure.
JF: Did you ever go out and get drunk together?
SR: Yeah.
JF: Party together?
SR: Yeah.
JF: Did you have another girlfriend Steve?
SR: Yeah, I know a lot of girls you know. I don’t know how to say it, I know she wanted someone to help her out with the rent so, and I didn’t want to stay at home anymore, so I moved over there.
JF: Are you actively seeing any doctor right now?
SR: Not since I got out of the service. I had a foot injury and that was about it.
JF: When you were in the service did you see any psychiatrist or psychologist or anything like that? Are you actively seeing one now?
SR: No, never, never, never. Never have.
JF: Did Denise entertain any boyfriends while you were living with her?
SR: I don’t know. I don’t know how to answer that really. She liked other people, she liked other dudes. We’re just good friends. She didn’t like me in particular, you know, not as a boyfriend. We had a mutual understanding. We could communicate with each other.
JF: When you were living with her, were there any guys who came over and spent the night?
SR: No, but there were some who wanted to. You see, that’s why she wanted me to move in. There was a cat that was bothering her and he was scaring her pretty bad I guess.
JF: While you were over there was there anyone going to bed with her that you know of?
SR: No, she wasn’t like that.
JF: Can you think of anybody she might have taken off with?
SR: No. I thought the guy from Delta (Gallegos), but it wasn’t.
JF: Did Denise take any other clothes with her when she left?
SR: No, just what she had on.
JF: Do you remember what kind of day it was?
SR: Yeah, it was a nice day then all of a sudden it was really cloudy and ugly. I didn’t report it for about three days because you know, we got into a hassle one time. She went out and told me she was coming home that night and I got worried about her when she didn’t come home that night. So I says, okay, you know, this chick took off on her bicycle and I figures she is 24 years old so she knows what she is doing. So I didn’t bother to report her until the third day. Then I went and told her parents.
JF: Did she take off with her girlfriends often and not come back at night?
SR: It happened before. I never knew her that well. I didn’t spend that much time with her but she did do it that one time so I figured I won’t call in because she… you know… she might get mad at me.
JF: Ok Steve, that will do for now.
SR: I’ll be glad to help you out, cause I’m concerned too. If there is anything I can do for you, let me know.
To summarize: it’s strange, in this interview the narrative he tells police seems to completely contradict everything else I heard about this guy. I mean, he denied him and Denise were a couple, and said that they never had sex, and according to every other source I read about this guy and their relationship, that is a complete and utter lie. Romero also said that he only moved in with her because ‘some cat was bothering her’ and he knew she needed help with paying rent, and that he wasn’t seeing anyone and that she wasn’t dating anyone else either.
In the beginning of the investigation authorities originally felt that Oliverson’s boyfriend had murdered her and hid her body in a crime of passion, but witness testimonies claim that they saw Oliverson leave his house and he did not go after her. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation conducted a polygraph examination on Romero on July 21, 1975 in an attempt to determine if he knew what happened to Denise, her location at that current time, or if he knew whether or not she was harmed in any way (by either him or someone he knew). He said that on Sunday, April 6, 1975 he went to the store with Denise to buy more shampoo from a drug store on North Avenue, and from there they went to the park and visited with several of their friends. Romero then said from there they ‘just messed around town’ then went home, and it was then that she told him she was leaving to go for a bike ride. Denise got her yellow ten speed bicycle out from the front room (where she kept it) and left at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon. She said that she was going to swing by her parents house before returning home, and that was the last time he ever saw her. Romero told police that he didn’t know what happened to Denise but that he didn’t harm her in any way but he strongly felt that something bad happened to her. The officer that administered the polygraph said that it was in their expert opinion that the subject was being truthful. After this, the leads went dry and the case quickly went cold.
In an anonymous letter from an unidentified ‘psychic friend,’ postmarked February 10, 1976, they claimed they saw in a vision that, in addition to being kidnapped, raped, murdered and her remains thrown in river in Dubuque Canyon, Oliverson suffered a violent head wound (by a weapon made of either steel or iron) and her hands were bound in some way (again, using some form of steel or iron) when she was thrown into a river. The psychic also said that a car was also somehow involved in her murder and that her remains would not be found for a very long period of time, if ever. She also said that Denise’s body traveled a long ways downstream from where it was originally thrown in.
Joe Oliverson sat down with Grand Junction law enforcement on May 29, 1975 to go over some details about his ex-wife’s disappearance. He shared that he married Denise in late September 1970 but had divorced her by mid-March 1972; he remarried shortly after it was finalized. In April 1975, Oliverson was employed at a company called Steel Fabricating and the last time he had heard from Denise was about a year prior. He said after their split she always seemed to be in some sort of relationship and always appeared to have a boyfriend, and he knew that she was seeing a guy from either Portland or Seattle but wasn’t sure if he was ever told his name. Joe knew that his ex-wife had a few close friends in Grand Junction and was incredibly trusting, almost to the point of being gullible. He also said that she was a very independent person and was exactly the type that would ‘just take off’ (which strangely enough is the exact opposite of what her friend said about her).
Law enforcement was able to track down Fred Gallego and spoke with him by telephone on May 29, 1975. In the beginning of the conversation when he was asked about Oliverson at first he denied knowing her, then said that he didn’t recall her name (or at least her surname). After the officer refreshed his memory a bit he finally admitted that he did remember her and their fling. Gallego said that when they were together he saw her once or twice every two or three weeks and talked to her for the last time a few months prior to her disappearance in February 1975. He shared that the last time he saw her was the day that she disappeared in the park, but clarified that he had not interacted with her in any capacity. Gallego also said that the reason why he cut off all contact with her was that he had recently gotten married and didn’t want to encourage any future contact with her. When he was questioned if Oliverson had gone back to the park later that day that he last saw her to see him he said no because he never saw her again. Gallego told investigators that he was aware that she had fairly major mental health concerns and always seemed to be looking for an escape from her problems, but he knew that she was talking to a counselor and trying to work through her issues.
Early in the morning on the day his daughter disappeared an unidentified male called his residence and asked if Denise was there. When he answered ‘no’ and asked who was calling, they immediately hung up without answering. The morning after that (Tuesday, April 7) Mr. Nicholson said the same person called again and asked ‘if Denise Oliverson was there.’ Once again, he replied, ‘no, she is not’ and asked who was calling, and it was then that the caller finally answered, ‘this is Steve.’ Later that same day Romero told Robert in a separate phone call that Denise had ‘been hurt by a car.’ Considering this wasn’t true, it’s speculated that Steve said that because he was still incredibly distraught and upset about Denise missing and wanted to make her dad feel pain as well (as if he wasn’t already).
On June 2, 1975 GJ investigators sat down for an interview with railroad engineer Wilbur M. Class, who is one of the employees that found Oliverson’s bike at around 7:30 AM on April 7, 1975. When investigators showed Class the sandals that were found near Denise’s ten speed he positively ID’d them as the ones he saw. Steve Romero also identified them as the pair that belonged to Denise. Mr. Class told LE that the yellow bike wasn’t there the previous day, meaning there was a possibility that he may have overlooked it (which he felt surely was something he would not do). He strongly speculated that someone may have placed the bike there in the dark, late night/early morning hours of April 6th or 7th.
Investigators spoke with a second employee of the railroad named Fidel Lopez that took place on June 25, 1975. Lopez said that while he was switching an engine he noticed a yellow bike and a pair of red sandals laying across the railroad tracks, under the overpass; he retrieved the bicycle then leaned it against a pillar underneath the viaduct, and placed the sandals and other items on its seat. When asked to describe the items and events, Lopez responded that he remembers the bike being yellow and that the shoes were sandals however he didn’t recall on what day he found them (but records within the railroad department showed that he had reported finding the items on April 6, 1975). He specified that he found the bike laying across one rail of the far south railroad track with its front wheel pointing north. Both shoes were found between the two rails on the same track: one was on the east side of the bicycle and the other was on its west side. In his opinion, when he stumbled upon the items they weren’t on the tracks for very long, as they would have probably been noticed right away and removed by someone else. Lopez said he didn’t notice anything that would have made him think a struggle took place in the area and he had not seen anyone in the immediate area.
At the time of Oliverson’s abduction Bundy was a law student at the University of Utah and was living at 565 1st Avenue North in SLC. It looks like it’s roughly 285 miles away from his boarding house to the 5th Street Bridge in Grand Junction, which is about a four hour and forty minute drive, one way. Per my ‘handy dandy TB job chart,’ it appears he was unemployed in April 1975: the last place he worked was at the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia. He resigned on August 28, 1974. Bundy remained without a job until June of the following year, when he became the night manager in charge of Bailiff Hall at the University of Utah (he was fired the next month after coming in drunk). He was still in a long-distance relationship with Liz Kloepfer, although things were getting ready to fizzle out for the final time (they officially broke up after Ted went to prison for the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch in 1976).
When Denise was murdered in April 1975 Bundy wasn’t on the run for much longer: Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward pulled him over in Granger at around 2:30 AM on August 16, 1975 after he saw his unfamiliar tan VW Beetle pass by him while he was out on patrol. The officer knew the neighborhood and its residents well and had no memory of ever seeing that particular vehicle before. When Hayward turned on his lights to get a better view of its license plate, the driver turned off their headlights and attempted to flee. The Sergeant began to follow the car, which went through two stop signs and eventually pulled into a gas station. When he asked the driver why he was out driving around so late, Bundy replied that he was on his way home from the Redwood Drive-In after seeing the Towering Inferno but lost his way. Two more officers arrived on the scene, and after noticing that the passengers seat was missing they searched the car (with Bundy’s permission) and discovered some incredibly unusual items: a black duffle bag that contained a pair of handcuffs, an ice pick, rope, a crowbar, a flashlight, a ski-mask, a pair of gloves, wire, a screwdriver, large green plastic bags, strips of cloth, and a pantyhose mask.
In addition to his ‘kill kit,’ LE also found maps, brochures of ski resorts, and gas receipts in Bundy’s glove compartment box. When asked why he had such strange items in his car, Ted told the officers that he was in law school and was studying how to arrest criminals. While they weren’t completely convinced the law student was the ‘crazed mass murderer of young women’ that they were looking for, investigators did know he wasn’t completely innocent and arrested him for possession of burglary tools; they didn’t have enough evidence to detain him and he was ROR’ed.
It didn’t take long after his first arrest that investigators began to connect the dots between the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch and the other Utah and Colorado abductions that were taking place during the same time, and they quickly began to suspect that the young law student was responsible. Perhaps one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Bundy were the handcuffs that were found in his car, which were the same style and brand as the ones found on DaRonch’s wrist after her attack. Additionally, the crowbar that officers found in his ‘murder kit’ was identical to the weapon used to threaten her the previous November, and his tan car matched the description of the one her abductor was driving. There were too many similarities for the police to ignore, but they also knew they needed more evidence to help support their case. A few days after Ted’s arrest on August 21, investigators searched his apartment and found various brochures from the areas where some of the women were missing from, however they failed to search the building’s utility room. Years later, the killer revealed to his lawyer Polly Nelson that he had kept a box of Polaroids of his victims inside that room in a shoebox, which he later destroyed.
On February 19, 1976 FBI forensics laboratories sent a letter confirming that they received a sample of Oliverson’s hair for comparison to evidence taken from Bundy’s Bug but nothing came back a match. She is Ted’s second to last confirmed victim (Sue Curtis was his last) until his second escape in late 1977 (although there are some suspected/unconfirmed victims that disappeared after, including Melanie Cooley, Sandra Weaver, Nancy-Perry-Baird, Shelley Kay Robertson, and Debbie Smith). Less than two weeks after Denise vanished on Tuesday, April 15, 1975 eighteen year old Melanie ‘Suzi’ Cooley disappeared out of Nederland, CO. After class was over for the day Cooley left the high school she attended where she was a senior and was never seen or heard from again. She was last seen by friends hitchhiking nearby campus, and it’s unclear where or when exactly she got picked up as no one saw the vehicle the young girl climbed into that day. Just a few weeks later on May 2, the body of Cooley was discovered fully clothed and frozen by a maintenance worker on Twin Spruce Road near Coal Creek Canyon about twenty miles away from where she was last seen.
According to Kevin Sullivan’s true crime classic, ‘The Bundy Murders,’ when Ted was asked about his possible involvement in Oliversons disappearance during his death row confessions by Detective Fisher, he ‘told me again of his tiredness and his wanting to get back to his cell to rest. I explained simply that he had promised to resolve all the questioned murder cases and now at the last minute he wasn’t keeping his side of the deal.’ As Fisher was walking out of the room the condemned man told him, ‘I’ll get back to you on that, I promise.’ The two men never spoke again. In a last minute, taped confession that took place less than an hour before he was put to death at 6:16 AM, Bundy confessed to Florida State Prison Superintendent Thomas Barton that he killed Denise Oliverson (it’s also listed on her ‘Charlie Project’ page that Dr. Robert D. Keppel, PhD was present as well). He said that he killed her in his car then transported her to the state border between Colorado and Utah and dumped her body in the Colorado River, about five miles west of Grand Junction. We don’t know if she was sexually assaulted, and he never shared exactly how he abducted her or took her life, but he specified that she ‘was not buried.’ In a sad, semi-related note, shortly after she disappeared Oliversons dad shared that she didn’t like water and wasn’t a big fan of swimming.
Bundy also shared that he came across Oliverson when he was returning from his second round of dumping Julie Cunninghams remains. Per Tiffany Jean in her case file of Denise, ‘Bundy claims that he encountered Oliverson as he passed through Grand Junction after he had buried Cunningham about 50 miles to the east’ (I have the link to the webpage below in my works cited). The twenty-six year old ski instructor was last seen the evening of March 15, 1975 after she left her apartment in the Apollo Park neighborhood in Vail. She was on her way to a local bar, and was last seen wearing jeans, a ski cap, brown suede jacket, and boots. On crutches and faking a ski injury, Bundy told investigators that he asked her for help carrying his ski boots to his VW, and when they arrived he knocked her unconscious, drove her to a remote area about eighty miles west of Vail and sexually assaulted her. He then strangled her to death then dumped her body in a shallow grave in a high desert area near Rifle, Colorado. Although Ted confessed to killing her on the morning he was executed, Cunningham’s remains have never been found, and her missing persons case still is considered open with the Vail Police Department.
After Bundy’s confession police said that they didn’t bother going to check out the potential dump site, as fourteen years had passed by and upwards of hundreds of thousands of people have walked through the area, trampling through evidence and destroying anything of possible value. Oliverson disappeared in early April, and according to environmental experts that is the time of year that the ‘runoff of the river would most likely have swept anything in it well downstream.’ It also gave local wildlife a good amount of time to pick apart her bones and disperse them throughout the area. Experts determined that if any trace of Denise were to turn up it would have happened by then.
The following is the transcript of a recording by Bundy regarding Denise Oliverson, dated the day of his death on January 24, 1989 at Florida State Prison; it took place in a five minute conversation roughly 45 minutes before his execution: ‘To the ah… Mike Fisher and the, the Colorado detectives ah… the last girl they wanted to talk about, Denise Oliverson, I believe, I’m not sure… out of Grand Junction that Mike Fisher wanted to discuss… ah, I believe that the date was in April 1975. Ah… the young woman’s body would have been placed in the Colorado River about five miles west of Grand Junction. It was not buried. That’s all the uh… the ones that I can help you with… it’s all the ones that I know about that uh… no missing ones outstanding that we haven’t talked about.’
In the same conversation Ted also volunteered that he abducted Susan Curtis from BYU on June 27, 1975 and gave investigators information as to where they would be able to find her body. Gas receipts placed Bundy in Grand Junction on the day that Denise disappeared: he put $3.16 in fuel at a gas station in Grand Junction on his Chevron card right before he abducted her. That same credit card was used to pay for fuel in Aspen and Vail on days his other victims Caryn Campbell and Julie Cunningham (respectively) were abducted as well. It was FBI agent Bill Hagmaier that Bundy confessed his total kill count to: eleven young women in Washington state, eight in Utah, three each in Colorado and Florida, two each in Idaho and Oregon, and one in California. The Oliverson family found out with the rest of the world that their daughter was murdered by the serial killer: they heard it on the news after he was executed.
In May 2019, the Grand Junction PD changed Denise’s disappearance from a missing persons case to a homicide after they reviewed Bundy’s confession tapes and talked to investigators that spoke with him while he was on death row.
In an interview with The Coloradoan in 2019, former Grand Junction detective Jim Fromm said ‘at the initial time we started the investigation, we didn’t believe that she was anything other than a missing person. And the more people we interviewed, the more concerned we got. It just, it did not make sense.’ With the news of Oliverson’s case closing, Julie Cunningham’s murder is now the only unsolved case directly linked to Bundy in the state of Colorado. A friend of Oliversons from high school named Linda Pantuso told the Coloradoan in the same article that she remembered hearing about her disappearance from Nina Nicholson, who she worked with: ‘We were just in the bathroom one day and I asked how Denise was doing. She went, ‘You haven’t heard? She’s been missing.’ I was just in shock. She was just a really great person.’
Dubbed by locals as ‘The Year of Fear,’ 1975 was a rough period for Grand Junction when it came to missing and murdered women: in addition to Oliverson, on July 28 twenty-four year old Linda Benson and her five year old daughter Kellie were brutally murdered in their residence at the Chateau Apartments. Just as a (strange) side note, according to the website cavdef.org, there is also a possibility that Bundy was present when the young mom and her child were killed: when a neighbor of Benson named Steve Goad saw him on TV after he was arrested in August 1975 he recognized him as a man that was in the apartment complex’s parking lot the evening Benson was murdered. In 2009 DNA linked serial rapist Jerry Nemnich to their murders. Strangely enough, she was friends with another Grand Junction woman that got murdered on August 23 in 1975: Linda Miracle. Twenty-four year old Miracle and her two young sons were killed by a neighbor, Ken Botham Jr. after he killed his wife at the home they shared. On December 27, Deborah Kathleen Tomlinson (not to be confused with Deborah Lee Tomlinson, who disappeared with a friend on her 16th birthday in October 1973 from Creswell, Oregon) was killed in her apartment complex in the 1000 block of Belford Avenue in GJ. She was found lying partially nude in her bathtub and had been sexually assaulted, bound and strangled. In December 2020 using DNA technology investigators identified Jimmie Dean Duncan as the man who killed Tomlinson.
In 2013, the Grand Junction PD collected DNA samples from Denise’s mother just in case they ever found remains. About his daughter missing, in 1986 Mr. Nicholson said ‘people need to finalize it in their minds, otherwise they’ll be bouncing back and forth. You don’t have a funeral, you can’t have a funeral. When the body is never found. A tragedy like this just tears the whole family up. I’ll never be the same. You raise a child, of course she wasn’t a child anymore. She was a young woman. It’s quite obvious when he got away from Glenwood Springs that he’s sick There’s something wrong up in the attic. There’s always the possibility that he’ll get out and do it again. They say he’s an intelligent young man, but it was channeled in the wrong direction. In the worst way’ Robert Nicholson also felt that Bundy ‘definitely’ should have been executed, and he was ‘just happy he’s been executed because it should have happened a long time ago.’
Denise’s father died at the age of 74 on October 2, 2001 in Grand Junction. Her mother passed away at the age of 94 on December 28, 2017. Nina remained a generous and kind woman despite the plethora of tragedies that took place during her life, and she loved to dance and was fascinated by Koala bears. Always hospitable, she wanted to make sure everyone around her was taken care of. Sadly, right before she passed Denise’s sister Renee died in the summer of 2017. Described in her obituary as a ‘gentle and loving soul,’ as a young woman Renee studied to be a dancer but was very ill in the final few years of her life, which restricted her activities. She died at HopeWest and Hospice Care Center on August 24, 2017. It looks like Steve Romero married a woman named Sandra on February 17, 1982 but they divorced just a few years later on May 22, 1984. He remarried a woman named Wilma on August 17, 1977 and died on November 3, 1996. Although her case has officially been closed, as of January 2024 no trace of Denise Lynn Oliverson has ever been found.
* Thank you to Archivist and Bundy researcher Tiffany Jean for the transcript of this interview.
Jean, Tiffany. November 20, 2019. ‘Case File: Denise Lynn Oliverson, 1975.’ Retrieved January 17, 2024 from https://archive.ph/2020.07.02-052035/https://hiimted.blog/2019/11/20/case-file-denise-lynn-oliverson-1975/#selection-211.0-211.38
Mortenson, Chris. July 16, 2020. ‘Ted Bundy Location/Denise Oliverson Tour With GJPD Homicide Investigator Doug Rushing (2020 Update). Taken January 19, 2024 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBVac81zFZY
Sulivan, Kevin. August 12, 2009. ‘The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History.’
Sulivan, Kevin. 2020. ‘The Encyclopedia of the Ted Bundy Murders.’
Susan ‘Sue’ Curtis was born on May 18, 1960 to Larry Eugene and Marilyn Ruth (Nee Haslam) in Salt Lake City, Utah. Larry Curtis was born on February 6, 1935 in Salt Lake, and Mrs. Curtis was born on August 27, 1936. The couple were wed on September 22, 1954 and eventually settled down in Bountiful. They had six children but unfortunately I wasn’t able to find out much else about the family. Sue was an honor student that also excelled in athletics and was involved in quite a few extracurricular activities at her high school: she played baseball and volleyball, and was also on the school’s track and basketball teams. She stood at 5’7” tall, weighed 120 pounds, had hazel eyes, and brown hair that she wore long and parted down the middle. Curtis had pierced ears and had just gotten braces the month before she was murdered.
In the summer of 1975, Susan Curtis was fifteen and about to go into her sophomore year at Woods Cross High School. Due to an unhappy home life she had a history of running away, but she was never gone for very long and would always return home after just a few days. Sue hada lot of mental health concerns, and attempted suicide on a couple different occasions. She was also an ongoing victim of sexual assault at the hands of from a former physical education teacher and coach named William ‘Bill’ Lugo, who taught at South Davis Junior High School in north SLC (he was eventually convicted of his crimes)*. In an interview with true crime researcher Chris Mortensen (also known as Captain Borax), Lieutenant Arnold Lemmon from the Brigham Young University campus Police Department (and close friend of the Curtis family) said that Lugo and Sue ran away together the week before she was murdered. He even flew her to Phoenix and put her up in a hotel room. They got caught after Susan had a pregnancy scare and (using the fake name of a friend) arranged for her to go to a clinic and take a test (there was apparently a mix up and the results were mailed to that friend’s parents). He was eventually court ordered to stay away from the FOURTEEN year CHILD and in July 1975 was sentenced to a year in jail for his crimes. Lugo was initially charged with rape but pleaded guilty to the reduced charge of unlawful sexual intercourse. The defendant’s lawyer as well as the ‘Adult Probation and Parole Administration’ both said that the teacher was a good fit for probation, and that he suffered sufficient punishment in the form of his loss of accreditation as a teacher, excommunication from his church, and derision of friends and associates. Thankfully this wasn’t enough to dissuade District Court Judge Thornley K. Swan from imposing the maximum allowed jail sentence: ‘because of the public trust you held and violated, this court is required to impose a jail sentence upon you.’ It’s been reported that the entire experience was pretty traumatizing to Sue, and because of the ‘relationship’ she suffered from a lot of behavioral health issues.
The summer before she disappeared Curtis had been spending much of her time at a friend’s house in Centerville, which is a suburb community north of Bountiful. She wasn’t getting along very well with her family and in an attempt to reconcile with them was picked up by her older sister Barbara on June 24, 1975, who (along with Mr. and Mrs. Curtis) were attempting to bring their ‘Sue-Sue’ back into the family fold. She also registered Sue for a two-day Latter Day Saints conference at Brigham Young University. On June 26, 1975 the sisters rode their bikes (along with a friend named Lynette Stringer) 50 miles from Bountiful to Provo. The girls met up with some other kids from Bountiful’s ‘Orchard Youth Ward’ at the Orchard Stake building in north SLC, and they all made the long ride together. They even stayed the night ‘in a yard at the residence of Eva Smith of Lehi, UT.’ On multiple occasions during the journey, Sue complained of stomach problems, as well as feeling suicidal. They made it to the Mormon university sometime in the mid-morning the following day, and quickly settled into their assigned rooms. Once at the conference, she was going to room with Lynette in Merrill Hall in the Helaman Halls, which is a group of dormatores; Curtis was staying in the all female dormitory in a second story room, specifically number 2121. According to the missing persons report, Barbara was staying nearby in room 2118.
There was a formal banquet early in the evening on the first day of the conference that was held at the Wilkinson Student Center. Curtis was last seen at around 7 PM wearing a full-length, yellow evening gown. She had just eaten dinner and was worried about food possibly being stuck in her new braces, and left her friends to walk the quarter mile back to her room to brush her teeth, telling one of them she’d be back in a few minutes. Although we have to keep in mind that Sue wasn’t a student at BYU and wasn’t incredibly familiar with the layout of its campus (her high heels didn’t help), the journey was fairly short and should have only taken her about 10 to 13 minutes (it was about 0.6 miles in length). When she didn’t come back to the banquet Barbara went looking for her, and when she went to inspect her toothbrush it was bone dry, meaning she never made it back to her room. All of her clothes, money, and personal possessions were left behind, and Susan Curtis was never seen alive again. After Barbara made the initial report with BYU police, the Provo Police, Utah Highway Patrol, Utah County Sheriff, and Orem Police Departments were all notified.
When officers looked through Susans possessions they found $21 in a jewelry box on the dresser. Also left behind were a pair of jeans and some other clothes folded and hanging up in the closet, along with several pairs of shoes, a pendant, and ring that she reportedly would never have left behind. It’s worth noting that there’s a parking lot near the Helaman Halls dormitory buildings, and in the past Bundy had successfully snatched quite a few of his victims from college campuses: Donna Manson, Sue Rancourt, Georgann Hawkins, and Roberta Kathleen Parks… When you think about these other abductions it makes sense he would park his VW in a secluded spot that was slightly out of the way but still within walking distance. This explains why no one witnessed the attack even though it happened in the early evening on a busy college campus.
According to an article published by The Salt Lake Tribune on January 27, 1989, Curtis’ disappearance stirred only a small amount of buzz in the media, although it caused great concern to investigators at BYU. Despite her habit of running away, law enforcement wasn’t hesitant to immediately start investigating her disappearance as an abduction, which is a surprising (but good) change of pace. I feel the need to comment that it didn’t take long for me to notice that a bunch of Bundy related cases weren’t taken seriously in the beginning because the girls were considered ‘runaways…’ even though she’s a unconfirmed victim, Brenda Joy Baker immediately comes to mind, whose disappearance didn’t make the news at all until they found her body. I suspect this is most likely because by this time in mid-1975 there were quite a few young women that had vanished around the general SLC area, and investigators knew that they were all most likely related.
BYU Campus Police and the Provo Police Departments investigated the disappearance, and in the beginning a few witnesses came forward claiming to have seen Curtis around town and on campus. One professor reported he saw her trying to sell a textbook in the back of his class four days after she went missing. He said she was wearing a blue knit top and faded jeans, and was able to positively identify her from a picture. Others claimed to have seen her hitchhiking in the Provo, Orem, and Spanish Fork areas, and one person reported that he saw her hiking up by the ‘Y-mountain’ directly to the east of the Woods Cross football field. According to the missing persons report Barbara gave to the BYU police, at the time Sue disappeared she was seeing a ‘social counselor’ about her mental health issues, who at one time shared with her dad that she had a lot of concerns as well as suicidal tendencies.
The gym teacher quickly became the chief suspect. Dan Clark, who was the lead detective on Sue’s case, polygraphed Lugo, however the examination was determined to be biased and was deemed inadmissible. Lieutenant Lemmon said that nowadays something like that would never fly, and typically an investigator would never be allowed to administer a polygraph to a suspect. In an interview with Captain Borax, Lemmon recently tracked down Lugo (he still lived locally) and asked him about his relationship with Curtis; he lived in an upscale neighborhood and still had all of his mental faculties about him. Lemmon shared that he was working on Curtis’s disappearance and understood that they had an affair many years ago. They briefly discussed it, and Lemmon asked him ‘point blank’ if he killed her, to which he responded ‘no.’ Lugo additionally said no when asked if he was aware of where her body was buried. Nothing ever officially tied him to Sue’s disappearance.
Here’s an interesting fact I learned from Kevin Sullivans book, ‘The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History:’ The Curtis family attended the same viewing of ‘The Redhead’ at Viewmont High School as the Kent family the night Deb was abducted in November 1974. This means that Susan was in the same auditorium as Bundy before she became one of his victims roughly seven months later. I wonder if he noticed her that evening? Sue and Deb grew up in the same Bountiful neighborhood and went to the same high school.
Apparently the Curtis family was so desperate for answers as to what happened to Sue that they hired multiple psychics, but sadly nothing ever came of it. At the time of her abduction Bundy was a law student at the University of Utah and was living at 565 1st Avenue North in SLC. Per my ‘handy dandy TB job chart,’ in June and July 1975 he was employed as the night manager in charge of Bailiff Hall at the University (but was terminated after showing up for work drunk). He was still with Liz Kloepfer, although things were getting ready to fizzle out for the final time (they officially broke up after Ted went to prison for the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch in 1976). Also according to Kloepfer he started growing a beard in June 1975, so there’s a good chance he had one when he abducted Curtis.
After Curtis was murdered Bundy wasn’t on the run for long: Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward pulled him over in Granger at around 2:30 AM on August 16, 1975 after he saw his unfamiliar tan VW Beetle pass by him while he was out on patrol. The officer knew the neighborhood well and had no memory of ever seeing that particular vehicle before. When he turned his lights on to get a better view of its license plate, the driver turned off their headlights and attempted to flee. Sergeant Hayward began to follow the car, which went through two stop signs and eventually pulled into a gas station. When he asked the driver why he was out driving around so late, Bundy replied that he was on his way home from the Redwood Drive-In after seeing the Towering Inferno but lost his way. Two more officers arrived on the scene, and after noticing that the passengers seat was missing they searched the car (with Bundy’s permission) and discovered some incredibly unusual items: a black duffle bag that contained a pair of handcuffs, an ice pick, rope, a crowbar, a flashlight, a ski-mask, a pair of gloves, wire, a screwdriver, large green plastic bags, strips of cloth, and a pantyhose mask.
In addition to his ‘kill kit,’ LE also found maps, brochures of ski resorts, and gas receipts in the VW’s glove compartment box. When asked why he had such strange instruments in his car, Ted told the officers that he was in law school and was studying how to arrest criminals. While they weren’t completely convinced the law student was the ‘crazed murderer of young women’ that they were looking for, investigators did know he wasn’t completely innocent and arrested him for possession of burglary tools; they didn’t have enough evidence to detain him and he was ROR’ed.
It didn’t take long after his first arrest that investigators began to connect the dots between the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch and the other Utah abductions, and they quickly began to suspect that the young law student was responsible. Perhaps one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Bundy were the handcuffs that were found in his car, which were the same style and brand as the ones found on DaRonch’s wrist after her attack. Additionally, the crowbar that officers found in his ‘murder kit’ was identical to the weapon used to threaten her the previous November, and his tan car matched the description of the one her abductor was driving. There were too many similarities for the police to ignore, but they also knew they needed more evidence to help support their case. A few days after his arrest on August 21, investigators searched Ted’s apartment and found various brochures from the areas where some of the women were missing from, however they failed to search the building’s utility room. Years later, the killer revealed to his lawyer Polly Nelson that he had kept a box of Polaroids of his victims inside that room in a shoebox, which he later destroyed.
Curtis is Ted’s last confirmed victim until his escape in late 1977 (although there are some suspected/unconfirmed victims that disappeared after, including Sandra Weaver, Nancy-Perry-Baird, Shelley Kay Robertson, and Debbie Smith). Just a few days after Sue vanished on July 1, 1975 Shelley Kay Robertson was abducted from Golden, Colorado; her remains were found less than two months later on August 21 in a mine in Berthoud Pass. Four days after Robertson was last seen on July 4, 1975, Nancy Perry-Baird was abducted from the gas station where she worked in East Layton, UT and was never seen or heard from again. After Susan Curtis Bundy didn’t kill again until January 1978, when he escaped incarceration for the second time and escaped to Florida, and killed Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman.
In a last minute, taped confession that took place less than an hour before he was put to death, Bundy confessed to Florida State Prison Superintendent Thomas Barton that he killed Susan Curtis. He also volunteered information as to where investigators would find her body and how they could get to it. Ted said that he dumped her body five to ten miles south of Price right before the Green River, and that he ‘turned left on a side road’ and after about a quarter of a mile took another left. He then drove roughly 200 yards down that dirt road and dumped her remains about 50 yards off of it, to the left. He also shared that he wasn’t aware of her name or identity. In the same confession, he took responsibility for the death of Denise Oliverson, who was last seen riding her bike in Grand Junction in April 1975. He dumped her body in the Colorado River, about five miles west of Grand Junction and specified that she ‘was not buried.’ Ted confessed to killing at least eight young women in the state of Utah: Curtis, Nancy Wilcox, Deb Kent, Melissa Smith and Laura Ann Aime; three more remain unidentified. The Curtis family found out with the rest of the world that their daughter was murdered by the serial killer: they heard it on the news after Bundy was executed.
When Bundy confessed to Curtis’s murder in January 1989 fourteen years had passed by. This gave local wildlife a lot of time to pick apart her remains and move them around, dispersing them around the area. After he was executed law enforcement was forced to put off the search efforts until the following spring because of the cold, snowy conditions. Because of the incredible amount of attention the case had garnered, at first Florida law enforcement gave the media only small pieces of his confession related to Curtis’s murder. This was most likely so people wouldn’t take it upon themselves to go check out the crime scene and potentially destroy evidence, or attempt to disrupt recovery efforts. The search team was headed up by the Salt Lake County and the Carbon County Sheriff’s departments, and volunteers combed the area looking for any trace of Curtis. They were hopeful that their metal detectors would be able to pick up her braces, however all they found were pieces of scrap metal, old tires, beer cans, and shell casings. They also used cadaver dogs in their search efforts, mostly because of the deep layer of snow that covered the area. In the years that followed the initial search, Curtis’s family and cold case detectives have searched the hills and fields, with the help of (multiple) mediums and psychics. They also used helicopters in their recovery efforts, but with every attempt they came back with nothing.
As I sit here writing, the abduction of Georgann Hawkins immediately comes to my mind when I think about the circumstances of this case, as they share a lot of similarities: they both took place on college campuses, with the girls walking back to their living spaces. They were both thin, and had brown hair they wore long and parted down the middle. Nancy Wilcox as well (to a point), who was on her way to her high school after getting into an argument with her father about her bf’s truck leaking oil on their driveway (my dad is the same way). She just… vanished into thin air. They all did. I know that with Hawkins Bundy used his ‘injury ruse’ in his abduction technique, I wonder if he did the same type of thing with Curtis. It wasn’t like he could have easily hit her over the head with a crowbar and dragged her away: she was abducted from a busy college campus at around 6-7 in the evening in the middle of summer. I’m leaning towards him using some sort of ruse to lure her back to his car, then he pounced. Maybe he faked a broken arm and told her he needed help carrying his briefcase to his car. Or maybe he faked a broken leg somehow… The possibilities are endless, and we’ll never know what actually happened.
Lieutenant Lemmon collected DNA swabs from Larry and Marilyn Curtis in hopes of one day positively identifying their daughters remains. Mrs. Curtis said that Susans disappearance was especially hard on Barbara, who blamed herself for not walking back to the dorms with her sister. I couldn’t find any record of either one of Susan’s parents passing away. Because her remains have never been recovered she officially remains a missing person. Susan Curtis would be 63 as of December 2023.
*As a personal note, I initially hesitated including this information in this piece. But I learned it from Captain Borax, so obviously it’s out there in the Bundy community, although it doesn’t seem to be widely discussed (I also saw it discussed on WebSleuths as well).
Rhonda Stapley was born on August 19, 1953 to Rulon and Vivian Stapley in Richfield, Utah. Rulon (who seemed to go by his middle name of Floyd) was born on July 22, 1928 in Joseph, UT and Vivian was born on October 19, 1933 in Austin, UT. The couple were wed on April 11, 1948, in Coconino, Arizona and eventually settled down in the Salt Lake City area. Together they had 4 children: two boys (Rulon Dale and Michael John) and two girls (Rhonda Karol and Bonita Rae). Mr. Stapley worked as an operator of a frozen food company but passed away in a plane crash on October 3, 1967 at the age of 39. Vivian had a variety of jobs in her life, and was employed as a school lunch lady, in fast food and retail stores. She remarried Stanley Redfern in 1978 and passed away at the age of 87 on October 7, 2021. The Stapley family apparently had a small-scale ‘claim to fame’ after developing a couple patents for some potato products. Rhonda graduated from Connell High school in 1971 and went on to attend the University of Utah. After completing her degree in pharmacy, the petite 4’11” brunette married Barry Robert Godding on (either) April 23/24, 1979 in SLC (according to Ancestry). In the acknowledgments portion of her book she mentions she has ‘daughters’ but doesn’t elaborate any further .
On an unusually warm and sunny day in October 1974 Rhonda Stapley was waiting for the bus to pick her up to take her back to her dormitory when a young man in a light colored VW Bug pulled up and asked if she’d like a ride: ‘just as it passed me, it stopped and he put it in reverse and backed up. He rolled down the passenger window and he says, ‘Hey where are you going?’’ When she replied ‘the University of Utah,’ he told her that’s where he was headed as well and asked if she’d like a ride, which she happily accepted. The shy young college student had been at the dentist and her mouth was still sore from the extensive work she had just had done. He introduced himself as Ted and told her he was a first year law student. Stapley immediately noticed his striking blue eyes and told him that she was close to being done with a degree in pharmacy. In an interview for the documentary ‘Ted Bundy: The Survivors,’ she shared that it ‘didn’t feel like hitchhiking, what I did. This felt like a friendly college student helping another college student, and that seemed normal and not out of place.’ But, it didn’t take long before Rhonda realized that the handsome stranger wasn’t taking the normal route back to school. When she asked him about it he politely inquired if it would be okay if he just ran a quick errand up by the zoo, to which she said no, she didn’t. But when the zoo came and went, Rhonda quickly became concerned again, to which the man simply told her that the errand wasn’t AT the zoo but near it. And that’s when things began to get extremely uncomfortable for her: ‘the ride started to become strained, he stopped talking to me altogether, he just had both hands on the steering wheel just driving.’ Desperate to escape, when Stapley reached for the door handle she realized it was missing, and that’s when she REALLY began to panic.
At around 3-3:30 PM, the young man eventually reached Big Cottonwood Canyon and ‘suddenly he pulled over. It seemed like he was looking for a place to park. At this point I did not expect a murder attempt, I was more anticipating an attempt at a romantic parking episode, and I wasn’t afraid of that either, just not interested, and wanting to get out of that potential situation without embarrassing either of us. I still thought he was a nice and somewhat charming guy right up to the moment.’ … ‘He turned a way that wasn’t the normal route to the university. You could get there that way, but it wasn’t the normal route and I questioned him about that. I said, ‘Where are we going?’And that was when the ride started to become strange. He just had both hands firmly on the steering wheel and was just driving.’
After finding a secluded spot off the beaten track, Stapley’s abductor stopped the car and turned to face her directly. The naive young Mormon woman was certain he was going to make a move on her and lean in for a kiss: ‘in my mind, I think he’s looking for a place to pull over and park and make out.’ The thought of such casual intimacy with a complete stranger was something she wasn’t comfortable with, not only because of her devout faith but also her sore mouth. However instead of a smooch he looked at her, his bright blue eyes now black, and said completely without emotion: ‘I am going to kill you.’ … ‘Then he puts his hands ’round my throat and starts squeezing and shaking me, and I’m thinking, ‘Why? Why does he want to kill someone and why is it me?’’ After dragging her out of his VW, Rhonda’s captor proceeded to physically and sexually assault her for hours in the public canyon near a picnic table. During the assault he choked her out, repeatedly taking her to the brink of consciousness then stopping; he even slapped her across the face to wake her up. Stapley also claims that he bit her on the right breast and would yell at her, ‘you should be thanking me that you are even still alive. I can kill you anytime I want.’ She said that: ‘he was angry, more angry than I’ve ever seen anybody. His fists were clenched and his veins were bulging on his forehead and his neck, and his face was bright red. His eyes were almost black.’ Interesting fact about the bite: Rhonda said the marking reappeared roughly forty years later (which immediately made me think of the stigmata markings on Christ during his crucifixion).
When his back was briefly turned and he was ‘distracted by something near his car,’ Stapley was able to escape her captor by jumping into a ‘fast moving mountain river’ and floating to safety: ‘As soon as I jumped up and started to run, I fell into a fast-moving mountain stream, which is probably what saved my life.’ When she got far enough away (I got the impression she was at one point unconscious while in the stream and woke up land), she managed to get herself out of the water then walked the roughly ten miles back to the University of Utah. She traveled mostly through the woods, petrified that her attacker would find her if she walked along the main roadway. She credited her new boots as one of the main reasons she was able to make the long walk back, and on the CrimePiper website, user ‘Fra La’ commented that ‘she has added yet another reason why she was on foot, she had new hiking boots to break in. New details cropping up all the time, lol. Too many details.’ To this, site creator (and good friend of mine) Erin Banks replied: ‘convenient plot twist to explain why she still had her pants on when she walked back home for 6-7 hours. The boots were a brilliant idea, I’ll give her that (when Stapley jumped in the running water she claimed that her pants were still around her ankles).’ After her long journey back to the University of Utah, Rhonda took a long, hot shower then assessed her injuries: she had bruising on her face, a large ‘goose-egg’ over her eye, bruises and markings all over her body (but especially around the neck), and a few broken ribs. Somehow, no one ever questioned her about any of it, including her friends, roommates, and professors, who all saw her routinely after the incident. Despite the headlines she saw that reported other women from the Salt Lake area were vanishing at an alarming rate, Stapley kept the incident to herself and didn’t come forward with her story until 2016.
Because Rhonda left some of her personal belongings (including her drivers license) behind in her abductor’s car, she was afraid that he would somehow eventually track her down. But, thankfully she never updated the DMV with her new mailing address after she moved so he couldn’t locate her through her ID. The identity of her attacker remained a mystery until roughly a year after her assault, when she saw his face in a newspaper in August 1975 when it was reported that a local law student was arrested for the unsuccessful kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. After Bundy (who she referred to as ‘her bad guy’) was finally caught, Stapley said that his arrest brought not only relief but also a ‘wave of guilt. It was another proof that it was him. ‘That’s the guy.’ Maybe I should have done something about it.’ She rationalized her decision of not going to LE because other women had since reported him and she felt that she had nothing else of value to add. She also feared unwanted attention from those who wondered why she didn’t report the incident to police earlier.
Fearing that if her mother found out she had been assaulted she’d make her dropout of school and return home, Stapley blamed herself for accepting a ride from a stranger. Also, at the time of her abduction she was a virgin as well as a devout Mormon, and didn’t want people to think poorly or less of her if they knew she was no longer pure: ‘the teachings in the LDS church at that time was that your virtue and your chastity were the most important thing a young woman could have, and if you come to a point giving up your chastity or your life, you’re better off eternally if you die.’ … ‘I felt ashamed and embarrassed and stupid; stupid for even getting into such a dangerous situation.’ … ‘I imagined people whispering, ‘that’s that girl who was raped.’ I didn’t want attention. I still don’t.’
When enough time passed and Stapley was finally ready to date again, she left little notes all over her (shared) apartment (including underneath garbage cans) sharing where she was and who she was with. She hoped that if she ever went missing again her roommates (or the police) would eventually find them and because of them they would be able to locate her. That I do think is a little weird: were they not friendly? I have friends who are devoutly religious and they still talk openly about dating and men. It’s not forbidden, why all the secrets and weird notes? And what if the garbage can got dirty and they needed to clean it? Ever have a bag of trash leak garbage juice all over the can? It’s not pretty… personally, I would have most likely hosed it off… So what’s to say the note would have even been found?
Could you imagine how many lives Stapley could have saved if she came forward immediately after she was attacked? I stopped commenting on Facebook posts of people talking about how it was her ‘faith that forced her to keep her mouth shut and she was embarrassed and ashamed.’ I’m sorry, I just don’t buy that. Being sexually assaulted was completely out of her control, and if she went to the police right after it happened maybe Bundy would have been caught sooner, which would have prevented some of his Utah and Colorado killings as well as everything in Florida. When asked why she didn’t go to police earlier she told People magazine: ‘I thought that I just needed to put it away and make life like it was before and just pretend it never happened.’
Rhonda kept the assault to herself until 2011, when a supervisor at her POE using the same type of threatening language as Bundy did put her in an uncomfortable situation, which forced the memories of her assault to immediately come rushing back to her. The nightmares and flashbacks finally forced her to seek help: ‘I couldn’t control my tears, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I thought I was going crazy. But I knew it had to be related to the Bundy stuff, because that’s what my dreams and my nightmares and my panic attacks were about.’ Stapley sought mental health therapy, and like many other Americans turned to the internet for help. After an anonymous online friend shared a run-in with the serial killer she was finally able to gather the strength and tell loved ones what happened to her after almost 37 years: ‘there’s no group of Ted Bundy survivors that I could sign up and join. But there are other people who have experienced trauma. They can understand not wanting to tell, and the shame and embarrassment and all those things that go along with rape. The main thing I wanted to tell people was that they’re not alone. Even though their traumatic experience may be different than my traumatic experience, at least there’s someone who can recognize those feelings and people who can understand.’ Looking into it, Rhonda publicly came forward with her story in the spring of 2016: I see she did an interview with Dr. Phil on April 26, 2016 and published her book ‘I Survived Ted Bundy: The Attack, Escape & PTSD that Changed My Life’ (complete with forward by Bundy bff Ann Rule) on May 5, 2016. She also did an interview with People magazine roughly a week later on May 13, 2016.
Rhonda kept the assault to herself until 2011, when a supervisor using the same type of threatening language that Bundy used put her in an uncomfortable situation, forcing her past to immediately come back to haunt her. The nightmares and flashbacks finally forced Stapley to seek help: ‘I couldn’t control my tears, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat. I thought I was going crazy. But I knew it had to be related to the Bundy stuff, because that’s what my dreams and my nightmares and my panic attacks were about.’ She sought mental health therapy, and like most other Americans, turned to the internet for help. After an anonymous friend shared a run-in with the serial killer, Stapley was finally able to tell loved ones her story after almost 37 years: ‘there’s no group of Ted Bundy survivors that I could sign up and join. But there are other people who have experienced trauma. They can understand not wanting to tell, and the shame and embarrassment and all those things that go along with rape. The main thing I wanted to tell people was that they’re not alone. Even though their traumatic experience may be different than my traumatic experience, at least there’s someone who can recognize those feelings and people who can understand.’ Looking into it, she publicly came forward with her story in the spring of 2016: I see she did an interview with Dr. Phil on April 26, 2016 and published her book ‘I Survived Ted Bundy: The Attack, Escape & PTSD that Changed My Life’ (complete with forward by Bundy bff Ann Rule) on May 5, 2016. She also did an interview with People magazine roughly a week later on May 13, 2016.
Stapley stated her assault took place in the ‘autumn of 1974,’ which does line up with when Bundy was living in Utah for his second (unsuccessful) attempt at law school (he moved there from Seattle on September 2, 1974). He was living at his first SLC apartment located at 565 1st Avenue North, and from what I understand he made a decent attempt his second time around and made a point of going to most of his classes. He was in between jobs at the time, but previously worked at the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia from May 3, 1974 to August 28, 1974. He remained unemployed until June 1975, when he briefly was employed as the night manager of Bailiff Hall at the University of Utah (he was fired the next month for coming in inebriated). Bundy was still in a long distance relationship with Liz Kloepfer, even though things seemed to be strained and sort of fizzling out at that point.
In my opinion, the most damning piece of evidence against Stapley’s claims is the missing VW handle. Like Sotria Kritsonis, Rhonda claims that the passenger’s side door handle was completely missing from the car, and I’m sorry… that’s never been brought up in any other CONFIRMED Bundy case (Kritsonis does not apply). I personally don’t believe it. As Erin Banks’ points out in her book, ‘Ted Bundy: Examining the Unconfirmed Survivor Stories:’ ‘the 1968 Beetle would not open if the outside door handle was still attached to the door while the inner door handle had been dismounted, Several researchers have credibly demonstrated that in the past. If the inner latch had been discounted, the integral part of the door handle, the cylinder pin latch assembly, and mounting screws holding inside and outside of the door handles together, and only separated by the door/panel itself, would sit loosely in the door. If one now tugged on the outer latch in an attempt to open the door, one would inevitably pull out the entire door handle from the outside.’ I don’t think I need to go on, as this right here proves there really was no way she would have been able to let herself in the vehicle if it had no inside handle. The only other thing I want to touch on regarding this topic is when I was in Seattle I listened to the Phantom Prince on Audible and I remember thinking to myself how often Ted drove around in his Beetle with Liz, Molly, and other friends… if he took the door handle off his vehicle he would have the run the risk of someone in his life seeing it, and no one in his inner circle ever reported seeing it missing. We also have to remember that he was drunk and/or high a good chunk of the time he was out ‘hunting’… he could have very easily forgotten that he took it off, running the risk of getting caught by Liz (or any other woman he was sleeping with). Lets also think back to Carol DaRonch, who had no problem exiting Bundy’s car on her own and never said anything about a missing door handle when she had her own experience with him a month later in early November, 1974.
Another thing about Stapley’s story that jumps out of me is her complete lack of any sort of substantial head wound. Most of Ted’s victims (if not all of them) suffered from some sort of skull injury in order to help incapacitate them, but Rhonda said her attacker didn’t go after her in any such way. He also didn’t use any sort of medium (like a cable or rope) in his strangulation technique aside from his hands, which is unusual for him (for example, with Cheryl Thomas he used a pair of pantyhose to choke her). Also, despite the fact that Stapley said it was an unseasonably warm fall day, the water she floated away in still would have been incredibly cold: according to my research, the waterways in and around SLC in October would have been in the high-50’s to low/ mid-60’s, and experts say that you should consider any water temperature below 70 degrees Fahrenheit with extreme caution. I guess I just find it hard to believe that she would have been able to gather the energy and strength to walk the TEN MILES back to her dormitory after being submerged in freezing cold water… Especially when you throw some (self-diagnosed) broken ribs, a painful dental surgery, and hours upon hours of being brutally sexually assaulted into the equation… I mean, the journey would have taken her hours, and since she traveled through the woods instead of the main roadway the conditions would have been a bit rough and less than ideal. In her book, Banks reports that when you take her height, weight, and normal everyday level of activity into account it would have taken her at least 15-20 minutes per mile of walking (and that was a healthy, uninjured individual). Also, when Stapley woke up after moving down the river she reported it was dark outside (meaning it was after 7 PM), which is the time of sunset in SLC in October. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure her adrenaline was really pumping, especially at first… but her walk back would have taken hours, it would have eventually worn off.
Additionally, Ms. Banks spoke with residents of SLC that lived near the area of Cottonwood Canyon where Stapley said she was assaulted. They reported that the level of water present at that time of year would have been minimal, and the depth of a puddle: ‘just a few short inches high during fall and winter.’ Banks also said there were lots of large boulders in the water which would have further prevented Stapley from ‘floating away from her abductor.’ Something interesting Erin points out in her book is that after the assault Stapley attempted suicide but half-way through had a change of heart. She called a suicide prevention hotline for help, and the man that answered her call (named Dave) immediately dropped the phone and rushed to her address in order to save her life. I mean… I work for a health insurance company, I have a pretty good understanding of HIPAA laws and how important it is to follow them. Even in a time as unregulated as the 1970’s, I never heard of a crisis hotline employee (or ANY other mental health professional) breaking every single rule put in place so they could go and help the person that called in. Stapley and ‘Dave’ somehow ran into each other again years later (he had since earned his doctorate), and after catching up a bit and telling him her story he told her that she was his hero and that he ‘put her on a pedestal right alongside my family members who work as first responders or who have been in military combat.’ I mean, what? Why would anyone say that to her?
Stapley is one of a few women that claimed to have been kidnapped and/or assaulted by Ted Bundy and lived to tell the tale. I know one individual from my Facebook group that said she was a victim of his but requested that I respect her privacy and not pry any further (she is working on a book from what I understand)… I know of a few others that have some pretty obvious mental health issues. Please keep in mind, when I say this I’m not talking about his confirmed victims, like Karen Sparks/Carol DaRonch/Kathy Kleiner/Karen Chandler/Cheryl Thomas. Just like Sotria Kritsonis (whose abduction site was my very last stop when I went to Seattle in April 2022), Rhonda came forward later in life to tell the tale of her run in with Ted. On February 9, 2018, Kritsonis did an interview with KIRO-TV where she discussed her 1972 alleged kidnapping attempt, which was very similar to Stapley’s: it also began at a bus stop on her way to college (just minus the dental surgery) and the car she got into was also missing its passengers side door handle. Just as a side note, one thing that does irritate me is how people say Rhonda isn’t ‘attractive enough to be a Bundy victim,’ which absolutely drives me nuts because first of all, attractiveness is subjective and (in my opinion), she was a pretty girl in her younger years. I mean, I personally think the serial killer was an opportunist that took advantage of whoever he happened to stumble across… Let’s look at his younger victims, like Kimberly Leach, or Lynette Culver. This is probably borderline inappropriate to say but I don’t think Bundy looked at these TWELVE YEAR OLD GIRLS and thought, ‘ they’re attractive and totally my type, they’re going to be my next victim.’ He simply took them because they were there.
The reviews for Stapley’s book on Amazon seem to be mostly good: as of December 2023, it had 677 reviews and a rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars. Some are overwhelmingly positive, for example one was written by a private investigator that said it ‘should be mandatory reading at all police academies’ Another that said: ‘the author’s story of survival, and struggle with PTSD is incredible. This is one person’s description of how trauma influenced her decision-making process. From an outsider’s point of view, it was enlightening, terrifying, awe-inspiring and educational. I encourage all law enforcement officers to read and study this book.’ However, others completely write off her story, and say that the entire scenario never happened and was made up for attention. This is just my personal observation, but most of the people that picked up her book and believed her story seem to be true crime novices, and didn’t have a very complete understanding of Bundy’s story, where the ones that were doubtful have a stronger background in true crime and have a deeper understanding of the case.
On June 22, 2016, Rhonda went on KATU’s morning show and told the host that her alleged encounter with Bundy was more serious and relevant than Carol DaRonch’s because she was sexually assaulted but DaRonch wasn’t, saying: ‘she actually escaped as soon as she got into the car so she wasn’t really assaulted.’ It’s absurd to think that because DaRonch wasn’t raped or brutally beaten that she wasn’t ‘really assaulted.’ The woman fought off a crowbar and escaped with a handcuff around her wrist. She clearly suffered horribly at the hands of her attacker. Of course she was assaulted.
I always wondered how Stapley’s family and other loved ones felt about her story, specifically if her husband and daughters believed her. Apparently, Barry Godding didn’t fully support his wife’s decision to publicly come forward after so many years and was even less enthused at the idea of her writing a book. She said that he liked to throw temper tantrums about her ‘quest to tell her truth and often insulted her with insensitive remarks about finally getting over that pesky rape all those years ago.’ I went through Rhonda’s FB page a few times in preparation for this article and interestingly enough, Erin Banks had the same mentality that I did about a heart attack Barry suffered the same year that she came forward about what happened to her, saying: ‘in a 2016 status update on one of her Facebook profiles Stapley speaks of how relieved she is that her husband is finally recovering after his heart attack, for she can now finally get back to promoting her and selling her book. I found this statement to be incredibly tone deaf and revealing as to her own level of empathy: ‘Barry seemed to think that I was dredging up ancient history for some devious purpose. I got the impression he thought that I was competing with him, that I had decided to become upset about a long ago trauma just as he was dealing with his own health crisis.’’
When I write an article, I have a set list of resources I go through, such as Reddit, YouTube, Ancestry, MyHeritage, and so on and so forth. One of my favorites is CrimePiper, which is run by Erin Banks, who is the author of the book I mentioned earlier. When I visited the sites files section something interesting caught my eye: a professor at the University of Utah and Rhonda’s one time mentor through the LDS church named Dr. Victor B. Cline published a paper on May 24, 2009 titled ‘Pornography’s Effects on Adults & Children,’ and on page nine he mentions Bundy. Rhonda said that Dr. Cline was ‘the first man to take a personal interest in her after the attack,’ and he requested to be assigned as her home teacher. Typically this is something the church does with all of the members of a family present, however in Stapley’s case he worked with her alone. The PhD told her he was famous and that people paid good money to receive his counseling services, but because they were meeting through the church he was providing her with those services for free. A great point that Ms. Banks brings up is that when Dr. Cline reached out to Rhonda, he had no idea that she had been assaulted by Bundy, and ‘she believed he, a virtual stranger, just ‘seemed to sense’ that something was wrong with her. To take such an extensive and personal interest in a female student, considering the obvious possible connotations of the nature of his interest, is astounding for someone who has much to lose as Cline did. It’s ‘not recommended’ by the LDS that a man and a woman who are not married or not otherwise related to one another interact without witnesses present or in great frequency. Still, Cline showered young Rhonda with attention. (Banks, 19).’ So, this man that apparently had a big impact on Stapley in her post sexually assaulted years wrote a paper that mentioned Bundy, and suddenly two years later she comes forward claiming that he assaulted her in October 1974? Come on.
Stapley still lives in SLC with her husband, and in a 2016 interview with People magazine she referred to herself as ‘an inventor’ as well as a pharmacist, wife, mother, and grandmother. In January 2003 Rhonda and her sister Bonita Hunt founded SnuggleHose, which is defined on her website as ‘warm, soft, cozy covers for CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure machines for patients with sleep apnea) hoses and ventilator machines.’ Stapley came up with the idea after she was diagnosed with sleep apnea in June 2002 and started using a CPAP. She is active on multiple social media platforms and even participates in ‘Ted Bundy trivia’ on the Facebook group ‘TB: All Opinions Matter.’ About her experience of living through being raped by Bundy, she said: ‘I think my experience with Ted Bundy affected every aspect of my life. It changed my level of self-confidence, it changed my trust, even my trust in myself. I became more introverted, less outgoing.’
I want to end this article with a quote from Erin Banks’ book: ‘Mrs. Stapley’s worth as a human being is indisputable. Her story is not.’ Before I wrote this article, a (very small) part of me wondered if *maybe* the young college student was raped (even though I didn’t think it was by Bundy). But, then I remember when I had my wisdom teeth extracted: my mouth was incredibly sore and puffy, plus I was numb from the novocaine. Not to mention I was bloody and stuffed full of gauze. Was Bundy really so hell bent on sexually assaulting a woman that he did it to one in such an off putting situation? Stapley said that he even raped her orally, which surely would have not been ideal for him considering the condition of her mouth (she said he was so rough that he ripped out some of the stitches in her cheek, which would have only made her 10 mile walk home even more hellish). Oddly enough, much like the bite mark on her breast that reappeared forty years after it happened, on one occasion when Stapley was thinking about the assault and how her oral stitches were ripped out her gums began to bleed for no reason. I mean, if I were Rhonda and I had just endured hours upon hours of hell, I would have looked for the first person available for help, not wandered back to campus, probably unsure of where I was going, hoping and praying I’d make it back alive. There’s just so many parts of this story that don’t really make any sense. A small part of me does feel bad for doubting a potential rape victims story, but I can’t help it.
Nancy Wilcox was born on July 4, 1958 to Herbert and Constance (nee Mouritsen) Wilcox of Holladay, Utah; she was one of six kids and had four brothers and a sister (David Michael, Richard Stephen, Thomas Brent, James Patrick and Susie Wilcox-Nelson). The Wilcox family were devout Latter-day Saint’s and Nancy was very active in the LDS community; she was described as being incredibly kind, very pretty, funny, and it seemed that everyone who knew her liked her. She was said to have a small, close-knit group of friends, was a straight shooter, and didn’t drink, do drugs, or party. The young girl had medium length strawberry-blondish hair, brown eyes, stood roughly 5’6” and weighed around 120 pounds; she used minimal make-up, had a small scar on the side of her face, wore a size 6.5 shoe and a size 9 dress. At the time of her disappearance in early October 1974, Nancy was sixteen years old and a junior at Olympus High School. It’s commonly reported that she was a cheerleader however according to her best friend Louisa Paulson-Graves, it was her that participated in that extracurricular activity, not Nancy. In September and October 1974, Wilcox worked part time at a small coffee shop called the Arctic Circle Drive-In near her home but was fired prior to her murder. When she disappeared she was in a healthy, committed relationship with a guy from her high school named John Hood.
Wilcox was last seen by some classmates near her high school in the passengers seat of a tan VW Beetle close to her home on Arnette Drive in Holladay, Utah on October 2, 1974. The young lady was on her way to the store to purchase a pack of gum, and it’s speculated that from there she was on her way to her high school to see her boyfriend, who was a football player and may have been somewhere on campus. Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Detective Jerry Thompson said she was last seen wearing a blouse of unknown color, blue corduroy pants, a silver chain necklace with beads and a turquoise ring; she wasn’t wearing a coat. In an interview with YouTuber ‘Captain Borax,’ Susie Nelson said that on the day she went missing her sister left the house in a huff after getting into a fight with her Dad about John’s pick-up truck leaking oil on the families driveway (oh my gosh my Dad would be the same way!). Both Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox said because of this initially law enforcement deemed her to be a runaway, however it was glaringly obvious to her loved ones that she had no intention of leaving home and had no troubles whatsoever in her personal life. Nancy left all of her personal belongings behind including some expensive jewelry that held deep sentimental value to her.
From January to July 1974, young women in Washington state were disappearing at an alarming rate, and even though most residents of Utah were somewhat aware of what was happening it still seemed too far away to really affect them. After all, it was Seattle’s problem, not theirs. At the time in the mid-70’s, law enforcement felt so strongly that the killer was going after young coeds in the general Seattle area that they were even hesitant to link ‘Ted’ to the disappearance of Kathy Parks out of Corvallis, Oregon. I probably don’t need to say that Nancy was the first of many young women to vanish without a trace from the Salt Lake City area in 1974. The juvenile division of the sheriff’s department did not release a public appeal for information related to her disappearance until December of 1974, three months after she vanished (and even then they stressed that she ‘might still be a runaway’). On the day after Ms. WIlcox’s case first made the news a waitress from Lake Point contacted the Sheriff’s Department and told them she had seen a girl matching Wilcox’s description at the restaurant where she worked. She further claimed that the young girl was with a ‘tall young man who had a mustache’ and when they were done with their meal drove off in a ‘light-colored Volkswagen.’
I hope I don’t need to point out that we live in different times now and back in 1974 there was no internet scroll with news constantly updating itself. Additionally, at that time police jurisdictions didn’t like to share information with one another, and Utah wasn’t on high alert like Washington state was about missing young females: Nancy was the first (known) of Bundy’s Utah victims to go missing. After Wilcox vanished, Utah law enforcement were unable to find very many helpful clues that would help them locate her (they had few leads and not much to go on). During the course of the investigation they spoke with at least 45 of her family, friends, school mates and acquaintances, however none of them knew anything about her disappearance. Several of her loved ones were also given polygraph tests but passed. On November 30, 1974, Utah police began a two day search of the canyons around Salt Lake City but were unable to find any trace of Nancy.
It’s speculated that Bundy may have been grooming Nancy Wilcox: family members said she mentioned an older man who would come into the drive-in that she briefly worked at and flirt with her. As I said earlier, she was employed at an Arctic Circle located on 3300 South and shared with her cousin Jamie Hayden that while there she had met an ‘older guy in law school.’ Susie told a similar story: one time Nancy became visibly excited when she saw this same older gentleman drive by their family home, and said something like, ‘oh my gosh, that’s the guy who has been coming into my work!’ During his final interviews with law enforcement, Ted didn’t share that he knew Wilcox beforehand nor did he elaborate or give any intimate details about her murder. Ted did admit he remembered Nancy’s case vividly because it took a fair amount of time for her name to appear in the news after she disappeared: ‘because nothing came out in the paper about it for some time, as I recall, in this particular case. Which I later would associate with Wilcox.’ This shows he was paying close attention to the media coverage surrounding his atrocities.
On September 2nd, 1974 Bundy left Washington and moved to Salt Lake City to attend the University of Utah School of Law. After Nancy’s mysterious disappearance on October 18, 1974, he abducted 17-year-old Melissa Smith from Midvale, Utah; her naked body was discovered nine days later by two deer hunters on a hillside in Summit Park, UT. A stocking was found tied around her neck and she had sustained multiple blows to the head. Less than two weeks later on the evening of October 31, 1974, 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime vanished after leaving a cafe in Lehi, Utah. Almost a month later on November 27th two hikers stumbled upon her remains in American Fork Canyon. A little over a week later on November 8, 1974, Bundy attempted to kidnap 18-year-old Carol DaRonch from the Fashion Place Mall on South State Street in Murray but was unsuccessful. After DaRonch escaped, Bundy quickly realized he’d need a new victim and drove roughly 25 miles away to Bountiful to abduct 17 year-old Debra Kent. Kent and her parents were at a play at Viewmont High School when it went later than expected. She volunteered to take the family car and pick up her two younger brothers at a nearby roller skating rink. On her way out to the parking lot, Bundy abducted then killed her and dumped her body roughly 50 miles away in American Fork Canyon. Upon realizing that a worrying pattern was emerging, the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office began a review of all their cases involving missing girls. Subsequently, they determined that Nancy Wilcox and Debra Kent were the only girls who were still unaccounted for.
Before Bundy was put to death in Florida, he confessed to killing Nancy on January 22, 1989 in a 90-minute confession with Salt Lake City Detective Dennis Couch. It’s not surprising: she fits the physical profile of one of his victims and it was established he was in the Holliday, Utah area at the time of her disappearance. During his confession, Ted said that he was driving on a ‘main roadway’ south of the University of Utah when he saw Wilcox walking along the side of the road, forcibly abducted her at knife point then ‘ushered’ her into a nearby orchard; he elaborated that it was dark at the time, the lighting in the area wasn’t the greatest, and that the area was ‘small’ and ‘residential’). Bundy then ‘restrained’ her, put her in his waiting VW then drove her back to his apartment (at 565 1st Avenue), where he sexually assaulted her; he kept her alive for a day. He then killed her and dumped her body in Capitol Reef National Park, located roughly 216 miles away; he specifically told law enforcement that he remembered disposing of Nancy’s body after driving south on I-15 then onto U-89. He had trouble giving them an exact location, claiming ‘we need better maps. That would help. We need just a clearer picture of what it looks like. I do not remember this Capitol Reef National Park. But I don’t imagine that it looks any different from the rest of it, except its name.’ Now, there’s two schools of thought here: either he couldn’t recall exactly where he dumped her body or he purposefully withheld information using the excuse about the map as an excuse. It is worth noting that Bundy claimed Nancy was never in his car which to me is just bizarre. Now, let me get this straight: he abducted her, killed her, then took her body over 200 miles away to dispose of it but she never was in his vehicle? That just doesn’t make any sense. And at first I thought maybe he had Liz’s car or a family members, then I quickly remembered she was a Utah victim not a Washington one and that Bundy is a notorious fucking liar.
During one of Bundy’s third-person ‘pseudo-confessions’ with Stephen Michaud, he suggested that ‘the killer’ parked his car further down the road then ran up behind Nancy and forced her to go into the orchard. He elaborated that they right then and there that he planned on raping her but didn’t intend on killing her. In his mind, avoiding murder might help bring less attention to the crime; obviously, this plan didn’t work when she began to struggle against him. At that point he started to get paranoid that someone nearby might hear Nancy’s cries of distress and decide to investigate so out of pure fear he wrapped his hands around her throat and strangled her until she passed out (or so he thought). Once she was unconscious, he then took off her clothes and sexually assaulted her. After he was finished he realized that she had stopped moving, which panicked him so much that he dragged her body into a corner and then left. However, once ‘the killer’ had returned to his apartment he began to worry that he had left behind physical evidence so he decided to return to the orchard and see if her remains were still there.
According to Ted, ‘the killer’ was so inebriated when he killed Nancy that it took him some time afterwards to piece together exactly what happened so he could locate the orchard again. Once he finally found it, he realized that her body was still there, completely undisturbed. He then swiftly loaded her into his Bug along with her discarded clothing and took her body back to his apartment. He waited ‘a day or two’ before finally dumping her body somewhere near Capitol Reef National Park, but was not able to provide an exact location. I don’t know, I don’t buy Bundy bringing her back to his apartment in any capacity, it just doesn’t sound plausible (unless she was dead but even that’s incredibly risky). Getting caught carrying an unconscious or dead girl in and out of your rooming house in the middle of the night is a bit of a red flag, in my opinion. Also, if she wasn’t dead and regained consciousness she could have screamed or made noise and getting caught was the last thing Bundy wanted. Obviously there are giant discrepancies between his third person ‘confession’ and what he shared with law enforcement before he was executed in 1989. Who knows what to believe.
After Bundy confessed to Nancy’s murder and the Wilcox family was informed their daughter was gone, Herbert Wilcox commented: ‘the sheriff’s office has advised us that the case is closed. The whereabouts of Nancy’s earthly remains are known only to her Heavenly Father.’ Sadly her older brother, David Michael passed away from a kidney disease four months after she vanished. In a 1984 letter to Belva Kent, Mrs, Wilcox wrote of their daughters deaths: ‘I compare my feelings in the loss of both of the children. Knowing that we buried (David’s) body is sad but peaceful and I have had some wonderful dreams wherein I have talked to him, and I know he is happy. I have never had a pleasant or comforting feeling about Nancy. It is a constant pain. Even now when the phone rings on Mother’s Day, Christmas or her birthday, for a split second I think she might be calling (I cannot imagine losing two children so young, so tragically).’ At Nancy’s memorial service on June 30, 1990, Robert Carlyle Stephens of the West Valley Utah Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints said she ‘has been at peace for 16 years, but there has been turmoil in our minds because we did not know what happened to her until recently. Now all those who knew and loved Nancy can be at peace and know that she left home happy and died quickly.’ … ‘When Nancy died, so white, so splendid, so fine, so beautiful and so innocent, she was received immediately into the Savior’s arms.’ He further said that the memorial service was ‘a final act to settle our minds and thoughts and remember her for who she was and how she was rather than what happened to her.’
On March 19, 1989, the Deseret News reported that after Ted confessed his crimes to law enforcement they searched Capitol Reef National Park and found bones along with the tattered remnants of an old, tan blouse with lace: ‘it was deteriorated to the point that it could have been 14.5 years ago, that they say may have belonged to Nancy.’ They found bones in three different areas during a 2.5 square mile search located one mile east of the park: it was from the location Bundy confessed to dumping her body roughly two months earlier. Forensic experts felt that most of the bones belonged to animals and at the time of the discovery former Wayne County Sheriff Kerry Ekker claimed that the bones found in one area could possibly have been human and that: ‘they were of the size that alarmed us to the point that it could have been human.’ … ‘he (Bundy) claimed that he buried her, but in past victims he didn’t bury them. The information that we got on this is very vague.’…’We didn’t extricate any of the bones.’ … ‘He thought the word `Notom’ meant something to him when he left the highway.’ Sheriffs found a ‘shoulder blade that would have to be off of a small animal or a human of approximately Nancy’s size.’ Shortly after they were found the bones were sent off to be tested and unfortunately none were a match to Wilcox. The only human bone found after Ted gave his death row confessions was a patella (knee cap) in Fairview Canyon a little over 130 miles away from Capitol Reef National Park; it was assumed to have been Debra Kent’s and was given to her family. However, because investigators were unable to get DNA from the remains they were unable to 100% confirm the identification until 2015. After going through the missing persons report, it was noted that Kent’s mother had the kneecap, which authorities at the time didn’t know about. Bountiful Police Sergeant Shane Alexander said: ‘Belva Kent was very hesitant at first, but eventually she agreed, believing that it would be a good thing to know and have that confirmation. I sent the patella to the University of North Texas as well as the samples that were collected, and then they were able to determine that the patella matched the family DNA that was collected.’
Steven Kuick has a different theory about Nancy’s death: ‘Just found a new one, so he said he remembers driving Nancy Wilcox through Scipio, Fillmore, and Beaver Utah, which is about 2.5 hours west from Capitol Reef National Park, and the road through the mountains would have been way too much at the time. Bundy spoke of being worried about driving the speed limit because a cop may be trying to reach his quota, and said (he drove through Beaver, which is 2.5 hours south of his apartment, and Capitol Reef National Park is another 2.5 hours east through a mountainous road at night, I just do not believe he did all of that, I do not. If he feels he went east out of Beaver towards the National Park, he very well could have, that would have been HWY 153 East towards Junction, Utah. Drive east off Highway 153 east heading towards Junction, it’s a 40.5 mile journey, and about 10 miles down 153 east there is a road that heads north, and it goes nowhere, it is not a named road on the map that I have, and it looks like it would be a perfect spot for Bundy, and it looks like a spot he could confuse with Capitol Reef National Park. I do not think he went down the road very far either once he went North on that road off of 153. He wanted to hurry up at that point and just get rid of her. Jim Reed Creek follows the road I am talking about, and there looks to be a gravel road that breaks off of there as well, which could truly be where Nancy Wilcox is located.’
Both Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox have both passed away as well as two of Nancy’s brothers. As of 1987, the orchard where Bundy took Wilcox no longer exists; it is now occupied by Summerspring Court, a housing development.
Works Cited:
deseret.com/1989/3/19/18799046/bones-blouse-may-belong-to-bundy-victim
thisinterestsme.com/nancy-wilcox/
int-missing.fandom.com/wiki/Nancy_Wilcox
bci.utah.gov/coldcases/nancy-wilcox
https://www.deseret.com/1990/7/1/18869477/victim-s-family-lays-hope-and-grief-to-rest-in-empty-grave
Georgann Hawkins was born on August 20, 1955 in Sumner, Washington to Warren and Edith Hawkins. She had an older sister named Patti and both girls were brought up in an upper middle class, Episcopalian household. Affectionately nicknamed ‘George’ by family and friends, Mrs. Hawkins described her daughter as a ‘wiggle worm’ because she was always full of energy and was unable to sit still. Georgann seemed to be universally adored by everyone around her, and she was always surrounded by a close-knit group of friends. At one point in her early childhood Hawkins went through a bout of Osgood-Schlatter Disease, which is described as painful inflammation found just below the knee that is made worse with physical activity and made better with lots of bed rest. One or both knees can be affected by this disease and flare-ups may occur after the initial episode has passed. Thankfully it never came back after George’s initial bout (although she was left with several small, barely noticeable bumps just below her patellae).
Despite her health challenges, Georgann went on to become a star athlete at Lakes High School in Lakewood, Washington: she was on the swim team in her early years but eventually gravitated towards cheerleading, winning numerous medals and competitions while on her high schools cheerleading squad (where she cheered all four years). In addition to her impressive athletic accomplishments, Hawkins was also a straight A student throughout the entirety of her academic career. During her senior year in 1973, Georgann was awarded with the title of princess to the royal court of the annual Washington Daffodil Festival. As Daffodil Princess, she traveled around Washington State with the other court members and their ‘duties’ involved being interviewed by newspapers, meeting children, riding in parades, attending concerts, and signing autographs at charity events. Georgann even gave a speech in the spring of 1973 addressing lawmakers at the Washington State Legislature.
Patti Hawkins went to Central Washington University in Ellensburg, which is the same school that Susan Rancourt attended before she was abducted by Bundy in April 1974. Georgann originally planned on following in her sisters footsteps and attending CWU as well, however her mother was strongly against it; she wanted her younger daughter to attend college at the University of Washington Seattle Campus, which was only about 30 minutes away from Sumner. Agreeing to this arrangement, Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins paid for Georgann’s tuition, books, room and board. To earn some extra spending money, she worked in Seattle throughout the summer, occasionally returning to her family home on weekends. The final time Georgann saw her parents was on Mother’s Day weekend of 1974.
Georgann’s freshman year at the University of Washington was a busy one: she joined the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and decided to major in either broadcast journalism or reporting. Despite having some troubles with a Spanish course she maintained a straight A GPA and found love with a Beta Theta Pi fraternity brother named Marvin Gellatly. Georgann planned to return to her parents house for the summer on June 13th and had plans to start a summer job on Monday, June 17th.
At the time of her disappearance in spring 1974, Georgann stood at a petite 5’2” and weighed a mere 115 pounds. She has long chestnut hair that went down her back and big, doe-like brown eyes. Earlier on the day on June 10th, Hawkins called her mother to tell her she was going to study as hard as she possibly could for her next days Spanish final so she wouldn’t have to retake it later. But before hitting the books she went to a party, even imbibing in a few mixed cocktails. But, because she needed to study didn’t stay long; Hawkins did mention to a sorority sister that she was planning on swinging by the Beta Theta Pi House to pick up some Spanish notes from her boyfriend. She arrived at the frat at 12:30 AM on June 11 and stayed for approximately thirty minutes. After getting the notes and saying goodnight to her beau, Georgann left the fraternity house for her sorority house, which was only about 350 feet away.
Although typically a very safe and cautious young woman, Georgann thought nothing of this short walk that she took hundreds of times before, as it was in a well lit and busy area. While on her way of what should have been just a quick jaunt home, a friend called out to her from his window and she stopped to chat for a few minutes. She said goodnight to him and continued her short walk back to her dorm. Hawkins sorority sisters knew something wasn’t right when the typically reliable George didn’t arrive home two hours later. One of them even called her boyfriend, who informed her that she left his place at around 1 AM. After hearing this, the sister woke the housemother, and together they waited up for Georgann until morning. When morning came and she still didn’t arrive home they called Seattle police, and because of the recent disappearance of fellow University of Washington student Lynda Ann Healy, they immediately sprung to action. They later were informed that one of the other housemothers had awoken that night to a high pitched scream: she thought it was some people joking around and went back to sleep. Bundy confessed to Georganns murder moments before his execution, and though he was foggy on some of the more specific details he distinctly remembered how kind and trusting she was. He went on to say that he asked her for assistance carrying his briefcase to his car (because of his prop cast), and she happily obliged. As Bundy was approaching the young coed he pretended to fumble with the briefcase he was carrying. This was a common practice Bundy used in order to gain his victims trust and get them to lower their defenses; he later switched things up a bit and used an arm sling during his Lake Sammamish abductions (most likely because he couldn’t drive with a ‘broken leg’). As she bent over to put the briefcase in his vehicle, Ted grabbed a conveniently placed crowbar and knocked her out with a single blow to the head. He then put George’s tiny body in the passengers seat of his car and drove off into the night, never to be seen again. Haewkins briefly regained consciousness and in her confused state asked Bundy if he was there to help study for her Spanish exam. He then knocked her unconscious again, pulled his VW Bug over to the side of the road near to Lake Sammamish State Park and strangled her using a piece of rope. Before his execution he claimed that part of her remains were included in those found at his Issaquah dump site.
The day after her brutal murder, Bundy returned to check on Georgann’s body and discovered that one of her shoes was missing. He immediately began to worry that it had fallen off in the parking lot during the abduction and that someone might remember seeing his car parked in the area. Ted was also worried people were going to piece things together because just two weeks prior he had attempted the exact same abduction technique on a different young woman but something spooked him and he decided against it. He was terrified that this unknown woman might come forward and mention the strange encounter if Hawkins belongings were discovered in the same parking lot. The morning after Hawkins abduction, law enforcement taped off the alley and searched it thoroughly for any evidence… but they left the parking lot where Bundy first approached her untouched. Because of this oversight, he was able to return at roughly 5 PM the next evening and retrieve the missing shoe as well as both of Georgann’s earrings that were misplaced as well.
Bundy also claimed he returned to Hawkins body again on June 14th, and at that point made the decision to cut off her head. His third (and final) post-mortem visit to her remains occurred about a week or two later, when he came back to ‘see what was going on.’ During his death row confession, Ted also hinted at acts such as necrophilia so who knows what he meant when he said he went back to ‘see what was going on’ with poor Georgann’s corpse. While going through the bones recovered from the Issaquah dump site, forensic experts found a femur they strongly thought to be Hawkins but is considered ‘impossible to identify.’ It’s also been said that Bundy himself admitted that one of her femur bones discovered at the Issaquah dump site was Georgann’s, but this statement has never been confirmed.
I’ve always wondered about Georgann Hawkins’ family and how they coped with the loss of their daughter. Many family members of other Bundy victims have been vocal with their opinions regarding Bundy’s fate and what happened to their loved ones (specifically Lynda Healy’s sister (Laura) was active in the Amazon mini-series “Falling for a Killer” as well as Susan Rancourts Mom and Sister) but it was tough for me to find anything about Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins. I did stumble across an article Georgann’s mother did with “Green Valley News” titled “Georgann Hawkins died at the hands of Ted Bundy, but that’s not how her mom wants her remembered” that was published on June 11, 2014. In it, Mrs. Hawkins fondly remembers her daughter, saying that “she was a very self-confident little girl … she wasn’t vain, she wasn’t arrogant and she wasn’t snooty. That’s why kids liked her.” She went on to say that her daughter was an avid swimmer who was active in the Brownies (however swimming eventually fell to the wayside once she discovered boys). Years after Theodore Robert Bundy was executed for his crimes against humanity by the State of Florida Georgann’s friends held a memorial for her at their alma matter: Lakes High School. Warren and Edie Hawkins did not attend. She explained, ‘my feeling at the time was, ‘What was it for,’ you know? It wasn’t going to help me any.’ She went on to elaborate that she didn’t keep in touch with anyone in her daughters life nor did she want to. Over the years many newspapers and magazines reached out to the Hawkins family for interviews about their beloved daughter but they turned them all down (aside from a single sentence Edie gave to the associated press after Bundy was executed, saying ‘I’ve never, ever, ever dwelt on how she died. I didn’t want to know how she died’). She didn’t like the idea of anyone making money off the death of her daughter.
THIS was an incredibly eerie experience for me. I felt a lot of sadness and fear at this particular site. When my Google Maps alerted me when I came to the supposed exact location (figured right down to latitude and longitude) I didn’t linger long, plus there was a cop just sitting there, watching the area.
A newspaper article mentioning Georgann Hawkins published by The Spokane Chronicle on October 16, 1974.
Janice Ann Blackburn-Ott was born on February 14, 1951 in McMinnville, Oregon to Dr. Donald Edwin and Ferol Lorraine (nee Hunter) Blackburn. Donald was born on May 14, 1922 in Lovell, WY, and during WWII he was in the US Navy; when he was done serving his country he continued with his education and earned his PhD from the University of Idaho. Ferol was born on August 2, 1921 in Moscow, ID and the couple were wed on July 18 1946. They had two children together: Janice and her older sister, Illona Lynn (who was born in February 1949). Dr. Blackburn was a high school teacher and coach in Idaho before the family relocated to Washington state, where he became a counselor and administrator for the Spokane School District (specifically at school #81).
Well-liked by her peers, Janice was bright and bubbly (this trait even earned her the nickname ‘Sunshine Girl’ at her job), and had a very busy schedule while she was a student at Shadle Park High School: she was a member of the ‘Hi-Lassies’ (which looks like some sort a cheerleading squad), the ski club, the ‘Eldah Tra Art Club,’ and helped out in the library. In a strange twist of fate, she was high school sweethearts with Susan Rancourt’s (another Bundy victim) older brother, Dennis. She graduated from high school in 1969 with high honors and went on to earn her Bachelor’s degree in social work from Eastern Washington State University.
Janice was a petite girl, and only stood at 5’1” tall and was estimated to weigh less than 100 pounds; she had long blonde hair that she wore long and parted down the middle and had smokey green eyes. Affectionately nicknamed ‘Jan’ by her loved ones, she married James Douglass Ott on December 15, 1972 and at the time of her murder worked as a probation case worker for the King County Youth Service Center. After her car was broken into while living in Seattle, Janice felt that living in a smaller community would be safer and moved in with a roommate in nearby Issaquah (located just two doors down from ‘The Issaquah Press’). At the time of his wife’s disappearance, Jim Ott was in graduate school in California (some articles reported that he was in medical school, where others said he was earning ‘an advanced degree in prosthetics’).
On the morning of Sunday, July 14, 1974 Janice spent a few hours washing her clothes at the laundromat, and from there she had a cup of coffee with a friend. After her chores and errands were finished, she went home and put on her black bikini, cut-off shorts, and a white blouse she wore tied at her midriff. Before leaving she made sure to leave a note for her roommate, one that read, ‘I’ll be at Lake Sammamish sunin’ myself. See ya.’ The park is still a popular destination for Issaquah locals, which is a suburb located right outside of Seattle. It contains several beaches and is known to get very crowded during the hot summer months. Ott then hopped on her yellow 10-speed Tiger bicycle and rode to the park; when she arrived at roughly around 12:00-12:30 PM, many beachgoers noticed the attractive young woman, and some even said they remembered her stripping down to her bathing suit and applying a layer of cocoa butter to her skin. That day at the park, Rainier Beer Company was hosting its annual summer picnic, and it was said that there were upwards of 40,000 people there. In addition to happy park goers, Theodore Robert Bundy was there as well, prowling for his next victim (or in this case, victims).
Before Bundy abducted Ott, he approached a young park goer named Janice Graham at the bandstand area. After he said hello and introduced himself to her as Ted, he asked the 22-year-old if she would be able to help him load a sailboat onto the top of his car. She initially agreed, however once the pair reached his vehicle she quickly noticed there was no sailboat, and it was then that her new friend shared that it was actually at his parents’ house that was ‘just up the hill.’ Realizing it was going to be more than just a quick favor, Janice told Ted that she was unable to help him because she was supposed to meet up with her husband and parents shortly. Bundy replied ‘Oh, that’s OK. I should have told you that it wasn’t in the parking lot.’ He then walked the young woman back to the bandstand area, apologized one last time then took off to his right. Graham later reported to law enforcement that the man was wearing a ‘beige sling’ and on three separate times during their short walk from the bandstand to the VW he stopped to rub his ‘injured’ arm, claiming it was from a racquetball injury. Immediately after he parted ways with Graham was when he ran into Janice Ott, as she lay in her black bikini soaking up the rays on Lake Sammamish’s Tibbett’s Beach.
Before Bundy abducted Ott, he approached a young woman named Janice Graham at the bandstand area, and after he said hello and introduced himself to her, he asked the 22-year-old if she would be able to help him load a sailboat onto the top of his car. She initially agreed, however once the pair reached his vehicle she quickly noticed there was no sailboat, and it was then that her new friend shared that it was actually at his parents’ house that was ‘just up the hill.’ Realizing it was going to be more than just a quick favor, Janice told Ted that she was unable to help him because she was supposed to meet up with her husband and parents shortly. Bundy replied ‘Oh, that’s OK. I should have told you that it wasn’t in the parking lot.’ He then walked the young woman back to the bandstand area, apologized one last time then took off to his right. Graham later reported to law enforcement that the man was wearing a ‘beige sling’ and on three separate times during their short walk from the bandstand to the VW he stopped to rub his ‘injured’ arm, claiming it was from a racquetball injury. Immediately after he parted ways with Graham was when he ran into Janice Ott, as she lay in her black bikini soaking up the rays on Lake Sammamish’s Tibbett’s Beach.
Janice was only at Lake Sammamish for about twenty minutes before she was approached by a tall, dark-haired man dressed in tennis shorts (white with a red stripe on the side), a white shirt, and tennis shoes. People nearby that overheard small pieces of their exchange reported that he asked Ott for her assistance with putting a sailboat on his car, which was ‘just down the road’ at his parents’ house in Issaquah. She invited the handsome stranger to sit down next to her so they could ‘talk about it,’ and he did. Fellow beach goers heard Jan say to Bundy that she always had an interest in sailing but never really tried to learn, and flirtatiously asked if she could ‘have a ride in the boat;’ she seemingly agreed to help if he would take her out for a ride afterwards. People also overheard her tell the man that she had her bike with her and she didn’t want to leave it behind out of fear that it would get stolen. He assured her that there was lots of room in his trunk for it, and she then said to him, ‘OK, I’ll help you.’ As the pair walked away, one witness overheard Ott say, ‘hi, I’m Jan,’ to which the man responded, ‘hi, I’m Ted.’ She was never seen alive again.
There were a few people that were sitting close to Ted and Ott that had a first hand account as to what happened: Jerry/Kelly Snyder is a retired DEA agent that was sitting roughly 30 feet away when the exchange occurred, and he has said that he noticed Bundy was only asking women for help, and that he appeared to be ‘trying to find someone who met certain qualifications.’
About the exchange, Snyder said: ‘I noticed a guy that was walking down the beach. A young man. Probably in his mid-to-late twenties. He was wearing white shorts and they had a red stripe, which immediately caught my eye. When he got close, I noticed he had really curly hair and his left arm was in a sling. It piqued my interest because every time he approached a woman, or a group of two or three women, he was getting turned down. And I just kept watching him and he eventually ended up being right in front of me, where he approached a young girl. She was a young and attractive blonde girl. And he asked her… words to the effect of… ‘I need some help.’ She’s saying that she just got here… So obviously, going through her mind is ‘I’d like to help you out, but I’m here to relax.’ He kept on and on and on, and he talks her into whatever he talked her into. He said something about a catamaran. And ultimately, she gets up… reluctantly… because her head is down and she is like ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ And then she started walking back past me. She had this frown on her face, like, ‘I’m helping this guy when I should be enjoying myself on the beach.’ And the end, the result is, she’s no longer with us because she was a nice person.’
Theresa Marie Sharpe was much closer to Ott than Snyder, and thankfully she was able to give investigators a detailed description about the exchange between the two strangers and what exactly they said. Sharpe also shared with LE that she ‘didn’t feel his arm was really hurt. I do remember he took his arm out of the sling and moved it around.’ A second young woman named Sylvia Valint was sitting closest to the pair, and where she was incorrect about his height (she said he was roughly 5’6” to 5’7”) she got the rest of his physical description correct. The fifteen-year-old was also able to tell detectives what was said between the two almost verbatim and provided them with details that no other witness was able to. Per a police report, ‘at about 12:30 hours, Sylvia Valint was laying on the beach at the park with her two friends. Jerry Snyder was about 15 feet from Valint with his wife. Theresa Sharp was with her family about 10 feet from Valint. They were all on the beach, about 200 yards directly in front of the east restroom. The above three witnesses all observed Janice Ott arrive on the beach and position herself between them.’
As we know, Bundy returned only four hours later and abducted Denise Naslund from the same park at around 4:30 PM, and it is the first time that he drastically switched up his MO and took two victims in the same day. It is strongly speculated that he abducted Ott, incapacitated and gagged her, then returned to Lake Sammamish to hunt again. Many TB scholars have theorized that by doing so he was attempting to increase the ‘high’ by taking one woman and returning to the scene only a few hours later to take a second one.
Although Bundy did (sort of) admit to journalists Hugh Aynesworth and Stephen Michaud what happened on July 14, 1974, it was during one of his third person, pseudo-confessions that didn’t directly incriminate him. When asked about Ott and Naslund, the killer theorized that ‘one of the women would probably have watched the other die; he later admitted that it was true while speaking to FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier during his time on death row. Despite finally (maybe… possibly??) telling the truth about how the two women were killed he refused to tell investigators the exact location of where he held them, or if the murders took place indoors or outside in a wooded area. We know that Ted was a liar and a narcissist, so we really need to be careful about taking his word as fact. It’s also possible that Ted tied Ott to a tree somewhere and left her there while he went and hunted for Naslund, and since the area he took the women to was most likely secluded and off the beaten track, it was highly unlikely that anyone would have stumbled upon her, especially if she was silenced (gagged).
Another possible theory is that Bundy lied completely, and he murdered Ott right away, then returned to Lake Sammamish to abduct Denise. Logically, there is a large chunk of time between when she was abducted at 12:30 PM and Ted’s return to Lake Sam at around 4 PM, and if we consider the length of the journey (12 miles, each way) between the park and the Issaquah dump site it means that he was most likely with poor Ott for a good 2-3 hours. If the original plan was to kidnap two women then attack them at the same time, it seems like a lot of time to spend with just one victim. I am including this thought while editing this article in July 2024, but I wonder if he did unspeakable horrors to the poor young woman for the entire 2-3 hours, and brought her to the brink of death over and over… only to revive her each time, so that she was alive when he brought Naslund back. Or, maybe Bundy took a second victim that day because something happened during Otts murder that prevented him from achieving complete sexual gratification. Or… perhaps the event wasn’t planned out at all, and he just wanted to try something brand new, right then and there. We will most likely never know.
A few hours later (at roughly 4 PM), Bundy returned to the same parking lot that he parked in earlier and began his ruse all over again. He approached Sindi Siebenbam and asked her for help getting his sailboat. The 19-year-old was on her way back from the bathroom when a visibly nervous Ted approached her asking for help. She immediately asked what happened to his arm, and he told her that he sprained it. Siebenbam also said that the man used his injured arm to gesture with his elbow, and even tugged on her arm in a way that somehow seemed to point her in the direction of his car. When she looked into his cold, dark eyes, she finally had enough of him and firmly told him, ‘no, I’m sorry. I’ve got people waiting.’ Even still, Ted almost seemed reluctant to accept her answer, and even tried a few more times to get her to go with him. The last time she saw him he was wandering towards the restrooms.
Patricia Ann Turner reported a very similar encounter with a stranger that matched Bundy’s description: at around 4:15 PM a tall, dark haired man with his arm in a sling approached her on her way to the concession stand. They chatted briefly and it didn’t take long for him to ask ‘a really big favor.’ Turner told him that she was in a hurry and wasn’t able to help and after that he just sort of wandered away. Approximately five minutes later, Jacqueline Plischke arrived at Lake Sam wearing a bikini and cut-offs, and as she was locking up her bike she noticed a man just staring at her from a short distance away. He quickly walked up to her and asked for help, but she was quick to tell him that she wasn’t very strong and was waiting for someone. Plischke also advised him that he might be better off if he asked someone that was alone (as she was waiting for a friend). Not willing to waste time on someone unwilling to help him, Ted quickly moved on and approached Naslund, who (as we all know) unfortunately agreed to help him.
I’m not going to get super in-depth about Denise Naslund’s background because I’m going to write a separate piece on her (but for obvious reasons, it’s important to discuss her in some capacity as she plays an important role in the murder of Jan Ott). Naslund was a 19-year-old student studying software development at night school. She worked in an office setting during the day to make money to help pay for college, and at the time of her abduction she was living with her mother and seeing a man named Ken Little.
At around 1 PM, Denise and Little arrived at Lake Sammamish along with her dog and another couple, Bob Sargent and Nancy Battema. The small group of friends decided to sit on the lawn on the east side of the park, roughly 200 feet north of the restrooms. According to Battema, Naslund took four Valium tablets when they arrived, and at some point in the afternoon she and her boyfriend got into an argument. Shortly after 4 PM, Ken and Bob fell asleep after the group had eaten hot dogs and potato chips and Denise then told her friend that she was ‘feeling high’ and after a short discussion about the time, she got up and walked towards the restrooms. It was the last time Battema ever saw her. Naslund had driven her friends to the park in her car, and as it got later and later in the day her vehicle stood out in the lot by itself. Over the next couple of days, it started to dawn on investigators that not one but two women had gone missing from Lake Sammamish on the exact same day, just hours apart from each other. Denise was well known for her sweet nature and friendly personality, and her family said she would have most likely agreed to help any person that was in need without a second thought, especially if they were hurt or handicapped.
After Bundy killed Ott and Naslund, he dumped their bodies along the side of a service road near Issaquah. Roughly eight weeks after their abduction on September 6, 1974, a pair of grouse hunters stumbled across their remains scattered amongst a grassy patch in a wooded area near Issaquah, roughly seventeen miles east of Seattle and two miles from Lake Sammamish. The hunters reported to police that they ‘found two shallow graves, and there’s one with long, black hair.’ King County police immediately sealed off the area and after a three-day search found two skulls as well as some other bones, teeth, and tufts of reddish blonde and dark brown hair. By that time, the remains had fully decomposed and had been dispersed throughout the area by forest critters. An absence of clothing and jewelry on or near the victims made investigators believe that the bodies were left at the scene completely naked. Using dental records as well as hair samples (taken from the victims hairbrushes), the skulls were identified to be those of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund. In addition, there was a third set of remains discovered in the form of a femur as well as several vertebrae believed to have belonged to Georgann Hawkins, but sadly they were impossible to identify.
As the investigation heated up investigators learned that Ted had scoped out the park the weekend before the murders, which would have been July 6/7, 1974. They were also able to place him in Issaquah on July 14 by matching up his credit card receipts, and it has been confirmed that he filled up his car at a gas station located at the northwest corner of Front Street and Sunset Way, where the Issaquah Library now stands. Before he murdered Ott it’s speculated that Bundy may have stopped at ‘The Issaquah Press,’ and after his mugshot was released to the public, their bookkeeper insisted that she had sold him a copy of the newspaper (if you recall, I brought this business up earlier as it was two doors down from where Janice was living at the time).
By this time in the summer of 1974 most Washington residents were aware there was a predator targeting young women in the Pacific Northwest, but despite this the abductions at Lake Sammamish still came as a huge shock to locals. But thankfully, because Bundy had asked several women for help before finding Ott and Naslund, for the first-time law enforcement was able to put together a composite sketch of the infamous ‘Ted:’ Fliers were hung up throughout the Seattle/Issaquah area and women were told to be cautious of men matching the description.
A little over six months after the Issaquah dump site was discovered on March 1, 1975 forestry students from Green River Community College stumbled upon the skull of Brenda Ball on Taylor Mountain while doing field work; this is approximately thirty miles away from the Flame Tavern, where she was last seen. Two days later, King County Detective Bob Keppel found the skull of Susan Rancourt, who had vanished from Central Washington State University in Ellensburg on April 17, 1974, roughly eighty-seven miles away from where she was recovered; like Ball, her skull had been fractured from blunt force trauma. Roberta ‘Kathy’ Parks was found next: the twenty year old was abducted from the campus of Oregon State University, which is 265 miles (or a 4.5 hour drive) away from the Issaquah dump site. Like the others, her skull showed signs of trauma. The last of the remains found on Taylor Mountain were those of Lynda Ann Healy, and unlike the previous victims only her mandible was found, which was later identified through dental records. No remains of Donna Manson or Georgann Hawkins were ever recovered.
Because of the distance between them, Janice and Jim Ott would frequently write to each other, and after her death he received a letter she had sent right before her abduction. In it, she complained about how long it took for mail to be delivered from Washington to California, saying: ‘five days! Isn’t that a drag? Someone could expire before you ever got wind of it.’ Jim waited by the phone all evening on July 14, 1974, and after dozing off a bit he woke up around 10:45 PM, claiming he heard her voice calling his name over and over in his head, begging him to come help her; the following day, he woke up to learn that she was missing. In the true crime classic ‘The Stranger Beside Me,’ Ann Rule tells of a conversation she had with Ott regarding Jan’s disappearance, and in his last letter to her he begged her to be careful: ‘And then I wrote at the bottom (and I don’t know why I choose those words) ‘please take care of yourself. Be careful about driving. Be careful of people you don’t know. I don’t want anything to happen to you. You’re my source of peace of mind.’’
On January 24, 1989 Bundy was put to death by Florida’s ‘Old Sparky’ electric chair, and he confessed to both Ott and Naslunds murders less than 24 hours before his execution: he told FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier that he drove an unconscious Jan to a secluded cabin 2-3 miles from Lake Sammamish and repeatedly raped her before knocking her out again and tying her up, and when he returned with a second victim, he said she at some point regained consciousness. He then raped and murdered Denise in front of her before eventually taking her life as well. After this confession came to light Dr. Blackburn said that he would have rather not known what happened to Janice, saying ‘would you like to hear the story of what happened to your daughter?
While doing research into Dr. and Mrs. Blackburn in the years following their daughter’s murder, I discovered there was an ongoing legal battle between them and the King County Sheriff’s department over Janice’s remains: police told the Ott and Naslund families that their remains could not be turned over for burial because they were needed as evidence but unfortunately, this wasn’t true and it turned out that they were misplaced. Both families filed a lawsuit against the county in 1984, and where a trial had been set for December a settlement was reached on November 2: Denise’s mother Eleanor Rose originally sought $750,000 (she got roughly $112,500), and James Ott and the Blackburns sought $2 million each (in the end they received about the same amount as Rose, which was divided equally between the two parties). Additionally, Denise’s father Robert sought $750,000 but the county refused to settle with him (although they gave her brother Bob about $5,000).
Dr. and Mrs. Blackburn were married for 64 years at the time of his death on June 3, 2010; he was 88. Ferol Blackburn died at the age of 97 on December 8, 2018 in Spokane, WA and is buried in Fairmount Memorial Park in Spokane. Janice’s sister Illona married a man named Gary Clark in 1971 and relocated to Lompoc, CA; the couple have two children together.
* Edit, July 2024: I would like to thank an individual named Anna, who was kind enough to reach out and let me know that I included a picture of the wrong Jim Ott’s grave stone on here. Looking at it I can’t believe I made such a glaringly obvious mistake, and I’m now even more confident in my decision to put off writing any new articles until I go back and make sure that my old stuff is up to snuff. Also, thank you for being so kind about it. So many people would have publicly blasted me, via a comment at the end of the post pointing out all of my errors. Reaching out through email was very classy, and I appreciate you.
Another Bundy Blog. 