Before I started this piece all I really knew about Brenda Ball was that she had recently dropped out of college and disappeared from a dive bar just outside of Seattle (which I went to during my visit in April 2022); she (obviously) also fit his typical victim profile: she was young, thin, and beautiful, with dark chocolate eyes and brown hair that she wore long and parted down the middle.

Brenda Carol Ball is Theodore Robert Bundy’s fifth (confirmed) murder victim. She was born on November 4, 1952, to Duane Kaye and Rosemary (nee Rupp) Ball; Mr. Ball was born on April 12, 1930 in Seattle, and Rosemary was born in September 1930; the couple were wed on March 31, 1953 and Brenda was their only child. They parted ways in November 1971 and the reason listed on their divorce certificate is ‘cruelty.’ 

Brenda was twenty-two years old, 5’3” tall, and weighed a mere 112 pounds at the time of her disappearance… just a short side note, most of Bundy’s victims were incredibly ‘dainty’ and petite women: both Georgann Hawkins (5’2”) and Lynda Ann Healy (5’6”) only weighed 115 pounds, Donna Gail Manson was 5’ even and 100 pounds, and Janice Ott was 5’1” and 105 pounds. I wonder if this was due to his sexual preference or because smaller women (in theory) would be easier to subdue.

In 1970 Ball graduated from Mount Rainier High School in Des Moines, WA and at the time she disappeared in 1974 was taking classes at Highline Community College but mysteriously dropped out roughly two weeks before she vanished. She lived with two roommates in a five-bedroom house in Normandy Park, and according to them, she was content and happy regarding her decision to leave school, but was beginning to ‘party a lot.’

In the early morning hours of June 1, 1974, Brenda Ball seemingly vanished into thin air after seeing a band play at The Flame Tavern in Burien, WA. The topless dive bar had a seedy reputation for being a bit rough back in the 1970’s (it definitely isn’t in the greatest of neighborhoods), and has changed hands/names a few times since that fateful night in 1974: at one point it was called ‘El Baron’ before most recently being named ‘Fiesta del Mar.’ As of April 2022 the building sits abandoned (complete with multiple mattresses conveniently located in the back parking lot, for relaxation purposes). The night Brenda disappeared she was wearing blue jeans, a turtleneck with long sleeves, a ‘shirt-style’ jacket, and brown clog-like wedge-heeled shoes; she arrived at the establishment alone to see the band play and stayed until last call.

Immediately following Ball’s disappearance no one seemed overly concerned: her roommates said that she was an adventurous person and would often disappear on trips for days at a time without telling anyone (this reminds me so much of Donna Manson). I further feel that the two young women were similar in the sense that their almost nomadic lifestyles, casual drug use, and frequent habit of hitchhiking put them both in a higher risk pool. However, as time passed by it was glaringly obvious that something very serious was wrong, as Brenda wouldn’t leave for weeks on end without reaching out to somebody. Only adding to the mystery: all of her clothes and personal belongings were left behind, and eventually her roommates decided to reach out to her bank to inquire if there had been any recent activity related to her account. When they learned that there was none, alarm bells started to go off, and it was at this point they called her parents in nearby Kent. They told them that they hadn’t heard from their daughter either, and upon hearing that no one had heard or seen from her daughter, Mrs. Ball immediately called the police. This is why she was not reported missing until June 17, 1974: two and a half weeks later.

According to police reports, the day before she disappeared at roughly 2 PM on Friday, May 31, 1974 Brenda did tell friends that she was thinking about catching a ride to go camp with some friends at Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park in the eastern part of the state the Memorial Day weekend after her night at The Flame. The park is located a little over two hundred miles away, and is roughly a four hour drive from Normandy Park.

At first, police didn’t link Balls disappearance to the other missing Seattle girls: by this time in mid-1974, Lynda Ann Healy, Donna Gail Manson, Susan Rancourt and Roberta Kathleen Parks were all abducted from places directly related to a college campus (except Healy who technically lived in an off-campus apartment, but I’m being nitpicky and I think you understand what I’m getting at). Brenda, on the other hand, was a bit older than the other victims (at a whopping 22 years old) and had disappeared from a seedy dive bar. She also had a well-established history of disappearing then reappearing, usually for days at a time. Former King County Detective Bob Keppel claimed that her disappearance didn’t have anything in common with the other missing women, and because of this law enforcement didn’t release any information about her case to the media until August 7, 1974. The police weren’t the only ones that were hesitant to publicly connect the dots between Brenda and the other missing girls: it was incredibly challenging to find newspaper articles related to her, and maybe if her disappearance was treated the same as Lynda Ann Healy’s or Georgann Hawkins they would have caught Bundy sooner.

Although not calling Brenda by name, Seattle based paper ‘The Sunday News’ published an article about her disappearance roughly one month after her case became public. She wasn’t brought up again until the gruesome discovery of her skull at Taylor Mountain in March of 1975 (I’ll talk more about that shortly).

Towards the end of the night after the band wrapped up their set, Ball asked one of its members that she knew for a ride home back to her shared house, but he told her that he was heading in the opposite direction and couldn’t. Now, there are two conflicting possibilities regarding how Ms. Ball possibly left the tavern on the night she disappeared: the first being that she left alone with plans of hitching a ride home, and the second one is that she left with an unidentified man wearing an arm sling.

It was reported by an employee at the Flame Tavern that Brenda was seen talking to a good-looking man that had his arm in a sling towards the end of the evening on May 31, 1974. It is worth mentioning that this statement was probably made at some point later in time (most likely after the initial police report was made in mid-June), because if the witness told law enforcement about the assailant using an arm sling at the beginning of the investigation, then it is highly likely that they would have immediately made the connection between Brenda’s disappearance and the other missing Seattle girls. By August of 1974, King County law enforcement knew that the man they were looking for was using a fake injury ruse, and because of this, it would make one think that any report of Brenda talking to a good-looking man with his arm in a sling would have been more important or prioritized.

On May 31, 1974 Ted was spending the evening with his girlfriend Liz Kloepfer, her daughter Molly, and her parents that were visiting Seattle from Utah. Kloepfer said that Bundy took everyone out for a pizza dinner but was reportedly in a hurry to leave and get out of there at the end of the night. The following is a transcript from one of her interviews: ‘it was a Saturday night, and my parents came out from Utah. The tradition in the Mormon faith is that when you’re eight years old, you get baptized. And so I was going to have my daughter Molly baptized, and my father was going to do the baptism. We went out to dinner the night before, and Ted treated us all to pizza. He was in a big hurry to go after we were done with pizza. The next day, he didn’t show up. He completely missed the baptism. He was probably two hours late. And after it was all done, he showed up at the church. I forget what he said was the excuse. Car trouble or something like that. I was mad because he was making me look bad in front of my parents. But, you know, never in our wildest dreams did we think he was out abducting people.’

Personally, I think Ted was practically giddy at the thought of committing another murder and wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. The last time that he killed was on May 6, when he drove almost four and a half hours to Oregon State College in Corvallis to abduct Kathy Parks. Furthermore, the fact that he was late for Molly’s baptism the following morning citing ‘car troubles’ almost makes one think he was held up trying to get rid of Ball’s body and clean up any lingering mess and simply lost track of time… or, maybe he went back to the body that morning for sexual reasons and his girlfriend was the absolute furthest thing from his mind. We’ll never know.

I think I own every single piece of literature ever written about Ted Bundy (I’m joking, but I do have quite a few and between two jobs, school, and my husband I may one day get through them all). In Michaud and Aynesworth book ‘Conversations with a Killer,’ Ted would frequently speculate about what ‘may have’ happened to the victims while talking in the third-person, and according to him ‘the killer’ may have intentionally changed his modus operandi slightly in Balls case by picking up a hitchhiker. Also, going after a victim that was in a slightly different population helped him fly under the radar a bit as missing young women on college campuses were getting a lot of attention at the time. He furthered that in his journey that night, the killer stumbled upon Brenda, who was looking for a ride home from a bar and after picking her up the two got friendly, and her assailant attempted small talk in an attempt to help keep her distracted and unafraid. When he learned that she didn’t have any plans for the rest of the night/early morning he asked if she wanted to go to a party back at his place, an invitation that she accepted. The drive back to his rooming house may have seemed casual on the outside but it was coldly calculated on the inside: her killer wanted to appear friendly and jovial so as not to alarm and frighten her, as he wanted to keep her relaxed and at ease. But of course, when they arrived there was no gathering, and he then concocted a story about why it was just the two of them. Bundy said that at first Ball seemed slightly hesitant on coming in, however the boredom and drunkenness eventually took over and she went inside. He went on to say that they continued drinking until she was ‘exceptionally intoxicated’ and apparently the two had a ‘consensual’ sexual encounter.

Unfortunately for Ms. Ball, a night of drinking and sex that was ‘more or less’ consensual was not enough to completely squash her killer’s dark desires, and because of this, he waited until she was asleep then strangled her to death. Many members of law enforcement and true crime scholars doubt this pseudo-confession (for obvious reasons): if we pretend Ted is telling the truth then it means that he brought Brenda back to his room at the Rogers Rooming House, and considering that he had lived there for quite a few years by then and was in a well-established relationship with Liz Kloepfer, this would have been an incredibly risky move on his part. What if he ran into another resident, or Ernst and Frieda? I mean… It was 2:00 AM, and Ted lived there for quite a few years by then so I’m sure he knew the nocturnal patterns of his fellow tenants (especially since he was such a night owl himself). But… When you think about the fact that Bundy was often drunk and/or high during his murders, it makes me lean towards him being an impulsive person that didn’t seem to think through his attacks very well. I’m sure for the most part Bundy scholars are overthinking things a bit: drunk Ted didn’t think, he acted… therefore, I think he most likely had a tough time keeping his shit together during the 15-minute drive back to his room from The Flame, and it would have made more sense that he drove Ball to a remote location then killed her.

The following is a quick but super interesting snippet from Michaud and Aynesworth’s book ‘Conversations with a Killer’ regarding Balls disappearance:
Michaud: ‘He’d take her home?’
Bundy: ‘Sure.’
Michaud: ‘It would seem terribly risky.’
Bundy: ‘If you live with someone. But he had his own house.’

Obviously, we know part of this ‘confession’ isn’t true if Bundy is talking about himself: he obviously lived with the Rogers as well as MULTIPLE other people at the time of Brenda’s murder, not in a house, alone. Now what would have happened if he wasn’t perfect in his attempt to kill Ball and she put up a struggle, and let’s say (just a theoretical) she started kicking and screaming while trying to put up a fight? That would have drawn a LOT of attention to him and probably would have gotten him caught, and I think that was the very last thing that he wanted. During interviews while on death row, Bundy told investigators that he cut off the heads of twelve of his victims, and according to Dr. Robert Keppel, he told FBI Agent Bill Hagmaier once that he kept ‘as many as four heads’ in his room on 12th Avenue in Seattle. Was Brenda’s one of them?

I’m not exactly sure why but I absolutely adore Phyllis Armstrong from Netflix’s ‘Falling for a Killer.’ I found her very sweet and easy to like, and I could tell she genuinely loves Georgann, and misses her. In one of her segments during the documentary, Armstrong said that at around 11 PM on May 31, 1974 (roughly three hours before Ms. Ball disappeared) a man using crutches asked her for help carrying a can of gas to his VW Bug on the campus at the University of Washington. She said yes, and when they reached his vehicle he asked her to get inside and push a button located underneath the steering wheel, starting it. At this point Phyllis was starting to get the willies, and after making up an excuse and apologizing she quickly dropped the can got the heck out of there. That gut instinct probably saved her life.

Now think about it: this encounter took place just a few hours before Brenda Ball went missing, which means if the man Bundy was talking about was indeed himself, then his confession about ‘the killer’ changing up his MO to hunt an ‘older woman’ in order to avoid getting caught was just another lie. Meaning, he didn’t switch it up as part of a well thought out plan: he just bombed out with Phyllis and needed to find another girl to kill. I mean, look at what happened when he crapped-out with Carol DaRonach in SLC? He drove to a high school roughly twenty miles away and abducted Deb Kent. After Balls abduction Ted went back to taking his victims from a school setting: Georgann Hawkins was next, and her abduction took place not even two weeks later on June 11th, 1974. She was taken early in the morning on her way home from a party outside of her sorority house at the University of Washington.

It’s also worth bringing up that Ball’s skull had a large fracture in the back of it when it was found on Taylor Mountain, and the King County Medical Examiner determined that she was missing one of her temporal bones, suggesting that her assailant may have struck her in the head with a blunt object (like a crowbar, as TB was known to have used). Bundy never mentioned this during his ‘confession,’ so if he really strangled her to death, then why was a large part of the right side of her skull missing? This injury completely contradicts the statement he made that he strangled her until she expired.

However, thinking in an ‘outside the box’ sort of way, what about foraging animals? Could they have been responsible for the giant hole that was found in Brenda’s skull? The wildlife population in Washington state is pretty diverse… It’s home to bobcats, lynxes, multiple types of bears, wolverines, deer and many other large animals. Could a large outdoor creature have stepped on her skull after Bundy dumped her in the forest, causing the fracture, maybe a bear? The area is home to both grizzly and black bears: an average sized adult male grizzly weighs anywhere from 300-650 pounds, and a male black bear can exceed 600 pounds. Well, apparently I wasn’t the only person that thought of this: according to the King County ME, there is a zero chance that Ball’s skull fracture occurred because of local wildlife. This means that if Bundy was telling the truth about strangling the young woman to death, then it is difficult to see why he would have also needed to inflict such a traumatic injury upon her as well.

The following is a short excerpt regarding Brenda Ball from ‘The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer,’ written by Dr Robert Keppel:
‘The dentition of the skull contained a pattern of silver fillings that were familiar to me. I had memorized the dental work detailed on [victim’s dental] charts and easily recognized the jawless expression of Brenda Carol Ball. My crude on-site identification was to be confirmed by a forensic odontologist three days later. We photographed the cranium from all angles and measured its position to two temporary triangulation stakes. We carefully picked up the skull and preserved it in the position in which it was resting. Since dusk was setting in, we decided to wait until the next day to resume our search for the remainder of the skeleton.’

Despite the fact that LE was hesitant to link Ball to the other missing Washington state girls, ironically it was because of her that they were discovered in the first place: on Sunday, March 1st, 1975, two forestry students from a nearby community college were doing a project at Taylor Mountain when they spotted her skull lying among the damp, moss-covered trees. Shortly after, investigators unearthed the craniums of Lynda Ann Healy, Susan Elaine Rancourt, and Kathy Parks; in addition to skulls, search parties also found clumps of hair as well as an array of human bones, including a mandible and a femur that is strongly believed to have belonged to Georgann Hawkins (however they had nothing else to compare it to and it was eventually misplaced).

The following is an excerpt from the ‘SurivingSara’ GoodReads blogspot; I will include the direct link below if anyone is interested in reading all of it. Just as a side note, I wrote an article about ‘Sara A. Survivor,’ which is a pseudonym for her real name of Susan Roller. She reportedly is a surviving Bundy victim and claims that she suffered from long term abuse by him, and by this I mean she said they had a relationship (of sorts) and she sustained repeated physical and psychological abuse as a result, trauma that she alleges that she still suffers from today. I won’t go too far into her as there’s an entire separate article written about her, but she’s a real piece of work and REALLY has it out for the King County Sheriff’s, specifically Bob Keppel:
‘Skeletal remains at the scene, marked with evidence numbers, were sent to Superior Court, then returned back to the King County Sheriff Office and then sent to the ME: all the evidence numbers of the skeletal remains line up and those numbers verify they were found on site in March of 1975 at the time of the discovery of Taylor Mountain. Further, those remains were sent to Texas in 2005 and identified via DNA three of the four girls found on Taylor Mountain and another who could not be identified. In addition, records show that at least 1-2 individuals besides Ott and Naslund were found at Issaquah and at least 1 individual not matching the four girls found at Taylor Mountain was found at Taylor Mountain. Both crime scenes had girls’ clothing, jewelry, and other evidence. None of this appears to have been preserved.’

On Memorial Day weekend of 2022 I went on an overnight trip to explore Bundy’s former hood in Philadelphia, PA, and I made the drive from Attica, NY which was about a 6.5 hour drive, one way. Making that drive two days in a row was a bit nuts, but I absolutely LOVED it because I renewed my Audible subscription, put on ‘The Phantom Prince,’ and just drove… and I’m really glad I did that because it provided me with a lot of smaller details regarding Balls murder that I wasn’t aware of previously… Because Liz’s Mom kept a detailed journal, there is a detailed account as to exactly what happened on the evening of May 31, 1974:(as I said earlier), Ted treated everyone to dinner at Pizza & Pipes, however she mentioned that the meal seemed rushed and it only lasted for roughly an hour and a half. She went on to say that after everyone was finished eating, Bundy dropped them all off at Liz’s house and said that he was going home.

I am absolutely flabbergasted by how fearless Bundy was: for a good amount of his atrocities he operated VERY close to home, and when I was in Seattle I saw first hand just how close in proximity everything was to one another. When I went to the site of where Karen Sparks once lived (the residence was torn down to make room for apartment buildings) I literally looked up and there was The (former) Sandpiper! Also, The Flame Tavern is only 4.2 miles away from the Rogers Rooming House, which is less than a 15-minute drive. Plus he lived in the general Seattle area since he was a young boy: HOW DID HE NOT RUN INTO ANYONE HE KNEW??! I know if I was going to feign injury while committing multiple felonies I would at least do it in an area where I was positive that I wouldn’t be recognized. Piggybacking off that, the fact that he killed women from the same university that he attended further amazes me. He must have had gigantic stones.

As far as the truth goes… I really think Bundy liked screwing with his audience, whoever it was. Journalists. Members of law enforcement. Carole Ann Boone. He’d tell one person one thing then turn around and tell another something completely different. He would literally change his story for his audience, and lied so frequently about so much… Obviously, like so many other Ted related things, we’re going to have to take his pseudo-confession with a grain of salt, and unless someone discovers his long-lost diary, we’ll probably never know what happened to Brenda Ball. However, one thing is for certain: her life was cut short because of Ted Bundy.

Thanks to the website OddStops (which is amazing, and if you haven’t checked it out yet you totally should), I found some interesting facts about the former Flame Tavern, most recently called ‘El Baron Rojo:’ the building was built in 1928 and in 2007 it sold for $990,000. During the 1970’s, the tavern was known for its live music, and drunken brawls would frequently break out in their parking lot. Denise Naslund (another confirmed victim of Ted’s that he would go on to abduct then kill exactly one month and two weeks later from Lake Sammamish) was a frequent patron of the bar. In addition to Brenda Ball’s abduction, in 1977 twenty-one year-old Rhonda Louise Burse was last seen getting into a car in the tavern’s parking lot and was never seen or heard from again. At one point the watering hole went by the name ‘MVP Sports Bar,’ and in 2008 a man was shot and killed somewhere on the premises with an AK-47 assault rifle, and in 2020, former owner Sonia Olvera Jimenez was arrested for the murder of a gentleman that was renting a room in her house.

Mr. Ball passed away on August 13, 1988 somewhere in Pierce County, WA. Brenda’s mother remarried a man named Donald Arnaud on March 9, 1974 and despite looking EVERYWHERE (Google, Ancestry, MyHeritage, etc…) I was unable to find any record of her passing away (even though she would currently be in her 100’s, but it’s not completely unheard of). According to an Associated News article regarding Bundy’s execution: ‘Rosemary Arnaud, mother of 22-year-old Brenda Ball, who disappeared outside a Burien, Wash., tavern in 1974, said Bundy’s death will be a relief only in the knowledge that he will never be able to kill again.’

Works Cited:
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/15965444-skeletal-remains-were-found-at-taylor-mountain
https://apnews.com/article/e83729933cf61be312252a25cf879025