Sherry Rae-Deatrick was born on September 12, 1956 to James and Mary (nee Fetz) Deatrick in New Albany, Indiana. Mr. Deatrick was born on August 20, 1931 and Mary was born on November 28,1935 in New Albany, IN. The couple were wed on March 16, 1956 and had two children together: Sherry and her brother, Timothy. James was employed as a computer operator for the corporate offices of Colgate-Palmolive Corporation and was a member of the Louisville Baseball Veterans Association, and the family was active at the Main Street United Methodist Church.
Sherry graduated from New Albany High School in 1976 and went on to earn her BA in Psychology from the University of Louisville, graduating magna cum laude. She briefly lived in NYC, where she was employed with Brooklyn Legal Services and at an insurance defense law firm while she was attending graduate school. At some point she married a man named Donald Paul Breitfield Kaler, and when she returned home to Indiana in 1992 she enrolled in night classes at the Louis D. Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville, and worked full time while maintaining top grades. In Deatricks first year of law school she earned the Marilyn Meredith Memorial Award for top female student, and she was a member of the Journal of Family Law.
After graduating from law school in 1997 Deatrick worked at various law firms across the United States, and according to her ‘Linked In’ profile, she has worked as an attorney for herself since 2008, and specializes in both Social Security disability and Department of Veterans Affairs appeals. From November 2004 to 2008 she worked as a Project Manager for Tichenor & Associates, where she was responsible for several government contracts, bankruptcy debtor audits, and state healthcare programs. From 1999 to 2002 she worked as General Counsel under Governor Paul Patton in Frankfort, KY.
On her law practice’s (public) Facebook page, ‘Sherry R. Deatrick, Attorney,’ on February 23, 2012 she announced: ‘I am now admitted to practice in the US District Court, Southern District of Indiana. Looking for office space in my hometown of New Albany.’ And almost ten years later on October 14, 2021 she said; ‘I’m back! I have relocated back home from Florida and I’m re-establishing my solo law practice again. My main focus is on social security disability law and bankruptcy. Serving Kentucky and Southern Indiana.’
Deatrick claims that she had an encounter with prolific serial killer Ted Bundy in the summer of 1974, and although she doesn’t provide an exact date that rough time frame fits perfectly into when he was active. I do want to say that on two separate occasions I tried to reach out to Sherry for clarification on this, but she didn’t see either of my messages. One day during summer school Sherry had gotten into an argument with her fiance and stormed away from him in a fit of anger, and as she was walking she was offered a ride from none other than Ted: “I’d had an argument with my fiancé and as he usually gave me a lift home from summer school, I set off home on foot. Then this cute guy pulled up and asked if I wanted a ride.’ She hesitated briefly, as she wasn’t one to take rides from strangers but after the man reassured her that she was safe, and he ‘was an assistant professor at the local school’ and ‘acting out of anger at my fiancé, I got in.’
Sherry told the man her address, which was roughly three miles away from where he picked her up in New Albany, Indiana, but instead of driving her directly home he stopped at a store to buy some beer: ‘he hadn’t asked my age and I wasn’t going to tell him how young I was. As we drank the beers, he said, ‘Why don’t we go for a ride?’’ She agreed. As the pair crossed the Ohio River and drove into a different state she began to feel nervous, and ‘felt a little worried but things were different in the 70’s. People were a lot more free sexually and I was no exception. It was all quite exciting and I decided to follow his lead though that seems pretty stupid now.’
At the time, Deatrick said that she was titillated at the thought of a romantic encounter with a handsome stranger, and called Bundy ‘handsome and hypnotic,’ which are words that are frequently used to describe him. After cruising around for about thirty minutes or so they arrived in Louisville, Kentucky, and the young man suddenly pulled off the main drag and into a parking lot: ‘it’s clear Bundy knew exactly where he was headed when he’d started driving. He must have scoped it out before picking me up. At the time I thought the location was a bit weird as the new housing estate wasn’t finished but I was quite adventurous.’ ‘Ted’ then led Sherry into a house that was under construction and “I thought it was nice that he was kissing me. I was still mad at my boyfriend and wanted to get back at him so I was up for it. Then all of a sudden, his hands were both going around my throat. I started to say, ‘Wait. Hold on.’
It was at that moment that they heard construction workers calling out nearby: they had returned from a break. About how things played out, Sherry said that ‘he was clearly rattled when he heard the voices and it was like he’d been shaken out of a trance.’ The man immediately took her back to his Beetle, thus ending their brief encounter: ‘I didn’t understand what had gone wrong. Why had he driven us all this way to make out, and then stopped suddenly? I worried I’d done something wrong?’ After driving back to New Albany in complete silence, ‘Ted’ dropped Deatrick off near her parents’ house then drove away into the night. She never saw him again.
Sherry kept the event to herself, and didn’t tell anyone about what happened to her. It wasn’t until the 1980’s that she read a book about Bundy and strongly felt there was a ‘good chance’ he was the man that she shared a brief romantic entanglement with in the summer of 1974. She speculates that maybe he was in the area looking at law schools to possibly attend: ‘maybe Bundy had gone there to scout it out and happened across me walking home. Later I heard Bundy say there were women in Kentucky who were lucky to be alive. I am certain I was one of those women. I fit the profile for most of his victims, walking alone, upset.’ Only in recent years did Deatrick tell her mother, who has since passed away: ‘she was so shocked but grateful I hadn’t been harmed. I hope young girls who read my story now will be more cautious than I was at that age. I was so naive and trusting and it almost cost me my life.’
In addition to being an attorney Deatrick has worn many hats over the duration of her career: she’s been a playwright, gallery curator, theatre critic, award-winning journalist, and (according to one blogger/artist) ‘a creator of whimsical and mysterious artistic creations.’ According to the website ‘annenberg.usc.edu,’ Sherry was at one time an ‘affiliated freelancer’ with the ‘Louisville Eccentric Observer’ that is based out of Kentucky (she was their theatre critic and won three awards three years in a row for her contributions to the paper). During her time at LEO, she largely focused on the arts and wrote pieces about celebrities like John Waters and local curiosities like Specific Gravity Ensemble (a group known for putting on micro-plays in elevators). Also, according to blogger and artist Jeffrey Scott Holland, Sherry at one time had her own art studio called the ‘Deatrick Gallery,’ which was located in Louisville; her medium included mosaics, crochet amigurumi, and ‘paper-mache miniature heads.’ According to the galleries ‘Geocities’ website, Deatrick’s gallery housed the work of several artists, including Jefferey Holland, Lila Afiouni, and Steve Rigot. She also put on a ‘one-woman performance’ named ‘Heads’ at her gallery in 2004, where she also sold her paper-mache heads that were painted bright colors.
I included Ted’s whereabouts in the summer of 1974 below, and nowhere in it does it say he visited the state of Indiana at any point in time. I understand that not every single one of his movements was recorded, but Indiana is many states away from the Rogers Rooming House in Seattle (where he was living at the time), and was a whopping thirty five hour drive away (and that’s just one way, without stops!). One would think he would have used a credit card to purchase gas at some point in the trip, and therefore would have been listed in the ‘1992 TB Multi agency Team Report.’
The summer of 1974 was a busy time for Bundy: in the late spring/early summer on May 30/June 1, 1974 he abducted and killed Brenda Carol Ball after she saw a band play at The Flame Tavern in Burien, WA. On June 11, 1974 Ted abducted then killed Georgann Hawkins from outside her sorority house at the University of Washington in Seattle. A little over a month later on July 14 he abducted and killed both Jan Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish Park in Issaquah, and in late summer/early fall on September 2, 1974 he abducted and killed the unknown Idaho hitchhiker during his move from Seattle to SLC. At the time Bundy was also in a fairly committed, long term relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer and was gearing up for his second attempt at law school in Salt Lake City. He also worked from May 3, 1974 to August 28, 1974 at the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia, WA.
Sherry Deatrick is the fourth living victim I’ve written about since I started writing about Ted Bundy (I briefly forgot about Susan Roller/’Sara A. Survivor’). The first was Sotria Kritsonis, who claims she escaped an encounter with Ted in the winter of 1972 after he asked if she wanted a ride while she was waiting at a bus stop on Rainer Street. The two drove around for a while, and after he realized she got her hair cut short he got angry and threw her out of his car. Kritsonis claims she saw him the following year on TV and immediately knew it was him… but it couldn’t have been Ted, because he wasn’t arrested for his crimes against women until August 1975, and he didn’t purchase his tan VW until the spring of 1973. Now, I suppose it’s possible she saw the news story about how he got caught wearing a disguise while infiltrating an event for the Washington state Democratic party, but I highly doubt it.
Rhonda Stapley is one of the more ‘out there’ living Bundy victims, and by this I mean she has been featured in various television specials and mini-series about the serial killer. Stapley was a twenty-one -year-old pharmacy student at the University of Utah when she claims Ted pulled over and asked if she wanted a ride back to her dormitory after a painful dental surgery in the fall of 1974. Like Kritsonis, she was sitting at a bus stop, and not long into the drive he looked at her and said, ‘do you know what? I am going to kill you now.’ He then knocked her unconscious and drove to a secluded canyon just outside of the city, where he beat and sexually assaulted her over and over again for hours before she was finally able to escape by jumping in a nearby stream. She eventually made her way back to the University of Utah, and because she was worried that her mother would pull her from school Rhonda kept the event to herself until 2011,: ‘I imagined people whispering, ‘that’s that girl who was raped.’ I didn’t want attention. I still don’t.’
Susan Lorrayne Roller (who writes under the pseudonym Sara A. Survivor) is an alleged repeat victim and long-time acquaintance of Bundy during the time he was active (and possibly before) in Washington state. She claims that she was friends with Georgann Hawkins as well, and where I couldn’t find any proof of any friendship (as in, pictures of them together) they were Pierce County Daffodil Princesses a year apart (Susan in 1972, Georgann in 1973). Roller claims that she dated Ted briefly before he began to routinely mentally and physically abuse her, and that he also stalked her during their time together at the University of Washington.
Roller has published three books about Bundy: the first is a memoir published in July 2016 and only a limited number of copies were printed (it has since been completely pulled to be ‘rewritten’); her website has disappeared as well because the domain wasn’t properly maintained. The second and third books are more based in facts, and are directly related to the Bundy investigation. In ‘Defense of Denial: Ted Bundy’s Final Prison Interview, 1989’ (published on April 5, 2016), Sarah released some interviews between Ted and Bob Keppell that supposedly provides evidence there were additional victims, and shows proof that police kept information related to the case from the public. Her third book, ‘Reflections on Green River: The Letters of, and Conversations with, Ted Bundy,’ was also published on April 5, 2016 and is ‘a collection of actual documents related to the interviews that took place between WA State authorities in 1984 and 1988 that were released to Roller after years of coming forward.’
James E. Deatrick died at the age of fifty-four on November 24, 1985, and Sherry’s mother Mary died at the age of 78 on March 26, 2014 at Floyd Memorial Hospital in New Albany, IN. Sherry is 67 years old (as of February 2025), and is a widow currently living in Largo, Florida. Her husband Donald Paul Breitfield Kaler died on January 30, 2000 at the age of forty-four, and according to his obituary, he was a US Army Veteran and a licensed attorney; he worked as a commercial insurance underwriter for the Kentucky Farm Bureau. Her brother Timothy A. Deatrick lives in Port Saint Lucie, Florida with his wife, Sandra.
Works Cited:
Deatrick, Sherry. (April 2, 2020). ‘Hypnotised by a Handsome Stranger.’ Taken February 25, 2025 from vtfeatures.co.uk
Deatrick, Sherry. (April 2, 2020). ‘True Life Lucky Escape: Hypnotised by a Handsome Stranger.’ Taken February 24, 2025 from vtfeatures.com
‘Deatrick Law Firm: Sherry R. Deatrick, Attorney at Law.’ Taken February 25, 2025 from piattorneylist.com/online/memberDetail38461.htm
Holland, Jeffrey Scott. ‘Unusual Kentucky: Sherry Deatrick.’ (June 7, 2010). Taken February 25, 2025 from unusualkentucky.blogspot.com
Punteha van Terheyden. (July 27, 2019). ‘Hitching a ride with handsome stranger Ted Bundy nearly cost me my life.’ Taken February 24, 2025 from ‘The Mirror.’
geocities.ws/deatrickgallery/deatrick.html
Another Bundy Blog. 