In the early morning hours of January 4th, 1974, Ted Bundy brutally assaulted college student Karen Sparks at 4325 8th Avenue NE in the University District of Seattle; she was his first known victim. Miraculously, he didn’t kill her, but he did leave her with numerous long-term injuries that she still struggles with to this day. The house she used to reside in no longer exists as it was torn down sometime in 1985 to make way for a new four-story apartment block called ‘Westwood Apartments.’
I’m posting this because things have been going really well for me lately and I need to knock myself down a peg (edit: my mom passed away almost right after I wrote this then I had a miscarriage shortly after that). I worked really hard on my itinerary before I went to Seattle in April 2022 in order not to miss out on anything and unfortunately, I went to the wrong location for this case. The correct address where Lonnie Ree Trumbull and Lisa Eleanore Wick were brutally assaulted is 2415 8th Avenue North in Seattle (98109),’ and I went to 2415 8th Avenue South (98134). I didn’t catch my mistake until I got home when it was obviously too late. This is a case that I slowly became obsessed with while in Washington. I really wish I figured out my mistake in time because I would have gone back.
Roughly eight years before the brutal murder of Lynda Ann Healy, two flight attendants living in a basement apartment in the Queen Anne District of Seattle were brutally assaulted as they lay in their beds in the early morning hours of June 23, 1966; one of them didn’t make it. Trumbull was born on April 4, 1946 in Portland, OR; after graduating from Madison High School in 1964 she attended stewardess school (where she met Wick). Like Lisa, Trumbull was born and raised in Portland and had recently graduated from flight attendant school about a month earlier. At the time of her murder in 1966, Lonnie had just taken a job working for United Airlines and lived with two other flight attendants: Lisa and Joyce Bowe. Thankfully, Joyce was not home at the time of the attacks. At first, it was speculated that the assaults occurred around midnight based on eyewitness testimony of a car speeding away from the scene of the crime around 12:15 AM, however evidence eventually led detectives to believe the attacks may have occurred as late as 3 AM. Additionally, the night of the murders a United Airlines coworker of theirs stated that he called the girls apartment regarding a change in flight plans at roughly 11:45 PM and had spoken to Wick, who said she would pass a message along to Trumbull, who was already asleep. He placed a second call to them the next morning at roughly 5:45 AM, which went unanswered. In a strange twist of fate, former King County Sheriff’s Deputy Terry Allman came forward that he was in a romantic relationship with Trumbull and spent most of the day before her murder at her apartment, leaving around 5:00 PM. The last contact he had with her was later that night when he called her around 10 PM.
The girls were not discovered until around 9:30 AM the following morning when Joyce came home. She discovered the front door was unlocked and the living room light was still on; knowing this was completely out of character for her roommates, she immediately knew something wasn’t right. Standing outside of the apartment door, Bowe cautiously called out to her friends and was met with complete silence. She slowly ventured in and was met with a gruesome sight: both Lisa and Lonnie were viciously attacked, their walls and bedding completely saturated with blood. Joyce dropped everything and ran screaming, ‘my girlfriends are killed, they’re bleeding!’ to their landlord, who immediately called the police. Per the Patreon, ‘hi: I’m Ted,’ Joyce said, ‘I looked at Lonnie and didn’t believe my eyes. Then I started to wake Lisa and she was in the same state.’ Wick was immediately rushed to either King County Hospital or Harborview County Hospital (I’ve seen both in articles), where surgeons performed emergency surgery in order to help ‘relieve pressure on her brain caused by multiple depressed skull fractures.’ Lonnie was determined to already have been deceased; according to medical records neither victim was sexually assaulted. At the time of the attacks, both girls were in bed, wearing their nightclothes, and Lisa was wearing large, bulky curlers in her hair which Doctors theorize may have helped cushion the blows of her assailant which in turn saved her life.
Although the investigation of the Queen Anne apartment resulted in detectives finding a fair amount of evidence, it didn’t result in much helpful information. They determined there were no signs of forced entry (meaning the door had either been unlocked or was poorly made and was easy to pick) although they did find a full palm print and several fingerprints at the scene as well as the murder weapon. In a nearby vacant lot, Seattle Detective Sergeant Herb Arnold found a five pound, one and a half foot long log completely covered in blood that the perpetrator used to bludgeon the girls with. Next to the discarded piece of wood detectives found a white girdle belonging to one of the victims as well as both of their traveling bags (containing only a small amount of change).
Aside from these small personal items that were taken from the victims nothing else of value was taken from the crime scene, which further strengthens the argument that this event was a planned assault (instead of a robbery). George Stoss (another tenant from the girls apartment building) told police he saw a car speed away from the complex at roughly 12:15 AM. He specified that ‘he took off so fast that I wondered if he was going to make the turn.’
Aside from these small personal items that were taken from the victims, nothing of value was missing from the crime scene, which further strengthens the argument that this event was a planned assault (instead of a robbery). Purses of both girls were found but police refused to share where. Another tenant from the girls apartment building named George Stoss told police that he saw a car speed away from the complex at roughly 12:15 AM and ‘at the same time I heard someone scream.’ He specified that ‘he took off so fast that I wondered if he was going to make the turn.’ On June 25, 1966, law enforcement talked to another neighbor who reported she heard the car, where others heard nothing. Police administered a polygraph examination to a 17-year old local boy on June 24, but he passed and was released. On June 29, 1966 at least six additional polygraphs were administered but everyone passed.
On June 24, 1966, former Seattle Police Captain Paul Lee released a statement to the press saying, ‘we don’t have much to go on right now. The girls had been in Seattle for such a limited period of time, we don’t know whether it was an acquaintance or a prowler. But we are not ruling out other motives, such as robbery.’ Due to the sick nature of the heinous crime, King County police felt that the attack was more personal than random and that the assailant most likely knew either one or both of the victims. On June 24, 1966 police developed a ‘vengeance theory,’ and that they have no evidence showing the crime was committed by a ‘casual prowler.’ Using this theory, detectives questioned close to one hundred friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances of all three roommates, even going so far to polygraph a few of the stronger suspects. As Ms. Wick healed from her injuries and got stronger, she regained some of her memory, and on July 15 she helped a sketch artist come up with a composite drawing of the assailant (which unfortunately resulted in no real leads). According to Wick, the assailant was 5’10” tall and weighed about 165 pounds; he was about 30 years old and had thinning blond hair. She could not say for certain whether or not she had ever seen him before, but said she felt she would have been able to ID the man if she ever saw him again. The surviving stewardess told detectives she was awake when the attacker killed her friend then turned on her.
On June 30, a bartender named Homer Sims went to law enforcement and reported that a man ‘about 30 years old’ was in his establishment on June 15 at around 8:00 or 9:00 PM asking directions. He said the individual had a city map and asked how to reach the 2400 block on 8th Avenue, which is the same area where Wick and Trumbull lived. According to Lieutenant Frank Moore, investigators were not overly ‘excited about this lead.’ On July 20, 1966, Lisa Wick was shown pictures of a variety of different suspects, including one of Richard Speck, a suspect in the murders of eight student nurses in Chicago. Nothing ever came of this.
It wasn’t until Bob Keppel of the Kings County Sheriff’s Department started poking around into Bundy’s past that he started piecing together his background. Specifically he noticed some striking similarities between the Wick/Trumbull case and the Chi Omega Sorority attacks that happened in Florida in 1978: both involved a heavy log as the assailants weapon of choice and took place in the middle of the night when the victims were asleep in their beds. We know this was at the end of Bundy’s reign of terror when he was spiraling, but the case of Wick and Trumbull varied drastically from his typical MO: as the assaults happened at a single location, the girls were left behind, there was a survivor, and there were two victims. As a side note, Rita Curran comes to mind when I write this, as she was also killed while in bed and was also left behind (even though I know Bundy was cleared of her murder in 2023 and there was no forestry involved in her tragic death). There is obviously a lot of variation in these characteristics when compared to his later atrocities; I also want to point out that the only other time we know of Bundy taking two victims ‘at once’ was at Lake Sammamish in the summer of 1974 (even though both girls were abducted separately hours apart, they were still taken in the same day). Unless DNA evidence is found hidden in police archives somewhere, we’ll most likely never know what actually happened in the case of Lonnie Trumbull and Lisa Wick. There is also another unconfirmed TB case involving two victims: the 1969 Garden State Parkway murders of Elizabeth Perry and Susan Davis, but at this time his involvement is purely speculative.
On September 3, 1966, Wick was discharged from Harborview and went home to her family in Portland, Oregon. That October she returned to work at United Airlines and got married in 1967; Joyce Bowe served as maid of honor and several members of the Seattle police department attended the wedding. Asked if she lived her life in fear after the attack, Wick said ‘the fear that I have is not an ‘afraid’ fear. It’s just something that happened and that shouldn’t have happened.’ Ted denied any involvement in the assaults (because he told the truth so often), however Wick confided in Bundy bff Ann Rule that she felt he was her attacker and that his eyes ‘deeply disturbed her.’ Lisa and her husband divorced in May 1970 on the grounds of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’; she got married for a second time in 1976.
In 1966 at the time of the attacks, Ted Bundy was a 19 year old University of Washington student living at his parents’ house on North Skyline Drive in Tacoma, WA. I know first hand walking around Tacoma and Seattle for days on end that they are about an hour apart and are not nearly as close as you’d think. Shortly before the murders in April 1966 Ted sold his first vehicle, a 1933 Plymouth Coupe and bought a 1958 VW Bug. It’s widely known that Bundy didn’t officially begin his crime spree until the brutal assault of Karen Sparks in 1974 (who was also attacked as she slept in her bed), however most true crime scholars agree he is a strong suspect in the disappearance of five year old Ann Marie Burr when Ted was only 14 years old on August 31, 1961. He denied involvement in both Burr and Trumbulls murders. It wasn’t until Bundy was arrested that investigators compared his fingerprints to those discovered at the site of the Trumbulls murder and determined they were not a match. However, crime scenes in the 1960’s were far less ‘secure’ than they are now and there is a chance the prints found belonged to someone else not involved with law enforcement (supposedly there was even a photographer from the local newspaper that was allowed on the scene). As recently as 2018 Washington state investigators re-examined DNA left behind at the crime scene and attempted to link it to Bundy’s, however no match has ever successfully been made. About the Wick/Trumbull case, Bundy researcher Tiffany Jean wrote on her ‘hi: I’m Ted’ Patreon site that: ’notably, in his death row conversations with journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, Bundy did mention a possible early assault on a woman with a piece of lumber, but the scenario he described was much different from the 1966 crime. In his third-person, pseudo-confession as recorded in Conversations with a Killer, Bundy said: ‘on one particular occasion, he saw a woman park her car and walk up to her door and fumble for her keys. He walked up behind her and struck her with a… a piece of wood he was carrying. And she fell down and began screaming, and he panicked and ran. What he had done terrified him.’
Aside from Bundy there are a few other suspects in the attack of Lisa Wick and the murder of Lonnie Trumbull, including a grocery store clerk who had an unreturned crush on Lonnie and a used car salesman who stood accused of raping an 8 year old child. It is also worth mentioning that the apartment owners son committed suicide only a few months after the assaults and newspaper clippings about the case were found left behind in his belongings. Was he just a concerned citizen interested in a crime that took place on his fathers property, or was he connected to it in some way? There is another possible suspect named Mike Boylan: in the same police report that mentions the used car salesman and the grocery clerk is the sentence: ‘I still say Mike Boylan did it!!’ That’s it, there is no elaboration as to who exactly Mr. Boylan was or what the context. Per ‘hi: I’m Ted,’ the only Michael Boylan on public record listed as living in the Seattle area in 1966 was an Irish immigrant who worked as a Seattle-Tacoma Airport police officer who later went on to work for the Seattle Police Department, the King County Sheriff’s Department, and eventually the Issaquah Police Department. In 1966, Boylan lived within walking distance to Wick and Trumbulls Queen Anne basement apartment. There is obviously more to this than what I’m saying here, and maybe one day I’ll delve into it deeper but I’m writing a blog about Ted Bundy, not Mike Boylan.
I assumed that at the time of the attacks Bundy worked at the nearby Safeway in Seattle that the girls were known to shop at (it’s rumored that’s where he first spotted them), however it was determined he didn’t start his employment there until April 12, 1968. Per the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992,’ in 1966 Bundy worked a summer job at ‘Tacoma City Lights‘ while saving up for his first year at the University of Washington in Seattle (he dropped out of the University of Puget Sound after only a year). I never heard of this employer before, and according to its Wikipedia page, Tacoma City Light was opened in 1893 when the citizens of Tacoma voted to buy the privately owned Tacoma Light & Water Company to ensure its safety and longevity.
Despite a $10,000 reward offered by United Airlines for any information leading to the arrest and conviction of the assailant of Lisa Wick and the murderer of Lonnie Trumbull, no arrests have ever been made. The case remains unsolved to this day.
Works Cited:
McFadden, Casper. ‘Bundy: Lonnie Trumbull (Suspected).’January 12, 2021.Retrieved May 4, 2022 from http://www.themorbidlibrary.coma
Jean, Tiffany. ‘The Unconfirmed Cases: Lisa Wick and Lonnie Trumbull, 1966.’ November 10, 2019. Retrieved May 4, 2022 from hiimted.blog.
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.
This (short) article is mostly going to be about the memorial garden that Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington dedicated to Susan Rancourt in October of 2012; I will focus on her life and murder in a separate article at a different point in time.
The life of Ted Bundy victim Susan Rancourt was memorialized on Friday, October 12, 2012 during the grand opening of the newly renovated Barto Hall at Central Washington University. Rancourt attended the university in 1973 and 1974 before she was abducted on campus and later killed; a beautiful garden was planted near the newly renovated dormitory and dedicated to her memory. While attending CWU as a Biology major, Sue lived at Barto Hall, a dormitory named after the schools’ former registrar, Harold Peter “Pete” Barto. In addition to serving as registrar, Barto also taught history PT and eventually left the role to teach full time (and served as chair of the Division of Social Work for roughly a year). He retired from teaching in 1961 and sadly passed away just a few years later. After his death, CWU built a three-story dormitory and named it after him; it fit 174 beds and opened in 1962.
In attendance at the ribbon cutting ceremony was Susan’s mother Vivian and her husband Bob Winters from Ephrata, WA (unfortunately Susan’s father Theodore “Dale” Rancourt passed away in August, 1990); her sister Judy and (her husband) Tom Zimmerman from La Conner, WA; her brother Dennis Rancourt from Orcas Island, WA; two of Judy’s daughters and Rancourt’s niece, Elena Carter. Mrs. Winters proudly cut the bright red ribbon outside the newly updated Barto Hall, where the beautiful, horseshoe-shaped garden was built in memory of her beautiful Susan. Judy said a few words on behalf of the family during the ribbon cutting ceremony:
“In the late ’60s my brother, Dennis, played football for the Wildcats and graduated with a teaching degree. Four years later my sister, Susan, told my parents she was attending Central.” … “My folks lived in Alaska at that time, my husband and I lived in La Conner.” … “We brought her to Ellensburg and moved her into Barto Hall.”
Zimmerman said that it was a “day of celebration,” and that her little sister really loved life while attending CWU. “On April 18, 1974, Sue’s roommate at Barto Hall phoned me to tell me Susan had not come home from a dorm-leaders meeting the previous evening.” … “My brothers and sisters, my mom and dad, Tom and I immediately came to Ellensburg from all points” … “We were supported in every way by this campus family in the following days” … “We would not find Susan’s body until the following year.” She said that during this incredibly hard time for them, the staff at Central Washington University took very good care of them, putting the family up in dorms and giving them food vouchers for the dining hall on campus. This must have been especially convenient for Dale and Vivian, as they were living in Alaska at the time of their daughters abduction.
“Eighteen years later our son, Tyler, announced to us that he wanted to become a CWU student. My heart froze,” Judy said. But while attending a parent session, any anxiety or fear she felt quickly dissipated, and both of her sons went on to attend the school. It was the right environment, both boys said, and it “felt like home.” Coincidentally, the day of the garden dedication ceremony would have been Susan’s 56th birthday: “It’s just dumb coincidence that this is the day,” Judy said. She went on to thank her niece for helping organize the event: at the time Elena Carter was a senior at CWU and played soccer for the school. “My family is thrilled that you are honoring Susan today. We really are. We humbly thank you for helping us remember our beautiful young Susan, happy and healthy and in her element on this great campus,” Judy said.
The associate dean of students for Student Living Richard DeShields said he hoped that many of Rancourt’s traits would be emulated in today’s students, such as her love for CWU, her passion for learning, and her helpful and kind nature. Sue was premed, majoring in Biology with plans to attend medical school after undergrad. Not only did Sue do very well academically but she also was very active in extracurricular activities around campus: she would sew patches on the uniforms of campus police officers and even went running with them after class. She was also an avid baker and tutored struggling students in German and Biology. About Rancourt, university President James Gaudino said, “she was taken from us too soon.” … “We are honored today to celebrate her life in this memorial.”
On March 2nd, 1975, two forestry students discovered the skull of Brenda Ball while doing field work over 90 miles away from CWU on Taylor Mountain (or as the locals call it, Tiger Mountain)… a day later, King County detective Robert Keppel was combing the area when he fell over a branch and stumbled across the skull of Susan Rancourt. After this gruesome discovery, it immediately became clear to law enforcement that they were dealing with another one of “Ted’s” dump sites: six months prior (and only 12 miles away), two grouse hunters discovered Ted’s Issaquah dump site.
On January 24, 1989 Theodore Robert Bundy was put to death for his heinous crimes against humanity, including the murder of Susan Elaine Rancourt. That morning, Seattle based news station KOMO-TV invited Susan Rancourt’s mom, Mrs. Vivian Winters to appear on TV through satellite from her home to share memories of her daughter as well as her feelings regarding Ted Bundy’s impending death. Just two days earlier, Bundy confessed to her daughters murder and I can only imagine the raw emotion she must have been feeling that morning of his execution. On top of Mrs. Rancourt being live on air, KOMO-TV reporter Dana Middleton Silberstein went to the Bundy family home in Tacoma and asked the emotionally fragile Mrs. Bundy if she would like to talk to one of the mothers of the victims (live, while on air of course). The reporter said that “John Bundy” was surprisingly easy to locate in the Tacoma phone book (despite the family having to change their number multiple times over the years due to threats and obscene calls). Surprisingly, Louise said yes and agreed to talk to Vivian live on air later that morning. On air, Mrs. Rancourt said to the timid Mrs. Bundy: “First of all, we send hugs to her, too” … “It has to be terrible for her. Our suffering is over, our answers are all there, and I think hers are probably just beginning.” When asked if she would like to say anything in response to Vivian, Louise hesitated then says, “I’m glad to be able to say it directly to one of the moms” … “We don’t know why this happened, we feel so desperately sorry for you. We didn’t want our son to do these things. We have two beautiful daughters of our own, and we know how we would feel. I am sorry.” In that moment, they were just two mothers who lost a child.
Despite this being slightly off topic I’m including it anyways (just because this only helps show what a monster Ted actually was, not the handsome, clean cut law student Bundyphiles drool over): When Dana Middleton-Silberstein went to visit Mrs. Bundy the morning of her son’s execution, she made a comment that he was “popular.” Middleton-Silberstein thought to herself that this “popular” man bit one of his victims nipples off during an attack, had sex with their dead corpses, and eventually dismembered them. One of his own lawyers described him as “the very definition of heartless evil.”
I would like to finish this short piece with a quote from Susans Mom: she pointed out that many of the women that became Bundy’s victims attempted to help assist him in some way (he was known to have frequently worn an arm sling or leg cast when hunting for victims). “They did not invite him into their lives.” … “The worst thing most of them did was to try and do a good thing. They offered him help. And it turned out to be the worst mistake they made in their lives.”
“Leaves and soil stuck to his tires helped send Ted Bundy to the electric chair.
The monster kidnapped, raped and murdered at least 30 women across the US from 1974 to 1978.
His last victim was Kimberly Leach, who was 12 when she was snatched from her Florida high school.
Weeks later, traffic cops pulled him over for loitering and erratic driving. His tires had leaves and soil on them that was later linked to the wooded area where he dumped Kimberly’s body.
Bundy, who kept the severed head of some of his victims, was executed in 1989, aged 42.”
– Nigel Bunyan & Rachel Howarth, July 16, 2022.
So… a few people have inquired why this group is called ‘The Yellow Beetle,’ as Ted’s Beetle has been described as tan. Or gold. Or bronze. Or even light brown.
Well, personally I look at it and I see yellow. If I were to describe it, I would call it a yellow Bug. But I think that adds to the mystery.
I was looking up information on Denise Naslund when I stumbled upon this picture of her Mother, Eleanore Mary (Deeb) Naslund when she was younger, before the tragic loss of her daughter.
I don’t think it’s possible to measure grief. No one can say, ‘that family’ had a harder time dealing with the loss of their daughter; they mourned longer and on a deeper level than the others.’ We don’t know what’s going on inside someone’s head or how they act behind closed doors.
However, I can say for ABSOLUTE certain that Ted Bundy destroyed Eleanore’s life. Look at that beautiful smile and those bright, sparkling eyes. One of the kindest compliments I ever recieved was, ‘your smile goes up to your eyes.’ That is the first thing I thought of when I saw this picture. Every single time I see this poor woman in a photograph or documentary it breaks my heart a little more. Her sadness is palpable. I don’t even want to do a side by side with her in later years, I don’t want to take away from the beauty of this picture.
Whenever you want to glamorize or sexualize a monster like Ted Bundy, think of this woman and what he put her through.
So, it’s common knowledge that everything Ted Bundy has been done before. Whether it be books. Movies. Documentaries. Podcasts. It’s mostly the same information over and over again. On one hand, we know next to nothing about his crimes but what we do know has been studied and analyzed TO. DEATH. Finding content that is still engaging, relevant, and ‘fresh’ has been a bit of a challenge. So, this article is going to be about a brick. Yes, that’s right: I am writing the equivalent of a 5-page paper around a brick I found on campus at the University of Puget Sound.
Unfortunately, I’m not finding my summer course as easy as I was hoping it would be, so I haven’t been able to write as much as I would like to. In April when I was in Washington, I spent over 24 hours in Tacoma (complete with missing my bus back to Seattle so I had to stay overnight at their lovely Comfort Inn & Suites). Most of my sightseeing involved many house-visits (I went to Ted’s Uncle Jack’s former residence, all three Bundy homes, and little Ann Marie Burrs old house), but what I found to be the most pleasant of my sightseeing was my visit to the University of Puget Sound. I know only my friends really care about ME, but I’m a fairly social person and not having very much human contact during my eight-day trip had a very negative affect on my mental health. I feel it was a combination of the loneliness mixed with the negativity that almost clung in the atmosphere around me that made me feel despondent. I noticed this feeling got exponentially worse when I rented a vehicle and started going to 8-9 places a day. I came home and was an absolute raging megabitch to my husband for a good 3-4 weeks and I have no explanation for it. A darkness crept into my head that I’ve never felt before. When I went to Philadelphia, I made sure it was just an overnight trip (even though I was tempted to stay a second night I went home immediately) and any Bundy related traveling in the future will be done with a girlfriend.
Anyways, the point of my rambling is, my visit to The University of Puget Sound stands out a bit in my mind because I was around other people and was able to interact a bit with some students and professionals. I feel SO bad because I never got their names but the girls at the university-run café were VERY sweet and patiently answered all of my questions and even pretended to be interested in my project. So, if any of you are reading this (I told them the name of the blog) thank you for your time and insights; I really enjoyed my cup of earl gray as well. I do want to mention, I drank a LOT of tea in Seattle: there were Starbucks and bubble tea shops EVERYWHERE. Seriously, every other storefront was a coffee shop. I know I’ve expressed in previous posts that I was hesitant to bring up the purpose of my visit during my time in Washington because I didn’t want to rub anyone the wrong way or seem disrespectful, but if I didn’t start talking to these lovely young women I would have missed out on a few REALLY cool Bundy-related things, one of which I’ve never seen before. I also learned that Mrs. Bundy worked at the university during the time of the murders and that she even has a memorial stone near their fountain on campus (I thought she worked in the office at her church until she retired). Louise worked as a secretary for the communications and theater departmentsinthe oldest building on campus, Jones Hall. The girls excitedly went on to tell me about how he lived on campus in either Schiff or Anderson/Langdon Hall but… unfortunately after some research I learned that information was incorrect: Ted lived at home with his family in Tacoma during his first stint at the university, and when he returned in 1973 for law school he resided at the Rogers rooming house on 12th Avenue in Seattle. So, logically I immediately ran over and got a few million photos of both buildings. They also told me that the law school used to be in Thompson Hall, which also unfortunately isn’t true: I asked a woman who appeared friendly where the former law school was located, and she informed me that it was completely off campus. She seemed to be around my mothers age and seemed only mildly interested in answering my question: when the friend she was waiting for arrived she stopped talking to me mid-sentence and went over to say hello. So, whatever…
So, to the girls at the cafe: one out of three ain’t bad… Interestingly, the law school eventually was moved from Tacoma to Seattle and now goes by a completely different name, the Seattle University School of Law. It is described as a ‘professional graduate school affiliated with Seattle University.’ So, perhaps Bundy wasn’t too off track when he said it was subpar, as it obviously needed some form of revamping. The brick was a neat find though, and the campus was really pretty. I also got some pictures of the communications/theater building where Mrs. Bundy worked.
I read an article that in over that years ago, Tacoma librarians had to worry about yearbooks being destroyed because Bundyphiles would rip out entire pages that had Ted’s pictures on them (he attended Woodrow Wilson High School, now called the Dr. Dolores Silas HS). However, they said more recently people have stopped inquiring about the serial killer and his name has faded into nothingness… Perhaps this is because everything about Bundy is simply a Google search away? I don’t think it’s because interest in Ted has faded… in fact, I think it’s the complete opposite.
I am going to say that it was incredibly eerie being on the school grounds knowing there was a good chance that Ted *may* have disposed of little Ann Marie Burr’s body there, somewhere on campus. It’s a well-known theory that the young girl could have been Bundy’s first victim in late August of 1961 when he was 14 and she was just 8. Two of my favorite Bundy myths are associated with the Burr case, the first is that Bundy was the family’s paperboy at the time of Ann’s disappearance (he wasn’t). The Burrs lived 3.1 miles away from the Bundy’s (which is only a 20-minute bike ride), and only 0.1 miles away from the University of Puget Sound. My second favorite is that Ted’s Uncle Jack Cowell was Ann’s piano teacher; he wasn’t.
The school was in the middle of a large expansion project at the time in the summer of 1961, and was in the middle of constructing eight new buildings on campus. Donald Burr claimed that he saw a teenage boy that resembled Bundy digging a hole in a construction site and kicking dirt into it on the schools campus the morning his daughter disappeared. By the time law enforcement got around to investigating it was too late, and the project had advanced to the point of not being able to find any trace of the little girl. If Bundy did indeed dispose of Ann Marie’s body somewhere on the campus at the University of Puget Sound it must have been a real rush to attend classes there: every time he went to a function on campus, he would have revisited a victim, in a way. After just two semesters he left the school in 1966 and transferred to the University of Washington for a brief period to study Chinese. Shortly after he dropped out of school completely and worked an array of menial jobs across Seattle while also volunteering for Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign.
Bundy eventually got his shit together enough (after screwing around at Temple University in Philadelphia for six months in early 1969) and went back to the University of Washington, earning a Bachelor’s degree ‘with distinction’ in psychology in 1972. The following year he went back to the University at Puget Sound, this time for law school. He eventually dropped out again (this is a pattern with Ted) and got a job as the assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission. I don’t mean to get too off track, but I just wanted to point out something I learned just now… it’s widely known that Diane Edwards was Ted’s first real heartbreak, and after he made a name for himself in Washington politics he won her back, even going to far as to propose marriage, which she happily accepted. However, on January 3, 1974, Ted coldly ended things with her without reason, essentially getting his revenge for being dumped by her years prior. It was the very next day that he assaulted and left for dead Karen Sparks, his first (confirmed) victim. I suppose I never thought about the timing of that breakup and how it worked around the murders. Anyways, as everyone knows Bundy moved to Salt Lake City in fall of 1974 and went on to attend the University of Utah’s law school until he was arrested by Bob Hayworth on August 16, 1975. The rest, as they say, is history…
Bundy denied any involvement with Ann Marie Burr’s disappearance. Before his death, the killer was even in correspondence with Beverly Burr, who pleaded with Ted for information about her daughter: ‘I feel like YOUR FIRST MURDER WAS OUR ANN MARIE BURR. The bench from the back yard was used to climb into the living room; the orchard next door was a dark setting for murder. What did you do with her tiny body?’ He wrote back saying that he knew nothing about Ann’s death. Because no real evidence connected anyone else to the crime, little Ann Marie’s case remains open to this day.
Donna Gail Manson was born on June 9, 1954 to Lyle Edward and Marie Elizabeth (nee Nilson) Manson in Olympia, WA. Mr. Manson was born on August 29, 1917 in Marion, Iowa and Mrs. Manson was born on May 9, 1923 in Auburn, WA. The couple were wed on December 4, 1952 and had two children together: Donna and her younger brother, James. An eagle scout and troop leader, Mr. Manson served in the Navy during World War II (he was a Pearl Harbor survivor), and upon returning home he continued with his education and graduated with his BA in music education from Coe College in June 1949; he went on to earn his Masters from Central Washington University in 1952 (which is the same college Susan Rancourt was abducted from), and after graduating he got a position as a music teacher for the Seattle school district. Marie Manson graduated from the University of Washington in 1949 with a BA in music education, and worked PT as a legal secretary; she was also the choir director at Auburn First United Methodist. Both Mr. and Mrs. Manson spent two years performing with the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra.
Donna Manson is Ted Bundy’s third (known) victim. It was said by those that knew her that at the time she disappeared Donna was going through a rough time and was struggling with depression, but she showed interest in overcoming these obstacles. Despite suffering from bouts of melancholy and anxiety, Donna’s loved ones called her a ‘free spirit’ and said that she was known to hitchhike and frequently ‘couch surfed’ among friends. She was an intelligent young woman and earned good grades over the course of her academic career, and was working towards a Bachelors degree in English. Much like her parents, she loved music and the arts and was an accomplished flutist. Manson graduated from Auburn Senior High School in 1972 and attended Green River Community College for a short period of time before transferring to Evergreen State College. She had pale blue eyes and chocolate brown hair that she wore long and parted down the middle; she was small in stature and stood at only five feet tall, and weighed a mere 100 pounds.
The campus at Evergreen State College is less than ten miles east of Olympia and was built in an isolated, remote spot surrounded by a dense forest of evergreen trees. A small, liberal arts school, in the fall of 1974 its enrollment wasn’t even at 3,000, and some of the more conservative Washington state residents complained about its high per-student cost of operation and ‘hippie-like atmosphere.’ One lawmaker even complained during a speech about how the students’ dogs were peeing on the expensive carpets in the schools library (which was ironically named the Daniel J. Evans Library, after the state governor that Bundy worked for).
On the day of her abduction, Donna planned on going to a folk dancing class at her schools activities building, and later that same night, she made plans to go to a jazz concert at the Daniel J. Evans Library (which was also on school grounds), which was scheduled to start at 8 PM. She lived in room 206 of the C building on Evergreens campus, and according to her roommates earlier in the evening Donna played her flute a bit and ate some beef vegetable soup (she even left some of it out in a pot on the stove). They also noticed that she seemed unusually focused on her appearance that evening, going so far as to switch outfits several times before eventually settling on a red, orange, and green striped shirt, blue (or green) slacks, a fuzzy black full-length coat (that used to belong to her grandmother), an oval-shaped brown agate ring, and a Bulova Caravell wrist watch. Despite this detail, Manson did not share any details about a date or meet-up with her friends. The night prior to her disappearance Donna spoke with her mother on the phone, and the two discussed her idea of taking a trip to the ocean during her upcoming spring recess. Regarding this, Marie Manson said it sounded like a good idea that they get away for a few days, and despite the ongoing gas shortage of the 70’s said that the family would ‘find a way.’
Donna departed her dormitory shortly after 7 PM on March 12, 1974 and set out for the dance class, which should have been just a two minute walk across campus. However, despite how close the College Activities Building was to her dormitory no one recalled seeing her at either the class or the jazz recital, meaning it is highly unlikely that she ever made it that far. She left behind all of her personal effects, money, and clothing.
Perhaps it was because of her free spirit and habit of hitchhiking and leaving for days at a time, but when Manson didn’t return home that night no one seemed very alarmed: it took her roommates a full six days to report her missing to the authorities, which is why newspapers didn’t start reporting on her disappearance until March 22, 1974, a full ten days after she was last seen. Several days after her disappearance some local police officers went to the Manson family home in Auburn to tell them that Donna had run away from school, news that made her mother immediately feel uneasy, and she immediately knew that: ‘she hasn’t run away, something’s happened to her.’
Perhaps it was because of her free spirit, her habit to leave for days at a time, or her habit to hitchhike but when Manson didn’t come back that night no one was very alarmed. In fact, it took her roommates a full six days to report her missing to the authorities, which is why newspapers didn’t start reporting about her disappearance until March 22, a full ten days later. Following Donna’s disappearance, on four different occasions search teams of up to 200 people combed the 990 acre college campus with the assistance of tracking dogs. Despite their best efforts, investigators were unable to find not one single trace of the missing girl: she had literally vanished out of thin air.
After he got the news that his daughter was missing, Lyle Manson immediately drove to the Evergreen campus to see if he could find out more information about what may have happened to her. When he arrived, Thurston County Detective Paul Barclift tried to reassure him by saying: ‘maybe she just went off somewhere with some boyfriend. That’s the way these things usually turn out around here.’ Manson’s stern Scotsman’s face showed cold disagreement, and in response he said: ‘no, Donna had no need to run away. We’ve always given her freedom.’ He and the detective walked from the parking lot to her residence hall, and together they looked through the items in her bedroom: she had left behind all her clothes, toiletries, and other personal items one would need if leaving for any period of time, and amongst her belongings Mr. Manson found her camera and flute, and it was then that he knew that something was seriously wrong. Following Donna’s disappearance, search teams of up to 200 people combed the 990 acre college campus with the assistance of tracking dogs on four separate occasions, but despite their best efforts not one trace of her was ever recovered: she had literally vanished out of thin air.
The guard also told investigators that he remembered seeing Donna around campus prior to her disappearance and recalled that when he last saw her she was wearing a long fur coat, a fact that her roommates corroborated. This strongly hints that he wasn’t mistaken and did in fact see Manson on the night she was abducted, meaning that she either got sidetracked by something (or someone, like a man with his arm in a sling asking for help) on her way to the dance class, or she lied to her roommates about what her plans were. Many Bundy sleuths believe that Ted approached the 19-year-old asking for help as she was walking toward the library, where others strongly feel that the two may have been acquainted previously (somehow) and that they had made plans to meet up that night. He liked to frequent college campuses, did he go to Evergreen at an earlier time and run into Donna? Maybe the two planned a secret rendezvous and she told her roommates that she was going somewhere else in an attempt to get them off her back? Obviously they would have started asking questions had they known she was going out with a guy, and when they found out she had plans to meet up with a 27 year old that she barely knew, then surely they would have persuaded her to not go.
Donna was into many things that would typically be considered ‘mysterious and dark,’ and had an interest in topics like death, the occult, and alchemy; when investigators searched her room they found several class listings on positive thinking and mind discipline from a local Olympia business called ‘The Institute of Insight’ (casual Bundy acquaintance Ann Rule incorrectly referred to it as the ‘Institute of the ESP’ in her 1980 book ‘The Stranger Beside Me’). It was mostly because of Manson’s unconventional interests that detectives initially wondered if maybe she had killed herself, and it wasn’t until a psychiatrist read through her journals and said that it was in his professional opinion that she wasn’t suicidal and most likely did not take her own life that they changed their minds. Donna’s habit of hitchhiking put her in a higher risk pool compared to other coeds, and it was very concerning to detectives, who felt that there was a possibility that she was picked up by the individual that killed her. Because her roommates did not see her take a backpack or a change of clothes with her on the evening she disappeared, LE deduced that she was not planning on going anywhere that evening and had no plans on hitchhiking.
The most widely believed theory was that Bundy grabbed Donna in a Georgann Hawkins-esque grab as she was on her way to the dance class that evening in March 1974: the route that she most likely took from her dormitory to the folk dancing class was only 350 yards away, and should have only been about a two minute walk, and because of the short distance involved it has been theorized that Ted grabbed Manson almost immediately after she left. One possible scenario could be that he may have approached her (perhaps while using crutches or an arm sling) in a nearby parking lot (lot F) and asked her to assist him with carrying something to his car. Another idea is that Bundy parked his car on Hidden Springs Drive, which is close to the c-dormitory and connects the area around the library with Driftwood Road, and is incredibly close to the route that Donna would have walked to get to the folk dancing class. But because traffic on campus was unusually high that evening because of three different events taking place, it stands to reason that both areas would have been pretty busy at the time, and a careful Bundy wouldn’t have taken the chance of getting caught. But at the same time… he was a known risk taker, especially while under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, so we can’t completely rule it out (and keep in mind that it worked out for him).
Mostly because Olympia is over an hour away from where Bundy’s other Washington state victims were abducted from, Manson’s case was not immediately connected to the other Seattle disappearances, and it wasn’t until more women started to disappear that it became clear that her case was a part of a much bigger puzzle. There was a (brief) period where (former) Thurston County Sheriff Don Redmond wondered if maybe there was a slavery ring nabbing young women from the area, but this was quickly ruled out. Unfortunately, we will never know exactly what happened to Donna on the evening she disappeared, as there are very few confirmed details regarding her disappearance. Due to the abduction taking place right before spring break detectives were not able to interview many of the eyewitnesses until weeks later, after their memories were dulled by time (maybe if her roommates reported her abduction earlier LE would have stood a chance of getting some worthwhile information).
In his previous two abductions/murders, Bundy broke into his victims’ houses and assaulted them while they were sleeping, but in the case of Donna Manson he completely switched up his MO and took her from a public place… I also wonder if perhaps this was the first time that he used the fake injury ruse? The dates of credit card receipts that were listed in the ‘TB Multiagency Report 1992’ prove that Bundy frequented the Olympia area at least 25 times in 1973 alone, so it would be reasonable to assume that he knew the area fairly well; this also falls in line with the theory that (most) serial killers prefer to operate in places that they are familiar with, and feel comfortable being in.
On August 29, 1978 two fishermen that were walking on Highway 7 southwest of Eatonville, WA discovered a human skull in the foothills of Mount Rainier; further searches by local investigators turned up additional bones, hair, and clothes that matched the description of the ones that Donna Manson was last seen wearing four years prior. Unfortunately, law enforcement lost everything before a positive ID could be made (although apparently color photographs were taken) and to this day she is classified as a missing person. Bundy confessed to her murder as a last ditch effort to avoid the electric chair in January 1989 and told investigators that he buried her remains at Taylor Mountain but burned her skull to ashes in his then-girlfriends Liz’s fireplace. He also told Robert Keppel that he didn’t remember much about the event because he was so drunk but did recall that it was ‘nightmarish, blurry, and incoherent.’
Retired Pierce County detective Roy Durham said that he felt the bones did not appear to go back as far as 1974 and did not appear to suffer from any blunt force trauma to the head (which is common in Bundy victims). Unfortunately, the skeletal remains were destroyed after being examined by a forensic dentist (who determined there was a strong possibility that the skeleton belonged to Manson) and most additional information (such as x-rays) related to the case were lost during a ‘routine purge’ of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. Personally, I wonder if the remains found in 1978 belonged to a different (unknown) Bundy victim. I know people will argue that he was in prison by that time and wouldn’t have been able to commit a murder in his home state, but even law enforcement admitted they weren’t sure when victim was killed, just that it probably wasn’t in 1974.
During Ted’s interview with Dr. Keppel he claimed that he left Manson’s body ‘up in the mountains,’ and although it was the same place where he disposed of Brenda Ball, Lynda Ann Healy, Susan Rancourt and Roberta Parks, he specified that he left her in a slightly different place than the others:
Keppel: ‘OK. How about Donna Manson? The girl from Thurston County, Olympia. Where is she?’
B: ‘Where is she? She should be… on Taylor Mountain.’
K: ‘Was she dumped out along the power line too or on a different road?’
B: ‘That was different. That was different.’
K: ‘What was different about it?’
B: ‘Well, where she was, relative to the power line road.’
K: ‘You told me before that Donna might be buried.’
B: ‘Yea. Do you have any pictures of the site?’
Bundy then pointed out a spot on a map where he thinks he left Donna’s remains, but clarified that search teams would never find her skull because it was ‘nowhere’ (Bundy’s words, not mine). When Keppel pressed Ted about that he claimed to have completely incinerated it then vacuumed up the ash that remained behind. Later searches of that area failed to find anything related to a human skeleton (keep in mind he admitted to being inebriated at the time of the abduction so he probably directed them to the wrong place). He explained: ‘it’s a lot of work and certainly very risky, under the circumstances. I mean, the kids come home from school and there’s a roaring fire in the fireplace and it’s warm outside.’
Now, there are holes in that story so big I can drive my VW Beetle through them: throughout the duration of his murder spree Bundy was (surprisingly) good about avoiding detection (although I firmly believe he may never have been caught if he wasn’t such a shitty driver), so I have a really hard time believing that he smuggled an entire HUMAN HEAD into his girlfriend’s apartment (which goes without saying is a huge risk). Additionally, burning a skull in a residential fireplace would not have been an easy feat: in order to transform human bone into ash, the fire would need to get to somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (which can be done with the use of an accelerant), and even if he was able to get it that hot, there would still be pieces of bone left behind.
What I think most likely happened: Ted attempted to burn Donna’s skull in Liz’s apartment but partway through realized how difficult of an ordeal it was (plus, burnt hair smells ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE, and at the time of her murder she had a lot of it) and took the pieces that didn’t turn to ash and disposed of them in a different way (as awful as this sounds, perhaps they were so small he was able to put them in the household garbage?). Another reason to doubt Bundy’s story is that he said it was ‘warm outside’ when be burned the skull, and according to records the temperature range during the week after Mansons disappearance in Seattle was between 49°F to 57°F, and it remained on the cooler side until March 26th. So, that makes me think Ted was either lying about the weather or he got his dates mixed up and the event took place roughly two weeks after the murder. It is often wondered if Bundy made up the incident entirely just to hurt Kloepfer, who had cut all ties with him by the time he shared that information… but, at the end of the day, he was a habitual liar that rarely told the truth. And let’s say this ONE TIME Ted wasn’t lying: he has evaded telling anyone what really happened for so long, why would anyone actually believe him (especially when he was trying to avoid the electric chair). Keep in mind that only minutes before he told Keppel about incinerating Manson’s skull, he cracked a ‘joke’ about how much press his confession would generate.
The following is a conversation between Bundy and Robert Keppel regarding Manson:
Robert Keppel: ‘What about Donna Mason?’
Bundy: ‘I won’t beat around the bush with you anymore because I’m just tired and want to get back to sleep. So let me tell you, I know part of her is buried up there, the head however, wouldn’t be there.’
RK: ‘Where is it now?’
TB: ‘It’s nowhere. I’m not trying to be flippant. It’s in a category all by itself. It was incinerated. It was an exception, a strange exception.’
RK: ‘Where did you incinerate it?’
TB: ‘I promised myself I’d never tell this. In her fire place. That’s not really that humorous , but I mean , the fireplace at her house… that was the twist . It’s a lot of work and certainly very risky, under the circumstances. I mean, the kids come home from school, there’s a roaring fire in the fireplace, and it’s warm outside.’
On August 28th, 1978, two fishermen discovered the skeleton of a young female in the foothills of Mount Rainier near Eatonville, about 60 miles away from Bundy’s Taylor Mountain dump site. Despite multiple newspapers reporting that the missing skeleton belonged to Manson, the facts do not seem to line up: ‘The News Tribune’ reported that the skeleton Pierce County sheriffs discovered was 5’7”, and Donna was only 5 feet tall. Also, the remains were discovered wearing blue jeans, where Donna’s roommates said she was wearing a pair of green (or blue) pants the night she disappeared. Investigators also showed photographs of the clothing found on the skeleton to Manson’s parents and her mother was quick to say that she didn’t recognize the top as belonging to her daughter. The report also said the victim was somewhere between 12 and 17 years old where Donna was 19 at the time she disappeared.
Mr. Manson passed away on December 31, 2007; Donna’s mother died on May 26, 2014 in Auburn, WA. James Manson is still alive and currently lives in Seattle; he is the owner of ‘Axis Stainless Fabrication,’ and works with metal, and just by doing some quick research it appears that he is an expert in his field and has his work on display at the Seattle Art Museum. It doesn’t surprise me that Donna’s brother turned into a successful artist, it’s in his genes.
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
Another Bundy Blog. 