Original subtitles

♪

♪

ELIZABETH: When I look at those photographs,

I just realize, what felt like a deep and meaningful

relationship we had, just having fun;

my daughter's in most of the pictures;

um, it just... it felt very inclusive.

And I think that's why I had such a difficult time

ever letting go of... of him.

It's so incompatible with the Ted that I knew.

I just didn't think he could do these things.

REPORTER: Theodore Robert Bundy, at age 28,

a University of Utah law student...

BUNDY: How you doin'? WOMAN: Good, how are you?

REPORTER: At 30, a Colorado jail escapee

and one of the FBI's ten most wanted men.

BARBARA: Ted Bundy knew how to prey on women.

♪

BARBARA: He knew he was going to go after women

for their good nature, their willingness to help out,

their empathy, their belief that they should be nurturers,

that they should be kind, and especially be kind to men.

KATHY: My jaw was broken in three places.

I had lacerations on my shoulder.

KAREN: I had a broken jaw.

Um, some of my teeth were knocked out.

REPORTER: 3, 2, 1.

Tonight, Ted Bundy and cameras in the courtroom...

REPORTER: Ted Bundy... REPORTER: Ted Bundy...

REPORTER: Ted Bundy... REPORTER: Ted Bundy...

REPORTER: Ted Bundy...

REPORTER: Theodore Robert Bundy...

MAN: Smile, Ted.

LAURA: The Ted Bundy story has been recycled

over and over and over again.

It makes for great entertainment.

He's a fascinating, evil character.

GINGER: It's a discounting of the stories of the women,

in favour of the central hero

being the most important character in the narrative.

And that is the failure to look deeper

and think harder about violence against women in our culture.

WOMAN: [screams]

PY: At that time, women were on the cusp

of becoming independent.

You're starting to feel like you can do anything,

and all of a sudden, you get walloped.

LAURA: I guess I feel like speaking about my sister now

because women's lives are still secondary to men,

and somewhat expendable.

It's the only reason to really poke at it again,

is to try to learn something, to rise above it.

♪

♪

ELIZABETH: The story has been told many times by men.

I want to tell the story because I think

there are some lessons to be learned.

Now's the time to talk about this.

And all of... all of this.

Not just bits and pieces of it,

but my story from beginning to end.

♪

♪ Poses, poses ♪

♪ That's all you are to me ♪

♪ Roses, roses ♪

♪ That's all you're offering me ♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

ELIZABETH: I've had so much to work through

since all of this happened.

There was shame; there was guilt;

there was all kinds of things that I...

I didn't feel really good about.

♪

ELIZABETH: Even after he was arrested

and he was in prison,

he wrote me many, many letters

where he talked about me and my daughter

being the best thing that ever happened to him,

and that's what he really missed by not being free.

He missed our life together.

♪

[exhales]

♪

♪

Gosh, it's...

♪

Oh, my gosh.

"I would not change places with any other man in the world.

"I consider you a miracle in my life,

"and in spite of the disaster we have suffered,

"I would not, for a moment,

"ever wish for another woman.

"You are the most loving and lovely woman I have ever known.

"You are in my mind constantly.

"No words could express adequately

"the dimensions of my feelings.

"I shall love you forever and forever in my dreams.

"I shall love you with every long-haired beauty I see.

"I shall love you with every clear blue sky.

"I will love you until my last breath.

"No goodbyes, just I love you."

[sighs] That one...

That one still gets me.

♪

♪

♪

♪

ELIZABETH: We came over I-90,

which is through the mountains.

It had been raining, and there was mist in the air

that was hanging at the tops of the trees.

And then we ended up on a floating bridge

that went across Lake Washington.

It was just beautiful.

And it just knocked my socks off.

I was so happy to be here.

I thought, "This is it.

"This is the place I want to be."

So I was a single mom,

and I was moving here from Utah with my daughter, Molly.

♪

ELIZABETH: I found a place on Capitol Hill,

which was kind of run-down at the time.

It was a one-bedroom apartment,

so my daughter slept on the couch.

But it was close to where my friend lived,

so I felt comfortable about that.

You know, there weren't a lot of options in the day.

There was like teaching, nursing, secretarial work.

I thought I would be really happy

working at the University of Washington,

and I knew I could be a good secretary.

[sound of fountains]

ELIZABETH: The first interview I went out on,

they hired me right away,

and I thought, "Oh, this is great."

And it just felt like I'm...

gonna have this big adventure.

♪

ELIZABETH: My daughter, she was just three

when I went to work.

I found a good daycare for her,

but it was hard for me to drop her off in the morning,

so they'd let me bring my daughter to work,

and she enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed having her there.

♪

ROBERT: When I was first introduced to Liz,

I just couldn't believe it.

She just looked so young and...

and so vulnerable.

The look on her face, it was like,

"Oh my God, I finally got a job at the U."

She just looked like she was so wide-eyed

and hadn't been very many places.

♪

ELIZABETH: Growing up in Utah,

I was the youngest out of four kids.

Not that I was ever that good at going to Mormon church,

but it was the culture in Utah.

All your neighbours are Mormon.

Everything that goes on down there

has got influenced by the LDS church.

The wife is there to support the husband in his important work,

and so the most important job for a woman

is to be a good wife and a good mother.

MORMON WOMAN: In the Relief Society,

we learn how to become better wives and mothers,

and receive religious instruction

in this worldwide organization.

[baby laughs]

MORMON WOMAN: I feel that Mormon women

have always been liberated.

NEIGHBOUR: Hi, Jeanette. JEANETTE: Won't you come in?

♪

ELIZABETH: I often looked at my parents' marriage,

and I thought, "That's just not for me,"

because my dad was the one that went out

and made the living and brought in the money,

and my mom took care of the home.

And even though I was really wanting a family,

I didn't see myself as having to... ask for money.

And so it felt like there was really not a place for me.

I mean, I just felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb.

♪

ELIZABETH: Since an early age I've been shy,

so it's been a lifetime of struggle.

When I meet new people or I'm in a situation

that I've not been in before, I just get so tongue-tied,

and really wishing that I could just crawl into a hole.

I think it had a lot to do with self esteem.

I just grew up thinking,

"There's something wrong with me.

"I don't know what it is."

♪

ELIZABETH: In college, I went through sorority rush,

and at the end of that, I... I didn't get a bid,

as they call it, and I got dropped.

And even though I didn't think I wanted to be in a sorority,

it was still devastating because it felt like rejection.

And that's when I realized that if I drank,

that I was just way more fun.

So I just felt smarter, prettier,

more charming, funnier.

So drinking was a big problem,

and it did nothing to help me become

the person that I was hoping to become.

♪

ELIZABETH: I did get married and had a baby

while I was still in college.

My husband was very immature.

He was a year younger than me and partying a lot.

The marriage just didn't survive.

♪

ELIZABETH: I really wanted to get married again

and have more children.

I thought that Seattle would be the place

where I would really settle down,

and I was just gonna work there until I found Mr. Right.

[indistinct voices]

♪

ELIZABETH: When I first walked onto campus,

I saw that there was this huge demonstration,

and I saw all these police cars go by,

and they were full of police in riot gear.

I had no idea what was going on.

And all of a sudden a big cheer went up,

and these people had pushed a bulldozer into this pit

that had been dug for a new building.

[people cheering]

ELIZABETH: And there were cops coming in riot gear

by the carful, and I just stood on the sidewalk

and watched it all,

because I'd never seen anything like that in Utah.

[people chanting]

KNUTE: The University of Washington was a hotbed

of anti-war movement.

There were campus radicals;

there was bombings; there were riots.

And young women were showing more independence,

trying new things.

♪

BARBARA: I was an undergraduate

at the University of Washington.

I was involved in the anti-war movement.

I was involved in all sorts of left-wing,

progressive politics, so for me,

the political life at the university was just wonderful.

It was a lot of fun.

PROTESTORS: Two, four, six, eight!

Separate the church and state!

SPEAKER: Women have a fundamental right

to control their own bodies and to control their own lives.

[crowd cheering]

PY: I came here in '69

not knowing what I was getting into.

We were making connections that we hadn't made before.

We were working together.

It was a time of discovery.

You know, the world seemed like a new place.

PROTESTORS: [chanting]

NEWSWOMAN: This is a search for equality

of opportunity, not the wish to be just like men.

It is a desire for more options, for choice,

for a shattering of stereotypes,

for women to choose more freely the kinds of lives

that they want to live.

BROWN: Sex and the Single Girl does state the fact

that single women do have sex lives occasionally,

and it isn't the end of the world when they have them.

The girl simply is not ruined, in my opinion,

if she has had an affair before she gets married.

ELIZABETH: It was a liberating time.

It opened all these choices to us.

And we were in control of our own fertility,

our own bodies.

It was a revolutionary change.

CHISHOLM: What we need is to thrust new people

into the limelight and to show the range and breadth

of talent among women all over this nation.

[applause]

WOMAN: We are a delegation!

We are women and we are allowed in this door.

WOMAN: Yes!

WOMAN: We're trying to point out what it feels like

to be whistled at, put down constantly sexually,

every time we walk down the street.

We'd like people to understand what it feels like to have

someone go [kissing sound] all the time.

MAN: Yay!

WOMAN: We're supposed to dig it

because we're supposed to dig that we're sexual objects,

and we don't want to be sexual objects anymore.

WOMAN: I don't want to be treated that way.

I want to have the rights to be a human being.

MAN: You ain't got the guts enough to do it.

PY: Men who were growing up in the times

when women were subservient,

and came of age when women were moving past that,

I believe it triggered some very strong feelings in them,

and in some of them, it was rage.

♪

ELIZABETH: My friend and I decided

that we were gonna go out.

It was my first night that I went out dancing in Seattle.

We found a babysitter for my daughter,

and we went to a tavern in the U District

called the Sandpiper.

I noticed just a really good-looking man.

He was sitting at the table by himself,

and he said his name: it was Ted.

♪

ELIZABETH: I was flattered when he asked me to dance.

I really had my eye on him all night, basically.

We did dance, and then that was the end of it,

so I was thinking maybe he was gonna ask me again,

but he didn't.

And I went over and started talking to him.

As a single mom, I never wanted to be bringing men home,

but I was too drunk to drive, really,

and I said, "So, will you spend the night here?"

And he said, "Yes."

So I just laid down on the top of my bed

without changing my clothes or anything,

but he didn't try to kiss me or do any of that.

♪

ELIZABETH: When I got up in the morning,

he had gotten Molly up,

and he was fixing breakfast for both of us.

So it just was like, "Oh, my gosh."

It just took my breath away, basically.

♪

ROBERT: I was kidding her when she come in;

I said, "What are you grinning about?

"You look so happy."

She said, "I met a guy last night,

"and oh, what a handsome looking dude he was."

[laughs] I says, "Oh, really?"

And she was telling me all about the manly jawline he had,

and how well-dressed he was.

And I said, "Well, what happened?"

She says, "You know, I went over

"and I danced with him,"

and she said, "You can't believe the enjoyment

"and the exhilaration of meeting somebody who reflected to me

"how I was feeling about him."

This is the way she went on and on.

And I said, "What is this guy's name?"

And she said, "Ted Bundy."

♪

ELIZABETH: I have not had that with anyone else,

where I just right off the bat felt connected to someone.

It just felt like two pieces of a puzzle

coming together. It just fit.

And it was really quite spectacular.

♪

ELIZABETH: I thought he was very funny,

and he seemed very mature, and he seemed polished.

And he told me that he was a law student,

so I thought,

"As a lawyer, he's certainly going to make a nice living

"and have these wonderful things that he wants."

And since I was new to Seattle,

he could hardly wait to show me his favourite restaurants.

He had a favourite Asian rug store that we went to

and looked at all the Asian rugs.

And just things that I...

I thought were just endearing.

♪

ELIZABETH: My daughter had a lot of friends

in our neighbourhood,

and so Ted was really fun with them;

he'd play with them.

He'd get a hose and they'd all get their little umbrellas

and they'd be in their swimming suits,

and he'd make rain for them on the lawn.

And of course, the kids loved it.

He taught my daughter how to ride her bike.

She just really took to that.

MOLLY: Much like it is with everybody's dad

teaching them to ride a bike,

he ran along.

Well, actually, let me start at this.

He did not like it that I had training wheels on my bike,

and so he took these wheels off my bike,

and he would hold onto the back of it

and run down the alleyway with me.

And I would try to steer,

and all of a sudden he said something,

and he was way at the other end of the alley,

and I realized I'm riding this bike by myself,

so I crashed into someone's garage promptly.

♪

MOLLY: I remember meeting him.

The first night when he came home with my mom

to our house,

and he read me my favourite book,

which I had memorized.

It was called, "Teddy Bear from Bumpkin Hollow."

He would read a line and he would say, "Freddy Bear,"

and I'd say, "Not Freddy Bear, Teddy Bear,"

and he would just make it ridiculous,

and I would laugh.

And I thought he was delightful.

♪

MOLLY: If you look at any of these pictures,

he's swinging me in circles, head first to the ground.

And he was always throwing me, hanging me upside down.

And I trusted him a hundred percent.

I mean, he gave you his entire self.

And, you know, for a kid, that's everything,

for somebody to pay exquisite attention to your experiences,

what you're looking for.

And, I mean, I could see he lit my mom up

like a woman in love,

and that just made sense.

We were like a family.

That's what I remember.

♪

ELIZABETH: Well, he did seem to just

settle right in to our family.

It was like everything that I'd ever wanted,

so I was hooked.

♪

ROBERT: That continuous happiness just radiated in her.

And it was such a sweet story to watch love grow

and be so intense and so complete.

She swore that it was like going to heaven.

ELIZABETH: I felt good in the relationship

and I felt loved.

I just didn't have any doubts.

Ted and my dad had a bond that was really different

than my relationship with my dad,

but they'd just talk about football and politics, and...

just have a good time together.

And pretty soon he was asking if he could

bring his little brother Richard along

on certain outings that we were going on.

♪

RICHARD: My name is Rich Bundy,

and I was Ted Bundy's little brother.

♪

RICHARD: We were more than just brothers.

You know, we were close friends.

You know, I really looked forward

to spending time with him, which I did a lot of.

I'd spend weekends with him, and...

summer vacations from school,

I'd go live with him for most of the summer vacation.

He was living in Seattle and he'd have me come up there,

spend the weekend, a couple times a month.

You know, we'd go over and pick up Liz and Molly

and get the raft out, and it would just be--

seemed like a really healthy, "Okay, I got the basket.

"Okay, doodly-doo," you know?

"Here we go."

Like...

the Wally and the Beaver, you know?

That's an analogy some people won't understand, but...

Uh, we were very close.

INTERVIEWER: You loved him.

RICHARD: I did love him.

♪

ELIZABETH: Ted just adored Richard.

Always wanted to take him places and do things with him.

We would frequently go,

me and Ted and Molly and Richard,

and we'd go and raft down certain rivers,

and so it was a lot of fun, and we did a lot of rafting.

I know that Richard looked up to him,

and kind of held him in awe.

RICHARD: You know, the kind of thing

a boy of 12 years old just automatically thinks, like,

"Oh, hey, that person's really awesome,

"got it together.

"I'm gonna follow what they say."

It's like he could do no wrong.

So...

Yeah.

♪

♪

♪

♪

JOEL: I was an instructor at University of Washington,

teaching undergraduate abnormal psychology.

A big thing on campus at the time

was eliminating grades.

And somebody spoke up and said,

"Well, we ought to assign our own grades.

"If I think I deserve a B, I'll work toward a B,

"and that's what I'll get."

And pretty soon, everybody's going, "Yeah."

It felt like the class was about to spin out of control

until this voice from about three quarters of the way back

spoke up and said, "No.

"Things need to be done properly.

"There needs to be evaluation of our accomplishments,

"and there needs to be order."

And so I... you know,

I looked up, and here's this fellow

dressed, tweed sport coat,

button-down dress shirt, penny loafers,

amid this sea of the unwashed, unshaven hippies.

That was my introduction to Ted Bundy.

♪

JOEL: I thought he was being kind,

I thought he was a person of some character.

And I felt a sense of relief

because a few moments earlier,

I felt beleaguered.

He seemed like a very likeable guy.

♪

DONNA: I was working at a place called

Law and Justice Planning Office.

And one of the things we were to do was to improve

crime prevention in the city of Seattle.

The whole rape issue was important at that time,

and I was lucky enough to do a study on rape

based on reported rapes in Seattle

in the previous several years.

I received a telephone call from my mentor

at the University of Washington,

and she called to say that she had a student,

and his name was Ted Bundy.

DONNA: He had applied to law school,

but his grades for his first two years in college

were very poor.

So his plan was to meet people in the system

and have recommendations to take with him

on his next round of applications for law school.

He was so impressive that he was hired

for a brand-new project, this crime prevention project.

♪

DONNA: He was to be working with some prominent lawyers

and some businessmen and other people

who were interested in preventing crime.

The head of the Commission at that time

was Professor Ezra Stotland from the university,

and Ezra was so charmed by him

that he had him to dinner at his home many times,

and told me that his 16-year-old daughter

also thought that Ted was just special.

And Ezra said, "You know, I secretly hoped

"that my daughter would marry someone just like him."

JOEL: If I were the father of a young woman

and this young man came to the door

to take my daughter to the prom,

I would think, "I know she'll be safe with him."

Because he really did come across as a Prince Charming.

DONNA: And he was so smooth.

He could attract you.

He could pull you right into his space.

He had a way about him.

He talked very quietly and very softly.

You had to lean forward to hear him, and it...

and it closed the space between the two of you,

and you were in his space, essentially.

♪

♪

ELIZABETH: He was very interested in politics.

And he liked hanging out with people

that were part of the Republican party.

EVANS: This nation demands new leadership.

This is the Republican hour.

[applause]

KNUTE: Ted Bundy worked for the very popular

pro-environment Republican governor that we had,

Dan Evans.

AD: Who's making sure California won't get

one drop of Washington water?

[slurping sound] Governor Dan Evans.

Who got the state's freeway construction

back on schedule?

Governor Dan Evans. [car honks]

♪

ELIZABETH: Dan Evans had just been elected as governor,

and so we got this invite to the Governor's Ball.

But I was very insecure.

Didn't feel like I fit the mould of a politician's girlfriend.

Ted, on the other hand, he seemed so comfortable

in social settings.

♪

ELIZABETH: No matter where he went,

he could fit in easily.

He could talk to almost anybody about anything.

I mean, it was just astounding.

♪

♪

MOLLY: He had the gift for dealing with all people.

He was really rather gifted at seeing

what you might need him to be, and being that.

Looking back on it, you know,

I feel like he was an impressive person.

♪

MOLLY: We felt lucky he picked us,

and we felt kind of like the country cousins, you know?

And he was more sophisticated than we were.

♪

MOLLY: What it looked like

is that he was a step above ourselves.

We kind of started to see

the kind of... choices he would want,

like in our clothes and things.

I remember that.

It was conservative, upper-crusty things.

He wanted me to wear a dress.

It was not really so much about evaluating him.

Clearly he was magnificent in all ways.

And so we should just, you know,

aspire to rise to his level of...

of polish.

♪

STEVEN: He wanted to dress well.

He wanted to be seen with the right kind of people.

He saw that as his way forward.

And how many Republican-- you know, young Republicans,

were there in-- at the University of Washington?

Not so many.

I mean, he was a Republican at the time that Nixon

was the face of the party.

♪

NIXON: I don't promise that we can eradicate poverty

and end discrimination,

and eliminate all danger of war

in the space of four, or even eight years,

but I do promise action,

a new policy for peace abroad,

a new policy for peace and progress

and justice at home. [applause]

♪

ANCHORMAN: At first it was called the Watergate Caper.

Five men apparently caught in the act

of burglarizing and bugging

Democratic headquarters in Washington.

KNUTE: Watergate was the big national story.

It gained momentum.

Everybody was following every development,

every hearing.

REPORTER: Donald Segretti.

Reports in major newspapers say White House aides

recruited Segretti for secret intelligence work

and dirty tricks against the Democrats.

DONNA: There was someone named Donald Segretti,

who was a dirty trickster in the Nixon campaign.

These Republican tricksters were calling prostitutes

and ordering them up

for delegates at the Democratic Convention.

It made it look like the Democrats had called up

to get all of these prostitutes involved.

At the same time, Ted came to visit me one day.

He'd been working in this gubernatorial campaign,

and he was standing in my office,

and I remember him telling me about this,

that he had been helping this candidate

in the governor's race,

and that he had been involved in following around the opponent

and wearing wigs and false moustache and other things.

BUNDY: It's hard for me to believe

that what I did is newsworthy,

and my part in the campaign was so insignificant,

I'm embarrassed that I should be getting this publicity from it.

Really embarrassed. [laughs]

DONNA: And I remember saying to him,

"Are you getting your lead from Donald Segretti?"

And I can remember he laughed.

He was sort of relishing telling us about that

and about wearing different wigs

and having to appear differently

in different contexts,

and that nobody ever put it together;

nobody ever saw him as the same person.

♪

DONNA: He was like a chameleon.

In addition to that, he stole all these things

from the political headquarters that he was working in.

He stole a typewriter; he stole a printer;

he stole paper; he stole--

everything he could get his hands on, he stole.

I was very put off by what he was doing,

and... I remember thinking,

"I think I'm done with this guy."

♪

♪

ELIZABETH: I didn't really know much about

the political part of his life,

but as long as I'd known Ted, he was stealing things.

And he would get all dressed up in his good clothes, and...

which, he looked so handsome, you know,

suit and tie, and...

he told me that there's a tunnel under Northgate,

which is a big mall here.

And that he would park in the tunnel

under the Bon Marche, at the time.

And he'd just go get what he wanted from the store

and take it out to the loading dock, to the car,

and he was proud of how brazen he could be

and get away with it.

So I'm running that through my de-coder to think,

"Oh, this is the way we live now,

"is we take things if they're there."

On a campus, everybody's stealing the textbooks.

I had read a book by Abbie Hoffman

that was titled, "Steal This Book."

And so I just thought,

well, I was way behind the curve as far as being cool.

♪

ELIZABETH: I did confront him about it eventually,

and I would tell him that I thought it was just so foolish,

because he wanted to make his living as an attorney

or as a politician,

and this was not gonna serve him well if he got caught.

And his idea was that he'd never get caught.

♪

JANE: By 1973, the women's movement

was making serious gains.

I mean, we had attained rights to autonomy over our bodies,

including the autonomy to be able to have an abortion.

♪

♪

JANE: Women felt free to date whom they choose,

to found their own women's liberation clubs on campus.

We started getting the inception of things

like Women's Studies, even, on those college campuses.

And that gave us hope

that the world was really opening up for us.

♪

♪

JOANNE: I was in Arizona, at the time,

and I was interested in the northwest,

and I saw a picture of the Space Needle in a magazine.

My adventurous spirit drove me to investigate the school,

and I decided to go.

♪

JOANNE: I think part of me was drawn to the political activism,

the social justice kinds of causes that I heard about.

I was certainly very interested in racial equity

and knowing more about that,

and being in a more diverse environment.

♪

PHYLLIS: I loved the University of Washington.

I came from a very small town, and everything was possible.

I mean, by 1973, that fall,

it wasn't our goal to meet some man from a fraternity

and get married; it wasn't like that.

I mean, truly, everything was possible.

In fact, when we went through rush, Bobby Riggs,

he had said that women belonged in the kitchen,

and they belonged in the bedroom,

and they belonged, you know, holding babies.

BOBBY: The male is king, the male is supreme.

Girls play a nice game of tennis, for girls.

♪

REPORTER: It's sometimes difficult to remember

that all this is about a tennis game.

For days, the two stayed away from each other,

away from confrontation.

But finally, like boxers at a weigh-in,

they met for the pre-game eyeball-to-eyeball challenge.

In between tennis hustles,

Riggs hustles pretty blondes.

BOBBY: She says you're gonna scrape me off the court

at the AstroDome, and I claim it's gonna be her

they're gonna scrape off.

And it is gonna be the battle of the sexes.

Don't anybody let you tell you it's any different.

PHYLLIS: But she's strong, she's a very good athlete,

and she smoked him.

PHYLLIS: It was a very big deal.

[crowd cheering]

PHYLLIS: It brought women together,

and that gets reflected culturally.

[theme music]

BARBARA: The Mary Tyler Moore show was a very important show

that resonated with women.

THEME: ♪ How will you make it on your own? ♪

BARBARA: It handled an unmarried woman's life

who moved to the big city

to become a successful career woman.

So it had a great sense of freedom.

I'm on my own.

I've got a little bit of responsibility.

THEME: ♪ You might just make it after all! ♪

GINGER: If you look at all of those popular

television shows in the 1970s,

these are all women who had the ability

to take themselves somewhere else.

Being mobile was an important part

of their being independent women,

and this was a big change in the culture.

And this, of course, is the time that the murders begin.

♪

♪

♪

KAREN: My name is Karen Epley.

On January 4th, 1974,

I was attacked and left for dead.

INTERVIEWER: This is the first time

you've ever spoken about this.

You are, I believe, Ted Bundy's first victim.

KAREN: I... I believe so, yes.

And one of the only that survived.

I was living in the U District,

studying political science.

He came into my home,

took a bed frame off of my bed,

and smashed my skull.

Then he used probably the same bed frame,

smashed it into my vagina, and into my bladder.

My bladder was totally split, so... uh...

It was horrible.

♪

♪

♪

INTERVIEWER: And you stayed that way in bed

without anybody knowing you'd been attacked,

for hours.

KAREN: Right. It was...

18 hours, 20 hours.

My roommate Bob thought I was still sleeping.

Later on he went down and checked me again,

and there he found the blood,

and it was just horrible for him to find me that way.

And next thing I remember, was waking up in the hospital

and I thought, "Uh-oh, this is really bad.

"This is really bad."

And so I asked my father.

I said, "Dad, what happened?"

And he said, "Well, you had a little bump in your head."

♪

♪

KAREN: I was permanently brain-damaged.

And he'd say, you know, "That's a desk, or a chair."

"Can you say those words?"

And I just couldn't get them out of my mouth.

I've lost 50 percent of my hearing,

40 percent of my vision.

I have a terrible ringing and roaring in my ears,

just constant.

I had epileptic fits.

Luckily I was able to overcome those.

INTERVIEWER: Why have you lived under the radar for so long?

KAREN: Well, I... I wanted to keep quiet.

I wanted to have my own life and privacy.

Women like us,

women that have been attacked,

women that have been raped,

women that are... survivors,

they keep their secrets to themselves.

I don't know why.

We're taught to just get on with it, so...

♪

♪

♪

REPORTER: Lynda lived here in this green house

in the university district,

along with five other university students.

She was last seen here Thursday evening,

about 12 o'clock.

JOANNE: Lynda was one of the first people I met.

Certainly the first person I spent any time with.

And I can't explain the welcome embrace

that I received from her.

I think we both knew within a day or two

that we were going to be very dear friends,

and we were together all the time

and excited about the world and life.

We had late-night conversations all of the time

about what we wanted to be, what we wanted to do.

She was just vibrant.

Just...

There's not a room she walked into that didn't light up.

She was beautiful. She was beautiful.

♪

KAREN: It was Lynda's week to cook.

And so Friday night, she planned to have

her parents over for dinner

and we were all supposed to be there.

JOANNE: That night, she wanted to do something extra special,

so I told her I would help her with the meal,

and so we were planning it together.

I had a bedroom on the main level by the kitchen,

and she stopped in so that we could discuss

everything we were going to do the next evening

for dinner.

And she was very chipper and cheerful,

and she said, "Okay, I'm going down to sleep,"

because she had to get up early.

KAREN: I came home, ran up the steps into the house,

and somebody was walking up the street.

I didn't look; I just sort of went in

and locked the front door.

Our upper two roommates, Ginger and Monica,

were upstairs asleep.

Joanne had a bedroom off the kitchen on the main floor.

Lynda and I shared the basement

and my window faced the back of the house.

And then her window faced the other side of the house.

So I came in, and I stayed up probably about a half hour,

or 20 minutes,

and talked with Joanne in the kitchen.

And then I went down to bed.

And when I went down to bed, I locked the side door.

You'd go down four steps.

♪

KAREN: When I got up in the morning,

the alarm was going and it wasn't being shut off,

and it went on, and it went on,

and on and on.

So I went in and shut it off

and her bed was made perfect.

I mean, like she had never slept in it.

And then the phone rang as I was getting ready to leave,

and it was the radio station.

She did ski reports on the radio to earn a little money

in the mornings, and they were asking where Lynda was.

And I said, "I don't know.

"She doesn't appear to have slept here."

Her jeans were gone,

her shoes were gone,

but the door was unlocked.

The side door, that I had locked on my way down.

It didn't make sense.

REPORTER: Lynda read the ski reports on her job.

According to a roommate, her alarm went off on time,

Friday morning, at 5:30.

But her roommate says Lynda wasn't in her room

and she never showed up for work.

REPORTER: Is she prone to leave the house at night?

JOANNE: Uh, no.

She has been known to take walks now and then,

but only when someone is with her.

JOANNE: What I remember is having to be very insistent

that something was wrong.

That the police were,

"Well, maybe she took off with a boyfriend,"

or "Maybe she's having an abortion,"

I think they said,

which just absolutely made me crazy,

because I knew that was not true.

At some point, another officer came,

and he wanted to see where her room was.

So we went down there and he looked around,

and her room was completely in order.

And he pulled the bedsheet back and we saw the blood,

so I said, "Well, maybe she had a nose bleed."

You just want to go to a rational place.

But it was too much blood.

So then he looked in the closet

and he pulled out a nightgown that had blood on it as well.

Um, so then of course, it flashes through your mind

that someone must have dressed her and made the bed,

and was in the room for a while.

And we just didn't have any real, deep sense yet

of the horror of it.

♪

♪

♪

LAURA: My sister was the person who would sort of

walk into a room and light it up.

She was an entertainer, a performer.

Beautiful, you know, young woman.

♪

LAURA: She was my older sister.

She was a mentor.

She was someone I looked up to.

We did a lot of vacations together.

We would go to the ocean.

My parents had a small boat

that the five of us and our dog would go out on,

and she taught me to water-ski,

and she would sing all the time.

Walk around the house singing.

And when she would sing a song,

it wasn't like she... she'd just sing it once.

You'd hear it over and over and over again.

She's in the bathroom getting ready.

She's walking down the hall.

She's setting the table.

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

LAURA: You know, she was...

She was the star.

♪

♪

♪

♪

[geese calling]

ELIZABETH: It was early in 1974 when Ted started

acting differently towards me,

where we weren't spending as much time together

as we had been.

And he'd just like drop out of my life

for three days or whatever,

and God, I'd go back over our last conversation like,

"What did I say? What did I do?"

This was a pattern that always made me feel like I was...

a shrew.

When we'd have a conflict, I would be really upset

and raising my voice,

and he would just get calmer and calmer.

And it was just...

It was crazy-making.

MOLLY: He and my mom were not as close

as they had been.

They didn't spend as much time as they had spent.

He didn't come over for a really long time

and I thought he might not come back at all, and I...

I was concerned that he wasn't gonna come back at all.

♪

MOLLY: My mom was worried all the time,

and she was drinking more at that time.

She felt that maybe he was seeing someone else,

and I do remember hearing those conversations.

I didn't understand what was happening there, at all.

But I knew it wasn't like it had been.

♪

ELIZABETH: What I knew of

was men that cheat on their partners,

and so that's what I thought was going on.

That I'd become boring, that I was predictable,

and that I needed to be somebody else.

Then he'd pop back in

and it was like nothing ever happened.

♪

ELIZABETH: One day when I came home

and I found him inside my apartment,

which he didn't have a key,

so he had the landlord let him in...

He was really upset when I got home.

He laid down with his head on my lap and just sobbed.

He told me that he had to tell me something

that was important

and that I would probably be shocked about.

But of course, I had no idea

what he was really fighting against within himself.

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪

♪