Ted Bundy 50 years later: How investigators took down infamous serial killer who terrorized country for years

Sunday marks 50 years since Ted Bundy, one of America’s most infamous serial killers, abducted two young women on the same day from the same crowded Washington state beach.

Although it was not the first time Bundy struck twice in one day, snatching the two women in a four-hour timeframe was among the most brazen acts of his years-long cross-country crime spree. 

Although Bundy confessed to 28 murders, some estimate that he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women between 1974 and 1978. 

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Janice Ann Ott, 23, and Denise Marie Naslund, 19, both disappeared from Lake Sammamish State Park, about 15 miles from Seattle, on July 14, 1974. 

Bundy killed both women that day, The Seattle Times reported, but their bodies weren’t discovered for another two months. 

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Bundy approached various women at the park, asking them to help him unhook his boat from his tan Volkswagen bug. Four female witnesses would later describe an attractive man wearing a white tennis outfit with his left arm in a sling who spoke in a slight, possibly Canadian accent and was overheard introducing himself as “Ted.”

Three of the women refused; a fourth accompanied Bundy to his car, then ran after seeing that there was no sailboat. 

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Denise Naslund, right, was abducted by Ted Bundy four hours after Janice Ott, left, on July 17, 1974. Skeletal remains of both women were found about two miles away on Sept. 6 of that year. (Kings County Sheriff’s Department)

Ott, a juvenile caseworker at the nearby King County Juvenile Court, was seen by three witnesses leaving the park’s beach with the man. Before she left her home on her yellow bicycle that day, Ott put a note on her door to tell her roommate that she was going sunbathing, drawing a doodle of the sun on her note, according to Friends of Lake Sammamish State Park. Her husband, James, was in California attending medical school. 

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Naslund, who was studying to become a computer programmer, never returned from the restroom on a picnic with her boyfriend and another couple. Her mother would tell The Seattle Times that Naslund had the sort of helpful nature that could place her in danger.

King County police distributed a composite sketch based on descriptions of the man and his car, which was printed in area newspapers and broadcast on local television stations.

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Ott and Naslund were lured off the crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park by Bundy, who wore a sling on his arm and claimed he needed help unhooking his sailboat from the trailer hitch of his vehicle. The park is pictured in 2020. (Chona Kasinger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Bundy’s girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer, his friend Ann Rule and one of Bundy’s psychology professors from the University of Washington all recognized the composite and contacted police, according to King County Detective Robert Keppel’s book, “The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer.” But at the time, Rule wrote in her own book, detectives thought it was unlikely that the clean-cut law student was their suspect.

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Based on the description of the vehicle and the suspect, Keppel pored over thousands of automobile registration documents, The Seattle Times reported. Bundy was on the final list of potential suspects. 

On Sept. 6 of that year, grouse hunters found skeletal remains near a service road in Issaquah, about two miles away – dental records showed that most of them belonged to Ott and Naslund, The Bulletin reported at the time.

Bundy was put to death on Jan. 24, 1989, at Florida State Prison. (Bettmann via Getty Images)

Bundy later identified an extra femur and vertebrae found at that scene as those of Georgann Hawkins, an 18-year-old University of Washington student who went missing in the early hours of June 11 of that year while walking from her boyfriend’s dormitory to her own, Keppel wrote.

Bundy later told journalist Stephen Michaud and FBI agent William Hagmaier that Ott was still alive when he kidnapped Naslund, and that he forced one woman to watch while he assaulted, then murdered the other. He later recanted that claim, along with others, in an interview on the night of his execution in 1989.

Before his capture, Bundy struck twice in one day once more on Nov. 8, 1974, first posing as a police officer and luring 18-year-old Carol DaRonch to his tan Volkswagen Beetle from a mall in Bountiful, Utah.

Ted Bundy’s image on a television screen on the lawn of the Florida State Prison. (Getty Images)

Bundy attempted to snap handcuffs onto the teen, but DaRonch was able to escape. A key that fit the lock to those cuffs was found in a high school parking lot where 17-year-old Debra Kent was last seen leaving a high school play to pick up her younger brother. 

In 2015, a patella bone found in 1989 at the site where Bundy told investigators he’d left Kent’s body was positively identified as the teen, Wired reported. After 40 years, her family finally got closure and a death certificate.

On Aug. 18, 1975, Highway Patrol Sgt. Bob Hayward stopped Bundy’s tan Volkswagen, which was lingering outside a home in Granger, Utah. 

After finding a ski mask, a crowbar, an ice pick and handcuffs in the car, the officer placed Bundy under arrest – but he was soon released. 

In October of that year, DaRonch and two other women pointed Bundy out in a police lineup, leading to his arrest on attempted kidnapping charges, according to the Los Angeles Times. He was convicted of aggravated kidnapping in March 1976, The Deseret News reported at the time. 

In October of the next year, while Bundy was serving that prison sentence, investigators were able to link Bundy to the January 1975 disappearance of Caryn Eileen Campbell with the discovery of her hair in his Volkswagen, The New York Times reported. 

Campbell, a 23-year-old registered nurse, was last seen walking down a well-lit hallway between the elevator and her room at a Colorado hotel in January of that year; her nude body was found a month later next to a dirt road just outside the resort.

After he was charged with first-degree murder in Campbell’s death, Bundy infamously escaped a law library at Aspen’s Pitkin County Courthouse in June 1977, leading police on a six-day manhunt before his capture, ABC reported. He would escape a second time after losing enough weight to slip through a ceiling duct in his Colorado prison cell. 

Before he was captured for good, Bundy killed two Florida State University sorority sisters and injured three more in January 1978, then killed 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. 

Bundy was apprehended in February 1978, and his nationally televised trial began in June 1979. He was convicted in the deaths of the Florida State students on July 24, 1979, then for Leach’s death in January 1980. 

Bundy was put to death on Jan. 24, 1989 at Florida State Prison – the declaration of the killer’s death at 7:16 a.m. drew cheers from the estimated 200 people in attendance, the Times reported.