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Forty-Seven Minutes: The Chi Omega Evidence That Convicted Bundy
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In the early hours of January 15, 1978, Ted Bundy moved through the Chi Omega sorority house in a controlled, sequential attack that lasted just forty-seven minutes — and left behind the bite mark evidence that would seal his fate. This chapter follows his second escape, his arrival in Tallahassee, and the forensic case that finally put him on death row.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's twelve-fifteen in the morning on January fifteenth, nineteen seventy-eight. The Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University is quiet.
To understand how Ted Bundy ended up inside that house, you need to pick up the thread from where we left off in the previous episode. By late nineteen seventy-seven, Bundy had already been arrested, tried, and convicted in Utah.
The Chi Omega house at the time was home to around forty women. It sat on West Jefferson Street, a short walk from campus.
Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy were pronounced dead in the early hours of January fifteenth. The sorority house became a crime scene, and what investigators found there would eventually become some of the most significant forensic evidence in American criminal history.
Twenty-five days after Chi Omega, Bundy killed again. On February ninth, nineteen seventy-eight, he abducted twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach from Lake City Junior High School.
On February fifteenth, nineteen seventy-eight, just after one in the morning, a Pensacola police officer named David Lee ran the plates on an orange Volkswagen Beetle driving slowly through a neighborhood. The plates came back stolen.
The Florida trial for the Chi Omega murders began in nineteen seventy-nine. Bundy, with access to public defenders, chose to serve as his own co-counsel.
By January nineteen eighty-nine, the appeals were exhausted. Bundy's execution was scheduled for January twenty-fourth.
At seven oh six in the morning on January twenty-fourth, nineteen eighty-nine, Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison. The chair was known as Old Sparky.
The Chi Omega attack is central to the full Bundy story for a specific reason. It's the one that ended his run.
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