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The Two Escapes That Killed: How the System Let Bundy Walk Twice
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Ted Bundy escaped custody twice in 1977 — and both failures led directly to more murders. This chapter traces the ceiling crawl in Colorado, the courthouse jump in Aspen, and everything that happened in Tallahassee because nobody noticed he was gone.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
How do you lose Ted Bundy twice? That's the question that sits at the center of this episode.
By late nineteen seventy-seven, Ted Bundy had already been active for three years. He'd killed across Washington, Oregon, Utah, and Colorado.
The first escape came on the night of December thirtieth, nineteen seventy-seven. Bundy was being held in a jail in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, awaiting trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell.
The first escape sometimes gets confused with a second, earlier break from custody. The timeline matters, so here's how it actually ran.
After the December escape, Bundy made his way to Tallahassee, Florida. He was operating under the name Chris Hagen.
On February fifteenth, nineteen seventy-eight, a Pensacola police officer named David Lee ran a check on an orange Volkswagen moving erratically through the streets in the early morning hours. The car came back stolen.
Bundy chose to represent himself at the nineteen seventy-nine Florida trial for the Chi Omega murders and the attempted murders of Chandler and Kleiner. He worked alongside public defenders but took the lead role.
What followed was a decade of appeals, legal delays, and a death row that Bundy worked methodically. He gave interviews.
He confessed to at least thirty murders. The real number is almost certainly higher.
The Keppel tapes closed some doors. They opened others.
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