Ted Bundy survivor describes her experience with infamous serial killer
A woman who encountered Ted Bundy and lived to tell the tale once revealed how she didn’t want to ‘offend’ him by turning down what she thought were his advances.
Bundy was one of the United States’ most notorious serial killers, having admitted to murdering 30 women over a suspected four-year period (1974 to 1978) - though experts estimate that his total number of victims could range to over 100.
The former University of Washington student was initially arrested and jailed in 1975, before eventually being executed by electric chair at Florida State Prison in January 1989.
Almost three decades after his death, a woman named Rhonda Stapley appeared on Dr Phil’s former chat show, Dr Phil, to recount the moment she came into contact with the serial killer when she accepted a car ride from him.
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Stapley, now 70, told the host that she was a pharmacy student at the University of Utah when she first encountered Bundy.
“I was at City Park waiting for a bus to take me back up to campus… and then this tan Volkswagen drove by very slowly.” she said.
Stapley claims the car driver then rolled the window down to ask her where she was headed before agreeing to get into the car with him.
Upon getting comfortable in the passenger seat, she allegedly noticed the door handle was missing.
However, she chalked the missing item down to Bundy just being a university student with limited funds.
She then claimed the pair embarked on ‘light conversation’ before he took a detour on their route.
“He was very polite and asked my permission if it was alright if he took a little detour, he told me he had to run an errand up by the zoo,” Stapley explained. “I didn’t care, I thought I’d still be home faster than if I’d waited for the bus.
“And then we went right on past the zoo.”
Bundy reportedly continued to drive Stapley further away from her university campus and became mute while the woman continued to compete in idle conversation.
“He’s probably looking for a place to pull off and park but I don’t know him and I’m not really a make-out person,” she claimed. “But he’s still a cute law student and I don’t want to offend him and I don’t want to embarrass myself.
Eventually, Bundy pulled into a parking place and turned off the car.
“He leaned in very close and I thought he was going to kiss me, but he said very quietly: ‘You know what, I am going to kill you’.”
Stapley claimed that Bundy put his hands on her throat and began to ‘squeeze’ tightly until she lost consciousness.
She somehow escaped from his clutches, but told nobody about the incident.
In her 2016 memoir, I Survived Ted Bundy: The Attack, Escape & PTSD That Changed My Life, her grandmother claimed that she immediately needed to ‘pretend’ the incident ‘never happened’.
“I thought that I just needed to put it away and make life like it was before,” she penned.
After having a change of heart and publishing her account in the book, Stapley said she wanted other survivors to feel as if they were ‘not alone’.
“Even though their traumatic experience may be different than my traumatic experience, at least there’s someone who can recognise those feelings and people who can understand,” she told PEOPLE in 2016.
“The crime doesn’t end when the attack ends.”
Topics: True Crime, Ted Bundy, US News
Ella Scott