Because of witnesses providing detailed information about Bundy, the police provided the public with a suspect description and car details and posted fliers all around the Seattle area. A sketch of the abductor was printed in newspapers and broadcast on the TV stations. Several women, including now crime author, Ann Rule, who had once worked with Bundy, recognized the sketch and the car and reported to the police that it was Ted Bundy in the picture. Detectives, however, found it hard to believe that a clean-cut law student with absolutely no criminal record could be the perpetrator.
On September 6, 1974, hunters stumbled across skeletal remains in the woods in Issaquah. The bones were later identified as those of Janice Ott and Georgeann Hawkins. Six months later, several skulls were found on Taylor Mountain; all were damaged from a blunt instrument.
Murders in Idaho, Utah, Colorado
Bundy received an acceptance letter from the University of Utah Law School in August, 1974, and moved to Salt Lake City. As his picture was being plastered everywhere, it is assumed that he moved to avoid being caught, even though he was not a suspect at the time.
After Bundy moved to Utah, young women started to disappear. On September 2, he strangled and raped a hitchhiker in Idaho who, to this day, has yet to be identified, and the next day returned to where he dumped her to dismember and photograph her corpse. Exactly one month later on October 2, Nancy Wilcox, sixteen, was taken and brought into a wooded area where Bundy raped and killed her by strangulation. Her body was never found.
Melissa Smith, seventeen, was the daughter of the Chief of Police in Midvale, Utah. Melissa left a pizza parlor where she had been visiting with her friends, but never arrived home. Her body was found on October 27 in Summit Park, nine days after she’d been abducted. The autopsy indicated that she might have remained alive for up to seven days before she was killed. On October 31, Laura Aime, seventeen, also disappeared after leaving a café. Her body was found by hikers in American Fork Canyon. She had been sodomized, raped, beaten, and strangled.
Carol DaRonch, eighteen, is alive and well, and one brave young woman. She is today the only living victim of Ted Bundy. Carol was at a mall window-shopping in November when a man presented himself as Office Roseland of the Murray Police Department and told Carol that someone had tried to break into her car. He asked if she would come with him to the station to file a complaint. When Carol pointed out that Bundy was driving on a road that did not lead to the police station, he immediately pulled to the shoulder and attempted to handcuff her. Carol got a lucky break. During their struggle Bundy unintentionally fastened both handcuffs to the same wrist, and DaRonch was able to open the car door and escape, but not before Bundy threatened her with a gun. Swinging a crowbar, DaRonch screamed, scratched, and squirmed, untl finally she burst out of the car. Carol immediately went to the police and gave her account of an attempted kidnapping, which subsequently gained disturbing weight when Debra Kent's disappearance was reported later that evening. The next morning, investigators found a handcuff key in the high school parking lot. Later that same evening, Debra Kent, seventeen, a student at Viewmont High School in Bountiful, disappeared after leaving a theater production at the school to pick up her brother. The school's drama teacher, and a student, told police that a stranger had asked each of them to come out to the parking lot to identify a car. Another student later saw the same man pacing in the rear of the auditorium, and the drama teacher spotted him again shortly before the end of the play. Debra’s body has never been found to this day.
From his home base in Utah, in 1975, Bundy switched his hunting ground to Colorado, and on January 12, Caryn Campbell, twenty-three, a registered nurse, disappeared while walking down the hall of the Wildwood Inn in Snowmass. Her nude body was discovered next to a dirt road a month later. Autopsy reports showed deep cuts from a sharp instrument and blunt force trauma to the head.
The killing continued. Julie Cunningham, twenty-six, Denise Oliverson, twenty-five, and Lynette Culver, twelve, were all killed between March and May of 1975.
The King County Police compiled all pertinent information they had to try to come up with a suspect. Their eventual list of twenty-six suspects included known sex offenders, Volkswagen owners, classmates, and acquaintances of each victim. In the end, Bundy’s name was at the top when word came about his arrest in Utah.
Arrest
A Utah Highway Patrolman in Granger, Salt Lake City, arrested Bundy in August of 1975 after he failed to stop for a routine check. The Patrolman noticed that the front passenger seat in the car was missing, and while searching the car discovered a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs, a coil of rope, trash bags, an ice pick, and other items that one would use in the process of committing a burglary. Bundy tried to explain that he’d found many of the items; however, Detective Jerry Thompson remembered the suspect and car description in the attempted abduction of Carol DaRonch, and the phone calls from Kloepher back in December of 1974. In a search of Bundy's apartment, police found a guide to Colorado ski resorts with a checkmark by the Wildwood Inn, and a brochure advertising the Viewmont High School play in Bountiful where Debra Kent had disappeared, but they had nothing adequately incriminating to hold him. He was released under his own cognizance and, without his knowing, placed on 24-hour surveillance.
In February, 1975, Bundy had to stand trial for the kidnapping of DaRonch. Judge Stewart Hanson found him guilty of kidnapping and assault on March 1 and sentenced Bundy to 1-15 years in prison. Also, he was charged with the Colorado murder of Caryn Campbell and was extradited to Aspen in January of 1977.
Escape, Capture, Escape
After electing to serve as his own attorney, Bundy was excused by the judge from wearing handcuffs and leg irons. On June 7, 1977, Bundy asked permission to use the law library at the courthouse to research his case. From behind a bookcase, he opened a window and jumped from the second floor. He then hiked to the southern part of Aspen Mountain while roadblocks were being set up by police.
Bundy broke into a hunting cabin near the mountain summit and stole clothes, food, and a rifle. The next day he continued south but got lost in the woods. Over the next few days, he continued moving around, breaking into camp trailers to steal food, and managed to avoid search parties and roadblocks. Three days later, Bundy managed to steal a car but police caught him weaving in and out of a lane and he was recaptured.