How Did the Only Woman Who Escaped Ted Bundy's Volkswagen End Up Putting Him in Prison?

Ted Bundy crossed a state line in September 1974 and became a new person. Washington had his name. Washington had his composite. Washington had two hundred thousand tips. None of it followed him to Utah.

He arrived in Salt Lake City as a first-year law student with clean plates and a clean record. Between October 1974 and August 1975, he moved across Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. Nancy Wilcox, sixteen, vanished in Holladay. Melissa Smith, seventeen, the police chief's daughter, was found in a canyon nine days after she disappeared. Laura Aime, seventeen, left a Halloween party and was found on Thanksgiving Day. Caryn Campbell, twenty-three, walked down a brightly lit hallway at a Colorado ski lodge and never reached her room.

On Taylor Mountain back in Washington, forestry students found four skulls: Lynda Healy, Susan Rancourt, Kathy Parks, Brenda Ball. Their families were burying daughters while Utah was just beginning to look.

The break came from two directions. Carol DaRonch, eighteen, who had fought her way out of Bundy's Volkswagen on November 8, 1974 — the only survivor who could identify him. And Sergeant Bob Hayward, parked in his own driveway, who chased a dark VW at 2:30 AM and found a kit in the front seat that no law student has a reason to carry.

When Detective Jerry Thompson connected the name Bundy to DaRonch's case and called Colorado and Washington, the files crossed state lines for the first time in nineteen months.

This is the second of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The killer who used geography as a weapon. The survivor who refused to disappear. The accident that finally made three states see the same man.

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