Why Did Colorado Give Ted Bundy a Law Library and No Handcuffs During His Murder Trial?

The State of Utah convicted Ted Bundy of kidnapping in March 1976. One count. Colorado charged him with one murder. That is what the system believed it was holding: a kidnapper and a single-count defendant.

The actual man had killed at minimum sixteen women across five states by the end of 1975.

That gap — between who the charge sheet said he was and who he actually was — is the reason he was able to act as his own attorney, get library access without restraints, and jump from a second-story window of the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen on June 7, 1977.

Six days on the mountain. A stolen Cadillac. Recaptured on Highway 82 by Officer Gene Flatt. Moved to the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs. And then the second project: months of quiet starvation, a gap in the ceiling that nobody checked, a stack of cash taped into a book.

December 30, 1977. Holiday staff. The head jailer's apartment empty. Bundy crawled through the ceiling, dressed in the jailer's clothes, and walked out the front door. He was not discovered missing for roughly seventeen hours.

His route took him from Glenwood Springs to Chicago to Ann Arbor to Atlanta to Tallahassee, Florida, where he arrived on January 8, 1978, completely anonymous again.

A man named Andy Leyba reportedly gave the hitchhiker his own jacket in a snowstorm that night in Glenwood. He didn't recognize the face until he saw it in the paper.

This is the third of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The story of a custody that was too narrow to hold what was in it — and a system that handed the man its courtesies and its ceiling and its holiday weekend.

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This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.

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