The investigation into Ted Bundy's second year of killing began with a traffic stop nobody planned. Sergeant Bob Hayward, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Utah Highway Patrol, was sitting in his cruiser outside his own home in Granger, Utah, at 2:30 in the morning when a tan VW Beetle passed with its headlights off. He chased it. He searched it. What he found inside — a ski mask, a pantyhose mask with eyeholes cut by hand, a crowbar, an ice pick, rope, and handcuffs — was a kit assembled by someone who had thought about what he was going to use it for.
The driver was Ted Bundy. He had no record. He was released on his own recognizance.
Two days later, Salt Lake County Detective Jerry Thompson read the arrest report and connected the name to Carol DaRonch — the eighteen-year-old who had fought her way out of a Volkswagen nine months earlier after a man posing as Officer Roseland tried to handcuff her at a mall. Thompson called Mike Fisher in Colorado, who had the Caryn Campbell case. He called Bob Keppel in King County, who had eight names and a stack of tip cards.
For the first time, three states realized they had been working the same case for nineteen months without knowing it.
The women between those states — Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Smith, Laura Aime, Debby Kent, Caryn Campbell, Julie Cunningham, Denise Oliverson, Lynette Culver, Susan Curtis — crossed jurisdictions nobody had connected. Five states. Five agencies. No shared file.
This is the second of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The investigative thread that finally tied the cases together — and the survivor and the accident that made it possible.
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