For true crime fans around the world, there's never been so much interest in Ted Bundy. Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, a documentary series examining a number of never-before-heard interviews, is currently airing on Netflix, and a biopic entitled Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, starring Zac Efron, is due to hit the big screen soon.
The infamous serial killer, whose full body count has never been fully established, has never quite managed to leave the public consciousness, and much of that is down to Bundy's powers of charm and manipulation.
He was capable of making young and vulnerable women trust him implicitly, drawing them in and cutting off their escape, before viciously butchering them. However, not all of Bundy's victims are dead. There are women out there who are a different kind of victim; people who escaped his clutches but were left traumatised by the experience.
Now, more than 40 years after his conviction, an ex-girlfriend of Bundy's is speaking out about how she narrowly avoided being killed by him. In a recent interview with Daily Mail TV, a 71-year-old woman, (who wishes to remain anonymous), discussed how she met Bundy when he moved to Utah in 1974 and how they dated for "several months" while living in the same building.
The woman stated:
"I'll never forget one night I stayed overnight and I woke up in the middle of the night and I said, 'Ted, where are you? What are you doing?' And he was through in the kitchen and he said, 'Oh just looking at my knives.' I thought about that later and I thought, 'Wow, I just escaped being killed. Except that he knew better than to do it in his own apartment.'"
She added:
"There was a girl who disappeared on Halloween night and was killed. And on Halloween night he came to my apartment when I was asleep because my door was partially opened because the rug was preventing it from closing. I was in bed and he came in and said, 'I want to tell you that your door is opened and unlocked.' He woke me up. And I said, 'Oh thanks Ted,' you know. He did a good deed and he also killed someone that night and I didn't notice a thing."
"Who would have thought I'd be reading about Ted in the news again after all these years? All of a sudden I'll hear the name and it seems so weird to realize just how long ago it all was because it seems to have not gone away ... It had an impact. For a couple of years. I found it hard to trust people, if I was out I would be fearful, I'd have another drink to deal with it. I was very naïve when I met him. But once you've lost that innocence, once it's gone, you can never get it back."
Ted Bundy was executed by electric chair at 7.16 am EST on January 24, 1989. He was 42 years old.
