Elizabeth Kendall said it feels “strange” to flip back through old photos of her former boyfriend, to see him smiling at the camera next to a younger version of herself, to see him playing with her daughter who was a child at the time, to see him being silly. It’s because that man was Ted Bundy, one
Elizabeth Kendall said it feels “strange” to flip back through old photos of her former boyfriend, to see him smiling at the camera next to a younger version of herself, to see him playing with her daughter who was a child at the time, to see him being silly.“I sometimes can’t believe this has really been my life,” Kendall told “20/20.” “I kept those photos of us when we were happier, before we knew what he was capable of.
“That’s my childhood,” Molly Kendall said. “Unfortunately, the memories that are attached to those pictures have lost their original emotional content and become something different.”Bundy mercilessly and viciously kidnapped, raped and killed dozens of innocent women across the United States in the 1970s in a trail of terror that took him from the Pacific Northwest to Florida.
“I always felt loved,” Elizabeth Kendall said of the man she once planned to marry. “But with Ted, it's impossible to tell. It could've been love, it could've been just another manipulation.” MORE: Chi Omega survivor of Ted Bundy murders: ‘I was asleep’ when evil opened door ‘and attacked me’ “[He] put a lot of energy into making us happy, doing fun things… he always seemed to embrace us as a family unit,” Elizabeth Kendall said. “I loved going to places with him. He was never at a loss for words, whereas I was on the shy side.”
Years later when he was on death row in Florida, Bundy confessed to FBI Special Agent Bill Hagmaier that by the summer of 1974, he had been abducting and killing women for months. “I said I was going to go to a park and lay in the sun. Molly was in Utah. And he asked me which park,” Kendall said. “And I think he was just wanting to know, if [I was] going to Lake Sammamish, then he wouldn't be going that way. He'd go to another park.”
Even a report about the Lake Sammamish disappearances that noted witnesses told police the suspect was a handsome young man who called himself"Ted" struck her as odd, Kendall said, but she still tried to talk herself out of believing this could be the Ted she knew. Elizabeth Kendall said she even read some of these newspaper reports out loud to Bundy while they were together, but he brushed them off.
“Once I started to worry, like, ‘Could this be true?’ I didn't feel safe bringing it up," Elizabeth Kendall added."I didn't want him to know what I was thinking."“I loved talking with him or being with him because he was just Ted. He was just the Ted I knew. Nothing was amiss,” Kendall said.
Then by chance, on Aug. 16, 1975, Bundy was arrested in Granger, Utah, after he was spotted parked outside a house where two young women lived. After Bundy’s 1975 arrest, police linked him to the attempted abduction of Carol DaRonch, who had identified him in a lineup. Bundy went on trial for aggravated kidnapping and was convicted in March 1976. He was sentenced to a minimum of one to a maximum of 15 years in a Utah state prison.
MORE: Remembering Kimberly Leach, 12, Ted Bundy's last victim: 'The world missed out on a great soul' In 1979, Bundy was found guilty of murdering Levy and Bowman and the attempted murder of three other women. The following year, he was found guilty of kidnapping and murdering Kimberly Leach. He was sentenced to death for the murder convictions.
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