Sunday marks 50 years since one of America’s most notorious serial killers, Ted Bundy, abducted two young women on the same day and on the same crowded beach in Washington state.
While this wasn’t Bundy’s first two attacks in the same day, kidnapping two women within the space of four hours was one of his most audacious acts of crime he committed across the country over the years.
Bundy confessed to 28 murders, but some estimate he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of women between 1974 and 1978.
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Ted Bundy, photographed during his murder trial at the Miami-Dade County Metro Justice Building in 1979, murdered at least 28 women and girls between 1974 and 1978. (Getty Images)
Janice Ann Ott, 23, and Denise Marie Naslund, 19, went missing on July 14, 1974, from Lake Sammamish State Park, about 15 miles from Seattle.
Bundy murdered two women that day. The Seattle TimesHowever, their bodies were not found for two months.
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Bundy approached women in the park and asked them to help him remove a boat from his brown Volkswagen Beetle. Four female witnesses later testified that they heard an attractive man wearing white tennis gear, with his left arm in a sling, introducing himself as “Ted” in a possibly faint Canadian accent.
Three of the women refused, and the fourth accompanied Bundy to his car, then fled when she saw the yacht was gone.
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Dennis Naslund (right) was abducted by Ted Bundy four hours after Janice Ott (left) on July 17, 1974. The skeletal remains of both women were discovered about two miles apart on September 6 of that same year. (Kings County Sheriff’s Department)
Ott, a juvenile caseworker at the nearby King County Juvenile Court, was seen by three witnesses leaving the park’s beach with the man. According to Friends of Lake Sammamish State Park, Ott had left a note on her door telling her roommate she was going sunbathing before leaving on her yellow bicycle that day, with a doodle of a sun on it, according to the Friends of Lake Sammamish State Park. Her husband, James, was attending medical school in California.
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Naslund, who was studying to be a computer programmer, had gone on a picnic with her boyfriend and another couple and never returned from a bathroom break. Her mother told The Seattle Times that Naslund had a kind nature that put her at risk.
King County police circulated a composite sketch based on descriptions of the man and his vehicle, which was published in area newspapers and broadcast on local television stations.
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Ott and Naslund were lured to a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park by Bundy, who was wearing a sling around his arm and claimed he needed help unhooking his sailboat from a car trailer hitch. The park photo was taken in 2020. (Chona Kassinger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
According to King County Detective Robert Keppel’s book, “The River Man: Ted Bundy and I Hunted the Green River Killer,” Bundy’s girlfriend Elizabeth Kloefer, his friend Ann Rule and one of Bundy’s psychology professors at the University of Washington recognized the composite image and contacted police. But in his book, Rule wrote that detectives at the time thought the clean-cut law student was an unlikely suspect.
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Keppel scrutinized thousands of vehicle registration documents based on vehicle and suspect characteristics. Seattle Times According to reports, Bundy was on the final list of suspects.
On September 6 of that year, a grouse hunter discovered skeletal remains about two miles away near a service road in Issaquah, most of which, according to dental records, belonged to Ott and Naslund. breaking news It was reported at the time.
Bundy was executed on January 24, 1989 at the Florida State Prison. (Bettman via Getty Images)
According to Keppel’s article, Bundy later identified an extra femur and vertebrae found at the scene as those of Georgian Hawkins, an 18-year-old University of Washington student who went missing while walking from her boyfriend’s dorm to her own in the early morning hours of June 11 that year.
Bundy later told journalist Stephen Michaud and FBI agent William Hagmeyer that Ott was still alive when he kidnapped Naslund, and that he had forced her to watch him assault and kill a woman. He recanted this claim, along with others, in an interview on the night of his execution in 1989.
Before his arrest, Bundy committed two attacks in one day on November 8, 1974. In the first, he posed as a police officer and lured 18-year-old Carol DaRonch from a shopping mall in Bountiful, Utah, into his brown Volkswagen Beetle.
An image of Ted Bundy appears on a television screen on the lawn of the Florida State Prison. (Getty Images)
Bundy attempted to handcuff DaRonch, but DaRonch was able to escape. A key that fit the handcuffs was found in the high school parking lot, where 17-year-old Debra Kent was last seen leaving a high school play to pick up her brother.
In 2015, a kneecap found in 1989 at the spot where Bundy told investigators he had placed Kent’s body was positively identified as belonging to the teenager. Wired reportedForty years later, her family finally got closure and received her death certificate.
On August 18, 1975, Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward stopped Bundy’s brown Volkswagen outside a home in Granger, Utah.
Officers found a ski mask, a crowbar, an ice pick and handcuffs in the car and arrested Bundy, but he was soon released.
In October of that year, DaRonch and two other women pointed out Bundy at a police interview and he was arrested on attempted kidnapping charges, according to the report. Los Angeles TimesHe was convicted of kidnapping in March 1976. Deseret News It was reported at the time.
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The following October, while Bundy was serving his prison sentence, investigators were able to link him to the January 1975 disappearance of Caryn Eileen Campbell after hair from her body was found in his Volkswagen. The New York Times report.
Campbell, a 23-year-old registered nurse, was last seen walking down a well-lit hallway between the elevator and a room at a Colorado hotel in January of that year. Her nude body was found a month later on the side of a dirt road just outside the resort.
After being charged with first-degree murder in Campbell’s death, Bundy fled from the law library at the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen in June 1977, sparking a six-day police manhunt before his arrest. ABC reported.He escaped a second time after losing enough weight to fit through the ceiling duct of his Colorado prison cell.
Before he was ever fully arrested, Bundy murdered two sorority members at Florida State University and wounded three more in January 1978, then killed 12-year-old Kimberly Leach.
Bundy was arrested in February 1978 and his nationally televised trial began in June 1979. He was convicted of the murder of a Florida State University student on July 24, 1979, and then convicted of the murder of Leach in January 1980.
Bundy was executed at the Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. Cheers erupted from the estimated 200 attendees when the killer was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m., according to The Times.
