My lover the serial KILLER
Ted Bundy murdered dozens of women — and the whole time he was living with Elizabeth Kendall and her little daughter. Now, she’s telling her chilling story ... and incredibly, says she is STILL touched by his devotion to her
TeD BUNDY once boasted that he was ‘the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet’ — and even his lawyer agreed, calling him ‘the very definition of heartless evil’.
He had a pathological hatred of young women, describing an all-consuming ‘force’ inside him that drove him to find, rape and kill them. He single-handedly reduced the female population of entire cities to a state of abject terror.
Bundy confessed to murdering 30 women — usually attractive university students — across seven states in the 1970s, although the real figure is probably higher.
Yet there was one woman who loved him. elizabeth Kendall has an unenviable place in history as the long-time girlfriend and ex-fiancée of the notorious serial killer.
After nearly 40 years of silence, Ms Kendall has spoken out again about her relationship and how she feels about Bundy in Amazon Prime’s chilling docu-series Ted Bundy: Falling For A Killer. It is told from the perspectives of women who were victims of Bundy’s crimes, including Ms Kendall and her daughter Molly.
In 1981 — five years after Bundy finally went to prison — Ms Kendall wrote a little-noticed memoir, The Phantom Prince, under a pseudonym ( her real name is elizabeth Kloepfer), then disappeared into obscurity.
She re-emerged last year after the release of the film extremely Wicked, Shockingly evil And Vile, in which she was played by Lily Collins and Bundy by Zac efron. Though it was based on Ms Kendall’s memoir, she felt it didn’t tell the whole story, so she has republished her book with a new foreword and afterword.
‘I’ve had so much to work through since all of this happened,’ she says. ‘There was shame, there was guilt, there were all kinds of things I didn’t feel really good about.’
SHe still has complicated feelings for Bundy. As she reads out some of the many letters he wrote her from Death Row, expressing his undying love for her and how she and her daughter Molly were ‘ the best thing that ever happened to him’, her eyes well up with tears.
In quieter moments, though, she reflects on the monster he was.
Ms Kendall remembers, for example, how he excused himself from the pizza restaurant where he had taken her family before her daughter’s baptism so he could slip off to a bar and find a young victim.
Then there was the time, while he was driving away to law school in Utah, that he rang en route to say he loved her. Later, police revealed to Ms Kendall that on that very day he had abducted a woman and battered her to death.
It’s not difficult to see how Bundy gained notoriety. His clean- cut good looks, charisma, intelligence and apparent utter normality contrasted so sharply with the monstrous nature of his crimes: he not only raped and murdered his victims but practised necrophilia on their bodies and kept severed heads as souvenirs.
Nor is it hard to understand how a vulnerable, insecure woman like Ms Kendall would be putty in his hands. A painfully shy and rather naive divorcee, raised in a Mormon home in Utah, she struggled with alcoholism.
They met in a Seattle bar one night in October 1969. She was 24 and, having recently divorced, had moved there to enjoy the dawning Women’s Liberation movement and ‘find Mr Right’.
Instead she found Mr Wrong. The self-assured 22-year-old bowled her over. He was a student and aspiring lawyer at the University of Washington, where Ms Kendall worked as a secretary. She ended up inviting Bundy home, where they simply went to sleep on her bed.
The next morning, she awoke to find he had got her little daughter up and was making everyone breakfast. ‘I fell in love with him from Day One,’ she says. ‘He took my breath away.’
They were soon in a serious relationship and although Bundy never formally moved into her flat, he would be a constant presence there until he was jailed in 1976.
‘It was like everything I’d ever wanted, so I was just hooked,’ says Kendall, who craved a happy family life. ‘We made love every chance we got. I had never felt this close to any man before.’
Bundy also rapidly enchanted two-year-old Molly. Family photos show him holding her upside down as she beams with delight, or teaching her to ride a bike.
Bundy would later describe his love for Ms Kendall as so strong it was ‘destabilising’, although he admitted they had little in common. She was ‘astounded’ by how easily Bundy mixed with people, able to talk to anyone about anything.
Others describe him as a chameleon. ‘He was rather gifted at seeing what you might need him to be and being that,’ Molly adds.
Bundy’s relationship with Ms Kendall was volatile. In February 1970, they obtained a marriage licence but he ripped it up a few days later during a fight, so they never married. Two years later she became pregnant but had a termination — he was about to go to law school and she needed to work to put him through it.
For all his protestations of love for Ms Kendall, Bundy wasn’t always faithful. In 1973 he rekindled a romance with a beautiful university classmate, Stephanie Brooks, and even discussed marriage with her. Neither she nor Ms Kendall knew of the other’s existence.
MS KeNDALL also didn’t know about Bundy’s creepy behaviour towards her daughter. Molly recalls how he once climbed into bed with her. Another time, as they played hideand-seek, he hid naked and sexually aroused under a blanket.
That he had a darker side soon became clear even to his besotted lover. He enjoyed stealing — everything from a TV set to textbooks — but when she confronted him about it, he said he’d ‘break your f*****g neck’ if she told anyone.
early in 1974, Bundy’s behaviour began to change. He would drop out of her life mysteriously for several days, leaving her to worry that she had said or done something wrong, then return as if nothing had happened. She feared he was seeing another woman. In fact, it was about then that he began his Seattle killing spree.
Because Bundy kept changing his story, there is no consensus on exactly when he first murdered. But it is a matter of record that in January 1974 he bludgeoned 18- year- old Karen Sparks, a student, in her Seattle basement flat. Although she survived, she was left with horrific disabilities.
A month later he murdered Lynda Ann Healy, another student. Her skull, along with other bodies, would be found a year later in a forest 23 miles away.
That year, female college students disappeared in Washington and
Oregon states at the rate of about one a month. He would play on their kindness by asking them for help, often pretending he was injured. He generally raped his victims, then beat them to death.
Few managed to escape. Bizarrely, Blondie singer Debbie Harry claimed in her memoir, Face It, that he tried to kidnap her in New York in 1972, though it is unconfirmed whether the man in question actually was Bundy.
Ms Kendall recalls coming home