Son of Sam gunned down
During the spring and summer of 1974, police officers in the Pacific Northwest of the US were in a panic. Young women at colleges across Seattle and Oregon were disappearing at an alarming rate.
In just six months, six women had been abducted. Locals started telling stories of how the women were being lured into cars by a young, dark-haired man named Ted, who faked injuries and pretended he needed help.
In October 1969, Elizabeth Kloepfer had met her dream man in a bar in Seattle, Washington.
She said later: “The chemistry between us was incredible, I was already planning the wedding and naming the kids.”
But something about the news reports of the serial killer rang alarm bells for Elizabeth.
As well as the suspect calling himself Ted, he drove a Volkswagen Beetle similar to Bundy’s, and a police sketch resembled him.
The suspect also wore a cast, and Elizabeth remembered seeing plaster of Paris in Bundy’s desk drawer.
When she called police though,
SHOOTER
Bundy with Elizabeth Kloepfer they told her she needed to come and file a report, saying: “We’re too busy to talk to girlfriends over the phone.”
So she hung up.
When Bundy moved to Utah to attend law school in 1974, people started disappearing from there too.
Elizabeth called the police there too – but they told her they had already spoken to Bundy, and cleared him.
Kloepfer was played by Lily Collins in a 2019 film version of the Bundy story, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly
David Berkowitz
Zac Efron as Bundy in court
Evil and Vile, which starred Zac Efron as her murderous lover.
Having missed that chance to catch Bundy, police first arrested him months later, in 1975, but not for murder. He was arrested for kidnapping Carol DaRonch, one of the few
BETWEEN two summers, the “Son of Sam” terrorised New York, as he gunned down innocent young people in their cars.
The killer was David Berkowitz, but he claimed that Satan had possessed his neighbour Sam’s dog, which then sent him messages to kill.
He was given up for adoption as a baby, and as a young child was caught thieving, killing animals and starting fires.
As he got older, Berkowitz lamented his lack of social life and inability to get a girlfriend. He once said: “Sex, I believe, is the answer – the way to happiness.” He felt this happiness was being denied.
Aged 18, he enlisted in the Army and in
The tan VW Beetle Bundy used women who managed to escape his clutches, and was jailed for 15 years.
A police officer had found a kidnap kit in his car when Bundy, cruising a residential neighbourhood in the early hours in his VW Beetle, had raced away in a panic.
Two years later, while acting as his own lawyer after being indicted over the death of a Colorado woman, he escaped by jumping out of the jailhouse library window.
He was caught eight days later, weaving in a stolen car due to a 1974, returned from a three-year military stint in South Korea.
Now 21, he moved to the Yonkers area of New York, but was struggling to deal with the emotions of his adoption, and the death of his adoptive mother.
This intensified when his birth mother then rejected him. Berkowitz believed he was unwanted by women in general.
By Christmas Eve 1975, something in sprained ankle from jumping out of the window.
But that December he climbed out of a hole in the ceiling of his cell, which he had spent months sawing, and fled to Florida, free to continue his bloody rampage.
In January 1978, Bundy broke into the Chi Omega sorority building at Florida State University, killing two women and bludgeoning three others.
His final victim was a 12-year-old girl, Kimberly Diane Leach, who he slaughtered just a month later. A him snapped. He followed two teenage girls on the street and stabbed them with a hunting knife. They survived but Berkowitz now had a taste for blood.
On July 29, 1976, he approached a car from behind in the Bronx and shot Jody Valenti and Donna Lauria who were inside, with a .44 caliber gun. Donna was killed, while Jody survived.
Berkowitz then went on a killing spree