Ted Bundy Bludgeoned, Almost Killed Me, Survivor: Serial Killer, Not An 'Evil Genius'
- A Light in the Dark: Surviving More than Ted Bundy, by Kathy Kleiner Rubin, Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, PhD, Good Reads. - The first book by a confirmed survivor of Ted Bundy, and the only memoir to challenge the popular narrative of Bundy as a handsome killer who charmed his victims into trusting him.
In January 1978, I slept in my bed at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University as Ted Bundy stalked nearby. He grabbed an oak log from a stack of firewood, slipped through a back door with a broken padlock, and headed upstairs. He began twisting doorknobs. Room 9 was open, and he quietly and quickly killed one of my sleeping sorority sisters.
Across the hall, he found another unlocked door and murdered again. Then, he turned the knob to my bedroom and found it was open. I remember the attack vividly. Bundy bashed me once in the head with the log and then attacked my roommate. He heard me moaning and came to finish me off. He never let his victims live. But he stopped suddenly when a bright light filled the room. He fled the sorority house and the light disappeared.
Bundy wasn’t my first brush with death, and he wasn’t my last. I’ve long been a survivor.
I was born into a Cuban American family in 1957 in Florida. I had a happy childhood until I received my first death sentence at the age of thirteen. Physicians weren’t sure why I was always so exhausted and running a low-grade fever. The prognosis was grim after my left kidney started to fail. Then, a physician from Cuba saved my life with a surprise diagnosis—lupus—and treatment chemotherapy. I endured chemotherapy again in my early thirties when I was diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer.
This is my story of surviving three death sentences and finding love and happiness along the way. I was saved by a bright light, and I hope my story is one for people who are experiencing their own dark times. I am a victim, but I am also a survivor, and I want to speak up for all the women and girls whom Bundy murdered. He has become a legend, and our voices have been muted or ignored. It’s time we were heard.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/122757860
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The Guardian, 'Ted Bundy bludgeoned and almost killed me. I resolved he would not ruin my life,' Feb. 27, 2024. * Excerpts *
..Bundy, the serial killer, rapist, necrophiliac, failed law student, loner, drifter – or, as Kleiner sees it, “sad little man” – has been the subject of many books, films, documentaries, plays, even songs. You don’t hear so much from the people whose lives he detonated. Bundy’s killing spree – he murdered at least 30 women and girls between 1974 and 1978 coincided with the start of criminal profiling; it was the decade that the term “serial killer” was first used by law enforcement.
His trial was the first in the US to be nationally televised. All this gave him a spotlight that has only shone brighter in the decades since – in the 2019 thriller Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, he was played by heart-throb Zac Efron. In popular culture, he has mythological status, a glamour and gloss never afforded to today’s serial killers and sex offenders. Meanwhile, his victims have been largely forgotten – and the few who survived, women such as Kleiner, have quietly found their own way forward.
.. Soon after her honeymoon, Kleiner was called to Tallahassee to testify before a grand jury in pre-trial proceedings, where it would be decided whether charges should advance. It was the first time that she had really seen him. “Bundy was sitting at the end of a long conference table and I sat at the other end,” she says. “By then, I knew his history, the case they were building. I wasn’t scared. He was a non-thing. He’s remembered as handsome but he was just an average person – you’d pass him by. He was sitting there, impatient, arrogant, like a bored middle manager, like we were wasting his time.”
The fiction that has built around Bundy has been hard for Kleiner to stomach. “He wasn’t an ‘evil genius’ or a brilliant legal mind,” she says. His grades were, at best, mediocre; he took eight years to get his first degree, then failed at two law schools. He had never rented anything bigger than a single room in a boarding house. He didn’t rely on good looks and charm to lure victims into danger. Maybe some women were programmed to “be kind” and suppress their instincts when he approached on crutches, or with an arm in a sling to ask for assistance. The majority, though, were bludgeoned from behind as they walked alone, or, like Kleiner, in their beds while they slept.
“At some point, it became really important to separate out the truth, and I had to do a lot of reading on psychology to know what he was,” she says. “And now I know.”...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/27/ted-bundy-bludgeoned-and-almost-killed-me-i-resolved-he-would-not-ruin-my-life
Wiki, Ted Bundy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Bundy
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