The first thing in the morning after his call I phoned his Seattle attorney. I wanted him to know what Ted was trying to do. I wanted him to tell me what I should do with the information Ted had given me. He was sympathetic, but as Ted’s attorney, he couldn’t advise me. He gave me the name of another attorney, who suggested I go to the King County Police. I had to wait through a three-day weekend, but on the following Tuesday I gave a statement about the phone conversation to Detective Keppel and Captain Mackie.
When I told them that Ted had agreed to answer any of my questions and that I had asked him things like “What did I have to do with what happened?” Keppel was beside himself.
“Why didn’t you ask him what happened to Jan Ott’s bicycle? Or where Debbie Kent is?” he wanted to know.
Because I’m not a policeman, I thought. I had asked Ted the things I did for my own peace of mind. I needed to be sure that nothing I had done had triggered Ted’s rampages.
I didn’t hear from Ted until May, when he called me at work one day. He told me that his horoscope said it would be a day for jealousy, so he thought he would call me. The conversation was extremely strained. He wanted to know if I was getting married. He told me that he kept busy typing and reading and that his mental state was great most of the time. Sometimes he felt pretty grim, he said, but he didn’t want to talk about that. His sister was getting married and he talked about his family. It would have been so easy to fall into the same comfortable conversations that we used to have, but I managed to force myself to tell him that I was surprised that he had done nothing about making things right as he had said he would do. He said that I would have to understand that it had been a very emotional time for him, and that in the light of new developments it was an inopportune time for such action.
In other words, he hadn’t meant to tell me the truth, but it had slipped out under the stress of his recapture.
His talk of “new developments” disgusted me. What new developments could change the truth? I thought that he knew the game was over and that everyone else knew it, too. He certainly knew I wouldn’t be standing behind him anymore. Tired and alone in Florida, his only hope had been to get back to Washington near his family. I didn’t know what had changed. I suspected that someone, maybe Carole Boone, the woman he later married during his murder trial, was willing to stand behind him.
As our phone call ended, he told me he would try to call again. I told him not to, that Hank wouldn’t like it. I still wasn’t strong enough to tell him that I, Liz Kendall, did not want him in my life anymore.
At the end of June, I got a strange letter from him. It was addressed to me but had been sent to Carole Boone who forwarded it to me with an odd, light-hearted cover letter. Ted wrote that he had heard I had gone to the police and had been saying some “fairly uncomplimentary things” about him. He said he was having a hard time believing I would do something like that.
From a purely factual perspective, the reports filtering back to me reveal what you allegedly told these people and what I told to you over the phone that night from Pensacola are two very different accounts. . . . I still cannot imagine you broadcasting the conversation we had. While I will not pretend to be Prince Charming, I do think it fair to say that for 2 1/2 years now I have done everything to keep your name out of the news and avoid embarrassment for you. . . . Several friends and reporters have called me a fool since they believe that you were in some way responsible for the things that were happening to me. . . . But if you did go to the police, you went to them thinking they might be able to use what you thought you had heard. What if, dear Elizabeth, the King County authorities were desperate enough to charge me, based on your representations. . . . Do you want to hurt me so badly that you would twist the truth to see me swing from some wooden beam by my neck? . . . All I am saying is that you could have gotten yourself in much hot water, and you are fortunate that what you thought you had was of no value to the police. . . . If you did what I have been told you did, you were not thinking of your welfare, or Molly’s, or your parents’ or your new life.
As sickened as I was by the letter, the guilt trip didn’t work anymore; it didn’t change the truth. Several weeks later he called and sheepishly told me that he had never intended to mail the letter and that he was very sorry that he had ever written it. We talked for less than a minute. It was the shortest phone conversation we had ever had, and it was also the last time I talked to him.
Ted’s problems continue to affect me in many ways. On one level I find I have developed a grim view of human beings and what they are capable of doing to other human beings. That makes it hard for me to get very close to people. On an outer level, I have to deal with writers and reporters and private investigators who barge into my life.
Unfortunately, I read everything that is written about Ted. One recent magazine article said:
This speculation in the press, filtering back to Seattle, resulted in the police getting their first real tip on Ted Bundy as a possible suspect. Ironically, it came from his Seattle girlfriend, whose suspicions had been stirred in a fit of jealous anger and vengeance over the feeling that Bundy was being unfaithful to her and was trying to end their relationship.
Yes, I was jealous of Ted. I loved him and wanted to be his wife, but I did not call the police because I was jealous.
I’ve thought a lot about the jealous feelings I had about Ted. I was so insecure when I met him, my self-esteem rocked by a series of setbacks going back to my freshman year in college—the same time when I began discovering the pleasures of alcohol. I hated, hated, hated being divorced. I wanted a stable, loving home for my daughter and the other kids who would come along. I handed Ted my life and said, “Here, take care of me.” He did in a lot of ways, but I became more and more dependent upon him. When I felt his love, I was on top of the world; when I felt nothing from Ted, I felt that I was nothing. But the fuel that fed my jealousy was his inconsistent treatment of me. We would be getting along fine and then a door would slam and I would be out in the cold until Ted was ready to let me back in. I’d spend hours trying to figure out what I had done or said that was wrong. And then, suddenly, he would be warm and loving again and I would feel needed and cared for.
In that middle-of-the-night phone call from Florida, Ted told me that he tried to stay away from me when he felt the power of his sickness building in him. I wondered if those times coincided with the times I felt so left out, felt that he was hiding something from me. I suspected that it was other women, and it often was, but he was also hiding a terrible secret. He loved life and enjoyed it to the fullest. The tragedy is that this warm and loving man is driven to kill.
AFTERWORD
As I reread The Phantom Prince in preparation for the publication of the updated edition, I realized how much I have changed over the years. There are pages I felt like ripping out because they made me so uncomfortable. The most cringeworthy line is on the last page: “The tragedy is that this warm and loving man is driven to kill.” The second-most cringeworthy thing I wrote is on the first page of the original preface. I said, “I have come to accept that a part of me will always love a part of him.”
I do have compassion for the me who wrote those things so many years ago. Although I was sober and getting counseling at the time I wrote the book, I was still in denial. Even after I had heard it from Ted himself that, yes, he was a serial killer, I stayed in a confused state for some time. I was constantly running scenarios in my head, trying to make sense of Ted and Liz and what had happened. The experience of our relationship seemed so real, and the things I learned about his brutal attacks seemed completely surreal. My counselor told me that obsessive-compulsive disorder often develops in people who have experienced trauma. She was the first to point out that my obsessive mental review of “Ted and Liz” was part of my denial. I know now that I was trying to protect myself from the unfathomable truth.
By writing in the book that Ted was warm and loving and lovable, I was avoiding f
acing the painful truth that I knew only a small part of Ted. And that small part was rapidly being overtaken by the rageful sexual deviant in him, as he repeatedly acted out his murderous fantasies.
In the years since the book was published, I’ve worked on knowing and accepting the totality of Ted. It’s been harder than hell. In the beginning, if I let my guard down for a minute, I’d recall the Ted who I thought I loved and had fun with. My mind could run with that endlessly—he was smart, he made me laugh, our chemistry was good, and on and on. I would have to go through the brutal litany of facts about what he did to remember the truth.
A few of the horrendous facts include: He abducted and killed two women in one day and then took me out to dinner that evening. He raped and murdered women and then slept with me. He took my visiting family out for a fun evening of pizza. He then excused himself, went to a bar in South Seattle, found a young woman, and murdered her. The next day he was his charming self at a family event. One day when he was driving to Utah to go to law school, he called from Nampa, Idaho, to tell me he loved me. I learned later that he abducted a young woman that day and murdered her. He caused so much heartbreak and worry for the families and friends of women who went missing without a trace, and he didn’t care. For those who knew their loved one was murdered, he left them trying not to think about last moments. As I write this, the facts are so unspeakably awful; I don’t know why it took me so long to accept the truth, but it did.
Now is a good time to clarify something. When I say it was harder than hell for me to face the facts, I know that my version of “hard” is nothing compared to how hard it must be for those who have had to grieve the loss of someone they love, someone who is no longer alive because of Ted Bundy. I am grateful that my daughter and I survived him. It is a gift to be able to make mistakes, find solutions, and move forward in life—a gift not to be wasted.
This is my chance to write a more clear-eyed version of the statements that I wrote so many years ago. “The tragedy is that this warm and loving man is driven to kill” should read, “The tragedy is that this violent and manipulative man directed his murderous rage at innocent young women to satisfy his insane urges.” And now that he is dead, I would add, “Compounding the tragedy, he only told the truth—and then only partly—when he thought it was a bargaining chip to prolong his life.” In my rewrite, the sentence “I have come to accept that a part of me will always love a part of him” would need to be completely deleted. Period.
The Phantom Prince seemed a perfect title for my book. I thought I had found my prince, especially in the first few years we were together. I was so enthralled and happy with my handsome Ted that I was willing to toss my own values aside and accept that he lied sometimes, and he stole a few things. There were so many things about him that were perfect in my eyes that I was blindly in love. But, of course, he wasn’t who I imagined him to be. Ted, himself, summed it up when he wrote a poem for me while in prison. He described combing back my hair, moving his hands on my back, and his lips caressing my ear—all the things I once loved.
The last verse included these lines, which still haunt me:
when we moved together loving,
did we need the world’s permission?
when we later lay unmoving
had you loved
an apparition?
My answer: yes, most definitely.
The day Ted was executed was an emotionally blank day for me. By the time I woke up in Seattle at eight o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, January 24, 1989, Ted was already dead in Florida. The electric chair had done its grisly job of killing a gruesome man. I don’t remember anything I did that day. I’ve never believed in capital punishment, but I hoped Ted’s death brought closure to the people who loved the women he killed and to those women who survived.
There had been other execution dates set in the ten years since Ted was sentenced to death for murdering Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy as they slept in their sorority house, and twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach, who was the same age as Molly was at the time.
Ted and I had very little contact after his middle-of-the-night phone call in February 1978, right after he was arrested in Florida. In that call, he confessed without being specific about his acts. He told me he was sick and there was a force in him that he couldn’t control. He said he was going to confess the things he had done and the people he had hurt. When he didn’t, I was mad. He started proclaiming his innocence in the media again. I knew the truth and was disgusted. Nevertheless, in 1986, when it seemed his execution was imminent, I felt compelled to write him a goodbye note, in which I briefly told him the reasons I fell in love with him when we first met. Just hours before his execution, the US Court of Appeals issued a stay. He lived another few years, but I never contacted him again.
One of the questions I am asked often is whether I think Ted loved me and Molly. Yes, I do. But who knows? I know I loved him, at least the part that he showed to me. It has been suggested that he needed a normal-looking life to hide his dark side, and that this was what we were to him. That could be true, too. We will never know.
Another thing that people want to know is how I could stay in the relationship after having my doubts and contacting law enforcement. The answer is that I was an emotional mess, I thought and hoped I was wrong, and I loved him. This choice has been hard for me to comprehend and accept, so I understand why people find it strange.
I do know the decisions I made allowed my daughter and me to survive Ted Bundy. A couple of years ago, I started wondering what would have happened if I had rejected Ted when he showed up at my Seattle door after he was bailed out of jail in Salt Lake City. My counselor at the time had recommended I stop interacting with Ted and the detectives, so I could focus on myself and my daughter. I had already told Detective McChesney I could not help law enforcement any longer. If I had told Ted to go away and leave us alone that day, would he have accepted that? Or would it trigger the explosive rage that we now know was in him?
REBUILDING MY LIFE
After Ted’s conviction in Utah for attempted kidnapping in 1976, I contemplated moving. There were too many reminders in Seattle of my life with Ted. The only other place I wanted to live was Utah, to be close to my family. The stigma of being Ted’s girlfriend would be just as bad there.
My job at the university was gratifying, and I liked and appreciated the men I worked with. I had started there as a secretary, the only woman in a small department with a dozen guys. When the department started growing rapidly, I took on more responsibilities and was promoted. I found it comforting that my coworkers had been there from the beginning of my relationship with Ted. Since he hung out at my office a lot and went to work functions with me, my coworkers knew that the man I fell in love with was different from the guy who was all over the news. They were supportive when everything blew up. This stability, when I felt like I was falling apart, was something I sorely needed. Much later, I learned they all thought Ted was guilty as hell and wished I would come to my senses.
Another reason I didn’t want to move was that I was seriously depressed, and making a decision requiring action of any type was completely overwhelming. You would know from reading the original text that I was bottoming out in my alcoholism and that I started a sobriety program a month and a half after the Utah conviction. The thought of starting over with recovery work in a new city was exhausting. Thankfully I am still sober decades later.
By the time The Phantom Prince was published, I had already married and divorced Hank. The only good thing I can say about the marriage is that having a husband helped me not get sucked back into the quagmire of my past. I could tell Ted not to call me again because my husband wouldn’t like it. And when the Florida prosecutors wanted to meet with me, I could say it had to be at a time when my husband could be there.
I have been in and out of relationships since Hank, but with my trust and intimacy issues, it wasn’t much fun. I tried to change and grow, but I decided that in the long
run I would be happier as a single woman. I have many women friends, and those deep relationships mean the world to me. And I can’t overstate the healing power of the animals in my life, especially my beloved cats, who bring much love and comfort to me every day.
As I rebuilt my life, I found that volunteering my time was helpful in addressing my feelings of failure because of my involvement with Ted Bundy. I held sick babies at a local hospital, did cat care for a rescue group, worked for the environment, helped seniors go grocery shopping and to appointments, and so on.
The number one thing that has allowed me to find peace after the catastrophe of Ted Bundy is my spiritual life. The church I grew up in forbade drinking alcohol, and I carried a lot of guilt during my periodic spurts of attendance as an adult. Once I quit drinking, I tried going again to see whether it was now a better fit. It wasn’t. I then found a church that did feed my spiritual side and it dovetailed nicely with my recovery program. Between the two, I learned much about living life on life’s terms.
As you’d know from reading The Phantom Prince, sound thinking was not my strong suit. The tools I’ve gained in my recovery have given me a new way of thinking and viewing life each day. And I’ve finally learned that no amount of intense, repetitive thinking is ever going to change the past. I’ve learned what “let it go” means.
I don’t have an earthly explanation for what occurred starting that day in July 1974, when my coworker handed me the newspaper composite of the man suspected of a string of abductions. Earlier that day, I had read a different newspaper with a different composite sketch. I studied it closely, but it didn’t look like anyone I knew. When I looked at the drawing handed to me, I saw that it did look slightly like my Ted. I immediately felt as if an unbearable weight had fallen on me.
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