The Survivor

Ted Bundy killed more than 30 women across America during the 1970’s seventies. Kathy Kleiner was one of the few that got away.

A little trunk full of books probably saved Kathy Kleiner’s life. 

It lay between the twin beds in room eight of the Chi Omega sorority house on the campus of Florida State University that she shared with her friend, Karen Chandler. A lamp sat awkwardly on top of it, alongside her glasses that she could barely see without. She’d taken them off around 10.30pm when the pair, tired from a day celebrating a friend’s wedding had decided to turn in. As always they’d left the windows open and the curtains pulled back. Kleiner loved how the sunlight would illuminate the room in the early mornings and the noise the wind would make as it blew between the plants that hung from the curtain rail. 

Some four and a half hours later, at around 3am their door clicked open and a man entered, leaving behind him the carnage he’d already wrought down the corridor in rooms four and nine: Lisa Levy in four was a freshman from St Petersburg majoring in fashion merchandising. She would be the first to die: beaten, raped, strangled and repeatedly bitten before being sexually assaulted with a hairspray bottle. Margaret Bowman in nine was 21 and studying art history. Her skull was crushed by a piece of wood. She was then strangled by a pair of tights. Neither girl awoke during the attack. 

But Kleiner, oblivious to what had taken place outside, did wake up. And she did so because the man, wanted in more than five states for kidnapping and multiple murder charges, and who’d already escaped from custody twice, had fallen over that little trunk of books. 

In the darkness she can’t ‘see’ him but she can sense him, this black mass above her. What she does see is the tree limb in the air milliseconds before it smashes into her face repeatedly, breaking her jaw in three places, knocking her out and ripping a hole in her cheek so wide that the skin folds back almost to her ear. Minutes later when she comes round Kleiner can see a different scene. Room number eight is now light and she’s staring not at the man who hit her but at sorority president Jackie McGill. She sits up in bed and crosses her legs as McGill tries to get her to talk. But all she can do is rock back and forth as blood pours from her cheek and mouth. She tries to call for her parents, but the sound is muffled and indistinguishable because her tongue has been severed almost in two. Her own blood drips down on her from the ceiling and the walls, and several of her teeth lay in the red-soaked bedclothes. McGill, who was the first person into the room after the attack assumes Kleiner is dying. 

But she’s very much alive. And although she doesn’t know it, she’s one of only a small handful of women to live through an attack by one of America’s most notorious serial killers, Ted Bundy.

It’s January 15^th, 1978. On this night, Kathy Kleiner is a survivor. 

Kleiner was born in 1957 in Miami to Rosemary and Jackson, and she especially doted on her father, often sitting on his lap to play Chinese checkers with him as he smoked his cigars. But when she was five he suffered three massive heart attacks and died, leaving her little world empty. “It was a confusing time,” she says, her voice away in the middle-distance. 

“I'd sit at the window and look for him and ask my momma when he was coming home,” she says. Two years later her mother remarried a German man who took Kathy and her elder siblings under his sizeable wing - he was 6’3, her mother only 5’2 - and helped her pick up the pieces that were left behind after Jackson’s death. Then, aged thirteen Kleiner was diagnosed with Systemic Lupus Erythematous, a long-term condition causing inflammation to the joints, skin and other organs for which there is no cure. She was given experimental chemotherapy and hospitalised for three months. She lost her hair and was bed bound and home schooled for a year. Doctors enforced strict rules: no sport, no sun and no future children. 

“It was a tough time. We were living in Fort Lauderdale and my parents worked in north Miami which was about two hours away, so I was alone at home for much of the day”, she tells me. “I’d look outside and see kids playing and long to be out there with them. I was so bored. I used to dial 0 for the operator and ask him to talk to me. I’d explain who I was and sometimes I’d get a really good one and he’d chit-chat to me for a while.”

By the summer of 1976 she’d recovered enough to enrol at Florida State University to study interior design, choosing Tallahassee because it was as far away as she could get from her mother - who’d wrapped her up in cotton wool after her illness - but still get state tuition fees. 

Whilst Kleiner was moving into her all-girls dormitory ahead of her freshman year, Ted Bundy was in prison three quarters of the way across country. In March of that year he’d been convicted of the aggravated kidnapping of a young woman named Carol DaRonch at a shopping mall near Salt Lake City, Utah. It was the first time he’d ever been in trouble with the police. No-one knew then that he’d already murdered thirteen women in Washington, Oregon, Utah, Idaho and Colorado.

Born Theodore Robert Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Vermont, he was raised largely by his grandparents who were ashamed of their daughter’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and for much of his childhood he believed his mother to be his sister. Bundy would describe himself as a loner, without the natural sense of how to develop friendships. “I didn't know what made people want to be friends,” he said in an interview. “I didn't know what underlaid social interactions.” For all that he harboured aspirations to become the governor of Washington State. He studied Chinese and then law and was so well thought of in the community that he became assistant director of Seattle’s Crime Prevention Advisory Commission in the same year he started killing. 

Whilst in office he wrote a rape‐prevention pamphlet for local women.

Despite his natural shyness Bundy was charming. And handsome. When he’d stepped into the courtroom in Utah to face trial for the attempted kidnapping it was difficult for people to countenance that this young man could be guilty of anything. He was the archetypal blue eyed All-American boy, dressed in turtlenecks and smart blazers. The New York Times described him as ‘Kennedyesque’. He carried himself with confidence and exchanged jokes with local newsmen. He was cool, engaging, relaxed. Just two years earlier he’d been known in his home town of Seattle as ‘Mr Up-and-Coming Republican’. He barely looked capable of a parking ticket. 

His first victim had been Lynda Ann Healy, a 21‐year‐old University of Washington student who worked part-time doing weather reports for a local radio station. She vanished from her rented room next to the campus in January 1974. Thirteen months later, forestry students walking in the countryside near the base of Mount Taylor, a little over twenty-five miles east of the city, found a shallow grave. In it was Healy’s jawbone along with the remains of three other young women: Susan Rancourt (who disappeared after attending a meeting at Central Washington University), Roberta Parks (who vanished from Oregon State University), and Brenda Ball (who went missing after leaving the Flame Tavern in the Burien area of Seattle). This discovery came a few months after two grouse hunters stumbled across the remains of three more bodies ten or so miles away along I-90: Georgann Hawkins (abducted from an alley behind her house), Janice Ott (who disappeared from Lake Sammamish State Park in broad daylight), and Denise Naslund (who went missing four hours later from the same park). 

Bundy killed four more times after Healy in 1974: 16-year-old Nancy Wilcox, and three seventeen-year olds - Melissa Anne Smith, Laura Ann Aime and Debra Jean Kent - yet he was able not only to evade capture, but to seemingly leave little or no trace evidence. The police, who rarely shared information across state lines, had very few leads. 

And when Bundy left Washington for Oregon, Oregon for Utah, Utah for Idaho and Idaho for Colorado it was as if he’d turned over a series of new pages, safe in the knowledge that his past was unlikely to ever catch up with him. 

To all intents and purposes he was a ghost. 

At that time the name ‘Ted Bundy’ meant nothing to Kathy Kleiner who was enjoying her first year at Florida State. She’d not heard of the ‘Ted Murders’ as they’d come to be known on the West Coast - a reference to witness statements about a stranger who’d approached women in a Volkswagen Beetle calling himself ‘Ted’. She didn’t see the news when he was sentenced to serve 15 years in Utah State Prison for trying to kidnap DaRonch. Or when he jumped out of the window of the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen and disappeared into the mountains for six days after being charged with the murder of 23-year old Caryn Campbell who’d disappeared somewhere along a well-lit hallway between the lift and her hotel room after a meal with her fiancé and his two children. Her nude body was found a month later in a snowbank three miles down the mountain. She’d been beaten to death. 

And Kleiner didn’t hear the news in late 1977 that he’d escaped again, this time from prison in Colorado Springs after climbing through the ceiling of his cell and into the apartment of the chief jailer, stealing clothes from the closet and casually walking out the door to kill once more, this time in Tallahassee. 

It was now just sixteen days before Kathy Kleiner’s life would change forever. 

As a sophomore she’d joined Chi Omega, the world’s largest fraternal organisation after a recommendation from a high school friend. She also moved out of her women’s-only dorm and into the impressive two storey sorority house at 661 West Jefferson Street, across the road from the University, and much to her mothers’ joy. Ironically, Rosemary Kleiner believed it to be a much safer proposition for the daughter she constantly fretted over. “It was such a sight to behold, so beautiful” says Kathy of the building. “It had these majestic pillars at the front with two double doors. It was grand and pretty and very southern in its look. When you walked inside the first thing you saw was this wonderful winding staircase that dominated the hall. There was a social living room where we’d sit and entertain, a recreation room with sofas and televisions where you could walk round with your pyjamas on, and beyond that a kitchen where we had a cook who did all our meals. At the top of the stairs was a bathroom and then down each side of the corridor, a row of bedrooms, maybe eight on each side.” Kleiner and Chandler’s room was halfway down. It was small but homely: two twin beds ran parallel to one another, each with a dresser and a small desk. 

And between the beds lay the trunk. 

“The trunk……...” 

Kleiner’s voice fades away as she thinks of its significance in her story. “I really can’t remember if it was Karen’s or mine or where it had come from. It was a sort of dark green, full of our books and we’d store things on it, plants, lamps, and the like,” she says. “But it fitted the room nicely. I remember that my momma and I had been shopping before Christmas and we’d bought a new bedspread and new pillowcases and pyjamas and it all looked so pretty.” Again, her voice falters just a little, the reality of what comes next suddenly washing over her like the tide. 

It was warm and muggy in Tallahassee on the night everything changed. Kleiner remembers that winter thunderstorms were approaching the Florida panhandle. They were part of the reason why she and Chandler left the wedding early. Across town, Ted Bundy was people watching at a bar called Sherrods which was next door to Chi Omega. Later in court, one of the girls who’d been there that night told the jury that he’d “stood out” because his behaviour was “unusual”. She also testified that he’d caught her eye several times, unnerving her. 

“It was a stare that kinda bothered me,” she recalled. “I felt very uncomfortable with it.” Bundy left the bar and wandered around, stopping two men on the street opposite the sorority house to ask for directions to the nearest Holiday Inn. 

He never made it to the hotel. 

When the paramedics get to Kathy Kleiner they tell her that the damage to her face is so bad that they assume she’s been shot. She’s in extreme pain, but more than anything she’s confused. Confused by why she’s there, by what’s happened to her and why she can’t say the words that are forming in her head. 

Confused as to why there’s so much blood on her new bedspread. 

“I was laying on my left side facing him when he fell over the trunk and woke me” Kleiner says. “I just saw his dark outline and then the piece of wood slammed down into my face. I know it sounds strange, but it didn’t hurt to begin with. It just felt like a thud, like a pressure on me rather than anything else. At that point I groaned or screamed, and he turned and saw Karen start to wake and so he attacked her too before turning back to finish me off. And then he really hurt me.” Bundy hit her shoulder first, wounding it deeply before hitting her so hard in the face that shards of wood remained in her skin and inside her mouth until long after she reached the hospital. “He was out of control at this point,” she remembers. “And the funny thing is, I think he was in control when he went into Lisa’s room to kill her.”

“How do you mean,” I ask, confused that a serial killer would ever be ‘in control’.

“I don’t know,” she replies softly. “Just that I feel like he knew what he was doing, that he didn’t have to kidnap anyone, he could just do what he came for. But then when he went across the hall to Margaret, the adrenaline was really flowing, and he was kinda getting out of control and he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t. And by the time he got to our room he was in a complete frenzy.” Bundy would have almost certainly killed Kleiner and Chandler were it not for the trunk of books and for a car that pulled into the car park behind the apartment, its lights illuminating the room and causing him to first pause, and then flee. 

Kleiner spent the first days after the attack in hospital under armed guard, her jaw wired shut as Bundy remained free. Only her immediate family were able to visit as police didn’t want anyone contaminating her fractured memories of that night. The authorities also decided not to tell her that both Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman were dead in case it affected her recall. It was only after she was asked to go back to Chi Omega to ascertain if anything was missing from her room that she began to piece together what had happened to her friends. “There was police tape everywhere,” says Kleiner of her arrival back at 661 West Jefferson. “And I was so frightened to go inside. When I got to the top of the stairs and there was police tape outside the girls’ rooms I started to think about what might have happened, who else had been hurt. At the door of our room I had to duck under the tape and then it hit me. It was devastating to see the actual scene. There was blood all over my walls and ceiling. All my new stuff, my bedspread…...it looked like someone had taken a red paintbrush and splashed it everywhere.” He voice tails off somewhere, back deep in 1978. 

I ask Kleiner what she sees when she closes her eyes and thinks of that room. To this point our conversation has been so remarkably upbeat that I’m expecting to hear about the pretty space she shared with Chandler. Perhaps the plants on the sills, or the way the curtains caught the wind, floating like voile butterflies. Yet despite everything, despite knowing the ferocity of what took place there, I’m caught unawares by the power of her answer. “All I see is blood,” she says. “Blood everywhere.” Again her voice breaks a little and she pauses. “I don’t see the happiness in there. I see the sadness. It’s there. It is. That’s what I see.”

Ted Bundy was arrested in Pensacola a month after the attack, but not before he’d killed again: 12-year old Kimberley Leach was abducted from a school in Lake City, more than a hundred miles south west of the Chi Omega house, her partially mummified remains discovered in a pig shed in a wooded area behind Suwannee River State Park. But this time there was no getting away, no escape. He was arrested near the Alabama state line after police pulled over his stolen car. Inside was a television set, 21 stolen credit cards and three sets of IDs belonging to female Florida State students. 

He was put on trial first for the attack in Tallahassee, then for the murder of Leach and found guilty on both counts before being sentenced to death plus 196 years. Kathy Kleiner helped put him away by taking to the witness stand and giving evidence. “I wasn’t scared of him,” she says as she recalls her time in court. He sat there just a few feet away and looked at me, and by God I looked right back at him. Every time I answered I looked straight at him. I stared him down. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of me looking away. I didn’t hate him, I was just disgusted by him, just sick to my stomach. But I was not going to look away.”

“Was he how you imagined he’d look,” I ask. 

She pauses. The line crackles a little. For a second I think the connection has dropped off. Then Kleiner says gently, “He didn't look like a serial killer. He just looked normal.”

Forty-five years have passed since that night in room eight. Thirty-four since Bundy was electrocuted at Florida State Prison on the morning of January 24th, 1989 and Kleiner cried and cried like she’d never cried before or since, releasing the demons that had festered inside her for more than a decade. Then, once she’d composed herself, she turned to her husband and asked to go to breakfast so she could start her life over. “That night defined me because I’m stronger now than I ever was,” she says. “I was attacked and in a horrible place physically and mentally, but I didn’t want to stay in a little box that was scared of the world. It was very important for me to keep going. I kept a beautiful scene in my head of a beach in the Florida Keys and each time I took a step away from him I’d mentally go there and place another foot in the sand. It enabled me to compartmentalise the things I saw. To put them away.” 

As we wrap up the interview and begin to say our goodbyes, I thank Kleiner for her time. She’s generous and giving and incredibly strong. I tell her I’d have been on the floor if I’d have lived though half of what she has, and she laughs and then there’s a silence between us. 

“You know what, one more thing Simon,” she says, suddenly filling the dead air. 

“What’s that Kathy?” I ask.

“We have a little library in our house and I have part of a shelf-full of Bundy books. I didn’t want him to have a hold on me for the rest of my life. If I was to truly survive all this, I had to learn everything I could about him. And by not running away it’s helped me to heal.” Her voice finally breaks and she’s fighting back the tears that haven’t come at any point in the eighty-five minutes that we’ve talked. “I wanted to let people know what happened to me, not hide away. I’d speak to people on the street and say ‘Hey, I’ve got a story for you’. Talking to you has brought some of that emotion back, but I faced it down like I’ve always done. That’s how I healed. 

That’s how I survived.”