Inside Ted Bundy’s twisted romance with girlfriend he forced into bondage and who turned him into police after finding bowl of his victims’ knickers
HE pressured her to try kinky sex moves, frequently disappeared in the middle of the night… and even tried kill her as she slept by lighting a fire and blocking her chimney.
But Elizabeth Kloepfer was still infatuated with boyfriend Ted Bundy – until she found a meat cleaver under the seat of his car and a bowl of knickers in his flat.
He went on to be convicted of 36 murders – making him one of the worst serial killers of all time.
In the new biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Zac Efron and Lily Collins play the couple, who met in a Seattle bar in 1969 when Elizabeth was a 24 year-old divorced single mother.
They embarked on a six-year relationship which spanned much of Bundy’s killing spree.
While she said the pair enjoyed a ‘tender sex life’, Ted was secretly sneaking out and murdering women by bludgeoning them to death in the middle of the night, before sodomising their corpses.
‘He locked me outside in the cold’
In her 1981 memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, which she wrote under the pseudonym Liz Kendall, Elizabeth admits her relationship with the killer was toxic and abusive.
“I handed Ted my life and said, ‘Here. Take care of me.'” she wrote. “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.”
The couple came across as outwardly normal, meeting each other’s parents and friends with Bundy playing the perfect father-figure to Kloepfer’s young daughter, Tina.
“Talking and eating and taking care of Tina and sleeping together all flowed along so effortlessly that we had become a family,” wrote Kloepfer in her memoir.
But beneath the veneer of normality, the relationship took a sinister turn.
“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,” Kloepfer explained.
“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.”
‘He dated other women when we were together’
Bundy would also blatantly taunt Elizabeth by going on dates with different women.
Despite this emotional game playing, she said their sex life remained loving throughout.
While Bundy was secretly bludgeoning and garroting his victims until they were unconscious before mutilating, raping, killing and sodomising them, Elizabeth claimed they had a great sex life which, on the whole, was gentle and tender.
In her book she wrote: “Over the years our sex life had been a strong bond between us, our desire rising and falling in cycles, but always tender and gratifying for me, and I know why – I loved him with all my heart.”
‘He tried to kill me as I slept’
Unbeknown to Elizabeth, Bundy tried to murder her one night.
Elizabeth woke up after being choked by smoke fumes – Bundy later admitted he had closed the chimney flue and put a towel under her door so the smoke couldn’t escape while she was sleeping.
Elizabeth, who only survived by opening a window for air, thought it was just an accident but she claimed in her book that, years later, Bundy told her he did it and, “he wanted me to die that night.”
She found a meat cleaver in his car
During their time together, Bundy would often disappear which would leave Elizabeth feeling insecure about their relationship – and also aroused her suspicions.
“Ted went out a lot in the middle of the night. And I didn’t know where he went,” she said.
“Then he napped during the day. And I found things, things I couldn’t understand.”
These things included a meat cleaver which Elizabeth discovered when she reached under the passenger seat of his tan VW Beetle one day to retrieve one of Tina’s stray socks.
Another time, she recalled seeing crutches in the bedroom, which Bundy explained belonged to his elderly landlord that he’d offered to return to the rental agency as a favour.
When eyewitness accounts to Georgeann Hawkins’s disappearance in August 1974 revealed she was last seen helping a man on crutches, Elizabeth felt a nagging suspicion that Bundy was involved.
There were other ‘coincidences’ too. A series of murders reported in the papers in 1974 lined up with Bundy’s absences, and a co-worker showed Elizabeth the police sketch of the primary suspect that looked remarkably similar to her Ted.
Eyewitnesses had also pinpointed the suspect’s vehicle – a bronze-metallic Volkswagen Beetle, the exact make and colour of Bundy’s car. Unable to ignore her suspicions any longer, Elizabeth went to the police.
‘I found a bowl of women’s knickers’
She told them how Bundy had a tendency to stalk women, and how she had discovered a bowl of women’s knickers at his apartment and the knife in his car.
She also revealed to Detective Hergesheimer, who was working on the case, that while they’d never had anal sex, Bundy had talked about it a lot to her in the previous year.
This was significant because the murder victims were anally raped.
He’d also brought home a book called ‘The Joy of Sex’, and after reading it Ted sheepishly asked her if she would try bondage.
Despite Elizabeth’s evidence, the police didn’t have enough to convict Bundy at the time and, unbelievably, despite all her suspicions, she stayed with him.
“There were questions we didn’t ask each other by unspoken agreement. He didn’t ask me why or what I told the police and I didn’t ask him about his connection to the crimes,” she later wrote.
‘He told me he was sick’
Bundy was finally arrested in 1975 and locked up for the aggravated kidnapping of Carol DaRonch. During the trial and his time in prison, Elizabeth’s loyalty to Bundy continued.
She wrote letters to him while in prison and visited him twice at Utah state penitentiary, much to her friends and family’s disgust.
Bundy wrote to her of his intention to escape and he succeeded in 1977, escaping the Garfield County Jail through a suspended ceiling panel – but he was arrested for the final time in 1978.
At this point, Bundy told police he would only reveal his identity in return for a phone call to Elizabeth in which he told her he was sick and, “consumed by something that he didn’t understand.”
Finally, the full extent of his heinous crimes were becoming clear and Kloepfer realised their relationship was over.
‘All victims looked like me’
Bundy confessed to 36 murders – some estimate that the total is closer to 100 – and he was sentenced to death and executed on January 24th 1989.
Confronted by pictures of his victims, Elizabeth was horrified by how much they all looked like her – slim young women with long dark hair parted down the middle.
Shocked that she’d been with a man that had murdered and brutalised so many women, Kloepfer struggled with alcoholism.
In her book, she wrote: “I pray for Ted, but I am sickened by him,” she said. “The tragedy is that this warm and loving man is driven to kill.”
Kloepfer eventually got sober and for the last 30 years has lived a private life, knowing she is lucky to have survived.
In the preface to her book, she wrote: “Never did I forget that real women had been murdered for no other reason than they were attractive and friendly. The hideous reality of their deaths became my reality, too.
“Their tragedy was my trauma…I am thankful to have survived, thankful for the chance to work my problems through, thankful for the resiliency God gives humans.”
Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile will be in cinemas from Friday May 3, 2019.