FSU Chi Omega Murders

Case background and investigation

In the early hours of Sunday, January 15, 1978, an intruder entered the Chi Omega sorority house near the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee. According to a Rolling Stone account based on interviews with survivor Kathy Kleiner, the man came in through a back door with a broken combination lock at about 2:45 a.m., carrying a piece of firewood he had picked up outside.

Margaret Bowman, 21, was beaten and strangled in her bed. Lisa Levy, 20, was beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled in a room across the hall; the Seattle Times reported that she died on the way to the hospital. The attacker then entered the room shared by Kleiner and Karen Chandler and struck both women with the club. Both suffered broken jaws and other serious injuries but survived. Kleiner has said the attack stopped when headlights from a car outside lit up the room.

Those headlights belonged to the car bringing sorority member Nita Neary home from a date. She saw a man leaving the house and later gave the only eyewitness identification at trial. Shortly afterward, several blocks away, FSU student Cheryl Thomas was attacked in her apartment. ABC News reported that her neighbors heard noises, telephoned her and then called police; the attacker fled and Thomas survived with severe injuries.

Ted Bundy, who had escaped from a Colorado jail on December 30, 1977, had rented a room near the campus earlier in January. On February 9 he abducted and killed 12-year-old Kimberly Leach in Lake City. A Pensacola police officer arrested him on February 15, 1978, after stopping a stolen car. He was indicted in July 1978 for the Chi Omega murders and the three attempted murders.

According to ABC News, Bundy rejected a plea agreement in May 1979 that would have spared him the death penalty. At the trial, which was televised nationally, forensic dentists testified that bite marks on Levy's body matched casts of Bundy's teeth. On July 24, 1979, the jury found him guilty of both murders and of the attempted murders of Kleiner, Chandler and Thomas, and he was sentenced to death about a week later.

A second jury convicted Bundy of the Leach murder in February 1980, and he received a third death sentence. After years of appeals, he was executed at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. The Los Angeles Times noted that the execution was technically carried out for the Leach murder, while he remained under sentence of death for the Chi Omega killings.