Ted Bundy Washington Victims

Case background and investigation

During the first half of 1974, young women began disappearing in western Washington at a rate of roughly one a month. According to an ABC News timeline of the case, the first was Lynda Ann Healy, 21, a University of Washington student who was taken from her basement room in Seattle's University District on February 1. A few weeks earlier, on January 4, an 18-year-old student had been bludgeoned in her bed in the same neighborhood; she survived with lasting injuries.

The disappearances that followed were spread across the region. Donna Gail Manson, 19, vanished from the Evergreen State College campus in Olympia on March 12. Susan Elaine Rancourt, 18, disappeared from the Central Washington campus in Ellensburg on April 17. Roberta Kathleen Parks, 20, was last seen at Oregon State University in Corvallis on May 6. Brenda Carol Ball, 22, was last seen in Burien on June 1, and Georgann Hawkins, 18, disappeared from an alley behind her Seattle sorority house on June 11.

On July 14, 1974, Janice Ann Ott, 23, and Denise Marie Naslund, 19, vanished hours apart from a crowded Lake Sammamish State Park. Witnesses told police about a man with his arm in a sling who introduced himself as "Ted" and asked women to help him with a sailboat, ABC News reported. In September 1974 the remains of Ott and Naslund were found on a hillside near Issaquah. Additional bones found there were later said by Bundy to be those of Hawkins, according to Wikipedia's summary of the investigation.

In March 1975, skulls and jawbones belonging to Healy, Rancourt, Parks and Ball were found on Taylor Mountain, east of Issaquah. The remains showed severe blunt force injuries. Manson's remains have never been recovered.

Bundy had moved to Utah in the late summer of 1974 and was arrested there in August 1975. He was convicted in Utah of aggravated kidnapping in 1976, escaped twice from custody in Colorado in 1977, and was arrested for the last time in Pensacola, Florida, in February 1978. Florida juries convicted him of three murders in 1979 and 1980. As the Los Angeles Times noted when he was executed, those three Florida murders were his only murder convictions, although he had long been blamed for killings in Washington, Oregon, Utah and Colorado.

In the days before his execution, Bundy gave detailed confessions to investigators from several states, including King County detective Robert Keppel. ABC News reported that he told an FBI agent he had killed 30 people in seven states between 1973 and 1978. He was executed in Florida's electric chair on January 24, 1989. Because no Washington charges were ever tried, the cases are considered resolved on the basis of his confessions and the physical evidence rather than by a verdict.