Original subtitles

♪♪

Being in prison,

going through a kind of hell, matures a person,

and I think it's done good things for me.

My only misgiving is that I might never be

in a position to apply it,

you know, on the streets where I'd like to apply it.

♪♪

♪♪

Welcome to "How it Really Happened."

I'm Hill Harper.

In the early 1970s, terror gripped the United States

when young women began disappearing.

They were later found murdered,

brutally beaten, and sexually assaulted.

The main suspect in the crime seemed an unlikely one --

a handsome, charming law student named Ted Bundy.

When he was taken into custody on kidnapping charges,

authorities and the public breathed

a collective sigh of relief.

But this was not the end of the Bundy story, not even close.

Here's how it really happened.

Reporter: From Washington State to Oregon to Utah,

police have discovered a pattern of rape-murders.

McChesney: Women started going missing,

their bodies found much later time

on deserted roads, in the forest.

Reporter: Lynda Ann Healy, Denise Naslund, Janice Ann Ott,

Georgann Hawkins and 18-year-old Susan Rancourt.

We were both sobbing, and I said to my husband,

"I'll never see her again."

McChesney: And we didn't have evidence.

We didn't have clues.

Lake Sammamish would change everything.

Meixner: This guy came up, and he was kind of tall,

very tanned, very good-looking,

and he said, "Hi. I'm Ted."

So that's the first time we had a name.

And they knew this person drove a Volkswagen.

Chino: The newspaper put the composite out,

and my friend -- she threw the picture on the table

and she said to me, "Who is -- who do you think that is?"

I said, "Well, it's Ted. Why?"

And then she burst into tears

because that looked a lot like her boyfriend, Ted Bundy.

Reporter: Theodore Robert Bundy at age 25 --

a Republican campaign worker in Seattle;

at 28 -- a University of Utah law student.

He didn't look like a murderer. He was nice-looking.

He was educated.

If he was in this room right now,

you would feel very comfortable, very comfortable with him.

He just didn't present any type of a threatening persona to you,

and that was his strength.

It was that deception.

Reporter: In a Salt Lake City trial,

Bundy was convicted of trying to kidnap Carol DaRonch

from a shopping center in Murray.

She managed to escape from his Volkswagen

and testified against him at the trial.

All throughout this, Ted was saying, "I'm innocent."

I'm no fool.

I don't like being locked up, and I don't think any man does.

It was in Utah

where Bundy was pulled out of the shadows.

As each day went on,

there was more information that came in about Ted.

Reporter: Eyewitness reports fitted with Bundy's description.

There was also physical evidence in Bundy's car

strong enough for Bundy to become the prime suspect

in the baffling series of crimes.

Because of the notoriety he got nationally,

all these various states started connecting the dots together,

and Bundy was there.

Reporter: Investigators in Vail, Grand Junction, and Aspen

have open murder cases that they believe Ted Bundy can solve.

For instance, 26-year-old Julie Cunningham,

a Vail ski instructor, disappeared in March of 1975.

Police have a credit-card receipt that tells them

Ted Bundy bought gas in that area on that same day.

Denise Oliverson disappeared from Grand Juction

in April of 1975.

Police can also prove that Ted Bundy

was in that area at that time.

In 1976, Ted Bundy was extradited from Utah to Colorado

to face charges, for the very first time,

of first-degree murder.

The victim was Caryn Campbell.

She was a nurse on vacation with her fiancé and his children.

She was last seen getting onto a crowded elevator in her hotel.

And they know that she got off on her floor,

but she never made it to her room.

Theodore Bundy is in Colorado tonight,

where he will stand trial for first-degree murder.

It was thought Bundy would fight extradition,

but this morning he told a Utah judge

he was ready to go to Colorado.

Jordan: Ted Bundy once again decided to act in his own defense,

and the freedom this gave him played right into his plan.

I get to go to the library. [ Laughs ]

It's a 50-yard walk from here

across the parking lot to the library.

That's my fresh air.

My class is graduating in about a month from law school.

I'll bet you I know more about law than any of them.

There was already a trial going on there.

Jordan: It was one of the first celebrity trials of its kind.

The French actress Claudine Longet

was charged with shooting her boyfriend,

the world-champion skier Spider Sabich, to death,

and the circus atmosphere

provided a wonderful distraction for Ted Bundy.

He was looking for avenues of escape.

Do you ever feel like you'd like to escape?

[ Laughs ]

I've dreamed about flying over those fences.

I've dreamed about climbing over those fences

and tunneling under those fences.

With every other man in there, I've dreamed about being free.

Sullivan: Because he was acting as his own attorney,

he was given access to the library,

which is on the second floor.

They used to keep that window open,

nice, fresh air coming in.

Guards started trusting him.

Even after he was associated with all these crimes,

and even after he'd been convicted in the DaRonch case,

charm was his first default mode.

Jordan: Ted Bundy petitioned and won a motion

that he wanted to be unshackled in court.

So in June 7th, 1977, Ted Bundy went to court

and was allowed to be unshackled

and go to the law library during a recess.

It was there that he escaped.

A woman walked into the courthouse, and she said,

"is it common for people to jump out

the second-floor window of the courthouse?"

He was charismatic, and they trusted him.

They let him go in the library,

and he jumped out of the building.

Reporter: Bundy was alone inside

when he decided to open that window

and jump the 25 feet to the ground.

In fact, you can still see the indentations

in the grass here where he landed.

Took off and got into the wilds of Colorado.

We covered the escape after the fact.

Packer: Roadblocks were set up within 15 minutes of Bundy's escape,

and 150 men and 5 bloodhounds combed the canyons around Aspen.

So far, these roadblocks have turned up no sign of Ted Bundy.

They didn't take security all that seriously,

and Bundy was, by all accounts, really smart, very clever.

He wandered around, lost a lot of weight,

was confused,

ended up coming back into Aspen and stole a car.

A couple patrol officers saw what they thought

was a drunk driver.

And they discovered two things.

One -- the person is not drunk.

And two -- Ted Bundy was back in Aspen.

So he was rearrested that night.

Reporter: Streets of Aspen are safe again.

Suspected multiple murderer Theodore Bundy

is back in custody after an absence of nearly seven days.

There was a note -- "You got to call

from Ted Bundy in Colorado."

He says, "I just wanted to know what you thought of my escape."

Jordan: After he was caught,

authorities were a lot more careful with Ted,

but they still allowed him a lot more freedom

than the other prisoners got.

And this would include having a newspaper photographer

come into his cell to take photographs of him.

Gay: It was me and Ted Bundy.

I was secure, and they were gonna be careful with Ted.

I feel I captured who Ted was at that time.

You see his deep, contemplative, and inner thinking

that he was going through.

He wasn't comfortable with himself or his life.

The photographs were introspective, but soon,

Ted Bundy would be on the outside.

What the authorities didn't realize

is that he was planning another escape.

He was in shackles, and they didn't keep him in shackles

when he was put back in his cell.

There was a light fixture that was not that large,

but large enough, and it was due to be welded,

but it hadn't been.

Bundy lost some weight.

The prisoners were coming to the authorities, saying,

"Listen, Bundy is getting up in the ceiling

and, like, crawling in the above-rafter area.

We hear him crawling back and forth at night

and going back into his cell."

They didn't do anything about it.

That is just astounding stuff.

♪♪

He did everything he could to avoid detection.

He takes his books and stuff and he forms what is,

like, a body, covers it.

He had already said he didn't feel well,

so they let him sleep.

He gets up in the rafters and down into a jailer's apartment.

The jailer had gone out for a movie.

Gets some of his clothes, puts them on,

goes out into the night and freedom once again.

Bundy, who had been awaiting trial near Aspen, Colorado,

escaped from a Colorado jail on December 31, 1977.

Jordan: Ted Bundy was gone,

and the authorities did not know where he went.

So the FBI started tracking down every possible lead.

And soon, they would be knocking on the door

of the very photographer who had spent three hours

together with Ted in prison.

Gay: After Ted escaped, they just came to say,

"Don't leave town,"

just in case I had something to do with it.

Was I able to slip something in to Ted and help him escape?

♪♪

Theodore Bundy is now one of the FBI's most-wanted men.

I woke up to being attacked.

Reporter: It was early in the morning of January 15th, 1978,

that a killer walked into this Chi Omega sorority house

at Florida State University

and strangled two young coeds to death,

beat two others with a club, and then struck again.

The next thing I remember, I was in the hospital.

A federal warrant was issued on January 5, 1978,

at Denver, Colorado,

charging Bundy with unlawful flight

to avoid prosecution for the crime of murder.

McChesney: When Ted escaped, we did not believe

he would come back to Washington

because he was too well-known in Washington State.

He would want to get to the furthest place

away from Washington State as he could get.

[ Helicopter blades whirring ]

[ Alarm beeping ]

Vasilinda: My clock radio went off

early that Super Bowl Sunday morning.

It was a national newscast saying four sorority girls

had been attacked at Florida State.

Reporter: The killer walked into this Chi Omega sorority house.

I got a call from the sheriff, who was Ken Katsaris.

He wanted me to meet him at the Chi Omega sorority house.

We have possibly three or four deaths.

We were all shocked at what occurred.

♪♪

McCain: It was a Saturday night,

and we'd all just returned from Christmas break.

It was, for all intents and purposes,

a time to get reacquainted after being gone for several weeks.

I had gone around 6:00 to a social

at our little community church.

Left about 10:00 and went back to Chi O,

went to my room,

did some reading, just kind of relaxed,

and then went to bed probably about 11:30 or 12:00.

Chandler: My daddy called and told me that my mother was sick.

She had the flu, and I would come over and cook dinner?

And my dad wanted me to spend the night,

but I had a project due on Monday,

so I went back to the sorority house.

I had dance rehearsal that day.

That evening, I had a date, a first-time date,

and then I went home and I went to bed,

and that's the evening that it happened.

Reporter: During the predawn hours of January 15th,

the killer walked through an unlocked door

at the Chi Omega sorority house

and brutally beat four FSU coeds as they slept.

Territo: We believe he had entered through an unlocked door

on the first floor of the Chi Omega sorority house.

Reporter: Two of the girls, 20-year-old Lisa Levy

and 21-year-old Margaret Bowman, died from their injuries.

Territo: He had gone up the back stairs,

and the first room he would have encountered

would have been the room occupied by Margaret Bowman.

He entered that room, struck her,

rendered her unconscious,

and then he strangled her with a pair of pantyhose.

He exited her room, would have turned to the right,

walked down the hallway maybe five or six feet.

That would have been the room of Lisa Levy.

Strikes her, renders her unconscious,

and then he strangles her manually.

Left her room, turned to his right,

then to his left, and walked into the room

occupied by two more coeds.

Kleiner Rubin: He attacked Margaret and Lisa

and then came into our room,

and I don't think he was expecting two of us in the room.

I woke up to being attacked.

I was numb and being hit.

When the light shone in, I remember seeing a shadow,

and I saw him attacking Karen, my roommate.

Struck her across the face.

He then left the Chi Omega sorority house,

walking downstairs,

and he disappeared into the night.

The young women who had been assaulted

starting screaming, of course,

and that's the beginning of the story

where police were called.

The ambulance was called.

McCain: I immediately went to Lisa's room.

She was not conscious, but she was still very much alive.

An EMT came right behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders

and pulled me away so that they could do what they needed to do.

♪♪

I did not see Karen until the ambulance drivers

were taking her out.

Chandler: I just remember little flashes of things --

being put into the ambulance and just asking how Kathy was.

Reporter: Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner

remember being taken to the hospital in severe shock.

Kleiner Rubin: I remember the cold

and going into the ambulance,

and it's, like, something I won't forget.

McCain: Yeah. A police officer wanted me to escort him

to various rooms in the house

to see if an intruder was still in the house.

But the killer wasn't done.

Katsaris: While all these police officers are all over this area,

we got a report of loud noises 4 1/2, 5 blocks away.

I sent an investigator and found that we had another victim

who had been brutally beaten.

Reporter: A short time later, the killer struck again,

where he severely injured Cheryl Ann Thomas.

Thomas: I had a very severe head injury.

I was unconscious or semiconscious.

I had two neighbors.

They heard pounding kind of sound,

and they heard moaning, and it frightened them so much

that they decided to call the police.

Katsaris: I knew this person had to be caught.

We had someone who was more than dangerous.

We've got a person on a rage.

Everyone's very nervous, just on pins and needles.

She saw the man walking down the stairway.

There was blood everywhere.

Man: They were calling him a raging animal.

[ Siren wails ]

♪♪

Chandler: I woke up, and I knew I was in a hospital.

My family was there,

and there was kind of a lull in the conversation,

and I said, "Well, why don't we turn on the TV?"

And my father said, "Well, before we do,

there's something I need to tell you."

And that's how I learned what had happened.

Reporter: Two Florida State sorority sisters

were strangled to death and three others brutally beaten

with a club the morning of January 15th, 1978.

Someone had come into the Chi O

and attacked two of my sorority sisters,

attacked me and Karen, and then left the sorority.

Reporter: The women who were murdered were

21-year-old Margaret Bowman and 20-year-old Lisa Levy.

My family has lived with horror, sorrow, and pain.

It's an emotional pain so deep it becomes physical.

McCain: Margaret was perhaps our most stylish sister --

vivacious, had a lot of personality.

Lisa was just a ball of fire,

just a lot of fun, a lot of energy,

and I just loved her instantly.

They were outstanding women,

outstanding young women with a huge life in front of them.

Police were baffled, calling it the work of a deranged murderer.

They were calling him a raging animal

because of the way he'd gone down

around the corner and attacked another woman in a duplex.

Thomas: He had pushed a chair under my front door,

so they had to kick it in to be able to go in,

and then that's where they found me in my bedroom.

I couldn't imagine why it had happened or who had done it.

Reporter: None of the three surviving girls remember their attacker,

and no one has been charged with the murders.

Everyone was very nervous.

There was a run on every hardware store in town.

People were buying dead bolts.

They were buying chains.

Nobody knew what had happened, who had done it.

Many of us were not allowed to attend the funeral,

thinking that the assailant might be in the services.

There was a haunting scene

that I remember vividly of a young woman looking out,

looking distraught at the Chi O house,

with the curtains kind of drawn around her.

It was just sad -- a real, you know, real tragedy.

It's been four days since the FSU murders occurred.

Well over 200 calls a day

are coming into the coed murder command center set up by police,

but so far they have no definite leads.

Law enforcement was working in the dark.

They were conducting neighborhood-by-neighborhood

canvassing, trying to locate suspects.

They were also asking the public to call in

if they saw any suspicious persons.

Thomas: I was being questioned by the police,

"Do you know anybody that would ever want

to hurt you in that way?"

They came and tried to hypnotize me.

Kleiner Rubin: Where I was, what I did, did I see anybody?

Did I see anyone outside?

Did I see any cars outside that I remembered?

Thomas: They were hoping I would remember something,

and they were trying anything they could.

Reporter: The reward is now up to $10,000,

and the mood, both on campus

and here in this usually peaceful city,

is still one of apprehension.

We weren't allowed back in the house

for the first week or so, and they were

collecting evidence and fingerprint material.

[ Sighs ] After I left the hospital,

I had to go back to my room at the sorority house.

There was blood everywhere.

Chandler: And they wanted me to look in the room

and see if I was missing anything.

Sometimes mass murderers will take a souvenir.

So I guess they were hoping, if they caught the person,

that they would find some of those

that they might be able to identify.

Florida Department of Criminal Law Enforcement

Crime Lab experts are still busy

sifting through and analyzing evidence

that was collected from the Chi Omega house.

You're looking for any evidence, any debris that is found,

or you're looking for the kind of murder weapon

that may have been involved.

We wanted to know what kind of weapon was used.

We found bark.

Anderson: Looked like sawdust taken from the scalp

of one of the young ladies that had been killed --

probably firewood within the Chi Omega house

to use as a bludgeon.

The speculation -- well, it really wasn't speculation --

that he probably picked up some --

a branch from some firewood.

Now, if we had found that limb, we would have found blood.

We would have found hair. We would have found tissues.

But it was never found.

Probably he discarded that piece of wood on a woodpile,

and very well it was consumed as a part of a fire

in one of the sorority or fraternity houses.

Details trickled out, few and far between,

but details trickled out.

One of the sorority sisters came home late,

when she saw the man walking down the stairway

kind of looking as he was coming down,

but did not see her.

It's dark.

He's got a hat on down over his ears.

That was basically it.

The fear -- people were very, very panicked.

They were looking for someone to be arrested,

and there was tremendous pressure on law enforcement

to get something done.

Jordan: The Chi Omega killings made national news.

The investigators in Washington State

thought this had to be the work of Ted Bundy.

He was still their prime suspect in the murders

of several college-age women in 1974.

Reporter: Bundy was a psychology major at the University of Washington

before starting law school in September 1974 in Utah.

The 31-year-old Tacoma man is still the center

of great interest here in King County.

We were very much focused on the killings in Florida

because we felt that there was a strong possibility

that it was Ted, and we figured that he would go

to another place with universities

and colleges where he could blend in

because he always was able to blend in

and draw no suspicion toward himself.

You understand, Bundy never operated

east of the Mississippi.

He was one of, you know,

literally hundreds of possible suspects.

Vasilinda: Little did they know, Ted Bundy had been living here,

walking around this college campus

and remaining very undercover.

On February 9th, about 100 miles east of Tallahassee,

a middle school student had gone missing.

Reporter: Kim Leach was only 12 years old

when she was abducted from her school.

It was an "aha!" moment that, okay, these may be connected.

Believe me. I've grown in the past year,

and I've learned a lot of things about myself in the past year.

Sure, I get angry.

I get very, very angry and indignant.

I don't like being treated like an animal,

and I don't like people walking around and ogling me

like I'm some sort of weirdo because I'm not, you know?

I'm perfectly happy with the person I am

and I've always been.

Welcome back to "How It Really Happened."

I'm Hill Harper.

The brutal attacks on five women at Florida State University

shocked the nation.

Two women were dead and three others badly beaten.

Authorities in Tallahassee were searching for any clue

that could lead them to the killer,

but a month after the attacks, they were still coming up empty.

Then, 200 miles away, a simple traffic stop

would bring a potential suspect into focus.

♪♪

Lee: I was patrolling west side of town,

and it was noted that it was a suspicious vehicle

behind a building.

A police officer observed a Volkswagen.

Lee: As a matter of routine, I was running a check on the tag

when it did come back as a stolen vehicle.

Katsaris: The car came back stolen from Tallahassee.

Lee: At this time, the traffic stop was made.

While I was placing the handcuffs on him,

he kicked my feet out from under me

and struck me with a handcuff

that had been placed on one wrist

and, of course, knocked me off my feet.

And that's when it started.

Territo: When the officer got to him,

he jumped up, started fighting the officer,

and the officer overpowered him, took him into custody.

Reporter: When he was arrested shortly after midnight on Wednesday,

he was just considered a belligerent speeder.

He first identified himself as an FSU graduate student.

Late Thursday, however, a bizarre story began unfolding.

They had found somebody that they thought might be connected,

but they didn't know who it was.

Katsaris: He gave a name.

The name was an athlete

that was well known at Florida State University.

He identified himself as that person

and actually looked a little bit like him.

As a result of that, of course,

it was put out that this star athlete from Florida State

was arrested in Pensacola,

whereupon we hear from him and says,

"Uh, I'm not in Pensacola."

"I don't know who it is you got out there.

It's not me."

Katsaris: We now knew that we weren't dealing

with the person we thought.

Reporter: Who is this man?

He refused to give his name to authorities

and then told his arresting officer

that he would probably get a promotion for nabbing him.

Jordan: Police now had an unknown person in custody,

and they were calling him "the mystery man"

in the Pensacola prison.

And then they ran his fingerprints.

Katsaris: At the time, fingerprints were much slower than they are now.

They had to be taken.

They had to be submitted.

They had to be cross-referenced by the FBI.

It was a slower paper process.

Today, that would be instantly done.

Reporter: Only late last night, following FBI fingerprint identification,

did Pensacola police learn they had captured

one of the most wanted and, according to the FBI,

most dangerous criminals in the country --

Theodore Robert Bundy, 31 years of age,

convicted kidnapper, escapee from prison,

suspected murderer,

killings in Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington,

and now he is being questioned in connection

with two murders at a sorority house

at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Those murders occurred just 15 days

after Bundy's New Year's Eve escape from Colorado.

He was really under the radar,

and nobody recognized him in Florida.

The night his identity was revealed,

Ted called his girlfriend, Liz Kendall,

and she recounted that telephone conversation

with the Washington State investigators.

It's that brick-in-the-face moment when you're like,

"God. I've been so wrong about him."

Vasilinda: I think what shocked everybody

was he was the mysterious stranger.

He was not a grotesque human being.

He was charming, in fact, and that was big news.

Reporter: Bundy was on the FBI's 10-most-wanted list,

and it was learned he was wanted for questioning

in as many as 36 sex murders.

Authorities also say they can place Bundy

in Tallahassee in January.

Bundy was living right up the street on College Avenue.

Not too far from the university, not too far from Chi Omega.

Reporter: Bundy lived in this rooming house

located less than a mile from the Chi Omega sorority.

I interviewed all the people that lived in the doors

next to him in the rooming house at the Oaks,

and no one had anything bad to say of him.

No one said they heard anything weird.

He seemed very calm, and we had no reason to suspect

that he could have done anything.

He was polite, but very soft-spoken.

He was a man of few words.

You really had to say something to him to get a response.

He looked very familiar to me.

I swear it must have been him riding a bike by my house

that I would see coming and going to my car,

going to classes.

I worked in the law library, and he had attended classes

so frequently that many of the professors thought

he was an actually enrolled student.

Reporter: Theodore Bundy has become a prime suspect

in the Chi Omega sorority house murders.

Jordan: Ted Bundy's arrest made headlines,

and it caught the eye of several people in Lake City, Florida,

about 100 miles east of Tallahassee.

There, on February 9th,

a middle school student named Kimberly Leach

had gone missing.

Kim Leach was only 12 years old

when she was abducted from her school.

It was an "aha!" moment that, okay, these may be connected.

And all we got to do now is prove this is the guy.

It's Bundy.

Katsaris: He was a manipulator of a superior kind.

He would tell me all the time,

"Ken, the evidence was there. You just couldn't find it."

Security is extremely tight here at the Pensacola City Jail.

On the second floor of this building,

Ted Bundy is under constant guard.

McCain: We heard that he had been arrested

and that he was under suspicion for the murders

and the assault on Cheryl.

Reporter: He became a prime suspect after

he was arrested in Pensacola driving a stolen Tallahassee car

and carrying 21 stolen credit cards,

many of which belonged to FSU coeds.

There was still this apprehension of,

is this the right person?

Jordan: The ages and appearances of these women

was very similar to Ted Bundy's other alleged victims,

but the crime itself was different.

It just wasn't his typical M.O.

Simpson: Ted's M.O. was to abduct young women

by getting them to accompany him to a vehicle.

That's completely different from what happened

at the Chi Omega house.

We didn't have any evidence that this person, Ted Bundy,

actually went into a home

and killed and left the bodies.

There's still a lot of evidence yet to be evaluated,

and there's no link yet between he or the murder scenes.

Simpson: And then Kimberly Leach was abducted

from her junior high school there in Lake City.

We obviously now had a different set of circumstances again.

Dekle: My wife had just given birth to our third child,

and I was headed to the hospital to visit,

and I heard on the radio an announcement

that a little girl had disappeared

from Lake City Junior High.

Reporter: February 9th, Kimberly Leach left

Lake City Junior High for the last time.

Simpson: She was a pretty little 12-year-old girl

who had just been elected to the Valentine court at her school,

and on the very afternoon she got kidnapped

was going to go pick out a ball gown to wear to the ball.

Reporter: Patty Kalish, a classmate,

was one of the last people to see Kim Leach alive,

watching as she went out the school's back door

to the gym, where Kim had left her purse.

But instead of taking the short route,

Kim went around to the front, where she was abducted.

Woman: To actually have a 12-year-old child

taken from our community --

just grabbed her up and took her away --

it was just shock and disbelief.

You can't imagine anything more disquieting

for a small, sleepy community like Lake City, Florida.

It was very traumatic and caused a massive manhunt.

They turned every stone possible in hopes of finding her.

When the connection was made that Bundy had been in Lake City

the night before Kim went missing,

it was like a bloody hindquarter into a tank of sharks.

Two and two added up to four,

and Ted looked like he could be our guy.

Katsaris: He always would involve several different

law enforcement jurisdictions in a crime --

where he picked the girl up,

where he would abandon her, where he would kill her,

where he would, you know, bury them.

He really made a lot of confusion,

and they weren't found

until the evidence was no longer available.

Sullivan: As a planner of murder,

he didn't leave any stone unturned.

It was like -- it was, like, choreographed,

so he was very difficult to track down.

I sent investigators over to talk to him.

They were hoping for a confession.

Carlisle: They were interrogating him.

I got a call, said that he's very distraught.

It looks like he's on the verge of confessing.

Shortly after that, he pulled himself together.

And I'll tell you, as long as they attempt

to keep their heads in the sand about me,

there's gonna be people turning up in canyons

because the police there aren't willing to accept

what I think they know,

and they know that I didn't do these things.

And I met him at the Leon County Jail

when a group of officers went over there

to try to interview him.

Bundy said, "Well, you know, I really don't have

anything to say to y'all."

And I said, "Well, thank you very much," and we left.

He was a manipulator of a superior kind.

He started playing games with these investigators.

They were like pawns that he would move around.

He would tell them,

"I'm not gonna talk during the daytime."

Okay. I said, "We'll talk at night."

Then they called me up and said,

"Sheriff, he won't talk unless he's near a window

where he can see the full moon."

Man: Have you been able to pick up anything,

any slips at all, that he might have made

that might have linked him to anything

that he's charged with?

No, he's a very careful thinker,

and from what I understand,

from the men that have been questioning him,

you know, he says what he wants to,

and he's very careful about how he says it.

He wasn't admitting to being involved or anything.

It was like a challenge.

He would tell me all the time,

"Ken, the evidence was there. You just couldn't find it."

And he didn't think we were smart enough

to know anything about that.

Reporter: So far, several hundred pieces of evidence have been analyzed

by the state's Department of Criminal Law Enforcement.

Katsaris: And then it all fell into place.

It just went boom, boom, boom.

If it turns out we made a mistake,

that case is over with.

We're finished.

Do you know something?

People say, "Ted Bundy didn't show any emotion.

There must be something in there."

I showed emotion. You know what people said?

"See? He really can get violent and angry."

Jordan: Ted Bundy was under arrest,

suspected in both the brutal killings

of the two sorority sisters,

as well as the middle school student Kimberly Leach.

Police in both jurisdictions were very busy

gathering the evidence that they needed to build these cases.

Katsaris: There was a mountain of evidence that we collected.

Basically, you're taking everything

because you don't know what is going to be important.

Reporter: Technicians there spent over 1,600 man-hours

poring over teeth impressions,

blood samples, clothing, and other articles.

Katsaris: We were looking for fingerprints.

We certainly found a lot of fingerprints,

but we did not find his.

Not only did we not have Mr. Bundy's fingerprints

in the crime scenes, but Mr. Bundy lived

at a rooming house here in Tallahassee.

The room had been wiped clean.

Territo: We really had no physical evidence

that would have linked Bundy

to these specific crimes at that time.

Reporter: The main evidence linking him with these crimes

appears to be an eyewitness who says

she thinks she can identify the killer.

We had an eyewitness.

One of the Chi Omega girls had come in late from a date,

and she actually saw a man leaving the sorority house.

Lloyd: She was not such a strong witness

'cause she saw this sketchy person

that sort of looked like Bundy,

but then along came something I had never heard of before.

Reporter: For the state, perhaps the single most important

piece of evidence linking Bundy to the crimes is bite marks --

the bite marks found on murdered coeds.

Katsaris: There was injury on both of the girls from biting.

One of them had injurious biting.

The other had almost like a perfect signature.

Reporter: The prosecution claims that Bundy's teeth

matched those marks.

To prove that, they called in Miami dental expert

Dr. Richard Souviron.

Whoever left that bite had crooked teeth.

In the upper jaw, there were chips

in his front teeth that left scratch marks,

and if you combine the number of points in the lower jaw

that were consistent with the scratches in the upper,

it would be pretty tough to find somebody else

that had marks like that.

Territo: There really wasn't, except for the bite marks,

the kind of definitive physical evidence that we hope we had.

Reporter: The new field, known as forensic odontology,

is only allowed as evidence in court in five states,

one of them being Florida.

Territo: Today, that would have been very different

because those bite marks would have been swabbed for saliva.

We would have gotten DNA.

This happened in 1978.

DNA probably didn't start becoming a factor

till around '87 or '88 in the United States.

The idea of matching a bite mark in somebody's flesh

with somebody else's teeth was too extraordinary for words.

The bite-mark evidence was certainly the most spectacular.

I mean, it was eerie and weird

because people were unfamiliar with it.

Jordan: Because this field was so new and so unknown,

the evidence they gathered had to be rock-solid

and legally sound.

So to get the match, they were going to need photographs

and dental impressions of Ted Bundy's mouth.

We wanted bite impressions

because we had a photograph of the bite mark,

and we wanted to compare them.

Normally speaking, when you want some dental impressions,

you go get a court order.

We didn't want to get a court order because then it would mean

we had to confer with his lawyer.

Ted would have been given kind of a heads-up about this.

We were concerned that he might damage his teeth.

Katsaris: He was in a very secure cell that had a lot of steel,

so he could have easily chipped a tooth.

One anomaly, one difference,

one little chip that doesn't match,

would throw it out.

It would not be able to be used.

We got a search warrant for his mouth.

To our knowledge, up till then, no one had ever gotten

a search warrant for somebody's mouth.

Katsaris: Now, with a search warrant,

you don't call up the person's attorney and say,

"We're gonna be serving a search warrant."

That's done by the police when the police are ready to do it.

With the search warrant came an element of surprise.

I don't think Bundy had any idea.

One night, I went to his cell, and I said,

"Mr. Bundy, you're coming with me."

I took him, with a series of deputy escorts,

to the dental office,

and as we went up the back stairs after midnight,

he noticed a lot of professional photographs

lining the staircase, and he broke out in laughter.

Territo: He thought he was going to a photo lab

and he said, "I know where I'm going.

You want to take a picture of me."

Katsaris: Well, the dentist just happened

to be interested in professional photos,

and that was what decorated his back staircase.

Territo: Once he got upstairs into the dentist's office,

I was standing there.

He started screaming for his lawyer.

I believe he started to put it all together.

The bite mark -- the evidence is there.

Bundy was cuffed with his hands and his feet,

so he was chained up pretty good.

Katsaris: At that time, I read to him

the complete search warrant for his mouth

and the fact that the judge said we could use

any and all reasonable force to retrieve those impressions.

Ted Bundy looked at me and said, "Force?"

He said, "Ken, come on, now.

You know I'm not a violent person."

He sat down in the chair, leaned back,

opened his mouth, and it was over.

I think he knew he was in trouble.

Reporter: He is handsome, articulate, and has a magnetic appeal to women,

and the state says he's a killer.

There was quite a bit of turmoil and confusion.

Will he be punished?

He just doesn't look like the type to kill somebody.

Looking him in the eyes was the first time that I felt,

like, sick to my stomach.

We think we've got a good case, but you never know.

He could go free.

And he was so haughty, so arrogant and thumbing his nose.

You told them that you were gonna get me.

He said he was gonna get me.

Okay, you got the indictment.

It'sall you're gonna get.

That was one of the first times I saw Ted Bundy really mad.

The evidence against Ted Bundy was mounting,

but would it be enough to finally bring

the suspected serial killer to justice?

And even if authorities were able to get a conviction,

could they keep this master escape artist behind bars?

Next time on "How It Really Happened."

I'm Hill Harper.

Thanks for watching.