Original subtitles

♪

- [Eugenia Godzik] My brother was six years younger than me

and I remember he had taken the job

and started working for Gacy.

And he says, oh, mom, me and this boy are working together

and we're digging around Gacy's house.

Well, it ended up they were digging their own graves.

[dramatic music]

- Five of the most prolific serial killers

in American history were all operating at the same time.

- John Wayne Gacy.

- Ted Bundy.

- BTK.

- Jeffrey Dahmer.

- So called Green River Killer.

- This was the golden age of serial killers.

♪

- My mother had told me that

the only thing she ever prayed for,

for herself was to die peacefully in her sleep.

And that's the one thing she did not get.

- [Mary O'Toole] Three months after the Otero murders,

Dennis Rader decided he was going to kill again.

- [Kevin O'Connor] Now you have five homicides

in Wichita, Kansas, within a few months.

- [Safarik] When John Gacy has his first kill,

he recognizes the powerful arousal component

of deciding whether they live or die.

This is when Gacy crosses over.

- [William Kunkle] He says, defended himself and killed him

and buried him in a crawlspace.

- [Kathleen] During the first half of 1974,

there were a series of murders about one a month.

Ted Bundy's m.o. was to

get women to trust him and go with him.

- My husband told me, he said she's missing

and they can't find her.

And I said, no, she's dead.

- [Mary O'Toole] What sets this group of men apart

is that they flew under law enforcement's radar

for a long time,

and in order to do that,

these individuals have to come across as being fairly normal

to their neighbors and to people that knew them.

You don't look like you're really scary and dangerous.

And when you're not killing,

you are sort of living a pro social life,

you're able to fly under the radar screen.

Gacy was able to do it.

Dahmer was able to do it.

BTK was able to do it.

Green River was able to do it.

Bundy was able to do it.

And when you have that combination,

you could murder for years and years and not be caught.

- [Safarik] Bundy was very careful

in his planning of his crimes.

He'd always taken a single female.

But here's what happens with guys like Bundy.

You have a success and then you have another success

and then another and then another.

And pretty soon,

you start to believe I'm so far ahead of law enforcement

that you start to believe you're invincible.

And this is what I think happens at Lake Sammamish.

♪

- [Kathleen] Lake Sammamish State Park,

it's a lake and a park and a wonderful, beautiful place,

particularly in the summertime in Seattle.

Different witnesses saw Ted approach various young women.

People saw that he had what appeared to be a cast on his arm

and ask for some help with his sailboat.

And people also observed Janice Ott leave with him.

- [John Brown] Remember, this was an age of innocence.

I think if the Lake Sammamish incidences happened today,

the women would be very suspicious of,

you know, some stranger asking to

put a sailboat on top of a Volkswagen.

- Bundy abducts her, takes her up about two miles away

to a preselected location

and is there with her for maybe about four hours.

- [Kathleen] After he committed

the first abduction successfully

and the police weren't on his tail,

he felt like he could commit the second crime of the day.

Denise Naslund, who was at the park with her boyfriend

and some other friends, went to the restroom

and she was never seen again.

- [Robert Schug] So in broad daylight,

in a very densely populated public park,

Ted Bundy abducted two victims and killed them.

This is very brazen, very risky behavior.

That risk of being caught must have been so intense

and that must have been something that he really craved.

But it also might speak to his opinion of law enforcement.

Well, they're never going to catch me.

They haven't so far.

I can do whatever I want.

So it might reflect both the thrill seeking

as well as his own grandiosity.

- [John Sandefer] But with the disappearance

of the Ott and the Naslund girls on the same day

from the same state park, came the first indications

that a male subject was involved.

- [Robert Schug] leading up to Lake Sammamish,

Bundy has already abducted and killed five women

from around Seattle

and an additional woman from nearby Oregon.

- [Kathleen] Lake Sammamish is outside

the city limits of Seattle.

So there was a task force set up between

Seattle police and King County Police.

That's when I became involved in the investigation.

As a detective with the King County Police Department

in Seattle, Washington and I was assigned

to investigate a series of homicides

that had been occurring in Washington State.

- [Mary O'Toole] That was a very innovative thing

to bring together a group of law enforcement agencies

to address the issue

in an attempt to identify the offender.

- They are going to start at the very beginning

and go through every one of those ten suspects we've got.

This is what we're doing right now with this task force.

- [Kathleen] The name Ted came to our attention

because one of the witnesses at the park

overheard Ted introducing himself.

- They also knew then that

Ted drove a light colored Volkswagen bug.

- [Rebecca Morris] Then the police had

something to work with.

- [Kathleen] We went to the public and said,

we need your help;

we need any photographs that you took at the park that day.

Witnesses; did anybody see this young woman?

The county police set up a hotline and we received

over the next two weeks over 1,000 leads.

- Thank you very much for calling.

- [Kathleen] We did notify law enforcement

throughout the western states

that we were looking for someone named Ted,

someone that drove a brown Volkswagen.

- A composite picture was released to the news media.

- [Rebecca Morris] It wasn't a great depiction of him,

but it got the attention of a number of people,

including Liz Kendall, his girlfriend.

- [Safarik] Liz Kendall says,

gosh, that sounds a lot like my boyfriend.

And he's had some weird behavior in the past.

I'm going to contact law enforcement.

- [Rebecca Morris] The initial story

in the paper after Lake Sammamish,

was that he drove a bronze Volkswagen and her Ted didn't.

Her Ted drove a very washed out, faded tan Volkswagen.

So she called to check to see about

the color of the Volkswagen.

And whoever she talked to said, no,

it's bronze. It's bronze.

So that kind of pacified her for a while.

She eventually called back two or three more times.

- [Safarik] No response from law enforcement.

Law enforcement doesn't believe that a guy like Bundy

fits what they think is their profile of a killer.

And they dismiss it.

- [Khadija Monk] In the mid-70s, society, in their mind,

had either this sort of Manson like idea of what

a killer would look like or it would be a minority on drugs.

But we weren't looking for

people that were hiding in plain sight.

- [Lindsey Wade] Ted Bundy was able to carry on

a normal appearing life.

He had a girlfriend.

- [John Brown] He was a shaggy haired college student.

- [W. Ken Katsaris] Ted Bundy simply could

walk the streets as a serial killer

and nobody would say, oh, that guy looks weird.

He's the reason why young ladies would go to his car with him.

He was smart, charismatic, good looking.

He was totally invisible for what he was.

- [John Sandefer] Since the publication of the description

of the man called Ted,

there have been no further disappearances from this area.

John Sandefer for ABC News in Seattle.

- [Mary O'Toole] Ted left Seattle in 1974 in the fall

and he enrolled in law school in Salt Lake City.

- [Lindsey Wade] Well, Ted Bundy definitely seemed

to take an interest in paying attention

to how police investigated crimes and intentionally

committed crimes in different jurisdictions

because he recognized that law enforcement

wouldn't necessarily be able to connect the dots

or that they wouldn't be able to make the connections easily.

- [Robert Schug] Bundy's tactic was moving around a lot.

He'd just move states and kept law enforcement guessing

and he actually killed four more women

by the end of that year.

He felt unstoppable.

- [Safarik] When you look at serial killers

and this really goes to all five

of the serial killers in this golden age,

there's an aspect of them, their personality,

that is consistent across all of them that makes them successful.

They are psychopaths.

They understand the difference between what is right

and what is wrong, both morally and legally.

They simply don't care.

The problem is for law enforcement,

when they engage in these horrifically brutal crimes,

they can immediately come right back from that

and act like a normal individual.

And that makes it so difficult to catch them.

- When Dennis Rader started in 1974,

he killed five people right off the top.

- [Khadija Monk] Following the Otero

and the Bright murders in Wichita, Kansas,

the police didn't really have any leads

and they certainly weren't connecting these cases.

- [Susan Peters] They had absolutely no suspects at all.

And then people started coming forward claiming responsibility.

- [Tim Relph] It was in the paper that there

had been an arrest in the Otero case.

So, the killer at this time decided,

no, no, nobody's getting credit for what I did.

[typewriter bell rings]

- [Larry Hatteberg] Rader had left a book in the library

and inside that book was a letter.

And it was a message to the police department

and really the whole beginning of the messaging

between the police department, the media and Dennis Rader.

- [Tim Relph] In this letter, he goes into very,

very specific detail about each one of the Otero victims.

It is very clear in that letter

that he had committed the Otero crime.

The specifics of the letter weren't published,

not at that time.

- [Mary O'Toole] We had not really seen serial killers

inject themselves into the investigation.

We had not seen serial killers

necessarily write letters,

very provocative letters.

And when you see that behavior,

it does set that offender apart

because those are the individuals

that tend to be even more arrogant.

Those are the individuals that are more grandiose.

They don't think that they're going to get caught.

- [Safarik] Dennis Rader is unique

from the other four serial killers of this age

in that Dennis Rader, he wanted a moniker.

- [Susan Peters] He wants to give himself a brand

and he says, by the way, my name is BTK

for bind, torture and kill.

- [Larry Hatteberg] You don't look for a serial killer

to be the guy next door.

Nobody suspected that.

We were looking for the wild guy, the crazy person.

He didn't look like those things.

He looked like a normal guy with a job,

went to work eight to five every day.

And to me, that is the most monstrous part of it,

is that he was the guy next door.

- [John Borowski] The ultimate serial killer

is one that can hide in plain sight

and that's evident in the cases of John Wayne Gacy,

Gary Ridgway and Dennis Rader.

They had a wife, they had children.

They had work lives.

- [Robert Schug] So in 1974, Ridgway is leading

a double life,

a dual existence where in one life he's married,

has a steady job and is sort of blending into society.

In the other life,

he's basically addicted to prostitutes

and spending a lot of time with sex workers.

- [Patty Eakes] Ridgway worked for 30 plus years

at the Kenworth plant in Seattle

and he was a truck painter.

He showed up to work every day,

he had perfect attendance, by all accounts.

- [Khadija Monk] Just like Ridgway in 1974,

Dahmer hasn't killed yet either.

He is a high school student.

He's a class clown, but he also has these urges.

So he goes into the back yard and he dissects animals.

These are the secretive lives that they are living

while at the same time

appearing to be a high school student

or a model employee.

- [John Borowski] They we're using this ruse

of having a normal life to seem normal.

Gacy was the same way.

Gacy knew what he was doing.

He built, carefully, an entire life

to live a facade, a duality

where he could be seen,

at least on outward appearances,

as a heterosexual father, husband, owner of a business.

- In his neighborhood, he was a big shot

and very popular because he threw all these parties.

Like, every summer, he'd throw this giant yard party

and he'd cook for everybody, hundreds of people.

- They all thought he was great.

They thought he was a great guy.

- [John Borowski] After Gacy's first victim,

he doesn't kill again

until 1975, three years later.

Gacy's business was operating full time.

Gacy would hire young men from the Chicago community

or outlying suburbs to work with him

on these contractor jobs for his company.

By hiring these young teenagers, Gacy is saving money,

he's seen in the community as helping out youth

and giving back to the community,

but he's also searching for victims.

- [Robert Schug] John Butkovich was hired by Gacy

when he was 18 years old

and he met him in a hardware store.

- On the night that he disappeared or was last seen,

Butkovich had come to Gacy's house.

- Gacy wound up owing Butkovich money.

He didn't pay him for two weeks' worth of work.

- [William Kunkle] Butkovich was very belligerent with Gacy,

wanting his money and threatening him and,

you know, shoving and pushing.

And that's where he gets the cuffs on him

and used his garret and strangled him to death

and buried him under the addition to the garage

in the back.

[Phone ringing]

- Missing persons, Leo, can I help you?

- [John Borowski] Butkovich's parents not only

went to the police station,

but they would call them numerous times daily

and the police just really wouldn't respond to it.

The Chicago police told Butkovich's parents

that it's not likely that a successful businessman

would be a suspect in the case.

Missing persons are considered runaways,

most likely, especially teenagers.

And in the 70s, you're talking about a time period

where kids would hitchhike and disappear for days

and then they would wind up coming back home

or showing up somewhere else.

Without the proper evidence, there is no proof

that there was any foul play or anything underhanded

going on with these kids.

They were just missing.

- [Safarik] You have to understand, at the time,

Gacy was an upstanding community member.

He was a guy that entertained children

at parties as Pogo the clown.

- He claimed he had big connections in Chicago politics,

that he was a precinct captain,

you know, he put a picture on the wall in his office

of him and Roslyn Carter.

- [Safarik] So the police knew him.

He was well-liked, well-known in the community.

He's quite an articulate individual.

Again, as a psychopath, he can, like, manipulate the situation.

- Gacy's marriage to Carol Hoff, his second wife,

slowly went downhill after their marriage.

On March 2nd, 1976, Carol Hoff files for divorce.

Once Gacy's wife leaves the house,

he has the entire property to himself

where he would invite his victims,

where he tortured them, rapes and strangled them

and then buried them in his crawlspace beneath this house.

- [Khadija Monk] After Lake Sammamish,

Bundy doesn't slow down,

as a matter of fact, he accelerates

and he begins to attack women in

Utah, Colorado and Idaho.

- [John Brown] Bundy was going to law school in Utah,

but he would just go to Colorado

for like a day or half a day or two days.

He was just trolling.

- [Safarik] In 1975, law enforcement

gets a huge break with Bundy.

- [John Brown] A Utah highway patrol officer

was going home to his house

and saw a suspicious car in his neighborhood.

- [Kathleen] It was in the middle of the night.

Bundy's car was parked by the side of the road

with the lights out.

The trooper flashed his lights onto the car

and Ted started to take off, but ultimately did pull over.

- [Safarik] In his Volkswagens trunk,

there were handcuffs, an icepick,

pantyhose with holes in them, duct tape,

license plates from Colorado, gas receipts from Colorado.

- [Kathleen] Also the seat was out in the vehicle too,

which makes it a little easier to conceal someone.

Those kinds of things tell you that he wasn't out for a picnic.

Ted was arrested and he was charged with

evading the officer from when he took off.

- [Safarik] So that is a pivotal moment for law enforcement

when they really get their first big break

in who he is with his car and the murder kit

and this is what started law enforcement to focus on Bundy.

- [John Brown] The find by Officer Haywood of the things

in Ted's car would make any police officer suspicious.

- [Khadija Monk] No one knows that he's

the Ted that everyone's looking for

but it's common practice for law enforcement

to look at unsolved crimes in their area

when they pick up a suspect with crime tools.

That's when they discovered the connection

to the abduction of Carol DaRonch.

- [Rebecca Morris] Carol DaRonch was 18 years old,

beautiful girl.

She'd gone into the mall and this man approached her.

- [Kathleen] Ted Bundy told her he was a police officer

and showed her some sort of badge

and said that your car in the parking lot,

I think it's been hit by someone.

And then he told her she had to go to the police station

with him to sort it all out.

And she got into his car with him,

realizing at that moment it was a huge mistake.

But when he pulled over to put handcuffs on her,

she managed to escape.

- [Safarik] She escaped and was able to provide

a description of both the car and Bundy.

It was a really big break for law enforcement.

- [Rebecca Morris] They put Ted in a lineup

and she picked him right out.

She said that's him, that's the person

that handcuffed me in the car.

- [John Brown] They arrested Ted Bundy

for the Carol DaRonch incident in October of 1975.

After Ted was released on bail, he returned to Seattle.

That's when I first met him.

I was assigned his case originally

by the King County Office of Public Defense.

I was his attorney and his adviser

kind of on and off for six or seven years.

I think the first thing he ever said to me was,

oh, there's this silly little matter in Utah,

that's exact quote, I'll never forget it.

And I went, "ah,

it's a little more serious than that, Mr. Bundy."

- [Kathleen] After Ted was arrested

in the Carol DaRonch case,

the media began putting two and two together,

in fact, that Ted had been in Washington State,

girls had gone missing.

He left and then girls were abducted in Utah.

- [John Brown] Then there was the headline in Seattle papers,

Is Utah Ted, Seattle Ted?

- [Safarik] Because investigators were focusing

on Bundy now and his VW bug,

that VW bug was immediately seized and taken by the FBI

and dismantled at the laboratory piece by piece,

looking for evidence.

One of the pieces of evidence they found in the car

was actually a head hair.

- [John Brown] Back then,

there wasn't a lot of technology for law enforcement,

but there was technology for hairs and fibers.

- [Robert Schug] Police were able to match the hair

in Bundy's car to Caryn Campbell,

who had been murdered in Colorado

nine months before Bundy was arrested.

- No one knew what had happened to her.

- On January 12, 1975,

Caryn Campbell disappeared from the Wildwood Inn.

On February the 17th, 36 days later,

her nude body was found almost three miles away.

- [Rebecca Morris] Now that was a crime

he hadn't even been suspected of.

- So now Colorado started investigating him.

- [Rebecca Morris] Law enforcement had his gas receipts

and they started tracing where Ted had traveled

and where he'd bought gasoline,

usually with a credit card.

And he'd been at this resort in Colorado.

- [Kathleen] We never doubted that the clues were there.

It was a matter of us gathering the evidence,

getting the information.

- All of the things started fitting together

and we began investigating Ted 24 hours a day.

- Once authorities catch Bundy

and connect him to Carol DaRonch,

then they connect him to Caryn Campbell in Colorado.

- [Kathleen] When it became clear

that Ted was such a mobile guy

and had been traveling throughout

the west and the northwest in his bug,

the different detectives from the different agencies

met and shared all the information that they had.

- [Safarik] The Aspen summit was really critical;

30 investigators from five different states.

This was really unheard of in law enforcement.

I think they strongly believed that Bundy was responsible

for a lot of these homicides and disappearances.

But more importantly, where is the evidence?

We need to start building a case with evidence,

which is what they really didn't have at the time.

- [Kathleen] Utah authorities

were also looking at other cases

that they believed perhaps Ted had been responsible for.

We developed information on our own.

We shared that information with Salt Lake

and law enforcement authorities in Colorado as well.

- The question was,

I think for a lot of the investigators,

was is Ted Bundy our offender?

But more importantly, how do we catch Bundy for murder?

That was, I think, the importance of the Aspen summit.

- [Kathleen] In Seattle, we were watching very closely

when Ted was charged with the Carol DaRonch abduction

and the subsequent trial and his conviction.

- [John Brown] Ted thought he could charm anybody.

He had a classic sociopath's ability to avoid reality.

And so, you know, I think he actually thought

he'd be found not guilty by Judge Hanson, which was ubsurd.

- On March 1st, 1976, 3RD District Judge Stewart Hanson Jr

found Bundy guilty of second degree kidnapping.

He was given a one to 15 year sentence

at the Utah State Prison.

- That was a big story

when he was finally convicted of something

and he went to Utah prison.

- [John Brown] I visited him at the Utah State Penitentiary,

but he thought, well, I'll be out of here in like nine months.

I said, no Ted, Colorado is this hot on your trail

and so is Washington.

[slate clicks]

- [Eugenia Godzik] My brother was six years younger than me.

He was very interested in cars and he was

a very, very big hockey player.

And I remember we were sitting at dinner,

he had taken the job and started working for Gacy

and he says, oh, Mom, me and this boy are working together

and we're digging around Gacy's house.

Well, it ended up they were digging their own graves.

♪

We always had a tradition;

we used to put the tree up the day after Thanksgiving,

so that Friday we were decorating the tree,

we got the gifts and we would put them under the tree.

Gregory, he got this job with Gacy for $5 an hour.

Oh, he was just as you know, like on cloud nine

because he's making all this money.

He's thinking oh, life is good, possibly that

he was going to go to college because he was a senior.

♪

- [John Borowski] On December 11th,

Gregory Godzik went out to dinner with his girlfriend

and supposedly he was going to Gacy's place

to pick up his paycheck.

- [Eugenia Godzik] The next morning when I woke up,

my mother said, did you see your brother last night?

Your brother didn't come home

and I said, I have no idea.

And I remember my mom saying we have to call his friends

and we called, we talked to everybody

and they're like, nope, nope, haven't seen him.

That Monday is when my mom called the police,

filled out whatever she needed to do.

They said, well, we'll do what we can,

but their answer always was,

you know, you know how kids are.

He'll probably be back. Don't worry.

My mother, you know, did everything

she possibly could to find her son.

- I can't help it, I cry all the time.

- My mother kept saying, is anybody doing their job?

You know, nobody seems to be doing their job.

You really think that this isn't real.

You cannot believe that it's happening to you.

You keep thinking, well, maybe,

well just maybe he might come back.

[sirens]

- [William Kunkle] When Greg Godzik disappeared

like the others, there was a police report on it

and that someone went to Gacy

and talked to them and as usual,

he simply denied it and said, yeah, he worked for me.

I know the kid. He was a good worker.

I don't know what happened to him.

He wasn't here.

- [John Borowski] Since Gacy was one of

the last people to see Gregory Godzik alive,

one would think that the authorities

would look into Gacy's background

and find his record of sodomy, but they never did.

Without a body, you don't have a murder,

you got missing persons, runaway kids,

none of that's a crime.

- [Kori Rumore] There are a few reasons

why police were unable to connect Gacy to these crimes.

One, you have to remember that in the 1970s,

runaway culture was rampant.

Second, computers were not used in policing at this time.

And thirdly, police districts do not speak to each other

and do not share information.

So John Butkovich lived on the north side of the city.

Gregory Godzik lived on the northwest side of the city.

But neither of those districts would have shared information

about the two young men's disappearances.

- [Greg Bedoe] There just wasn't any communication.

In those days, there was no way to connect the dots.

- [Safarik] Gacy thought he's

smarter than everybody else.

He's smarter than the cops, smarter than the detectives,

Gacy really epitomized

the completely organized serial killer,

but so did Dennis Rader.

- [Kevin O'Connor] Dennis Rader had a BTK side

and he added Dennis Rader, the family man side.

But he will describe to us later in interviews

that he much preferred the BTK side.

That's where he really wanted to be

and his family just got in the way.

- [Susan Peters] A couple of years after the

Otero's and Kathryn Bright were murdered,

his first son was born.

So we took a break from the murders.

- [Tim Relph] When a criminal goes dormant,

you start to wonder, has he left the area, is he dead?

When somebody goes dormant, it's not like,

okay, great, we can really work on the case now.

There's a reason they go dormant

and some of them aren't always criminal.

It certainly wasn't that way with Dennis Rader.

Dennis Rader went dormant because

he had family obligations.

- [Robert Schug] While this, on the outside

appears as a period of inactivity,

even though he's not killing,

he still may be stalking,

fantasizing about the murder, reenacting the fantasy,

reenacting the events, allowing the fantasy to continue

and to strengthen to the point where he has to act on it.

- Dennis was driving his wife to an appointment

when he had seen Nancy getting her mail.

- [Safarik] Rader was very careful

about planning out his attacks and selecting his victims

or as he called them, projects very carefully.

- Nancy Fox was a sweet daughter of a local family.

- [Larry Hatteberg] He saw her just, you know, out and about.

None of these murders are linked together with anything.

They're just, oh, I like her, she's next.

That was the hard part for the police.

That's the scary part for the public.

- [Kevin O'Connor] He cut her phone lines

in the back of the house.

He broke in through a bedroom window

and waited for her until she gets back from work.

One of the first things that Nancy Fox did

when she discovered him in her home

is she went to her phone and the line was dead.

In the 70s, it would be very significant

if you cut someone's phone line

and he'll even talk about how it would be different nowadays

because he couldn't stop somebody's cell phone.

- [Susan Peters] Dennis Rader didn't think anyone

apparently was going to know about this murder,

so he goes to a pay phone, calls the police station.

- [Tim Relph] It's a pretty brief call

and it wasn't put out initially right away.

They had a lot of people look into it,

you know, linguistics people.

- [Robert Schug] Dennis Rader making a phone call

very close to his crime scene

may reflect an intensification of that rush

associated with committing a crime and not being caught.

And now, he just needs to take it up a notch

and make it an even riskier behavior.

So that might add to the thrill.

And it's also, I think, conversely, interesting

that we see the same relationship in many cases

between these serial killers and their victim.

On one hand, they play the role of the mouse

relative to the police, which is the cat,

but in their own world, in killing,

they are now the cat and the victims are the mice.

[ominous music]

- [Rebecca Morris] Ted was convicted

for the Carol DaRonch abduction,

so he was sentenced to spend up to 15 years in prison.

- [John Brown] Ted was in the Utah State Prison

and he was charged in Colorado

about nine months after his conviction

in the DaRonch matter.

- Bundy is accused of murdering

Caryn Campbell of Dearborn, Michigan.

She was vacationing in Aspen at the time of her death

in January of 1974.

- [Rebecca Morris] Law enforcement in Colorado

determined they had enough to charge him

with the murder of Caryn Campbell.

So he was moved to a jail in Colorado.

- [John Brown] The jail in Aspen

is the Pitkin County Courthouse.

So Ted was representing himself,

along with the public defenders and the authorities in Aspen

who were really nice about enforcement people let him use

the law library and basically unshackled him

from time to time.

And he jumped out of the window one day.

- Good evening, convicted Utah kidnapper,

Theodore Bundy, has escaped, escaped.

- The last time we looked, the defendant was there,

the next time we looked, he was gone.

- Second floor window on the corner there.

Guards waited outside the room, but Bundy was alone inside.

- The FBI said Bundy escaped from a jail near Aspen, Colorado

- and remains at this hour the subject of a manhunt.

- [Rebecca Morris] That was a pretty monumental day

when he went to the law library.

He was alone.

He was alone on trial for murder.

He was alone in the library.

Two stories up from the ground.

- [Khadija Monk] Security was at a minimum.

He didn't look like the hardened criminals

they were used to dealing with.

- [John Brown] I don't believe they had

any video surveillance at all.

The Pitkin County Sheriff's Office

was greatly embarrassed, obviously.

Nowadays, those people would be shackled.

They'd probably have an ankle monitor on them

that they can't cut off.

They didn't have that technology back then.

And so there was a major manhunt all over that area.

- The search around Aspen, now in its third day,

is being wound down, but a spokesman

for the Pitkin County Sheriff's Department

says the dragnet will definitely continue.

- I think it's really scary. I don't like it.

I just, I wish they would just catch him.

- [Rebecca Morris] It made the county look really dumb

that he could jump out of the window and escape.

Sheriff Dick Kienast: Just the sheriff's office

is certainly at fault in terms of security in the courtroom.

And we hope we've changed that at the moment.

- I believe that Ted did get

some sort of thrill from

playing a game with law enforcement,

playing a game with the judicial system,

playing a game with his victims.

He was of the belief that he was so smart,

so cagey that he could handle any situation

and do so in such a way that made him feel like

he was superior to others.

- The streets of Aspen are safe again.

Suspected multiple murderer Theodore Bundy,

who's escaped from Pitkin County authorities last week,

terrorized the Aspen area,

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

- [John Brown] When he gets arrested,

they take him to the jail in Glenwood.

And that's a more modern jail

that's supposedly a more secure jail.

I never thought the authorities

would allow him to escape a second time.

♪

- My phone rang and they said,

sheriff, we've got murders and injuries at the Chi Omega House.

- [Rebecca Morris] He was really out of control

to attack five women in one night.

- [Susan Peters] Dennis Rader apparently wants

just as much attention as Ted Bundy.

- How many do I have to kill before I get

my name in the paper or some national attention?

- That's a quote that you don't forget.

- [Susan Peters] After that, Wichita was scared.

- Jeffrey Dahmer is 17 years old

and about to commit his first murder.

- [Safarik] Dahmer doesn't want him to leave.

And the only way that he could figure out

how to do this was with massive blunt force trauma.

- I asked him if he was the Green River killer.

He said nothing, just a plain blank look.

I am the only survivor of the Green River Killer.

- Well if you kill 30 some people and never get caught,

you begin to think you're never going to get caught.

[Dave] He looks at me right in the face and he says

"you know Dave, clowns can get away with murder."