How Did the Only Woman Who Escaped Ted Bundy's Volkswagen End Up Putting Him in Prison?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is History's Hidden Killers. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:09)
There's a question I have to start with, because if we don't get this tackled right at the beginning here, none of the rest of this makes sense. How does one man cross five state lines in 11 months, taking women in every one of those states, and have nobody figure out it's the same man?
Well, I think the answer to that question is the year 1975
It's funny, when you look back, it's a weird thing to look at and say. When we're talking about cases involving serial killers and such, it's a weird thing to say, wow, it really would have been easy to get away with this sort of stuff back then, but it really would have been easy to get away with this stuff back then. Compared to today, compared to today, which then makes you wonder, okay, these are the ones who got caught, how many did not? How many were slicker than Bundy? How many weren't as narcissistic as Bundy? How many were just quiet, able to not have to find a way to bask in the sickly ego that so many of the killers that are infamous of the time come along with?
And I think the answer, if we could ever get to it, which I'm sure we never really will, it would be shocking. The amount of people who engaged in horrific behavior, murders and such of the era, who have never been caught. There's a lot of cold cases from those years and a lot of ways that they're just, they'll never be discovered. The technology wasn't there. So I think that probably is the answer to that question. Not that I should have answered it immediately for you, but I think realistically, that's what we're talking about. And I guess have that kind of as a filter over all this, as you run that through your head, it's like, how did he get away? How did he do this for so long? That and a lot of incompetence. We're going to get to all of that. And as we do, your thoughts in the comment section and sub stack in YouTube. As we work our way through chapter two here in our story of Ted Bundy, five pieces all this week as we work through history's Hidden Killers, this edition about Ted Bundy. So 1975, that's the year Bundy left Washington in September of 1974 He drove east, he arrived in Salt Lake City as a first year law student at the University of Utah. And by the time the Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant pulled him over in his own driveway 11 months later, Bundy had attacked or taken women in Utah, in Colorado, and in Idaho. He had crossed jurisdictional lines in 1975, may as well have been national borders. Different sheriffs, different counties, different files, different detectives, none of them talking to each other. And if you think that's improved a whole lot since 1975, I got news for you, that part hasn't, all that much. I mean, in certain cases it has, but still each state very much its own jurisdictions, and not all of them like to talk to each other. They're still ego involved. We see it in cases to this day.
Before we walk into any of this, let me be clear about one thing. I'm not telling you Bundy was a strategic genius. You sat down with a map and figured out the loopholes in 1970s American criminal investigations. I don't think that's what happened at all. What I think and what the evidence supports is that he stumbled into the single biggest gap in the system at the time and then exploited it instinctively. A killer who crossed his state line in 1975 was, for all practical purposes, hitting a reset button on the people chasing him. That's the architecture of this conversation. Not a list of names, although every one of them gets named. And they certainly matter. Not a procedural recap, although the procedural failures are the whole point. The structural reason a serial killer was able to operate across five states in less than a year, and the fact that the system that finally caught him didn't catch him at all, two ordinary people did, one survivor, one off-duty sergeant. The system was identical.
This is our second conversation in Ted Bundy, History's Hidden Killers, and the hiding place in this chapter is the most boring, most fixable, most lethal thing in the whole story. It is geography. Let's start with the survivor. Carol DaRonch is 18 years old, November 8th, 1974 She's leaving the bookstore, the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, Utah. A man walks up to her in a leisure suit. He flashes a badge, tells her he's Officer Roseland with Murray PD. Somebody, he says, has been trying to break into her car. He needs her to come down to the station to file a report. She's 18 He's a stranger in a suit. There's no marked car. There's no partner. He tells her to get in his personal vehicle. Every modern instinct tells her, to get in.