What Did a Sorority Sister Find After She Saw Ted Bundy on the Stairs at 3 AM?

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

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Three weeks. That's how long it took in January and February of 1978 for the most wanted man in America to walk into a new state, settle in to a boarding house, and attack five women. Take a 12-year-old girl from a schoolyard, and disappear into Florida traffic until a Pensacola Patrol officer ran a stolen plate at 1.34 in the morning. Three weeks.
The question that keeps me up about how this chapter even happened is not really the obvious one. The obvious question is what he did in those three weeks. Not how he did it in those three weeks. You know he's capable of these things. We know what he did. The names are documented. The investigation is documented. The bite mark on Lisa Levy's body is documented. The question that matters is this. How does the most hunted man in America walk into a new state and have three weeks to operate before anyone catches up? It's the enigma that will always be the Ted Bundy case. And as we continue to try and answer these questions and go through this, your questions, your thoughts, comments in the sub stack and YouTube comments section, the links are in the description. The answer is the smallest, most uncomfortable answer in this whole story. He didn't need a disguise. He didn't need anybody else on the outside. He didn't need a forged identity. He needed a new zip code. That's it. That's the entire hiding place in this chapter. The same thing that worked in Seattle in 1974 was working again. Seattle didn't yet know there was one man to look for then. In Utah in 1975, Utah didn't have Washington's file. Now, Tallahassee in 1978, Florida had no Ted Bundy on file. Florida had no idea he was coming and the states did not communicate amongst themselves. And a lot of times to this day, they still don't. The FBI's 10 Most Wanted List, which had been added to after the Colorado escape, was a list. It wasn't a face anybody at the disco next door to the Chi Omega sorority recognized that first week.
In the seven days between Bundy's arrival in Tallahassee and the attack at Chi Omega, he had not gone anywhere. He had been at the Oaks the whole time. By some accounts, he was stealing wallets at the laundromat. He was eating at the diner. He was drinking at the disco next door to the sorority. By some accounts, sorority sisters at the disco noticed a man at the bar staring at them. Nobody thought anything of it, though. That was the week Tallahassee was unknowingly living next to the most wanted man in America. This is the fourth conversation in Ted Bundy, History's Hidden Killers. And the hiding place? This time is real anonymity. A fresh state. A new alias. A clean start. Nobody asked for it.
Let's start with the only living person who saw him leave that house. It's 3 o'clock in the morning, January 15th, 1978 in Tallahassee, Florida. Nita Neary is 20 years old. Member of the Chi Omega sorority at Florida State University. Her date had just dropped her off in front of the chapter house on West Jefferson Street. She turns her key. She steps into the dark foyer. She hears something upstairs. A thump, then footsteps, then a sound from one of the rooms. It does not sound like a person sleeping. She looks up the staircase. A man is coming down it. He's crouched. He's wearing a stocking mask. He has a dark knit cap pulled low on his head. He's carrying a piece of wood in one hand. Investigators will later identify it as an oak log.
He bolts past her out the front door into the dark. Nita Neary is the only living person who sees him leave. She doesn't scream. She doesn't run out the front door after him. She runs upstairs. She wakes up another sister, Nancy Dowdy. They turn on the hall lights. They open the first bedroom door, the second, the third. They find Karen Chandler in the hallway crawling. They find Kathy Kleiner sitting up in bed with a broken jaw and bloodied everywhere. They find Margaret Bowman. They find Lisa Levy.
That's a 20-year-old making the right call at 3 in the morning in the worst circumstance she'll ever encounter. She doesn't go for help. She goes for her sisters, and two of them are alive because she did.
Margaret Bowman, 21, killed in her bed. Lisa Levy, 20, killed in her bed, bitten on the left buttock. The bite mark is the only thing in the entire crime scene that the man in the stocking mask cannot take with him. Kathy Kleiner, 20, jaw broken, several injuries, severe injuries. She survived. Karen Chandler is 21, Kathy's roommate, severe injuries. She survived. Four young women, 15 minutes, one oak log, one man in their house and their bedrooms in the middle of the night.