This is an installment of my ongoing “unconfirmed” case study series. All of these cases have been connected to Ted Bundy in some way, whether by active investigation or later speculation, but never officially linked to him. As they are all still unsolved, generally police will not release the case files. However, using newspaper archives and other works for reference, I have written the most exhaustive summary of each case as I can. I also include my own analysis based on my research and personal knowledge of Bundy’s timeline and modus operandi.
All suspects are innocent until proven guilty and all opinions are my own and not that of law enforcement unless otherwise indicated.
The Case
In the early morning hours of June 23, 1966, 20-year old roommates Lisa Wick and Lonnie Trumbull were brutally bludgeoned as they slept in their Queen Anne Hill, Seattle basement apartment. Originally from Portland, Oregon, both women were working as fledgling flight attendants for United Airlines at the time of the attack and had only been in the apartment for a month, with plans to move into another unit later that week. A third flight attendant roommate, Joyce Bowe, came home later that morning at around 9:30 a.m. As Bowe entered the apartment, she noticed that the front door was unlocked, which was unusual, and a lamp was still on in the living room. After getting no answer to her called-out greeting, she stumbled upon a horrific scene– both victims still in their beds, coagulated blood soaking into their pillows and spattering the walls. “I looked at Lonnie and didn’t believe my eyes,” Bowe said. “Then I started to wake Lisa and she was in the same state.” She ran upstairs screaming “my girl friends are killed, they’re bleeding!” to the apartment manager, who called the police. When police arrived, it was determined that both women had been repeatedly and viciously clubbed with a blunt object, though neither had been sexually assaulted.
An unconscious and critically injured Wick was taken to Harborview County Hospital, where she underwent emergency surgery to relieve pressure on her brain caused by multiple depressed skull fractures. Doctors speculated that she only survived the attack because she wore bulky hair rollers to bed, which may have cushioned her somewhat from the blows as they rained down upon her head. Sadly Trumbull was not so fortunate, and was pronounced dead on arrival.
An autopsy concluded that Trumbull had died at approximately midnight from a blow to the head she had received about an hour earlier. However, subsequent evidence led detectives to believe the attack may have occurred later in the night, possibly as late as 3 a.m., instead of before midnight.
A United Airlines employee said he had called the apartment about a change in flight plans at about 11:45 p.m. and had spoken to Wick, who stated that she would relay the information to Trumbull later, as she was already asleep. Another call at 5:45 a.m. the next morning went unanswered. King County Deputy Sheriff Terry Allman came forward to say he was dating Trumbull, and had spent most of the day at her apartment on Wednesday the 22nd, leaving around 5:00 p.m. He talked with her again by phone that same evening around 10:00 p.m. This was the last known outside contact with Trumbull.
An upstairs neighbor, up early preparing for a trip to the coast around 4am, heard nothing. Another neighbor named George Stoss said he saw a car speed away from the apartment building at about 12:15 a.m. “He took off so fast that I wondered if he was going to make the turn,” Stoss said, and “at the same time [I] heard someone scream.” Another neighbor said she also heard a car; others heard nothing. However, this lead was discounted when Detective Lieutenant Frank Moore said the incident was “traced to a youth who had screamed facetiously as a friend drove off after dropping him at his residence.”
Investigators dusted the crime scene for fingerprints, finding numerous prints including a full hand-print to the left of the front door to the apartment, but would not say whether the prints belonged to the occupants or to a potential assailant. They noted that the apartment had not been ransacked, and there were no signs of any struggle or forced entry. Police believed the front door had either been left unlocked or the intruder had somehow managed to ‘slip’ the common, low quality lock; a detective later stated “an ordinary person could have gotten in.”
Veteran Seattle Detective Sergeant Herb Arnold said a 5-pound bloodstained piece of lumber measuring 3 inches thick and 18 inches long, apparently taken from a nearby open garage, was found in a vacant lot next door to the apartments and seemed the likely murder weapon. A white “pantie girdle” from one of the victims was found in the same lot, which police cautioned may have “only been used as a precaution against leaving fingerprints,” as well as the women’s on-duty flight bags (in other reports also described as ‘purses’) which had been thrown under a bush at the edge of the lot and contained only small change.
The next day, police developed a “vengeance motive” theory, saying they had no evidence the “vicious and sadistic” crime was committed by a “casual prowler,” but that there was a “strong possibility” that it was an act of vengeance by someone one or both of the victims knew. “We don’t have much to go on right now,” explained Seattle Police Captain Paul Lee. “The girls had been in Seattle for such a limited period of time, we don’t know whether it was an acquaintance or a prowler. But we are not ruling out other motives, such as robbery.” Captain Lee also stated that there was no evidence that the attack was sexually motivated: “the crime does not fit the normal pattern of a sexual psychopath.”
The Suspects
Police questioned “a 17-year-old youth” about the attack on Friday but released him after he passed a polygraph test. A Portland high school acquaintance of Trumbull’s also took and passed a polygraph test the following week and had a solid alibi. Four days after the murder, police had questioned nearly 100 friends, acquaintances, and neighbors in several cities, without any viable suspects emerging. Detectives said they were not discounting the “possibility that the assailant may have been a degenerate” who had committed a number of rapes in the Queen Anne Hill district, entering unlocked homes and “forc[ing] several housewives to submit.” However, according to police the rapist’s pattern did not indicate that he was “homicidal in nature” and he had been inactive for about four months preceding the crime.
On June 30th, a bartender named Homer Sims told police that the day preceding the assault, a man “about 30 years old” was in his tavern about 8:00 or 9:00 p.m. asking directions. Sims said the man had a city map and asked another customer how to reach the 2400 block on 8th Avenue where Trumbull and Wick were attacked. The bartender said he was busy at the time and therefore didn’t get a good look at him. According to Lieutenant Moore, investigators were “not that excited about this lead,” because the area was “difficult to find… any stranger not familiar with the city could have asked directions… but we’d like him to come into the office.” Unfortunately, he was never located.
By July 14th, Wick had recovered enough to tell detectives that she was awake when the intruder bludgeoned Trumbull and had caught a glimpse of him before he turned on her. She thought he had entered through the front door. According to Wick, the assailant was a white male, wearing dark clothes, about 30 years old, 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed about 165 pounds. She also said he had thinning blond hair and a receding hairline. Seattle Police detectives took her statement and developed a composite sketch of the suspect from her description. She could not say whether she had ever seen the man before, however, she felt she could identify the man if she saw him again. Wick also stated that the room’s lights were out when she was attacked and could not explain how she had seen such a detailed description of her assailant, but police stated that they were “satisfied that she knew what she was talking about.” A few days later, Wick was shown dozens of photos of potential suspects, including one of Richard Speck, who would later be convicted in the murders of eight student nurses in Chicago, but could not identify any of them as her attacker.
By early September, Lisa Wick had recovered enough to leave the hospital and went home to Portland, Oregon. She returned to work for United Airlines in October and married the following year. Joyce Bowe was her maid of honor, and several Seattle police investigators were guests at the wedding. Asked if she was still afraid, Wick replied “the fear that I have is not an ‘afraid’ fear. It’s just something that happened and that shouldn’t have happened.”
A month later, Seattle police interrogated a 28-year-old used car salesman held for allegedly raping an 8-year-old girl in Portland, Oregon. He had been out of the city at the time of the attack, supposedly in Montana, and had returned to Portland a day later. While investigating the unrelated rape accusation, officers found newspaper clippings related to the crime and a copy of the assailant’s composite sketch in the man’s possession. However, he passed a polygraph test and was subsequently cleared from suspicion.
A recently released Seattle PD undated follow-up report mentions an unnamed “grocery store clerk where the victims bought groceries” referred to by a “friend of the victims” and “Lonnie’s sister tells about a grocery boy who tried to date her, but she snubbed him.” Apparently, this was in reference to a grocery store near the victims’ previous residence because the files also state: “’all grocery boys’ referred to were involved with the gals when they lived in the area of the Nettleton Apartments… we weren’t thinking about any local grocery connection.” The Nettleton Apartments were in downtown Seattle, not the Queen Anne District.
The same report states: “I still say Mike Boylan did it!!” There is no further information regarding this suspect in the available file. The only Michael Boylan listed as living in the Seattle area at that time was an Irish immigrant who worked as a Sea-Tac Airport police officer in 1966 and later for the Seattle Police Department, the King County Sheriff’s Office, and the Issaquah Police Department. In 1966 Boylan was 35 years old, had been married for seven years with three young daughters, and did have an associated address in the Queen Anne District about 15 minutes’ walking distance away from the victims’ apartment. He’d met his wife Barbara in 1959 when she was working at Sea-Tac Airport as a United Airlines stewardess. According to his obituary, he quit police work in the 1970s for “health reasons” and from then on worked as a courtroom bailiff. Boylan died in 2017.
Despite a $10,000 reward offered by United Airlines, national media attention, and hundreds of tips, eventually all leads were exhausted, and the case went cold.
A Bundy Connection?
Speculation linking Ted Bundy to the attacks came many years later. In his book The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer, Robert Keppel said: “as I got to know Ted better over time, Ted became a good suspect to me,” and noted similarities to the Chi Omega crime scene. Bundy victims Lisa Levy, Margaret Bowman, Karen Chandler, and Kathy Kleiner were all bludgeoned as they slept with a piece of wood (in that case, a piece of firewood) picked up from outside their sorority house. The modus operandi of the crime was also similar to Bundy’s earliest confirmed attacks on surviving victim Karen Sparks and murder victim Lynda Healy, who were savagely beaten while sleeping in their beds in Seattle basement apartments. However, when Keppel specifically asked about the case during Bundy’s “deathbed confessions” a few days before his execution, he adamantly denied involvement. In The Riverman Keppel noted that Seattle detectives’ favorite suspect at the time was the apartment owner’s son, since he committed suicide and had a newspaper article about the murder in his belongings.
Lisa Wick contacted Ann Rule in 1986, saying she could not read Rule’s book The Stranger Beside Me: “I try to pick it up and read it, but it is impossible. When my hand touches the cover, when I look at his eyes, I get sick to my stomach.” Rule claimed that Wick had seen Bundy’s eyes before in “her deepest forbidden memory,” and quoted her as saying: “I know that it was Ted Bundy who did that to us, but I can’t tell you how I know.”
Notably, in his death row conversations with journalists Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, Bundy did mention a possible early assault on a woman with a piece of lumber, but the scenario he described was much different from the 1966 crime. In his third-person, pseudo-confession as recorded in Conversations with a Killer, Bundy said: “on one particular occasion, he saw a woman park her car and walk up to her door and fumble for her keys. He walked up behind her and struck her with a… a piece of wood he was carrying. And she fell down and began screaming, and he panicked and ran. What he had done terrified him.”
A commonly circulated misconception (repeated even by Keppel) purports that Bundy worked at the nearby Queen Anne Hill Safeway grocery store at the same time as the murder and assault. However, according to the Multiagency Investigative Report compiled by the FBI, he did not start working there until nearly two years later, on April 12, 1968. The Seattle police timeline list Bundy as working at Tacoma City Light in the summer of 1966, preparing to enroll in his first semester at the University of Washington after leaving the University of Puget Sound the previous semester. He was also still living at home with his parents in Tacoma. He was 19 years old at the time.
According to recently released Seattle police reports, the finger and palm prints left at the scene were checked against Bundy’s in January 1977 and did not match. Unfortunately many people, including a news photographer, were allowed into the crime scene and may have left fingerprints, which was common in 1966. In early 2018 it was reported that Washington investigators were re-examining evidence from the Trumbull-Wick attack for DNA and if found would attempt to match it to Bundy’s DNA, discovered as evidentiary blood samples seven years earlier in Florida. However, since then no new stories have emerged regarding the success of this venture.
Today the murder of Lonnie Trumbull and the near-deadly assault on Lisa Wick remains unsolved.
Author’s Analysis
At first glance, linking Ted Bundy to this crime is tempting. The basic modus operandi of a home invasion bludgeoning certainly fits his earliest confirmed assault (Karen Sparks) and murder (Lynda Healy), as well as the Florida attacks on the Chi-Omega sorority sisters and Cheryl Thomas. And of course, Bundy was living in the Seattle area at the time. But beyond those similarities, any evidence of his involvement is non-existent, and the timing of the crime does not fit with what is known about Bundy’s development into a serial killer.
The most damning piece of circumstantial evidence, that Bundy worked as a stocker at the same Queen Anne Hill grocery store where the victims shopped, is demonstrably false, as he did not work there until nearly two full years later. While the MIR does not list an address for him during the summer of 1966, since he had a summer job at Tacoma City Light the most reasonable conclusion is that Bundy was living at home in Tacoma before starting the fall semester at the University of Washington. The Tacoma suburb is a good distance away from Queen Anne Hill, Seattle. Bundy had no prior known association with that district before 1968.
Bundy’s earliest known attacks occurred quite close to his residence in Seattle’s University District, usually just blocks away. This way he was able to stalk his victims, probably peeping into their windows and learning their routines. This was easy for him to do, as he was essentially their neighbor, and felt comfortable roaming about the neighborhood. In her interview with police, Liz Kloepfer’s friend Mary Lynn Chino said she had seen Bundy doing just that late at night. As he became more confident, he began to travel incrementally further away from his home base in search of victims. In Tallahassee as well, when Bundy reverted to his earlier “blitz attack” m. o., he stayed close to his residence at The Oaks, not straying further than a few blocks to find his victims. This is likely because, as when he was first starting out, he felt more comfortable staying close to home and in familiar surroundings. If Bundy was indeed living in Tacoma in the summer of 1966 and not frequenting the Queen Anne Hill district, it does not follow that he would have chosen that particular, unfamiliar location for what would have likely been his very first home invasion attack.
The early date of 1966 also doesn’t really fit with Bundy’s development as a killer. Bundy himself discussed this, describing to his psychiatrist Dr. Dorothy Lewis how his deviance began slowly, beginning with violent sexual fantasies, which incrementally increased to stalking and peeping, then attempted (but failed) half-baked assaults and kidnappings, likely due to a lack of experience on his part. It took several years of this ‘conditioning’ before he committed his first murder. During a teary phone call with his ex-girlfriend Liz Kloepfer after his 1978 arrest in Florida, a despondent and vulnerable Bundy indicated a similar personal history, saying “I’ve fought it for a long, long time … it got too strong. We just happened to be going together when it got under way.” As he began dating Liz in 1969, this timeline also jibes with what he told Dr. Lewis nearly a decade later in the days before his execution in 1989. For such an attack to be as ‘successful’ as it was (and I use that term only in the sense that it is still unsolved) seems to imply a level of criminal experience that Bundy almost certainly did not possess so early in his murderous evolution.
Then there is the obvious problem with the description and composite drawing Lisa Wick provided to police about her assailant; hardly any of it resembles Bundy, except the race, height, and weight. The murderer was described as having blond, thinning hair, a receding hairline, and aged about 30 years old. Bundy was over a decade younger, with thick, brown, wavy hair. The facial features in the composite drawing, at least in my mind, do not resemble a young Ted Bundy at all. While it’s certainly possible that Wick could have been mistaken on some points, as the light was likely quite poor and she probably did not get a very good look at the intruder, her description just seems too dramatically different to implicate Bundy. Wick herself does not address this contradiction in her later conversations with Ann Rule; instead The Stranger Beside Me implies that she retained no memory of the traumatic event at all.
The fact that neither Trumbull or Wick was sexually assaulted is also pertinent. Violence featured heavily in Bundy’s sexual gratification, as he often emphasized in his final days when attempting to answer the ‘why’ question of what he did. Arguably, rape and the excitement or stimulation associated with the sexual aspect of murder were Bundy’s main motivations in committing his crimes. Nearly all of his assaults and murders involved some form of rape, whether ‘by proxy’ (using an object) or in the traditional sense of the term. In the few instances where he did not sexually assault his victims, it seems that circumstances and timing simply did not permit him to do so. At the Chi-Omega sorority house, his last attacks occurred on Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler, though neither were raped. This is almost certainly because, as Kleiner later described, the headlights of Nita Neary’s returning car illuminated their room and frightened him away. Although he had only been at the Chi-O house for about 15 minutes, he did manage to sexually assault Lisa Levy by proxy with a hairspray bottle, and sexually molested Margaret Bowman as well. Apparently unsatisfied, he then ran a few blocks away, breaking into Cheryl Thomas’ apartment to attack and attempt to rape her too, only to be frightened off again by her anxious neighbors’ frantic phone calls. When examining the pool of confirmed Bundy victims it seems to me that if he had the time and opportunity, he would always rape before killing, as that factored so heavily into his violent sexual fantasies. Yet in the case of Trumbull and Wick, despite having hours to spend with his victims before they were found at 9:30 the next morning, the killer did not even attempt to sexually molest the young women, who were both found fully clothed. This points to a perpetrator with a motivation that was not sexual in nature, perhaps one driven more by jealousy, hatred, vengeance, or rage. This also fits with the Seattle police’s original theory of the crime.
In his final confessions, Bundy repeatedly denied any assaults or murders, even any attempted ones, before 1969, when he claimed to have attempted (but failed) a kidnapping in Ocean City, New Jersey after planning but chickening out of a rape at a hotel in New York City. He claimed his first murder, possibly of a hitchhiker, did not occur until about 1972 or 1973. He also specifically denied any involvement in this case when asked. While Keppel obviously did not believe his repudiations and liked him for the crime, the detective has been notoriously wrong in his theories before. He adamantly believed Bundy was responsible for the murders of Washington hitchhikers Kathy Devine, Carol Valenzuela, and Martha Morrison, young women who were all murdered at about the same time and in the same part of the country as Bundy. However, years later DNA evidence eventually linked those murders to two other serial killers operating in the Pacific Northwest region during that time period. Therefore, while I highly respect the renowned criminologist, I take Keppel’s Bundy hunches with a large grain of salt.
None of the suspects discussed in the media or according to Keppel seem particularly likely to me. I was unable to find a likely candidate for the “apartment owner’s son” described but never named by Keppel in The Riverman. City property records list the apartment’s owner in 1966 as Richard D. Lee, a prominent builder in Seattle. While he did have a son, Richard D. Lee, Jr. was only 13 years old in 1966, and did not live on the property. I also checked the apartment managers at that time who did live there, but Virgil and Rubye Gohn had no children of public record. Therefore I am unsure who Keppel meant by “apartment owner’s son.” However, even if this story is accurate and I have been remiss in my research, having a clipping related to the crime does not seem too unusual, since due to the proximity he no doubt would have been following the media reports. While I do not know the circumstances of his suicide, this fact alone does not lead me to believe he was involved (although it would explain why no print match was ever found, if he died before committing another crime).
Although I do not put too much stock into the validity of passing polygraph tests and would be disinclined to clear a suspect because of one, the unnamed 28-year-old car salesman from Portland also seems an unlikely suspect, given that his alleged crime involved pedophilic sexual assault, entirely dissimilar to the Trumbull-Wick physical assault.
The aforementioned suspect named Mike Boylan is quite interesting, as he generally seems to fit the physical witness description (besides having dark hair, not blond as Wick described), worked at Sea-Tac Airport in 1966, and lived in the Queen Anne neighborhood at some point in the 1960s. In October of 2020, I interviewed retired King County Police Detective Dick Kraske, formerly of both the “Ted” Task Force and the Green River Task Force. Kraske knew Boylan personally (“Boylan had the same attributes as Bundy– both could charm the rattles off a snake”) and offered quite a bit of insight into his background. Apparently, the stewardesses at Sea-Tac were “afraid of Boylan, especially when he offered to walk them to their cars at the airport.” He went on, “in one incident, Boylan somehow got the keys to one of another stewardess’ residence and when she got home from work found Boylan masturbating in front of her daughter. I don’t know if there is a police report on this. If there was, Boylan would have been capable of making sure that it would never become official as he had a lot of friends in police departments.” Kraske also said Boylan “had a penchant for violence that I feel could have been triggered by rejection of some other perceived insult… while with SPD he was known as the really tough guy who would sadistically beat the crap out of prisoners in the holding cell.” Kraske also mentioned that Boylan had later assaulted his second wife. Obviously this insider information from a veteran police officer who personally knew Boylan is more than a bit eyebrow raising. This sort of past alleged behavior certainly seems consistent with the type of person who would commit this crime. However this begs the question, as a police officer, wouldn’t Boylan’s fingerprints have been on file because of his line of work? Then again, the fingerprints at the scene may have never even belonged to the perpetrator at all. Overall, to me Michael Boylan seems a likelier suspect than Ted Bundy.
During our interview, Detective Kraske also mentioned another detail not included in the newspapers at the time. He was good friends with Terry Allman, the deputy sheriff Lonnie Trumbull had just started dating at the time of her murder. According to Kraske, Allman said that while visiting his new girlfriend at her apartment, someone knocked on the door. “When Lonnie answered the door, she met a man who wanted to know what time it was. Terry said that he only got a glance at him. Later on Terry was convinced the man at the door was Bundy when Bundy became popular in the media in 1974.” While certainly interesting, it’s nearly impossible to know whether the man Allman glimpsed really was a 19-year-old Ted Bundy, or even remotely connected to this case.
The unnamed “grocery boy” is a strange suspect since you’d think Wick would have been able to recognize him if she shopped at his workplace often enough for him to notice her. On the other hand, it’s also possible she simply never noticed him, or that Trumbull was actually his intended target.
The fact that Wick could not identify her attacker despite apparently seeing his face seems to indicate that it was probably not someone she was familiar with socially at least. He may have been someone who saw the women at their work or at other establishments they frequented in the area, who followed them home, perhaps becoming romantically obsessed with one of them. Trumbull’s visit from her boyfriend that day may have inspired a jealous rage. Or it could have been a simple home invasion burglary gone wrong, as indicated by the stolen bags, albeit the sheer ferocity of the attack makes this scenario less likely in my mind. It’s also possible that there was more to the story than was reported, such as a feud situation, a love triangle, a jealous ex-lover, an obsessed acquaintance who was good at passing polygraph tests, or even a hired hit, although this is all obviously just pure speculation.
Without DNA evidence (it’s unclear if any even exists) in this case, and apparently no fingerprint match even after the advent of national criminal databases, it seems likely that the perpetrator either did not actually leave his fingerprints, did not go on to commit another crime, or died soon after 1966. So to the main point of this article- did Bundy murder Lonnie Trumbull and savagely beat Lisa Wick in Seattle in the summer of 1966? In my mind, I would have to say no; from my research the clues just don’t seem to point to Ted Bundy.
The stewardesses’ apartment building remains largely unchanged today. Photos courtesy of Redfin.
1946-1966
Rest in Peace
Sources:
- The Oregonian
- The Seattle Times
- The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
- The Stranger Beside Me (Ann Rule)
- The Riverman (Robert Keppel)
- Defending the Devil (Polly Nelson)
- Conversations with a Killer (Stephen Michaud & Hugh Aynesworth)
- The Seattle Police Dept.’s Bundy files
Many thanks to retired King County Detective Richard “Dick” Kraske for his insight, candor, and willingness to be interviewed for this article.
I very much doubt it was Bundy too. AFTER ALL, he was only nineteen then, and while its still possible for a 19-year-old to murder, its is nonetheless a very young age. The sketch of the suspect also does not resemble Bundy either.
I think it was Boylan.
Absolutely this was not Bundy. Any idiot can rule him out.
According to this story Mike Boylan was mentioned as a person of interest however the physical description that Wick gave didn’t match up. What isn’t mentioned is the lack of information regarding any more follow up on Boylan. I knew the SPD officer that did the background on him before he was hired by SPD. It is very interesting considering the characteristics between Boylan and this case, When Boylan was working as a security guard at Sea-Tac flight attendants were afraid to have him walk them to their cars according to his background info. Was Wick ever shown a photo of Boylan?. Boylan shot his Chinese wife in the face in their residence in Bellevue, WA on May 12, 2016. She survived. He died on August 7, 2017 in an assisted living facility in Modesto, CA.
That’s very interesting insider information! It’s true, the physical description didn’t match Boylan or Bundy, however as the attack was while the girls were asleep with the lights out I’m surprised Wick managed to see her assailant at all. If she did see him, it couldn’t have been for very long, and there would have been low visibility.
The fact that he had a residence in the Queen Anne district at the time, and worked at the Sea-Tac airport escorting flight attendants, and later had an incident of violence against a woman, seems like a lot of interesting circumstantial evidence to me. Unfortunately I can’t get a copy of that case file to see if there was any follow-up on him as it’s still considered an open investigation. The snippet I have which mentions Boylan (and what I posted there is literally all of it!) came from Bundy’s file, when they were analyzing the fingerprints left at the scene in 1977 and comparing them to Bundy’s.
Thanks for reading, Dick! Please continue to comment, I’d love to hear more of your insight from serving with law enforcement.
Thanks for your reply. Another thing that caught my attention is did the investigators consider the attack to be random or targeted. Targetting involves planning. From what I can see in the photos of the Apartment house a person would have to climb a flight of stairs from the street level or come in at the entrance above if there is one.. The small bridge that gives access to a part of the building in my view is not an accommodation for a random walk. Another question is; did the victims have lockers at the Sea-Tac facility?
I actually think this one makes the most sense among the earlier crimes often attributed to Ted – as in, Ann Marie Burr, the Ocean Parkway girls, the one in Burlington, and so on. It fits his M.O. (as far as the Sparks/Healy and Thomas/Chi Omega crimes are concerned, at least), and doesn’t require him to have started at an absurdly young age, like Burr; or to have traveled far outside his usual stomping grounds, as in the Vermont case; or to have used a type of weapon he’s not known to have used before, as with the girls in New Jersey. The sketch also looks not unlike some of the pics I’ve seen of Bundy when he was younger – thinner face, shorter hair – though, of course, that’s not the same as saying it actually looks like him.
There’s no sign of sexual assault, true… but many serial murders are sexually motivated (as in, motivated by sexual fantasy) without involving any actual overt sexual acts. I don’t tend to put much stock in the police speculating the crime wasn’t sexually motivated, as this type of crime didn’t really start to be deeply understood, from a psychological viewpoint, until the FBI got to work on it in the late 70’s.
As far as Ted himself is concerned: he was young, and no doubt would have been nervous, frightened, and if nothing else, extremely “keyed up” to be committing a crime like this for likely the first time. It’s possible he simply wasn’t able to rise to the occasion, so to speak, in those sort of anxious circumstances; if I recall, he didn’t even manage to assault Karen Sparks in the “traditional” sense, but rather with a foreign object. For that matter, it’s possible he freaked out when the one girl started to wake up; or when he heard the scream, or the guy peeling out, outside; leading him to quickly clobber the girls and then bolt. This isn’t that different, in principle, from the stories he told Michaud and Aynesworth about hitting the woman with a piece of wood and then making a run for it, or jumping on the woman’s bed and trying to restrain her before ultimately fleeing when she woke up and started to scream.
Ted also made frequent allusions to supposedly trying to fight the compulsion to kill; not only to Liz, but to Michaud and Aynesworth, whom he told about trying to “de-escalate” from murder to rape after he moved to SLC. Since we can pretty well assume he wasn’t trying to resist these impulses out of a sense of conscience, or a moral desire to refrain from killing – though this may be what he was trying to imply to Liz – why would he have tried to resist? I think it’s possible he felt this early attack was a close call, and that it managed to scare him straight for a while.
I’m not saying I actually believe Ted did it, by the way; as a matter of fact, I don’t have an opinion one way or the other. But I think it IS possible to fit this attack within the accepted framework of his development as a killer, if we assume that he might have sanitized certain details in his descriptions to Michaud in order to avoid having it be too obvious which specific crimes/assaults he was talking about; or that an early attempt that did not go smoothly might have motivated him to try and clean up his act for several years.
i find it hard to argue with that summation of the possibility of bundys participation in the stewardess attacks,i cannot believe that even if he did not get underway by killing little anne maries burr in 61 at an age of 14,though the physcopathy,time line regardless, of the person in question could certainly allow him to do it.i do not believe he got past 1966 without releasing his murderous inclinations in full.method,tool,and the early adaptation to murder,and the issue of purses being taken lead me also to strongly suspect bundy for this,its his home town and he must have literally been chomping at the bit,the fact that it may have given him the last real shock to make him reign in his evil for a while,is well explained and i agree with that.it was probably the last time he ever thought about not killing again .he was from this point after his next slayings all in,apart from normal cooling down periods .bundy did this atrocious killing and attack i am sure.
I love your blog