Why Were Washington Families Burying Daughters While Utah Had No Idea Ted Bundy Existed?

Carol DaRonch was eighteen when she fought her way out of Ted Bundy's car on a November night in 1974. She ran into the road. A couple stopped. She told her story to the Murray Police Department at ten o'clock that night. She would tell it again in a Salt Lake courtroom sixteen months later, and that telling would put him in prison.

The system did not catch Ted Bundy. A survivor did. An accident did. Carol DaRonch and Sergeant Bob Hayward, in the right place in the same week, did what three state task forces had not been able to do in nineteen months.

Between September 1974 and August 1975, Bundy moved across five states — Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and back again — taking women in jurisdictions that did not know about each other. Nancy Wilcox, sixteen. Melissa Smith, seventeen. Laura Aime, seventeen. Caryn Campbell, twenty-three. Julie Cunningham, twenty-six. Denise Oliverson, twenty-four. Lynette Culver, twelve. Susan Curtis, fifteen.

The detectives working each case had their own stacks, their own leads, their own walls covered in photographs. None of them knew there were other walls in other states with other photographs.

Hayward's 2:30 AM chase of a dark Volkswagen in Granger, Utah ended with a kit in the front seat and a name that would reach Washington and Colorado within forty-eight hours. The files finally crossed state lines.

This is the second of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The year geography did his hiding for him — and the people who ended it.

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