Did a Colorado Man Give Ted Bundy His Own Jacket the Night He Escaped From Jail?

The first time, he went out a window. The second time, he went up through a ceiling. Both times, the building he left behind had believed it was holding somebody smaller than who was actually there.

Utah had Ted Bundy for one kidnapping. Colorado had him for one murder. The man in custody had killed at minimum sixteen women across five states by the end of 1975. Nobody in either building had processed that yet. The courtesies they extended — library access, no restraints, holiday staffing — were appropriate for the man on the charge sheet. They were not appropriate for the man in the cell.

June 7, 1977: he jumped from a second-story window of the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, landed on his ankle, and spent six days on the mountain before being recaptured in a stolen Cadillac.

December 30, 1977: he crawled through a ceiling he had spent months widening, dropped into the head jailer's empty apartment, and walked out the front door wearing the jailer's clothes. He had lost more than twenty pounds to fit through the gap. He had hoarded over five hundred dollars taped into a book. He had planned every stop from the ceiling to the bus terminal in Denver.

He was not discovered missing for seventeen hours. By then he was on a plane to Chicago, and by January 8, 1978, he was in Tallahassee, Florida — a state that had never heard his name.

Andy Leyba, a Rifle, Colorado resident, reportedly gave a hitchhiker his own jacket in the snow that night. He didn't know whose face it was until the papers ran it.

This is the third of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. Two preventable escapes. One system that couldn't see what it had.

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