Why Did a 3 AM Phone Call Through an Apartment Wall Save Cheryl Thomas From Ted Bundy?

Nita Neary did not scream. She ran upstairs. She woke another sister. They turned on the lights. They opened doors. They found their friends.

That is who acted first on the night of January 15, 1978, inside the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. Not the police. Not a detective. A twenty-year-old woman who saw a masked man on the stairs and chose to go up instead of out.

Margaret Bowman, twenty-one. Lisa Levy, twenty. Both killed. Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler survived with severe injuries. Four blocks away, Cheryl Thomas survived because her neighbor Debbie Ciccarelli heard thumping through an apartment wall at 3 AM and picked up the phone.

The survivors of that night are alive because ordinary people did something. Nita Neary went upstairs. Debbie Ciccarelli made a call. Danny Parmenter wrote a license plate on his hand when a man approached his fourteen-year-old sister Leslie outside a Jacksonville school three weeks later.

The cost of the weeks between those acts: Kimberly Leach, twelve years old, who walked back to a classroom for her purse on February 9 and was seen by a teacher's aide walking toward a white van. Her parents waited fifty-seven days.

The man responsible was caught on February 15 when Officer David Lee pulled over an orange VW with a stolen plate at 1:34 in the morning in Pensacola. Not detective work. Not a manhunt. One stolen plate.

This is the fourth of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The people who acted — the women who went upstairs, the neighbor who called, the brother who wrote down a plate — and the three weeks that had names no one will forget.

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