Ted Bundy timeline: every verified date, 1946 to 1989

• Name at birthTheodore Robert Cowell
• Born24 November 1946, Burlington, Vermont
• Known attacksJanuary 1974 – February 1978
• StatesWashington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Florida
• Confessed30 homicides, in the days before his execution
• Convicted ofAggravated kidnapping (Utah, 1976); two murders at Chi Omega (Miami, 1979); the murder of Kimberly Leach (Orlando, 1980)
• Died24 January 1989, electric chair, Florida State Prison, Starke

Most retellings of the Ted Bundy case start with the charm, the law school and the Volkswagen, and treat the dates as scenery. This page does the opposite. It is a timeline: what happened, where, and on what day, from his birth in 1946 to his execution in 1989. Each date below was checked against at least two independent sources, listed at the end. Where the sources disagree, the disagreement is written into the entry rather than smoothed over.

One thing to keep in mind before the dates start. Bundy confessed to thirty homicides, but he was tried for only three of them. Every killing in Washington, Oregon, Utah and Idaho, and the Colorado murder he was awaiting trial for when he escaped, rests on confessions, investigators' conclusions and circumstantial evidence, not on a verdict. That is not a reason to doubt them. It is the reason the timeline is careful about which word it uses: disappeared, attacked, convicted.

1946–1973: before the first known attack

He was born Theodore Robert Cowell on 24 November 1946 at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont. His mother later moved with him to Tacoma, Washington, married, and he took his stepfather's surname, Bundy. He studied psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

In 1971 he worked night shifts at Seattle's Crisis Clinic, a suicide hotline. One of the volunteers beside him was Ann Rule, a former police officer then writing for true-detective magazines. She would go on to write The Stranger Beside Me (1980), the account of discovering that the colleague she liked was the man police were looking for.

1974: Washington and Oregon

• 4 January 1974Karen Sparks, a University of Washington student, is attacked in her basement room in Seattle. She survives with severe injuries. It is the first attack attributed to Bundy with confidence.
• 1 February 1974Lynda Ann Healy, a UW undergraduate, disappears from the house she shares near campus. Her bed is found made, with blood on the pillow.
• March – June 1974Five more young women vanish in quick succession: Donna Manson, Susan Rancourt, Roberta Parks (from Oregon State University in Corvallis), Brenda Ball and Georgann Hawkins.
• 14 July 1974Janice Ott and Denise Naslund disappear from Lake Sammamish State Park, east of Seattle, within hours of each other. Witnesses describe a young man calling himself Ted, his arm in a sling, asking women to help him with a sailboat.
• August 1974Bundy moves to Salt Lake City to start law school at the University of Utah.

The Lake Sammamish afternoon is what finally gave Seattle a name and a description. Police released a composite sketch and the detail of the Volkswagen Beetle. Several people who knew Bundy, including Ann Rule, reported him as a possible match. The tips were among thousands, and he had already left the state.

1974–1976: Utah and Colorado

• 8 November 1974Carol DaRonch, 18, is approached at Fashion Place Mall in Murray, Utah, by a man posing as a police officer. In his car he tries to handcuff her; she fights free and escapes. The same evening Debra Kent, 17, disappears from Viewmont High School in Bountiful.
• 12 January 1975Caryn Campbell, a 23-year-old nurse on a ski trip, disappears from the Wildwood Inn in Snowmass, Colorado.
• 16 August 1975Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward stops a tan Volkswagen Beetle in Granger, a suburb of Salt Lake City. In the car are a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs and an ice pick. Bundy is arrested.
• 2 October 1975Carol DaRonch picks Bundy out of a police lineup.
• March 1976Tried without a jury, Bundy is convicted of aggravated kidnapping for the DaRonch attack and later sentenced to one to fifteen years in the Utah State Prison.
• October 1976Colorado charges him with the first-degree murder of Caryn Campbell. He is moved to Aspen to stand trial.

The DaRonch escape matters more than its place in the list suggests. It was the first time a woman got away and could identify him, and it produced the only conviction any state won against him before Florida.

1977: two escapes

• 7 June 1977Allowed to act as his own lawyer and to use the law library on the second floor of the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, without leg irons, Bundy jumps from a library window and runs for the mountains. He is recaptured six days later.
• 30 December 1977At the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs, he removes a light fixture in the ceiling of his cell, squeezes through the gap into the crawl space and walks out. Within days he is on his way to Florida.

The second escape ended any chance of a Colorado verdict. The Caryn Campbell charge was never tried.

1978: Florida

• 8 January 1978Bundy arrives in Tallahassee and rents a room in a boarding house on West College Avenue, a few blocks from Florida State University.
• 15 January 1978In the early hours he enters the Chi Omega sorority house at 661 West Jefferson Street. Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, are killed. Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler are badly injured and survive. Within about an hour Cheryl Thomas is attacked in her apartment on Dunwoody Street, several blocks away, and survives.
• 9 February 1978Kimberly Leach, 12, is abducted from Lake City Junior High School, about a hundred miles east of Tallahassee. (One source dates this 8 February; most, including the court record summarised on Wikipedia, give the 9th.)
• 15 February 1978Near Pensacola, Officer David Lee pulls over a Volkswagen that turns out to be stolen. The driver struggles with him, runs, and is caught. It is Ted Bundy.
• 7 April 1978Kimberly Leach's remains are found near Suwannee River State Park.

1979–1980: the Florida trials

• 25 June 1979The Chi Omega trial opens in Miami, moved there because of publicity in Tallahassee. Judge Edward Cowart presides. It is one of the first criminal trials televised nationally in the United States, and Bundy takes part in his own defense.
• 24 July 1979The jury finds him guilty on all counts, including the murders of Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman.
• 31 July 1979Judge Cowart sentences him to death, twice. Sentencing him, the judge tells him he would have made a good lawyer.
• 7 January 1980The trial for the murder of Kimberly Leach opens in Orlando.
• 9 February 1980During the penalty phase, Bundy calls Carole Ann Boone as a character witness and, while she is on the stand, declares that he marries her. Under Florida law a declaration in open court before officers of the court was a valid marriage. The same day he is sentenced to death for the third time. (A minority of accounts date the sentence to 10 February.)

The Leach conviction rested heavily on physical evidence. Fibres from the van he had stolen matched Kimberly Leach's clothing, and witnesses near her school described a man leading a girl to a white van that morning.

1980–1989: death row

Appeals took nine years. In the final days before his execution Bundy gave a series of confessions to investigators, including FBI agent Bill Hagmaier. He named some victims and could not or would not name others. In Washington, according to HistoryLink, he confessed to eleven killings and could identify eight victims by name.

• 24 January 1989Ted Bundy is executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke, and pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. He was 42.

How many people did he kill?

The figure usually quoted, thirty, is his own: the total of the confessions he gave before the execution, in seven states in all. Investigators have long believed the real number could be higher, and some of his admissions pointed to killings before 1974. None of those has been proven. The honest short answer is: at least twenty victims are confirmed, he confessed to thirty, and he was convicted of three murders.

The survivors are part of the record too. Karen Sparks, Carol DaRonch, Kathy Kleiner, Karen Chandler and Cheryl Thomas lived, and several of them testified. DaRonch's identification and the testimony from Chi Omega are much of the reason he was convicted at all.

Why the case is still retold

Part of it is the televised Miami trial, which put a defendant acting as his own lawyer in front of a national audience in 1979. Part of it is Ann Rule's book, written by someone who knew him before anyone suspected. And part of it is that the story has been retold again and again on screen, most recently in 2019 with the Netflix series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and the film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.

If you are reading about the case because of one of those, the timeline above is the part they compress. The distances matter: Seattle to Salt Lake City to Aspen to Tallahassee, in four years, while he was a law student, a prisoner and a fugitive in turn.

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Questions people ask

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Sources

Every date and name on this page was checked against at least two of the following. Where they disagree, the disagreement is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

1. Ted BundyWikipedia
2. Ted Bundy Killings: A TimelineBiography.com
3. Timeline of many of Ted Bundy's brutal crimesABC News, 2019
4. How Ted Bundy was able to escape from custody twiceABC News, 2019
5. Bundy execution anniversary revisits dark piece of Roaring Fork Valley historyGlenwood Springs Post Independent
6. Serial killer Ted Bundy is put to death in the electric chair (Essay 2637)HistoryLink.org
7. Remembering Ted Bundy and the Chi Omega MurdersFlorida Sheriffs Association
8. Florida State University Chi Omega murdersWikipedia
9. Murder of Kimberly LeachWikipedia
10. Ted Bundy: infamous serial killer arrested in PensacolaWKRG
11. Carol DaRonchWikipedia
12. Theodore Robert Bundy Trials: 1976 & 1979Encyclopedia.com
13. Who Was Ted Bundy's Wife, Carole Ann Boone?Oxygen
14. The Stranger Beside MeWikipedia
15. Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy TapesWikipedia

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