by Erin Banks
When Bundy abducted Michigan nurse Caryn Eileen Campbell on January 12, 1975 from the Wildwood Inn in Colorado, he was forced to rape her in the car due to the extreme cold. When she awoke, she scratched his face so badly that even Bundy friend Wynn Bartholomew remarked on it upon Bundy’s return to Utah. (Bundy’s explanation was that he had run into some tree branches while out in nature.)
It is hence not unlikely he may have had to kill Campbell quickly to stop her from fighting back; something he wasn’t fond of as he liked to take his time with victims. Six weeks passed until he took Julie Cunningham in Vail, Colorado on March 15, 1975 – an unusually long time for him, especially as it relates to Utah.
Going through my old notes, I discovered that someone in The Ted Bundy Research Group had mentioned to me police had allegedly discovered another young woman in a ditch with her skull fractured, yet no one linked or could link it to Bundy. Nothing appears to pop up for Colorado during that time frame, though there is a murder of a young Seattle woman named Loralee Sue Lhotka which some believe Bundy may have committed, though it appears unlikely. However, being that some of Bundy’s victims were hitchhikers and also that some of his victims were never found, it may not be entirely impossible he killed someone on the day or in the days after Campbell’s disappearance.
Caryn Eileen Campbell, her fiancé Dr. Raymond Gadowski, and her ex-boyfriend Dr. Alan Rosenthal who were all at the Wildwood Inn together. Campbell went to fetch a naughty magazine for her ex-boyfriend much to the chagrin of Gadowski, which is when she was abducted by Bundy.
I’m drawing parallels between other instances when he had a longer cooling off period, such as after Lake Sammamish on July 14, 1974. Bundy killed two women in one day because he accidentally killed Ott too soon, as he had conceded to author Stephen Michaud when “speculating” what may have happened that day at the lake, all the while denying he was the infamous Ted-killer. The homicidal experience with Ott wasn’t satisfying, so he had to return to the lake to abduct Naslund. He seemed more insistent when he came back to hunt a second time around, too.
(Photos: OddStops, link at the bottom of this post)
At the same token, the botched DaRonch abduction in Murray, Utah is of relevance here, after which he raced through the night and then settled on Viewmont High in Bountiful, Utah. He had originally set his sights on drama teacher Raylene Shepherd, trying to chat her up several times to get her to come out to the parking lot with him to help him with his vehicle. When he stayed in the auditorium after she refused to comply, Shepherd shared with law enforcement that Bundy was breathing heavily and audibly throughout the whole play of “The Redhead;” so much so, in fact, that the audience kept looking around at him uncomfortably because he was being extremely obnoxious. After Debra Jean Kent left the auditorium early in order to pick up her brother Bill from The Rustic Roller Rink after closing time, Bundy yet again refrained from killing for another six weeks. At least that we know of.
So the deliberation is whether, whenever he’d lived through a dissatisfying kill experience, was it “traumatizing” to him enough that he refrained from killing for a longer period than usual? Or to the contrary, when he went for a second victim, was the experience so positively overwhelming, the triumph of having killed more than one person in one day, so fulfilling, that it left his Entity satisfied for a longer period of time?
Photos: OddStops, Classmates, Findgrave, Thisinterestsme, Ted Bundy: A Killer In Aspen
Here’s to the return of The Ted Bundy Research Group
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