CHAPTER 2

He went to the University of Michigan, and he could have stayed there. There'd b
een enough money left from the stash he'd hidden in jail to pay for a twelve-dol
lar room at the YMCA but Michigan nights in January can be unrelentingly icy, an
d he didn't have warm clothing. He'd been to Florida before. Back in the days wh
en he was an energetic young worker for the Republican Party he'd received a tri
p to the 1968 convention in Miami as part of his reward. But, as he pored over c
ollege catalogues in the University of Michigan Library, he wasn't thinking of M
iami.
He looked at the University of Florida in Gainesville and dismissed it summarily
. There was no water around Gainesville, and, as he would say later, "It didn't
look right on the map - superstition, I guess." Tallahassee, on the other hand,
"looked great." He had lived the better part of his life on Washington's Puget S
ound and he craved the sight and smell of water: Tallahassee was on the Ochlocko
nee River which led to the Apalachee Bay and the vastness of the Gulf of Mexico.
He knew he couldn't go home again, ever, but the Florida Indian names reminded
him a little of the cities and rivers of Washington with their Northwestern trib
al names.
Tallahassee it would be. He had traveled comfortably up until New Year's Day. Th
e first night out was a little hard, but walking free was enough in itself. When
he'd stolen the "beater" off the streets in Glenwood Springs, he'd known it mig
ht not be up to making the snow-clogged pass into Aspen, but he'd had little cho
ice. It had burned out thirty miles from Vail-forty miles from Aspen-but a good
Samaritan had helped him push the car off the road, and given him a ride back to
Vail. From there, there was the bus ride to Denver, a cab to the airport, and a
plane to Chicago, even before they'd discovered he was gone.
He hadn't been on a train since he was a child and he'd enjoyed the Amtrak journ
ey to Ann Arbor, having his first drinks in two years in the club car as he thou
ght of his captors searching the snowbanks further and further behind him. In An
n Arbor, he'd counted his money and realized that he would have to conserve it.
He'd been straight since leaving Colorado, but he decided one more car theft did
n't matter. He left this one in the middle of a black ghetto in Atlanta with the
keys in it. Nobody could ever tie it to Ted Bundy.
CHAPTER 3
...not even the FBI (an organization that he privately considered vastly overrat
ed,) who had just placed him on their Ten-Most-Wanted List. The Trailways bus ha
d delivered him right into the center of downtown Tallahassee. He'd had a bit of
a scare as he got off the bus. He thought he'd seen a man he'd known in prison
in Utah, but the man had looked right through him, and he realized he was slight
ly paranoid. Besides, he didn't have enough money to travel any further and stil
l afford a room to rent. He loved Tallahassee.
It was perfect, dead, quiet-a hick town on Sunday morning. He walked out onto Du
val Street, and it was glorious. Warm. The air smelled good and it seemed right
that it was the fresh dawn of a new day. Like a homing pigeon, he headed for the
Florida State University campus. It wasn't that hard to find. Duval cut across
College and he turned right. He could see the old and new capitol buildings ahea
d, and, beyond that, the campus itself. The parking strips were planted with dog
wood trees-reminiscent of home-but the rest of the vegetation was strange, unlik
e that in the places from which he'd come. Live oak, water oak, slash pine, date
palms, and towering sweet gums.
The whole city seemed to be sheltered by trees. The sweet gum branches were star
k and bare in January, making the vista a bit like a northern winter's, but the

temperature was nearing 70 already. The very strangeness of the landscape made h
im feel safer, as if all the bad times were behind him, so far away that everyth
ing in the previous four years could be forgotten, forgotten so completely that
it would be as if it had never happened at all. He was good at that; there was a
place he could go to in his mind where he truly could forget.
Not erase; forget. As he neared the Florida State campus proper, his euphoria le
ssened; perhaps he'd made a mistake. He'd expected a much bigger operation in wh
ich to lose himself, and a proliferation of For Rent signs. There seemed to be v
ery few rentals, and he knew the classifieds wouldn't help him much; he wouldn't
be able to tell which addresses were near the university. The clothing that had
been too light in Michigan and Colorado was beginning to feel too heavy, and he
went to the campus bookstore where he found lockers to stow his sweaters and ha
t.
CHAPTER 5
He had $160 left, not that much money when he figured he had to rent a room, pay
a deposit, and buy food until he found a job. He found that most of the student
s lived in dormitories, fraternal houses, and in a hodge-podge of older apartmen
t and rooming houses bordering the campus.
But he was late in arriving; the term had started, and almost everything was alr
eady rented. Ted Bundy had lived in nice apartments, airy rooms in the upper sto
ries of comfortable older homes near the University of Washington and the Univer
sity of Utah campuses, and he was less than enchanted with the pseudo-Southern-m
ansion facade of "The Oak" on West College Avenue.
It drew its name from the single tree in its front yard, a tree as disheveled as
the aging house behind it. The paint was fading, and the balcony listed a bit,
but there was a For Rent sign in the window. He smiled ingratiatingly at the lan
dlord and quickly talked his way into the one vacancy with only a $100 deposit.
As Chris Hagen, he promised to pay two months rent-$320within a month. The room
itself was as dispirited as the building, but it meant he was off the streets. H
e had a place to live, a place where he could begin to carry out the rest of his
plans. Ted Bundy is a man who learns from experience-his own and others'.
Over the past four years, his life had changed full circle from the world of a b
right young man on his way up, a man who might well have been Governor of Washin
gton in the foreseeable future, to the life of a con and a fugitive. And he had,
indeed, become con-wise, gleaning whatever bits of information he needed from t
he men who shared his cell blocks.
He was smarter by far than any of them, smarter than most of his jailers, and th
e drive that had once spurred him on to be a success in the straight world had g
radually redirected itself until it focused on only one thing: escape-permanent
and lasting freedom, even though he would be, perhaps, the most hunted man in th
e United States. He had seen what happened to escapees who weren't clever enough
to plan. He knew that his first priority would have to be identification papers
. Not one set, but many. He had watched the less astute escapees led back to the
ir prisons, and had deduced that their biggest mistake had been that they were s
topped by the law and had been unable to produce I.D.