Post by Graveyardbride on Sept 26, 2023 14:43:37 GMT -5
A Light in the Dark: Surviving More than Ted Bundy by Kathy Kleiner-Rubin
In the early morning hours of Sunday, January 15, 1978, a man entered the Chi Omega Sorority House on the Florida State University campus, and by the time he left, two women were dead or dying and two others were badly beaten and maimed for life. One of the survivors was Kathy Kleiner-Rubin, now 65-years-old, and she has written a book about what happened that cold winter night 45 years ago.
Once he reached the second floor of the building, Bundy entered Room 4, where 21-year-old Margaret Bowman was sleeping. He bludgeoned her with the wooden club he had grabbed from the woodpile just outside the backdoor, then strangled her with nylon pantyhose. His next stop was Room 9 across the hall, where he crushed the skull of Lisa Levy, age 20, sexually assaulted her with a bottle of Clairol hair-spray,* and during the frenzied assault, sank his teeth into her left buttock.
The next room he entered was Number 8, shared by Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler. Kleiner heard the door open and when the intruder bumped into a trunk between the two twin beds, became fully awake.
“Bundy gripped the oak log .... I saw him raise his left arm into the air. He slammed the log onto my face with tremendous force,” Kleiner writes in A Light in the Dark: Surviving More than Ted Bundy. “… My responses were primal. I wanted to scream for help, but I could not.
“I didn’t yet know that both my jaw joints were broken and disconnected from my cheekbone. My chin was so badly smashed that it shattered, and my cheek had been ripped open as though I had been hit by a bullet,” she continues. “My teeth were still in my jaw, but the intense force of the blow had pushed my molars forward. They were like cars on the highway that had been rammed forward in a massive, multi-car pileup.” The impact of the club was so violent that the young student almost bit off her entire tongue.
During the assault on Kleiner, Karen Chandler awakened and Bundy moved to the other bed and proceeded to bludgeon her face and head. Fortunately, at this point, the headlights of a car in the parking lot below spooked the assailant and he fled the room and building, but not before Nita Neary, who had just gotten home from a date saw him. She later identified Bundy as the dark profile of the man with a club in his hand she had seen in the house around 3:15 that morning.
There was no 911 service in Tallahassee at that time and the women had to call the operator, who in turn, notified the police.
When emergency personnel arrived and observed Kleiner’s horrendous injuries, one of them told her she had been shot in the face. Unfortunately, she was unable to move her mouth to tell them about the man with the club.
Shortly after attacking the Chi Omega sisters, Bundy entered the apartment of 21-year-old dance student Cheryl Thomas about a half-mile away. “He wore hose over his face. He pulled that off and dropped [it] on my floor,” she said during a 2009 interview. She, like the other four women, was severely beaten in the face, suffering a broken jaw, permanent hearing loss and balance issues. There’s little doubt he would have killed her had a neighbor not heard disturbing noises coming from her apartment and dialed her number.
None of the three survivors ever fully recovered. Chandler, however, later returned to FSU and the Chi Omega house, saying that with all the extra security, it was probably the safest place on campus. Kleiner (above) did not return to the university, instead relocating to Miami to be close to family members. Like Kleiner, Cheryl Thomas never resumed her studies at FSU, however, despite her equilibrium problems, she went on to teach ballet and work with the deaf.
Initially, there were no suspects in the attack and local law enforcement officers were in a quandary. Then a call came from more than 1,700 miles away. “I got a call from Colorado about an escaped criminal named Ted Bundy,” Leon County Sheriff Ken Katsaris recalls. “I was familiar with the name. They said, ‘Do you know Ted Bundy?’ I said, ‘I’ve heard of him.’”
Then according to Katsaris, the caller informed him Bundy had escaped and the authorities had no idea where he was. “And I wrote his name down on a legal pad in my car – Ted Bundy,” the sheriff continues. “It was the first name associated with the murders in Tallahassee. … Ted Bundy was known to lure women away with his charm and then abduct them, or pick them up at a bus stop and say, ‘Can I give you a ride?’ … But I did not think that the method of operation of this case was anything near similar, except for an attack on girls … so I did not take that at that time as serious.”
It would be a month before Ted Bundy was stopped for erratic driving in Pensacola, 200 miles west of Tallahassee, and by this time, he had abducted and murdered 12-year-old Kimberly Diane Leach in Lake City, a hundred miles to the east.
Kleiner is disgusted by the movies, books and articles describing Ted Bundy as handsome and charming. “I had married months after Bundy was executed,” she says. “I boxed up my memories, moved to a new state, and pushed forward with my life. More than 30 women and girls never did the same. Bundy viciously cut their lives short. I often worried that these women had become nameless shadow figures while Bundy had become legendary.
“It feels good because in the book I mention all the women, the dozens of women that he killed,” she adds. “And that has been very important to me because usually there’s a paragraph with all our names written with commas. And that just was’t right. I was living, I had a life, and they had dreams and things they wanted to do.”
Nonetheless, not everything Kleiner writes and relates in interviews is true. For example, she claims, “He killed because he wanted to keep their souls. He would have sex with the bodies afterward. He’d go and put makeup on the dead corpses. But then tomorrow, he could be a charming person. He was very manipulative. He wanted to be what he wanted to be when he wanted to.”
In fact, there is no evidence whatsoever that Bundy was collecting souls. And while he did apply makeup to some of his victims while they were in an unconscious state, there’s no evidence he applied makeup to any of them after death. Finally, although he was something of a necrophiliac – he took the head of Donna Gail Manson to Liz Kloepfer’s house and engaged in a sex act with it in the shower before burning it in the fireplace – he never admitted to applying makeup to the heads of his decapitated victims.
Sources: Andrew Conklin, Fox News, September 26, 2023; Ted Bundy: The Killer Next Door by Steven Winn and David Merrill; The Deliberate Stranger by Richard W. Larsen; The Tallahassee Police Department, and The Leon County Sheriff's Office.
