You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together
with Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a
researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social
media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind of a Murder. I'm Kristin
Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas, and we are joined today by Kathy Kleiner Rubin,
who is here to talk to us about her new book, A Light
in the Dark, Surviving More Than Ted Bundy. Kathy, thank you so
much for joining us. We are thrilled to have you. Thank you very
much for inviting me to come on. I'm not sure the two of us
have ever been more excited to have a guest on because we are both such
big fans of you personally and professionally. Thank you very much. It's nice
for our listeners who may not know who you are. Can you tell us
just a little bit of background about yourself. I was born in Miami and
I lived there for a number of years, and I consider myself a serial
survivor. Over the years, I've had childhood lupus, and I was in
seventh grade at that point. Then I was attacked by serial killer Ted Bundy,
and then I've gone through breast cancer stage two, breast cancer mesdectomy.
That's who I am in a nutshell. But my stories are very different than
just saying one sentence. I love that idea of being a serial survey that
takes bravery and that takes guts. Was it hard for you to sit and
write about surviving all of these things? It was a roller coaster of emotions
and love. It took me two and a half years to write it because
I wanted to get it right. I wanted to tell of myself, and
I wanted to expose everything about me so that the readers did know who I
was and why I survived and why I persevered. I enjoyed writing it once
I got into it. In the beginning, I was scared and nervous and
everything, but then it just started flowing. So how did you meet your
co writer, Emily LeBeau Lukes. How did the two of you get connected?
She actually emailed a mutual friend, Tory Telfer, who wrote the article
on me for Rolling Stone, And that was back in twenty eighteen, and
Emily contacted Tory and said, well, she's ever interested in telling her story.
I would love love to talk with her, and here's my email address.
Have her call me or email me. And I think it was a
year later she talked to Tory again and said, Kathy never responded to me.
I'd really like to talk to her. So Tory got my attention,
and that's how Emily and I met. What made you decide that now now
is the time to tell your story about surviving all of these things, lupis
and cancer and Bundy. It was a right time now because I'm settled in
my mind, and my husband and I are very close together, and I
feel like I'm at a pause in my life that I can talk about what
happened. Every time I speak about all of this it helps heal me.
So I'm in a position now where my son's grown up and it's just my
husband and I and we just were in a good place, so I thought
it was finally time. That's actually something I was going to ask about,
but you went ahead and said it, So I'm going to follow you for
a second. I've heard you say a couple of times that every time you
tell your story it helps to heal you. Can you expand a little bit
about that. I know there are plenty of people in your place who maybe
wouldn't want to talk about it. I find that, especially with the attack,
I needed to know that it wasn't my fault and that I would get
through it because that's me, and my parents were there to help and family
were there to help me, and I didn't want too much too many people
around me. I knew this was my attack and it was my story.
And when people say I don't know what can I do for you, just
say, oh, can you move those flowers around? Just to give someone
something to do because everyone don't know what to do. I find it heals
me because I feel good about the people around me, and I want to
heal them. So by talking about everything, it just puts a positive light
on what I've gone through, so they can feel better now. You and
I were on a panel together a Crime Can a couple of weeks ago,
and you mentioned this idea that you're telling the story and even retelling the story
is a healing process for you. And yet the people in the audience also
responded incredibly positively. Do you feel like there's something going on in terms of
this exchange of your life experiences and inspiring people? I hope so. I
know when I tell my story, I reach a lot of people on a
different level. Either they've been through trauma or they're going through it and they
can hear my story, and I hope it gives them strength because it's their
story too. They need to talk about it whomever will listen to them.
The first day you're attacked or you're traumatized, you're a victim. The next
day you're a survivor, and you have to get that thought in your head
to do that on your own. There's people around seek help, but I
think people relate with me because of the breast cancer or just because of the
loopus, and of course for the Ted Bundy's attack. So I like touching
people on different levels and let them know they can get through anything. They
just have to do it themselves, but they can do it, and they
should seek help or whenever they need to. What is it like for you
to be in a room full of people who are waiting with baited breath to
hear your story. I remember the first time that you spoke at Crime Con
because nobody wanted to miss that session, and people were wall to wall,
standing room only, and you could hear a pin drop. It was intense.
What is that like for you being up in front of a huge group
of people like telling your story? I love it. I love it because
I try to connect with people. I try to look around the audience and
I want to take them into my story. I don't want to just tell
a story and just be a story to tell. I want people to be
drawn in, and when I talk about the sorty house and my bedroom and
everything, I want them to put themselves in the same place and walk through
it with me. Because each time, like the attack, I walk myself
into my room and after it was over, I got to see my room
before I left Tallahassee, I walked in and I got to see the room
the way it was messed up, and I knew this is what happened to
me, this is where it was, and I could relate that other people
have the other things they are going through. To see that many people at
one time just makes me feel good. And I just want to connect with
people. To see so many people, I really did hope I connected with
them. Do you get nervous? We've seen you in front of a thousand
people or more in these massive hotel ballrooms at crime con and other conferences,
and you seem completely comfortable up there. My knees shake when I first get
out there and I look around, and then I'm like, this is what
it's going to do. This is what I'm doing today. And I keep
my story in order so that the loopus and then the Bundy and then the
breast cancer, and I want to tell all my little thoughts in between,
the way I've recovered and recuperated in my own little way, and I think
that's important for people to hear your old at crime con. Now, this
is was this your third crime conerlanda second? Okay? And then I know
you've also we say Savannah crimexpough, what is most interesting to you about these
mass gatherings of true crime fans. I find it interesting the people go there
for so many diverse reasons. They want to know true crime, or they
want to hear about ways of taking people down and discovering when a subject is
finally caught and going to be prosecuted. I think people want to hear all
these stories. They appreciate it. They want the knowledge of what goes on
behind scenes. I think, learn about the DNA and learn about other things
that they're interested in. So I think there's a lot of people there for
a lot of reasons. Kathy. When you and I first met, I
think it was in twenty nineteen at the ASOC conference, and ASOCK stands for
the American Investigative Society of Cold Cases. I saw you speaking a couple of
hundred investigators, forensics experts. There were students there. Our mutual friend Cheryl
mac McCollum had reached out to me and she said, are you going to
ASAK, which was in Albany that year, and I said yes, this
is before COVID. She said, will you watch out for my friend Kathy
Kleiner And I said I'd be honored to, so I sought you out and
introduced myself. The day you were to speak, you marched yourself up onto
the stage and I hope you don't mind me saying this. You're very fatigue
and the podium was very tall, and then the stage was very tall.
You actually ended up stepping out from behind it so people could see you.
And then you proceeded to hold this entire room. And this is a tough
crowd. They were completely mesmerized by your conversation. You spoke for about forty
five minutes. You told your story and then this is the part that surprised
me. I was blown away by your story and covering moving through these challenges
lupis Ted Bundy being a breast cancer survivor, and it was very inspiring.
I was standing at the back of the room and you came and you stood
next to me, and you didn't look at me. You looked forward towards
the stage and they were setting up for the next speaker or whoever that was.
And you said, I've never done that before. And I said,
never done what? Because remember I've just been blown away by this amazing magnetic
public speaker. You said, I've never spoken like that about my life and
I remember turning to you and just so shocked that you had never done this
before, yet you seemed so natural. You did say gosh, I was
nervous at the beginning. And I said to you, as I've said that
many other public speakers, myself included, most of the nerves are in your
head. People really want to hear, especially someone like you. They really
want to hear what you have to say. But I was so amazed that
you were so good at it and so effective in telling your story, and
then to come back and stand there and not even look at me, just
say I never did that before. Has it gotten easier for you now in
the last four years since you first started speaking out publicly. I think so.
I've got a lot more confidence in me now, and I do go
out and each crowd gets larger and larger. And when I was at Crime
Con nineteen, they were like five hundred seats set up, but they were
standing up on the wall and sitting down on the floor, I remember,
and I enjoyed it. It was a smaller crowd and I could just see
everybody, and it was very emotional for me. It is my story and
I want people to know it and I don't want to just stand there and
not make sense. I want to give everybody everything I have. And like
I said, when I tell the story my life story, I walk through
each section that I'm doing and talking about, and I'm putting myself there.
I want the people to come along my journey with me. One of the
best moments for Crime Con this year for me was when I was able to
introduce Jane Barroski to you. And Jane survived the Connecticut River Valley serial killer.
It was so moving and I can't talk about it too terribly much for
I'm gonna cry, but it was so incredibly moving to see how you just
embraced her and you were like, it's cool, Like you get it,
you understand because you've gone through it. How does it feel to you to
meet other survivors of violent crime, or people like Jane's survivors of other serial
killers. I find it healing for me to actually go to them and hug
them and feel their pain, not in a weird way, but just I
can hold them, and hopefully by holding them they hold me back. And
I think having been there or gone through trauma, people can get it that
way. I got so many people coming and hugging me. It was great.
It was just a good thing. And I think just relaying and sympathizingly
understanding what they've been through. As much as I hate to have to talk
about him, he is a subject of the book. So let's get into
the Bundy of it all. So first of all, can you tell us,
like, why do you think the American public is still so interested in
Bundy after all these years? Why do we even care about this guy anymore?
Do you have any insight into that. When he was in the courtroom
and the trial was going on, it was the first time or very second
time or whatever the TV cameras were allowed in the courtroom, and his prisana
was exactly what he wanted people to see. He wasn't himself because he wasn't
anything special, but he wanted people to think he was. And I think
a lot of the young girls actually who went to the trial, there were
a lot that sat in the front room of the courtroom, and I just
didn't get it why they were there. And then I understood some of them
wanted to be oh, look he's next to me. Oh look he looked
me. Oh man, I think he could attack me and I'd love it,
And I'm like, what, you know, get a life, And
that's their thought at that time. And I think the other women that were
there were more of a I can fix him, I can make him better.
I should be here to talk to him or to hold him the mother
figure. So I think it was very diverse on how each of them felt.
The ones that were so excited I just didn't get. I think that
started the mystique about him being a good looking guy, and that's what he
wanted people to see. He was very manipulative and he just he wanted them
to see who he wanted to be and whomever that was. A student,
which he never finished school. He fell out of law school, and he
was a candidate. He wanted to be a candidate for the I forgot Republican
Party and all this stuff, and he didn't get very far in that.
It didn't it didn't work out for him. He was actually such a loser.
He'd still shoplift his own clothes because he didn't have any money to buy
clothes because he didn't have a job. He did the talking to people who
wanted to commit suicide with Ann Ruhl, that was showing him a bit of
normal, But I think he really just wanted to hear their stories, and
with those stories it fed into what he felt like he could do, or
what he wanted to do in his mind or in the other side of him.
It was the evil, just horrible. I can't say enough bad words
for him. He was not a charmer, He was not good looking.
In my mind, he was not anything in a good way. It was
just a loser. One of the things I learned from your book, and
there's a lot in here to learn about you, your life as well as
Bundy. You take the air out of a bunch of these myths about him.
One is that he's some sort of genius. It took the guy eight
years to graduate from college, which most people do in four, sometimes even
less. So he's not exactly a scholar when it comes to academics, and
he's not necessarily such a brilliant strategic thinker either. You point out that in
many of the examples, he's attacking these women from behind while they're asleep.
This isn't the charmer. This is a guy who is lashing out at defenseless
people who aren't even looking at him, or whose eyes aren't even open.
He attacked women that were vulnerable in his mind. He didn't care what they
looked like, He didn't care anything about him. He just wanted to kill
and he got such pleasure when he killed that He was really just worse than
anything you can think of in his feelings. Or He finished his graduate school
in eight years, but he went less than two years to law school because
he couldn't handle it, because he just wasn't with it. He just didn't
have the fourwithal to try to get something and do it right. He was
just going through the days he could and then killing at night was his main
thing for living. Somehow, I think Ted Bundy should be synonymous with loser
more than anything else. I don't have a lot of respect for this guy.
I never had much respect for him, and your book A Light in
the Dark really highlights the fact that this guy is nothing unique and certainly knowing
to be looked up to. No, he wasn't. And I can say
some words about what I related to, but I don't think I should.
But yeah, it just he's creepy, he was sick. He was just
like not a human when he attacked people, the girls, and he did
do it from behind or attacked him with a crowbar or something. He never
confronted someone and attacked him that way. There was a couple times where men
were involved with the when he was trying to take the girls and one of
them was a little Kimberly Beach in Lake Florida, and she was trying to
get He was trying to push her into a van and a guy came up
to him and it said, oh, that's just her dad. She probably
had a bad day and pushed him in the van and he walked away.
She was ended up being killed, but he didn't want to confront anybody,
so if he had come to him, he probably would have just let her
go and leave. So we've covered a couple of the important misconceptions about Bundy
that you'd like to see cleared up or I guess blown up. Are there
any others that we've missed? We've already talked about the fact that he wasn't
really intelligent, wasn't this master criminal? What else should we be aware of
here about Bundy? When he was young, he did the typical killing the
cat and being he was a peeping tom, and he had all the early
signs of being distressed as a human, and he did other things as he
grew older. And it's just even in the beginning there we know the signs
now, but no one knew him then, and he just proceeded just like
a psychopath would. He just followed all the stages into growing into manhood.
Do you mind telling us that story about you staring him down and how you,
even as a young woman, convinced yourself. I need to buck myself
up and I need to face this man. The first time I saw him
after the attack was when I was subpoenaed for the deposition and I'd never been
to one before, and it was in this long conference room and I was
walking into the room and there's a conference table in front of me and on
one side where the defense attorneys on the other side of the prosecution, I
sat down. I looked at the other head at the table and there was
Ted Bundy and he was sitting there looking so smug and so like we're wasting
his time. And I put my elbows on the table and I looked at
him, and I thought, he's not going to get me. I don't
have to be afraid. Now he's at the other end of the table,
just where we need him to be on the outside. I did have to
build myself up for that, and I don't remember what the questions were that
either side the fence or prosecution asked. But then when I was asked to
leave and I could walk out, I told my mother, I think I'm
going to throw up because that was just such an emotional setting and I didn't
expect him to be there. That was the first time I saw him.
The second time I saw him was during the grand jury and I was against
the peanut and there was another conference room. I sat down and he was
over there. He had a light blue jacket on, and I still remember
him distinctly, and this time he was acting like, oh, man,
just get this over with again. He always thought he wouldn't be charged with
anything. He was so charming, he could get himself out of anything.
And at that point I was just frustrated and mad. When I saw him,
it was just like this. I was mad. I was really mad.
And the third time I saw was at the courthouse when I have to
give my testimony of what happened during that night. So I did, and
they heard the story and they agreed it was time to come and put him
into trial. Now in a situation like in the courtroom in the third example,
Kathy, you're being asked questions by a prosecutor, and then were you
also asked questions by a defense attorney as well. Yes, When I entered
the courtroom and I got sworn in and I sat in the box where you
answered the questions, he was sitting in the courtroom as well, on one
side at his table, defense on the other side of the prosecution. And
again I just looked at him. He was antsy a little bit, then
shmug, you know this is going too far. Let's just get out of
here now. And the prosecution did ask me questions and I don't remember what
they were. And then defense asked me a couple questions, and I was
just staring at Bundy. I don't remember what there were the last question they
asked me, and I was so felt so good that I was going to
help convict him and help take him all out of this world and hurt him
bad. The one question I remember, is this the man you saw in
your room that night that attacked you. No, I had to say,
no, I don't know. And I was so upset that I couldn't help
convict him at all. But I had to say that, and it bothered
me for a long time. But it was dark, Am I correct?
It was you weren't able to see your attack her in the darkened room.
No, he came in. We were in the sorority house. I lived
on the second floor, and it faced the back parking lot on the second
floor, and we always had our curtain rat open because we hung plants on
the curtain rods. It was at night and it's still dark in the room,
and I heard him come in the door, swished on the carpet,
and it woke me up. It's about three in the morning. And then
he tripped and heard a louder noise. We had a little foot locker between
my roommate's bed my bed, and he tripped over that, and that woke
me up. Now I'm awake, and I look and I see this figure,
this black silhouette of someone standing next to me. And then I see
as him raise his arm, raise his arm up over his head, and
he had something in his hand. He had a stick or something I couldn't
tell. And he slammed that down, that wood on my face so hard
that it slit my cheek open, and it looked like I had been shot.
It broke my jaw in three places. It shattered my chin, and
my face was all numb. I had two broke broken jawbones. I just
was hurting a lot at first. Actually it felt like hitting a bag of
potatoes. It just was a thud, and not maybe four minutes later,
the pain hid in and that's when I started moaning and groaning, and my
roommate heard it. So Bundy went over to that side of the bed and
attacked her with the same piece of wood that he attacked me with. Bundy
heard me crying now, and he didn't leave any victims alive, so he
came back to my side of the bed to hit me again. But I
had made myself as small as I could in a little bitty ball, and
I tried to get into under my sheets, and I just lay there so
vulnerable in a little ball, and I thought, if he can't see me,
he won't hit me. So I again. I saw him put his
arm up in the air and he had, as it turned out to be
a piece of firewood in his hand, and just as he was going to
strike me again, the room got all light. The light shone in the
room, and it was a brilliant light, and it shone in from the
car that was driving someone home a date that night. And the shot car
pulled up into the driveway, and the lights of that car shone up into
our room. Now I could see him, and he could see me,
and he spooped him. He moved around a little bit, and I think
he thought he was seen either by me or whatever made those lights shine up
in our room. He spooped out and ran out of our bedroom door.
And as the lights went out and it got dark again, I'm staying in
my little bitty ball because I knew he was going to come back and hit
me again. But he didn't. He didn't come back. He left the
sorority at that time. How many people did he attacked at the sorority that
night? There were two. He attacked Margaret Bowman and hit her with the
piece of oak club he had picked up outside our back door. In the
sorority on the first floor, there was a stack of firewood we used for
the fireplace, and that's where he picked up a piece of wood. He
picked it up and the door was broken, the back padlock, so he
just waltzed right into the house, and he went around to the front of
the house and the wood staircase that led to the second floor. He went
up those and then he turned the hall that went to my bedroom. There
was a hall on the left and a hall on the right, so he
came down our hall and the first story opened was Margaret Bowman. He attacked
her with the log and put the sheets up over her face so that looked
like she was sleeping. He went across the hall and attacked Lisa Levi.
She was again alone in her room, and he beat her viciously with the
log. He did a lot of things to her, and he bit her,
and actually the teeth marks ended up being like a fingerprint, because your
teeth leave a natural impression that no tour like. So after he attacked both
of those girls. So he attacked two and killed two. Then myself and
my roommate he attacked, but we survived. And then later on that day,
that night he rode down the street to another girl's house and he attacked
her as well, so he attacked three and killed two. You're listening to
Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors we're
back here, Mind over Murder. Out of all of the really excellent content
in your book, the most important and impactful, I would say, is
your three appendices. The third one, Appendix C, is titled how to
honor the women and girls who lost their lives to Bundy, And I really
like that you put this together. Can you give us a quick overview of
the five different strategies to honor the lives of those women. The first thing
was to name them, to give them a true name and put a face
to that name, don't just have in regular Bundy books. You open the
book to the page of the victims and it's one paragraph and our names are
separated by commas. And my name's on that on the very bottom. And
this isn't fair. I had a life. I was strong, I wanted
to be in college. I was exciting. I was a fresh sophomore.
I joined Kyle Mega sorority. I did a lot of fret parties, and
this was my life and I had to be taken out of that so fast.
But these women were taken away so fast, and he killed them,
and he didn't think anything about who their family was or who's going to be
impacted by this killing because he didn't care. He just went through in the
motions of killing, just because that's the way he was made and the way
he worked. So I wanted to give a face and a name to each
of the women and then talk about them a little bit. What were their
dreams, what did they want to do, what did they do last night?
Tell me about their family? And we found as much as we could
about the thirty two women. That made me happy because I gave them a
voice and I let people know who they were. There were real people,
not just victims. I would imagine their families if they were comfortable talking with
you, probably would have enjoyed that, because here you are talking about their
legacy and their lives and not just positioning them as victims. I hope.
So I've not been reached out by anybody yet. I expect to at some
point, and I'd love to talk to them, just let them know that
I never knew their daughter, their sister, but I loved them. So
what are some of these other strategies? I like? The English teacher is
about to say that she loves your verb use here. I love your choice
of verbs. For the second item here, you said stomp on and discredit
the Bundy legacy. I love stomp. No, yes, I love that.
That's great. That's a great verb. Stomp as hard as you can.
I love that. So what does that mean when you say to discredit
the Bundy legacy? What does that mean? Just pull them apart, take
them apart, and show what he's not. He was never charismatic and a
good guy and had money, and everything he perceived was a lie. So
I wanted the truth to be taken out put into the equation because he just
couldn't survive as a normal person. He couldn't get over his killing sprees and
his he actually would kill girls and take them into the woods and then go
back to their bodies and put makeup on them and be with them again.
And he just can't I can't say enough bad words, or in my vocabulary,
I don't have the words I could say. And he's just needed to
be taken down. At the same time, what a pathetic loser. This
is a guy that couldn't interact with people in any kind of positive way,
get to know people, learn about them. He's just lashing out and then
going back to visit their bodies. It's just pathetic. He killed a lot
of women, and he would take their body parts, he would cut them
out and then put them in different states so that they couldn't be associated that,
oh, look, here's an arm, and let's go look for the
body, because he'd never find it. And here's a head, what is
the body? Where is the body? And that would be woods in another
state. So he was thinking about not getting caught the whole time was what
can I do to not get caught? But he didn't care. He wasn't
going to get caught. In his head, he was just going to do
as he pleased for as long as he wanted to. And of course he's
operating at a time that's well before DNA and other forensic advances had taken place,
so you would not be able to identify someone who's arm or leg or
what have you is found in another location, unlike twenty twenty three, where
you might actually be able to forgive me piece together the story of what had
happened to a victim. The science would allow that now, but it wouldn't
back then. Correct. I like that. You also mention that people need
to stop victim blaming when it comes to Bundy's victims, such as she was
hitchhiking, she must have deserved it or something like that. I like that
you take the point within this appendix to really focus on the social norms were
different at the time. It is fine for you to walk alone, like
women should be allowed to walk alone without ever having a worry. Is a
serial killer going to accost me from behind? I like that You guys just
really went out there and said, hey, stop victim blaming. I don't
think people appreciate too how common hitchhiking was back then. Now, I was
a young single guy in college, but I hitchhiked back and forth to my
university, the University of Massachusetts, at least once a month, sometimes more
often than that. I never took a bus back and forth from my parents'
hometown to the University of Massachusetts. I had a sign one side said you
mass and the other side said Lowell, which is my parents' hometown, and
I kept it in the bottom of a duffel bag. When I was ready
to head home for a particular weekend, I just hit the road with my
sign saying Lowell. And then on Sunday, when I was heading back,
it said you mess and I consistently got a ride back and forth about one
hundred miles. Even single women hitchhiked very frequently. This we're talking about a
very different era very much. I never was in that time of frame and
that mindset to go and hitchhike. That just wasn't into what I did and
how I moved along in getting transportation. But I can't imagine being picked up
by somebody like Bundy and then being hit in the head with the crowbar.
And now she's a victim, but she was actually a survivor. She lived
for any amount of time, so he would hit them and go to kill
them, but a lot of times they weren't dead yet, so victimized them
over and over. So it was like she should be on the survival mode,
she should go for, she should hope in her head. And I
just it makes me feel sad to think that their last words were please don't
kill me, Please don't. Those words just haunt me when I think about
it, because he was there were so many of them, and he just
had no care about it. He didn't care what he was doing to him.
And Kathy, now that you've said that and you really have contextualized it
for people, this is not somebody that we need to be glorifying. I
do the fact that you and Emily mentioned do not in any way support fictionalize
stories about Bundy or his victims, and there have been so many over the
last couple of years. One of those. Yes, I've read every book
and I've watched them, and it desensiized myself a little bit and pushes it
back. But you have to remember, when I make a movie, they
hire an actor and actresses and they're working to get money, so they're going
to do whatever it takes to make the story believable and make it that way.
So when I see these movies, I know that actors and they're just
doing what the writers wrote for him, and the directors are telling them what
to do. And I know the mails that pick or picked for the part
of Bundy. They have to die really low and to the man and understand
him one hundred percent on who he is and who he was. That's a
difficult thing for me to know what that actor had to go through to be
part of his head. And I'm sure that was difficult, But the movie
itself was somebody wrote it and somebody act in it. I was actually watching
the other day with a friend of mine. They had wanted to see Elizabeth
Kendall's documentary about her life with Bundy. And I was watching there was actually
footage of you from the courtroom in it, and I stopped and I said,
Oh, that's Kathy, that's my friend Kathy. But have you watched
the document all of the documentaries that have come out about him? Is that
something you watched as well? Yes, I did. I watched each one.
Is it difficult? The fourth part series that Netflix did was never mentioning
the victims. It was Bundy's tapes. So we got to know Bundy the
way he wanted us to think. It was Bundy. So we watched the
tapes and it was interesting. It was you know, education to know him,
learn what he was and who we talked to and psychiatrist and getting through
all that. And then at the very end when they got to the end
of the tapes and it was the last session and they were going to kill
him, and he started saying, no, please, don't kill me,
please, I'll talk to you more. Don't kill me please. And that
just the thought of him saying that, and the girls saying that, it
just that eats me up. Let's step away from him for a second and
tell us a little bit about your writing process, because really, this could
not have been easy. How long did it take you? What is your
I love asking people about their writing process because I try to teach it to
my eyes. Student, talk to us about your process. It was difficult,
and Emily was wonderful. We'd take a section of the book and go
for maybe two and a half or three hours, and she'd get into my
head and I'd tell her what I want to say, and then she sat
down and wrote it so eloquently. I give her so much credit for the
way she wrote it. She got into my head and said how I wanted
it to sound. Just working together like that, we just took sections of
a time like when I had lupus, and we just talked about that for
a couple of days or a couple interviews, which made me feel in a
weird place because I did bring it back in my head, and again,
I wanted people to feel what it felt like when I was home alone and
sick. So that was something that it took a while for us to talk
about. We finally did, and it was good. I enjoyed the way
it came out. I was happy with the way it came out. Now,
you live in Florida and Emily lives out Chicago. Were you doing this
mostly remotely via zoom or conference calls? How did you actually put the interviews
together? Most of it was on the phone. We didn't get into the
zoom back then as much. We just did phone hours and hours. Every
now and then we do a FaceTime or something. But I just felt more
comfortable on the phone because I could talk it and close my eyes and feel
it and not have to see her and wondering if she's reacting to what I'm
saying that kind of stuff. Yeah, so I just closed my eyes and
talked. Did she record those conversations? I don't know. I never asked.
I know you have to say, I'm recording you if you do.
But then she was trying to capture the essence of these different important chapters in
your life, from as far back as when you were a girl, all
the way through to the present day. Did this feel a little bit like
therapy in a way? It did, and it does. One of the
things. After I was attacked, I had to leave Tallahassee and I went
down to Miami with my family and my parents and had to recuperate there.
I was going through a lot because I had to leave the house, leave
my sorty house and the girls. I needed to be talked to and told
I did nothing wrong and that they loved me. And I couldn't get through
to any of the sorority sisters, and they never really touched out to me.
As I tried on the phone, they just didn't respond, they didn't
call me back. That was difficult. That was difficult to get through because
I knew I hadn't done anything wrong. It wasn't my fault, and yet
I felt like they thought it because they didn't contact me. But one of
the ways that really bothered me was the whole attack, the whole recuperation,
the whole series around it, all the attention, and I felt like I
had this black cape around me, this black, ugly mass, and it
struck to encompass me and I could see out of it, but I felt
more and more like it was going to close up on me. And as
I saw it, I didn't want to live like that. I didn't want
to be scared in a little room with no windows and just hang out in
there because I was afraid to walk out. And as I saw that mass,
I looked way out in the distance and I saw a little island and
it had one palm tree and one beach chair sitting on it. And I
wanted to get to that island so bad. So I used to take baby
steps to get to my island. And it took a long time and a
lot of baby steps. And as I took the baby steps, I turned
around and looked and that black mass were baby steps behind me. And I
continued to walk and walk, and I finally got to my goal, and
that was my little beach chair. I sat down, I put my toes
in the sand. I looked up and there was no black mass. It
was completely gone. I had shed my ugliness that I had around me.
And after that, I never got that feeling of being afraid like that that
he was going to come back or it was going to come back, because
I overcame and I beat it. That was my therapy. I didn't have
visit mental therapy back in seventy eight. It wasn't all that given to victims.
And my mama was Cuban and she's don't talk about our problems outside the
house, so she never offered me to have a therapist because she didn't want
anyone to know our business. One of the other things when I was attacked
and I started feeling not afraid, but just uncomfortable around men I didn't know.
I wasn't afraid they were going to attack me. I was just uncomfortable
with him. And my mouth had been wired for nine weeks, and as
soon as I got it opened up and I could talk. I went to
work at a lumber yard because I figured where can I see the most men
and the quickest amount of time so that I can get over this phobia.
Very interesting and a positive wow approach on your part, especially for a young
person. I worked there for three weeks and then I decided these guys aren't
going to hurt me. Not everyone I sees a bad man, and so
after about three weeks, I quit. But I did learn that there's a
lot of cute construction workers, you guys. That was a good thing.
Gosh, I'm going to quote Bill to himself here for a second. As
I asked this question, do we have to we have? We have to
because it's important for this So Kathy. Bill has always said that losing a
loved one to violent crime, grant you membership in a club that no one
wants to join. And I would say that the same is true for anyone
who has survived violent crime. What words of encouragement do you have for anyone
who has had the misfortune to join the club? If you will seek help,
if you need it, go to someone that professionally can help you.
What I've done for me is I've talked about it, and I talk about
it to whomever wants to hear me. And that's some way I think I'm
getting into helping someone else. And for them to know that it's not their
fault whatever happened. They're a victim for one day or for years, they
really will be a survivor once they get to the other side. That's beautiful
and nicely said. The book is a light in the dark surviving more than
Ted Bundy. Kathy, thank you so much for joining us today. We
adore having you on here and you've made both of us cry a little bit,
but I think you too. Thank you so much. This has been
wonderful. And where can everybody find the book? Is it out at all
major retailers? Yes? And also Amazon and books a million and Barnes and
Noble, and they're on several retail stores. Fantastic, I was going to
do it for this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for
listening. We'll see you next time. Mind Over Murder is a production of
Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin
Dilley. Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois. Our theme music is by
Kevin McLoud. Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.
You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. You can also
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