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America's Most Infamous Crimes with Katie Ring
Ted Bundy’s Deadly Trick to Get Away with Murder Pt. 2
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- [00:00]
Narrator/Announcer
Foreign.
- [00:06]
Host (Katie Ring)
This is Crime House. Ted Bundy would lure many of his victims by feigning injury or pretending to need help.
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Co-host/Interviewer
He would put his arm in a fake sling, ask women for help carrying
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Host (Katie Ring)
something into his car, and the moment she got close enough, she would be gone. No scream, no chance to run, just gone. Everyone calls him the charming killer next door. But charm was just one weapon. Bundy studied the criminal justice system and used this knowledge, as well as his charm, to manipulate everyone around him. Friends, girlfriends, even the police. And for years, it worked. Even after the woman who loved him tipped off the police twice. Every crime tells a story about the people involved, the system that tried to stop it, and the nation that couldn't look away. Some cases are so shocking, so deeply woven into who we are, that decades later, we're still asking, how did this happen? I'm Katie Ring and this is America's Most Infamous Crimes. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, I'll take you deep into cases that have a lasting imprint on society and still haunt us today.
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Co-host/Interviewer
I want to thank you for being part of the Crime House community.
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Host (Katie Ring)
Please rate, review and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes wherever you get your podcasts and to get all episodes at once ad free. Subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Before I get started, please be advised that this episode contains descriptions of physical and sexual assault and murder. So please listen with care. This is the second of three episodes on Ted Bundy, one of the most notorious serial killers of all time. Today I'll talk about the beginning of his horrifying murder spree, how he got away with it, and how it all started to fall apart.
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Co-host/Interviewer
In the early hours of February 1,
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Host (Katie Ring)
1974, 27 year old Ted Bundy claimed his first confirmed murder victim, 21 year old Linda Ann Healy.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Just like when Ted had gone after
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Host (Katie Ring)
Karen Sparks about a month earlier, Linda's housemates had no idea she had been attacked.
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Co-host/Interviewer
At 5.30am, her alarm went off and
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Host (Katie Ring)
woke up her housemate, another girl named Karen. After a half hour, it was still beeping, so Karen got up to tell Linda to shut it off. But when Karen cracked open Linda's door, the room was empty. However, she didn't think anything was wrong. She just assumed Linda had left already since she worked for the campus radio station and made early morning weather forecasts. So Karen turned off the alarm and started to head back upstairs. On her way out, she noticed that Linda's bed was made, which was odd since she didn't usually bother making it. Even weirder, the bed was made Up. In a strange way, something about it didn't sit right with Karen, but she shrugged it off. Thirty minutes later, someone from the campus radio station called the house, wondering why Linda wasn't at work. Karen realized that something wasn't right. There wouldn't be any other reason for Linda to leave the house that early. For the rest of the day, she called around to see if anyone knew where Linda was, but no one had heard from her. So Karen called Linda's family, and they reported her missing to the police.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Thankfully, it's not actually true that you're required to wait 24 hours before you
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Host (Katie Ring)
report someone missing, so officers were able to get to Linda's house right away. They searched Linda's room and found trace bloodstains on her pillows, along with a huge red spot on the nightgown hanging in the closet. But even though it had been a few weeks since Karen Sparks was attacked, the investigators didn't immediately suspect foul play. Although you don't have to wait 24 hours to report a missing person, sometimes police won't take the report seriously for 24 hours. This is what happened with Linda. The police figured that college students like Linda could sometimes go off the grid for days at a time. And they figured that was the case here and that the blood stains could have been from a massive nosebleed. They thought that maybe Linda had left to go find a hospital in the middle of the night without telling anyone. It sounded like a stretch, but they really didn't think Linda was in danger, and they figured she'd come home soon. Meanwhile, Ted Bun was already planning his next murder. Over the following weeks, he became so obsessed with his violent fantasies that he barely went to his law classes. He still saved some energy for his girlfriend Elizabeth and her young daughter, but that was about all he had patience for. His bloodlust was too overpowering. Just like last time, Ted waited about a month before seeking out another victim. But he knew he couldn't go back to the same neighborhood where he had attacked Karen Sparks and Linda Healy.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Thanks to his time on the Seattle Crime Committee mission, he knew that if
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Host (Katie Ring)
he kept killing in the same area, there were more risks of being caught. So for his next attack, he went further from home. On March 12, 1974, he drove down to Evergreen State College in Olympia, about an hour south of Seattle. Once he got there, Ted lurked in the shadows outside of the school's concert hall until a young woman named Donna Manson passed by. She looked a lot like his other victims. Young, white and pretty, with dark hair parted down the middle, Ted abducted her without anyone noticing and murdered her in the nearby wilderness. It didn't take long for people to realize that Donna was missing. But like Linda Healy, the police didn't suspect foul play at first.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Donna was a regular hitchhiker and had
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Host (Katie Ring)
a reputation for being a free spirit. So the authorities assumed she'd taken off without notice. With Ted nowhere close to even being on anyone's radar, he went out again about a month later on April 17. This time, he abducted a young woman named Susan Rancourt outside of the library at Central Washington State College, about 100 miles south of Seattle. Thankfully, her case was actually taken seriously this time. When Susan disappeared, her laundry was running and none of her things were missing. So it was pretty clear that she wasn't planning on going anywhere for long. But unfortunately, the authorities didn't have much to go on. Ted's strategy to strike across different police jurisdictions had worked. Nobody had realized that the female college students were disappearing across the Pacific Northwest, which left Ted free to continue his killing spree.
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Co-host/Interviewer
On May 6, 1974, about a month
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Host (Katie Ring)
after murdering Susan Rancourt, Ted drove south to Oregon State University and murdered 22 year old Roberta Parks. And again, it took a while for foul play to be seriously considered. Before Roberta went missing, her father had a heart attack. So when Roberta was suddenly gone, her friends figured she'd gone home to be with him while he recovered. It was another twisted stroke of luck for Ted, and his urge to kill was only getting stronger. But at the same time, the respectable image he presented started to crumble. Until this point, Ted had managed to maintain his relationship with Elizabeth even as other parts of his life fell by the wayside. And on June 1, 1974, Ted was scheduled to attend the baptism of her now 8 year old daughter.
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Co-host/Interviewer
The day before the baptism, he spent
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Host (Katie Ring)
the afternoon and evening with Elizabeth's family. And as always, he acted like a supportive boyfriend. But Elizabeth noticed him getting antsy as time went on. They didn't get home until around 10pm and according to Elizabeth, Ted was desperate to head back out on his own. Elizabeth assumed he was going out for one of his strange walks, or maybe to indulge in his urge to steal random stuff. All she hoped was that he didn't stay out too late, since they had an early morning. But Ted had other plans.
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Host (Katie Ring)
Just a few hours before his girlfriend's daughter was getting baptized, ted Bundy met 22 year old Brenda Ball outside of a bar called the Flame Tavern in Seattle. She was last seen in the parking lot catching a ride from a brown haired man with his arm in a sling, which was in line with Ted's mo. He wasn't actually injured, of course. He liked to wear a sling or cast when he hunted for victims to make himself seem less threatening. Later on, Ted would claim that he took Brenda back to his place and that the two of them had consensual sex. But that wasn't what he was really interested in. He ended up killing her in her sleep and then spent the rest of the morning cleaning up and dumping the body. He was so busy that he was late to the baptism and Elizabeth was furious with him. As Ted's personal life was unraveling, so was his seemingly perfect crime spree. The police were finally realizing that all the women who had gone missing weren't coming home and that their disappearances might be linked to one person. In June of 1974, the authorities in Seattle learned about some disturbing reports from students at Central Washington State College where Ted had killed his third victim, Susan Rancourt. Back in April, five days before Susan's disappearance, multiple Students had told the campus police that they had weird encounters with a guy wearing a sling, who we can safely assume was Ted Bundy. As one young woman had passed by the campus library, she'd spotted Ted hunched over a pile of dropped books with his sling on. She offered to help him carry the stack, and he brought her to a secluded parking lot where he'd parked his Volkswagen Beetle. The student was wary of him, but Ted pressured her to help him load the books into his car. Thankfully, she was able to rush out of there afterwards, and Ted didn't chase after her.
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Co-host/Interviewer
The young woman had reported the encounter
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Host (Katie Ring)
to the campus police, and a second student described a similar experience. Once the local authorities put all of the pieces together, they realized they needed to spread the word, and they reached out to police departments across the region.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Although it took a while to reach
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Host (Katie Ring)
their counterparts in Seattle, it paved the way for a coordinated investigation into their recent disappearances on college campuses. So far, the only thing that connected the victims was their physical appearances.
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Co-host/Interviewer
The attacker didn't leave any identifying evidence
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Host (Katie Ring)
at the crime scenes and almost always took his victims to a second location where he presumably murdered them. So there were no bodies to examine either. And by the time they realized this, Ted had claimed another victim, a University of Washington student named Georgianne Hawkins, who disappeared shortly after visiting her boyfriend on June 11, 1974. To the police, the culprit was clearly a meticulous killer who targeted young women at random, making him the hardest kind of criminal to catch since January of 1974. He'd claimed a victim every single month. By the beginning of July, six young women were already dead, and the seventh, Karen Sparks, had been beaten to the edge of her life. Ted had covered his tracks well, and now that his rampage had begun, he wasn't going to stop. However, the spotless Persona that served as the perfect alibi was starting to crumble. No one noticed it more than his long term girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer. Throughout their five year relationship, she'd supported Ted as he went back to school and tried to make something of himself in return. He acted like a perfect boyfriend and an ideal father figure to her young daughter. That was all starting to change. Though Ted was less dependable than he used to be, he was acting moody and irritable, and on top of that, their sex life had taken a dark turn. Towards the beginning of the year, around the time of Ted's first murder, he'd started pushing Elizabeth to perform more extreme acts in bed, starting with things like tying her up with nylon stockings, which she agreed to. But one night Ted also started choking her, which they had not discussed beforehand. And she ended up kicking him out of bed. By mid July, it had been a little over a month since Ted's last kill. Until this point, he'd committed his crimes under the COVID of night, abducting his victims when nobody was there to see it. But now Ted was ready to take things a step further. On July 14, 1974, he decided to strike in the middle of the afternoon and in a massive crowd that day he drove down to Lake Sammamish, a 500 acre waterfront state park about 15 miles from Seattle.
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Co-host/Interviewer
He wore a bright white tennis shirt
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Host (Katie Ring)
with a fake sling around his arm and it seemed like he wasn't really thinking about blending into the crowd of beachgoers. Ted walked up and down the shoreline looking for victims. For his plan to work, he needed to convince someone to get into his tan Volkswagen Beetle. So Ted came up with a cover story that he needed help picking up a sailboat at his parents place nearby. He tried a few times without any luck, but eventually he managed to win over 23 year old Janice Ott. She was a free spirited girl with a bohemian vibe and agreed to help Ted if he gave her a ride on the boat. But of course there was no boat and after getting into Ted's car, Janice was never seen again. And it turns out that one victim wasn't enough to satisfy his urges.
- [14:37]
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Host (Katie Ring)
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Host (Katie Ring)
After kidnapping Janice Ott, Ted came back to the lake later that day, and he successfully used the same sailboat story on 19 year old Denise Nasland. The double murder appeared to satisfy Ted's lust for violence. For now. After killing Janice and Denise, he took Elizabeth out to dinner and stayed over at her place. He seemed tired, but other than that, he acted like he was back to normal. But the inner peace Ted had gotten from these latest murders didn't last long. Janice and Denise's friends quickly noticed that they were missing, and thankfully, the police connected their disappearances all to the area's elusive serial killer. Investigators were able to track down the women Ted had failed to lure into the lake, and they were able to describe him and his Volkswagen Beetle to the police. Ted was even arrogant enough to use his real first name to introduce himself. By the next morning, the story was all over the news, along with a composite sketch of Ted's face. Some people who knew him had their suspicions. One of his former professors called the authorities and described Ted as weird. But this professor wasn't the only one who realized there was something off about him. Elizabeth had also connected the dots. She couldn't bring herself to fully believe that Ted was a serial killer and that the man she trusted with her heart and her child was capable of this level of evil. But she also couldn't deny how closely he matched the description of the man at the lake. Or the fact that they drove the same car and even had the same name. After agonizing over what to do, she decided to make an anonymous call to the Seattle PD encouraging them to look into Ted Bundy. It was enough to place Ted on a list of 100 potential suspects, but considering his spotless reputation and lack of criminal record, he was basically at the bottom of it. The police's general lack of interest in him made Elizabeth feel like maybe she was being paranoid. And for the time being, she let it go. Ted had no idea Elizabeth had called the authorities, but he'd seen all the reports about his crimes at the lake. He decided to get out of town for a while and transferred to the University of Utah's law school in Salt Lake City for the fall semester of 1974. It was a calculated move.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Elizabeth had family there, and even though
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Host (Katie Ring)
she didn't move to Utah with him, it made sense that he'd go there. He had been talking about it as A possibility for a while. And the decision didn't come as a surprise. So when he Left Seattle on September 2, 1974, Elizabeth didn't necessarily find it suspicious. After the murders at the lake, Ted knew he couldn't risk killing again in Washington. But once he got settled in Salt Lake City, he felt like it was safe to go back out on the hunt. Between the start of October and the first week of November 1974, Ted murdered four more young women. They were even younger and more vulnerable than his previous victims. One was just 16 years old, while the other three were 17. Ted also tried to claim a fifth victim, an 18 year old girl named Carol Durant. However, he failed to handcuff her properly, and she managed to escape by jumping out of his moving car. Carol was able to give the police a description of the man who'd attacked her. And as word got around, the authorities realized that the killer from the Pacific Northwest was now in Utah. Unfortunately, they didn't have many leads to follow. But thankfully, the investigation back in Washington was making real progress. Two weeks earlier, on October 27, a group of hunters had stumbled upon the bodies of Janice Ott and Denise Nasland in the wilderness area near Lake Sammamish. And the evidence was chilling. It suggested that the killer kept the women alive in the woods for several days while he sexually assaulted them and continued to do it even after they were dead. He also routinely cleaned them up and
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Co-host/Interviewer
put makeup on them.
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Host (Katie Ring)
It was like the murderer had treated the victims more like dolls than people. When these reports hit the news, they understandably terrified a lot of people. And when Ted's girlfriend Elizabeth read the stories, she was no exception. Her suspicions about him came roaring back. In late October, Elizabeth called her local police. And then again in November.
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Co-host/Interviewer
This time, she gave her name and
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Host (Katie Ring)
explained her relationship to Ted. But just like before, nothing came of it. Detectives were receiving hundreds of tips every day, and officers were putting in hundreds of hours per week just fielding phone calls from distressed parents and curious journalists. And at this point, they needed to prioritize suspects who seemed more likely to commit violent crime. Despite her suspicions, Elizabeth was comforted by the fact that the police weren't interested in Ted. So she once again set aside her fears about him, and they spent a happy Christmas together. But their happiness wouldn't last much longer. By the end of the next year, Elizabeth's fairy tale romance with Ted Bundy would come to a terrifying end.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Like we did yesterday, at the end
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Host (Katie Ring)
of the episodes, we're going to be
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Co-host/Interviewer
taking any questions you may have so
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Host (Katie Ring)
let's get into it.
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Guest/Expert
How could someone so close to Ted Bundy not fully believe he was capable of murder?
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Co-host/Interviewer
In hindsight, I think it's easy to chalk up Ted Bundy and a lot
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Host (Katie Ring)
of other serial killers to just these evil people.
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Co-host/Interviewer
But they never really expose that part of themselves to their long term partners or families.
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Host (Katie Ring)
That side of them is really reserved for their victims.
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Co-host/Interviewer
And I watched an interview with Elizabeth, his ex, and she said that Ted was a total gentleman. He was smart, charming, charismatic, and he
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Host (Katie Ring)
was a great father figure to her daughter. Her parents loved him.
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Co-host/Interviewer
So there were no other signs that he was this person except for, you know, maybe the stealing at night. But she, again, didn't think that was stealing would be a serial killer. That's the next level. But imagine if someone today told you
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Host (Katie Ring)
that your boyfriend was a serial killer.
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Co-host/Interviewer
Like, the first thing is you're, there's no way. There's no way my judgment would be off on someone like that. And I think that's why a lot of people also victim blame, because it feels safer to think, how did that person not realize that the partner they
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Host (Katie Ring)
were with was a serial killer?
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Co-host/Interviewer
Because you want to think I would realize. So I think for her, you know, you see this amazing guy, and separating that fact is very hard. It completely turns your world upside down. Despite that, she did actually report Ted twice. The first time, her coworker showed the sketch to her after the Lake Sammamish incident. And she again was totally thrown off, but thought that she needed to do something, so she called the police anonymously. The second time was someone came to her and said that the killings are
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Host (Katie Ring)
picking up in Utah. And this was right after Ted had moved to Utah.
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Co-host/Interviewer
And so she's like, there's no way that this is just a coincidence. So again, she called the police. And this time the police actually did show Ted's picture in like, a stack of pictures. And one of the witnesses picked his picture out and said, no, this guy's too old. And so the police couldn't really do anything after that because the witness didn't identify him. And I think that gave her a sense of comfort that, okay, like, you know, maybe I was just crazy. Like, how could I think this guy that I love so much would do this? It's just me losing my mind.
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Guest/Expert
What made Ted Bundy's method so especially disturbing? And why did they reveal something even darker about who he really was?
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Host (Katie Ring)
I think one of the most disturbing
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Co-host/Interviewer
things about Ted in general is how
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Host (Katie Ring)
normal he looked and how some People
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Co-host/Interviewer
considered him after attractive, which I personally don't get. But what made his tactics even more disturbing was that he took advantage of people's good nature. And a lot of the women he, you know, he would pretend like he
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Host (Katie Ring)
was wearing a sling or he needed help putting something into his car.
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Co-host/Interviewer
And a lot of women are taught to be polite and to be helpful in that way. And so that's just really disturbing. And I resent him for that because I'm a person who would love to help people. But now I always advise women in self defense that men don't usually ask for help from women and children they don't know. And if they do, there's usually an ulterior motive. So your want to help or be polite is not more important than your safety. So it's always better to be safe than sorry. He also acted like a person of authority and took advantage of women that way. We talked about the case of Carol Durant earlier and we didn't go into all the details, but in that he
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Host (Katie Ring)
actually pretended he was a police officer and told her that someone was breaking
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Co-host/Interviewer
into her car in the parking lot, which, why would he know which car is hers? So that's kind of the first red flag. And he told her that she needed to get in the car with him and he needed to take her to the police station. And he attempted to handcuff her and she immediately was like, there's something wrong with this, and was able to escape. That's also the importance of listening to your gut and being like something's wrong right away. And be wary even of authority figures and people who are faking injuries and asking for help.
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Guest/Expert
What advice would you give to someone who feels uneasy about their partner?
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Co-host/Interviewer
I think the best advice for women in general is to always trust your gut. Women have a very good intuition, and that's one of our best advantages in
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Host (Katie Ring)
these kinds of situations.
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Co-host/Interviewer
And a lot of people will have a gut feeling, but they'll explain it away.
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Host (Katie Ring)
No, I know this guy. No, he loves me. No, he's such a good father. No, my parents love him so much. There's no way, even though you may
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Co-host/Interviewer
have had that original gut feeling that something is off. So I always say, listen to that initial feeling. And even if these other rationalizations come in, if you ever have that feeling, I don't usually say to snoop on a partner, but if you get a feeling like that, I highly recommend looking into your partner because your intuition is very strong and it's usually trying to scream at you that something's wrong if you're getting that feeling.
- [26:07]
Host (Katie Ring)
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to subscribe below. If you're listening on audio, please rate, review and follow America's Most Infamous Crimes.
- [26:17]
Co-host/Interviewer
And to get all of the episodes
- [26:19]
Host (Katie Ring)
at once ad free, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. Make sure to come back tomorrow for our final episode on Ted Bundy.