On a sunny Saturday in Utah in 2018,Carol DaRonchspent more than an hour talking about the worst night of her life. The moment whenTed Bundy, already witha trail of dead or disappeared women in his wake, tried to abduct and murder her in the Salt Lake City area decades ago when she was 18.
“It’s still really scary to me that I survived, that I was even able to survive,” DaRonch told PEOPLE.
She did more than that: A little more than a year after escaping him in the fall of 1974, DaRonch, at 19, confronted Bundy in court at his trial for aggravated kidnapping.
“She never wavered at all,” said retired district attorney David Yocom, who prosecuted the case. “She obviously didn’t like the idea of testifying, but she knew it was her duty.”
“I thought she was an excellent witness,” he said.
In 1976, Bundy was convicted of DaRonch’s violent abduction — the first proof of his rampage across the West and a crucial development in unraveling what was then a mystifying web of missing-persons cases and homicides.
Bundy was adept at leaving little trace of his crimes, and experts believe he murdered at least 30 people. But DaRonch was an exception. She shared her story on the Netflix docuseriesConversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which was released in January 2019.
“She represents that rare person who was able to get away,” said directorJoe Berlinger. “I thought it was very important for people to understand the horror of who this guy is and how he is a master deceiver and manipulator.”
Berlinger added, “He generally was able to kill people before they even knew what was going on.”
In a 2019 exclusive interview with PEOPLE, DaRonch — fiercely private about the parts of her life Bundy has not touched but long used to relaying what she simply called “the story” — took another view on her brush with America’s most notorious serial killer when she was an “extremely shy teen.”
“It made me angry to think that he thought he could just take me like that,” she said of their encounter.
She continued, “I think that I couldn’t be this shy little girl anymore. I mean, I had to stick up for myself.”
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Escaping Ted Bundy
Bundy approached the teenage DaRonch at a mall in Murray, Utah, while she was shopping one night in November 1974. As he had with his other targets, he lured her to his Volkswagen with a lie: He claimed to be a police officer investigating a break-in of her vehicle — complete with a badge to flash to reassure her.
“I thought he was kind of creepy … I thought he was a lot older than he was,” she said, noting that she smelled alcohol on his breath. (From behind bars, Bundy later said he usually drank heavily before killing.)
Once inside his car together, Bundy struck, and the fight for DaRonch’s life began.
She told PEOPLE that it was luck that spared her. Bundy unsuccessfully tried to handcuff both of her wrists, and she had declined his suggestion to put her seatbelt on as they drove about a half-mile away from the mall.
Though Bundy wielded a crowbar and brandished a gun, DaRonch fought back.
“I was able to open the door on my side and get out, and he came out after me over the seat, and we just fought outside of the car,” DaRonch recalled.
On the side of the road, Bundy tried to bludgeon her into submission, DaRonch said. But then Wilbur and Mary Walsh approached them in a car from the other direction.
Hysterical but determined, DaRonch saw perhaps her only chance to escape.
“That’s when I broke away,” DaRonch said.
When she leaped into the passing vehicle, Bundy’s pair of handcuffs dangled from her wrist.
Belva Kent, Debra’s mother, told PEOPLE that DaRonch was “the lucky one.”
“She suffered a lot, and she was very blessed … to go on and testify and do what she needed to do,” Belva said.
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Making Him Pay
Initial news reports about DaRonch testifying against Bundydescribed her as tearful— fearful even — but looking back, those aren’t the words she would use to express her emotions.
“I was totally happy to do it. I thought that the sentence he got [for kidnapping], the one to 15 years, I thought it wasn’t enough,” DaRonch said. “I thought, ‘This monster tried to murder me, and he might be out in two years.’ I thought, ‘I will go and help them get a murder conviction and have him put away.’ So I never felt that I wouldn’t testify. I thought it was really important that I do.”
The initial scene from 1976 — DaRonch, a quiet teen coming forward about a lunatic still unknown to most of the rest of the world, with Bundy sitting just a few feet away — replayed multiple times untilhis death sentence in 1980.
After he was found guilty in Utah, Bundy was sent to Colorado to be tried for murdering Caryn Campbell, a 23-year-old nurse from Dearborn, Mich. DaRonch pursued him to Aspen. By that time, Bundy acted as his own attorney, as he would in subsequent trials, which allowed him to cross-examine DaRonch.
“He was so arrogant,” she said of their face-offs at trial. “I just think he thought he was going to get away with everything.”
“It was quite a confrontation in the courtroom.” said prosecutor David Yocom, as he remembered a dramatic moment when Bundy questioned his one-time target: How can you be sure it was me that night?
According to Yocom, DaRonch told him, “I would never forget your face.”
“I surprised myself of the strength I had to get through all that,” she said, “but I had a lot of support.”
For all of her efforts, though, it’s impossible to say if DaRonch could have prevented more deaths: Bundy twice slipped out of custody in daring escapes — the second time for more than a month, when he traveled to Florida and killed two college students and a 12-year-old girl.
When he was charged with those crimes, DaRonch headed south.
“My relationship with him was purely to make him pay for what he had done,” she said.
Carol DaRonch in 2018.
Her Later Life
As much as people have always asked her about Bundy (“I just think I’ll always be known as the girl that got away”), in truth, he occupied only a small part of her life, DaRonch said. Even during his various prosecutions, she traveled to court a few days here and there.
Otherwise, she said, “My life continued normally.”
“I was able to detach myself from an event that could have ruined my life,” she explained. “It may not be a reasonable solution for everyone, but it is how I have been able to move on.”
Except for an early incident very soon after the kidnapping, when a magazine seller approached her car in a grocery store parking lot, DaRonch said no terror lingered.
She grew “more cautious around strangers, more aware of my surroundings and less trusting,” but Bundy didn’t take up space in her head. She did not have nightmares about him.
Bundy’s periodic trials were only pauses in her return to normalcy, including her night classes in business management and weekend lake trips with her boyfriend.
DaRonch earned a degree in business management and has long worked in the telecommunications industry, where she met her partner, Michael. At the time of her interview with PEOPLE, they lived together in the same part of Utah, around Salt Lake City, where she was living with her parents when Bundy first approached her.
“Even reliving it now, I’m not entirely comfortable,” she said. “I enjoy my anonymity — when I have it. I also realize that it is an important story to tell, and if someone can benefit in a positive way from it, then that’s what I want.”
DaRonch’s son, Levi, convinced her to participate on the Netflix series.
She said, “We both agreed that I had an important story to tell. It needed to be heard again.”
“I’m really happy and healthy and just live a normal life,” she said.
AfterThe Ted Bundy Tapespremiered in January 2019, the response from friends and family, even strangers online (or at her local coffee shop), was very positive. That, in turn, has boosted a Facebook page where she has posted about Bundy victims and other cases.
“It is still hard for me to talk about his victims and their families,” DaRonch said. “Bundy destroyed a lot of lives, and I came so close.”
Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapesis available on Netflix.
source: people.com
