1974: The Escape and the Disappearance: How a Handcuff Key Linked Ted Bundy to a Missing Utah Teenager
On this day in 1974, Ted Bundy tried to abduct a young woman named Carol DaRonch from a Utah shopping mall, posing as a policeman and snapping handcuffs onto her wrist inside his Volkswagen. She fought free and ran, leaving him without his prize.
That same night, a schoolgirl named Debi Kent left a school play to collect her brother from a roller rink and was never seen again. Investigators later found a key in the school car park that fitted the handcuffs still locked around DaRonch's wrist, tying the botched abduction directly to the vanished teenager and giving police one of their earliest hard links to Bundy's campaign of murder across the American west.
