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1974: An Extra Femur Bone: the Discovery That Revealed a Third Victim of Ted Bundy

Hunters searching brush near Interstate 90 in Issaquah, Washington, about one mile from Lake Sammamish State Park, stumbled on fragmented human remains scattered across the ground. Forensic examination identified them as Janice Ott and Denise Naslund, two young women who had vanished from the park on the same afternoon in July 1974 after a man with his arm in a sling, calling himself Ted, asked each separately for help loading a boat onto his car.

Among the bones was one extra femur that did not belong to either woman. It was later attributed to Georgeann Hawkins, a University of Washington student who had disappeared weeks earlier while walking a short alley between her boyfriend’s dormitory and her sorority house, her body never otherwise found.

The discovery helped investigators connect a string of disappearances across Washington and Utah to the same killer, Ted Bundy, whose calm, disarming manner and use of a fake injury to lure victims would become one of the most chilling signatures in American criminal history.

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