Carol DaRonch had already escaped once. In 1974 a man posing as a police officer lured her to his car, snapped a handcuff on her wrist and tried to force her into it; she fought free, leapt from the moving vehicle and ran.
Months later she stood in a police lineup with two other women and picked out the same face: Ted Bundy. He was arrested and charged with her attempted kidnapping, denied any wrongdoing, and waived his right to a jury trial, gambling that a judge alone would be less swayed by the growing suspicion linking him to a string of disappearances across several states.
DaRonch’s escape and her identification became one of the threads that eventually unravelled Bundy’s double life, feeding directly into the case that first put him behind bars.
