1975: Ted Bundy Caught by a Wrong Turn: The Traffic Stop That Unmasked a Serial Killer
At 3 a.m. on 16 August 1975, Utah Highway Patrol Trooper Bob Hayward took a wrong turn leaving a subdivision and stumbled onto a tan Volkswagen Beetle parked outside a neighbour’s home. When his headlights hit the car, it fled, running dark through stop signs. When Hayward finally pulled the driver over, a search of the vehicle turned up handcuffs, an ice pick, a crowbar, and pantyhose with eye holes cut out. The missing front passenger seat only deepened suspicion. The driver was Ted Bundy, law school student, and by then already responsible for the deaths of at least 25 young women across four states.
Bundy was initially arrested for burglary. The items found matched restraints used in the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, who later identified Bundy in a lineup. He was convicted of her attempted kidnapping. Separately, detectives linked him to the February 1975 murder of Caryn Campbell, a 23-year-old nurse killed in Colorado. Charged with Campbell’s murder, Bundy was transferred to a jail in Aspen, Colorado, to stand trial. His girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer, had reported her suspicions to police multiple times in 1974. Nobody had acted. A wrong turn finally changed that.
