In case you hadn't noticed, interest in notorious (not hot) serial killer Ted Bundy has skyrocketed thanks to Zac Efron's new Netflix movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Which means the time has come to brush up on some very creepy facts.
Bundy is infamous for a string of highly disturbing murders he committed against at least 30 women the 1970s. Eventually, he was sentenced to death for his crimes. The weird thing? He maintained a serious girlfriend throughout his entire killing rampage, which spanned years. Her name? Elizabeth Kloepfer. And yes, she's still alive.
First Up, How Did They Meet?
Bundy and Elizabeth met in 1969 while they were both living in the Seattle area. She was a divorced single mom working at University of Washington, where Bundy attended school. Among other terrible tendencies, he cheated on her pretty early on in their relationship, dating his ex-girlfriend Stephanie Brooks in 1973 without ever bothering to tell Elizabeth about her existence.
Of course, the question on everyone's mind is did Elizabeth know Bundy was moonlighting as a serial killer? The answer? It's complicated, but more on that in a minute—let's watch this preview real quick for a Zac Efron palate cleanser.
Okay, So Did She Know?
Yes and no. There were definitely things that made her suspicious. It's unclear exactly when Bundy first murdered anyone, but his spree had certainly started by the early 1970s—when he and Elizabeth were dating. Elizabeth was actually one of the people who reported Bundy as a possible suspect when she recognized his likeness in a police sketch in July 1974. Truly, can you even imagine worrying that your life partner was a killer?!
In August of that same year, Bundy and Elizabeth were still together, even though he'd moved to Salt Lake City and had secretly began seeing other women on the side. Elizabeth became even more suspicious of her boyfriend once several women turned up murdered in Utah, where Bundy had relocated, and so she called the police to report him twice—once in November and then again in December 1974. But in January 1975, the pair spent a week together in Seattle and she didn't mention her suspicions.
Things took a turn in August when Bundy was put on "surveillance" after a policeman found a bunch of questionable stuff in his car (think: a ski mask, handcuffs, etc.), and detectives flew to Seattle to interview Elizabeth, who confessed that she had found objects she "couldn't understand" in his apartment. Among those objects were...crutches, a meat cleaver, surgical gloves, and a "paper sack" of women's clothing. Nope-nope-nope-nope-nope.
Elizabeth also told police that Bundy threatened to break her neck, and sometimes she woke up to him looking at her body with a flashlight under the covers. Amazingly, after all this, Elizabeth still let him live with her while he was awaiting trial. When Bundy finally admitted to the extent of his crimes, he told detectives that he burned a woman's head in Elizabeth's fireplace, saying, "Of all the things I did to [Kloepfer], this is probably the one she is least likely to forgive me for. Poor Liz." It goes without saying but...wow, what an effing lunatic.
So, Where Is Elizabeth Now?
Enjoying life out of Bundy's shadow, thank goodness. Elizabeth has been living completely under the radar with her daughter—who's known in Extremely Wicked as "Molly" and in Elizabeth's book as "Tina." That said, an old audio interview of her speaking openly about Bundy was used in Netflix's documentary series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.
In the series, Elizabeth explains that she was Bundy's first phone call after his final arrest in Florida: "He told me that he was sick and he was consumed by something that he didn't understand. He just couldn't contain it...he was preoccupied with this force."
Meanwhile, in 1981, Elizabeth published a memoir about her relationship with Bundy called The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy. But aside from that, she's remained relatively out of the spotlight—in part thanks to pseudonyms like Elizabeth Kendall and Meg Anders, which protect her identity. That said, we do know that Elizabeth currently lives in Washington state and that she visited the set of Extremely Wicked.
“I don’t know if she’s going to see the movie because it’s difficult, but within the filming process, she came on set and she was a positive light on-set,” Lily Collins (who plays Elizabeth in the film) recently said. “You wouldn’t expect that with what happened. She gave us her support. She’s really lovely.”
Meanwhile, director Joe Berlinger told Vanity Fair that Elizabeth showed him family photos of her time with Bundy, and even private letters he'd written her. "[She] pulled out this box of dozens of handwritten love letters from Ted, written on those yellow legal pads. . . . He wrote them with such a force that, instead of them just being pen on paper, it was like his handwriting was deeply embossed into the page."
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This article originally appeared on Cosmopolitan.com. Minor edits have been made by the Cosmo.ph editors.
