How Did a Routine Stolen Plate Check at 1:34 AM in Pensacola End the Hunt for Ted Bundy?
True Crime Today | Daily True Crime News & Interviews
Tony Brueski
4.2 • 612 Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
The Tallahassee Police Department responded to the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in the early hours of January 15, 1978. What they found inside — Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy killed, Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler severely injured — was unlike anything the department had investigated.
Nita Neary, the only eyewitness, described a man in a stocking mask on the stairs carrying an oak log. The investigators photographed a bite mark on Lisa Levy's body. It was the only physical evidence the man left behind.
Tallahassee did not know it was hunting Ted Bundy. Florida had no file on him. He had arrived in the state nine days earlier under an alias, after escaping from a Colorado jail on December 30, 1977.
In the weeks that followed, he moved around Tallahassee under stolen identities. On February 8 in Jacksonville, he approached a fourteen-year-old girl outside a school. Her brother wrote the plate number on his hand and called police. The plate came back stolen. On February 9, twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach was seen walking toward a white van at Lake City Junior High. Her body was recovered fifty-seven days later.
The investigation broke on February 15 when Pensacola Officer David Lee ran a stolen plate on an orange Volkswagen at 1:34 in the morning. The driver fought, ran, and was caught. He gave a stolen student ID. Two days later he identified himself as Ted Bundy, and three state investigations converged on one Florida holding cell.
This is the fourth of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The investigation that started with a bite mark and ended with a stolen plate — and the three weeks in between that had names attached to every one of them.
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Transcript
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