Why Did Colorado Give Ted Bundy a Law Library and No Handcuffs During His Murder Trial?
Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski | True Crime News & Commentary
True Crime Today
3.3 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 15 minutes
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Summary
The State of Utah convicted Ted Bundy of kidnapping in March 1976. One count. Colorado charged him with one murder. That is what the system believed it was holding: a kidnapper and a single-count defendant.
The actual man had killed at minimum sixteen women across five states by the end of 1975.
That gap — between who the charge sheet said he was and who he actually was — is the reason he was able to act as his own attorney, get library access without restraints, and jump from a second-story window of the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen on June 7, 1977.
Six days on the mountain. A stolen Cadillac. Recaptured on Highway 82 by Officer Gene Flatt. Moved to the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs. And then the second project: months of quiet starvation, a gap in the ceiling that nobody checked, a stack of cash taped into a book.
December 30, 1977. Holiday staff. The head jailer's apartment empty. Bundy crawled through the ceiling, dressed in the jailer's clothes, and walked out the front door. He was not discovered missing for roughly seventeen hours.
His route took him from Glenwood Springs to Chicago to Ann Arbor to Atlanta to Tallahassee, Florida, where he arrived on January 8, 1978, completely anonymous again.
A man named Andy Leyba reportedly gave the hitchhiker his own jacket in a snowstorm that night in Glenwood. He didn't recognize the face until he saw it in the paper.
This is the third of five conversations in Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The story of a custody that was too narrow to hold what was in it — and a system that handed the man its courtesies and its ceiling and its holiday weekend.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is history's hidden killers. |
| 0:04.6 | Here now, Tony Bruske. |
| 0:09.3 | June 7, 1977, Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, Colorado, a small mountain courthouse. |
| 0:16.3 | During a court recess, a defendant in a first-degree murder trial walks out a second floor window. |
| 0:22.5 | Half an hour passes before anyone actually notices. By that afternoon, the police chief of |
| 0:27.1 | Aspen has, by some accounts, suspended handgun sales in the town. The lines outside the |
| 0:34.2 | Aspen sporting goods stores are women. |
| 0:46.3 | That happens because the system was holding the wrong version of a man in not secure enough custody. |
| 0:48.7 | There's a wrong question people ask about what happens next in this case. |
| 0:53.4 | And then there's the right one. The wrong question is |
| 0:55.9 | how Ted Bundy escaped from a second floor window, from custody twice in six months? The right question |
| 1:03.2 | is why the system, both times, gave him exactly what he needed to escape. He didn't have a |
| 1:09.5 | brilliant escape plan. He didn't have a Confederate |
| 1:12.2 | on the outside. He had two different courthouses in two different counties. Both of them handed |
| 1:18.0 | him the opening he needed. And both times he walked through it. This is our third conversation |
| 1:24.7 | in Ted Bundy, history's hidden killers. Your thoughts are welcome |
| 1:29.4 | in the comment section on Substack and YouTube as we continue to work our way through |
| 1:33.5 | this story and this series. And the hiding place this time is the most procedural, the most |
| 1:40.2 | bureaucratic, most preventable thing imaginable. |
| 1:49.3 | It's a charge sheet that was too narrow really to describe him. |
| 1:53.8 | To get there, we have to go back to 1976, February Salt Lake City, |
| 1:57.0 | a bench trial in front of Judge Stuart Hansen. |
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