Why Did a Computer Program Flag Ted Bundy as a Top Suspect and Then Filter Him Out?

Bob Keppel was one of the King County detectives who could see the pattern forming in the spring of 1974. Same age range. Same appearance. Same young man on crutches or in a sling. The Seattle papers started using the word pattern. The Task Force opened a tip line. The phone did not stop ringing.

By summer, the Ted Task Force had a composite, a first name, and a car description from witnesses at Lake Sammamish, where the man calling himself Ted had taken two women from a crowded beach in a single afternoon. The tips eventually exceeded two hundred thousand names.

Three of those tips came from people who knew Ted Bundy personally. His girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer reportedly called. Crime writer Ann Rule, who worked a crisis line with him, reportedly called. A psychology professor reportedly called. The name Ted Bundy appeared on three separate cards inside the same file.

The Task Force ran a computer cross-reference at the University of Washington. Bundy made the top hundred suspects. He was ranked down — no criminal record, good apartment, law student. The picture in every detective's head of the man doing this did not match a clean-cut campaign volunteer.

The right name sat in a stack while women kept disappearing and families waited for phone calls that would not come for months. When the remains at Issaquah were found in September, the killings had already stopped — because Bundy had driven to Utah.

This is the first of five conversations on Ted Bundy: History's Hidden Killers. The investigative failure that let him stay hidden for an entire year, told through the names of the women whose lives were the cost.

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