SHRINK CHAT: Ted Bundy's Escapes, Kimberly Leach & Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Ted Bundy walked out of a courthouse law library through a second story window, and seven months later he squeezed through a light fixture in a cell he was not supposed to be able to leave. Part six of the Ted Bundy reboot is the escapes, and what he did with the freedom.

CONTENT WARNING: this episode covers the Chi Omega attacks in detail, including bludgeoning, strangulation, biting, sexual assault with an object, and the murder of a twelve-year-old girl. It is the most graphic hour in this series.

CHAPTERS

00:16 Welcome, and Monsterpalooza

01:59 Cathy on synesthesia, and finding out in a neuropsych class that she has it

06:51 The definitive Dolph Lundgren film ranking, by Melody on Medium

08:33 Horror Facts with Cathy

10:12 The reboot resumes: captures, arrests and escapes

13:04 Dr. Al Carlisle, the one-man Bundy could not charm

16:10 Aspen, the law library and the second story window

19:55 The light fixture, the weight loss and the second escape

24:15 Chi Omega, January 15, 1978

26:56 Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy

28:43 Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler survive

30:00 Why nobody in the house sensed it, and what that says about attunement

33:48 Cheryl Thomas, and a rampage that does not stop

36:05 Leslie Parmenter, Kimberly Leach and the arrest

41:55 Mare of Easttown

44:06 The Silencing

45:56 Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

50:06 The Last Matinee

51:59 KIMI

55:22 Malignant

58:11 Horror Facts answers

THE EPISODE

The escapes are the part everyone knows, and nobody explains. Cathy and Shannon take the interesting question instead: not how Bundy got out, but why two separate institutions let him. The answer they land on is not incompetence. It is that the guards and the court had a narcissism of their own, a belief that a man they had been kind to and who had been pleasant back could not possibly outsmart them. Shannon reaches for the Stanford Prison Experiment. Bundy played subservient for months and walked through the door the moment it opened.

Then Chi Omega, and the register changes completely. Four women attacked inside an hour, two of them killed, and Cheryl Thomas down the street afterwards. Cathy sits with the thing that unsettles her most, which is that a woman came home into a house where two people had already been beaten and simply went to bed. Shannon's answer is about attunement, and about how many people never learn to read what a room is telling them.

CORRECTIONS

Bundy was charged with Caryn Campbell's murder in October 1976 and moved to Colorado for trial. He was not convicted of it. He escaped before that trial began. He was arrested in Pensacola on February 15, 1978, six days after Kimberly Leach was taken.

LOOKING FOR THE REST OF THE SERIESAll eight parts are on the feed. Search Terror Talk plus SHRINK CHAT for: No Man of God; Midsommar and Hereditary; the Hillside Strangler; Ann Rule; Janice Ott and Denise Naslund; Kimberly Leach; Carole Ann Boone; and Georgann Hawkins.

SOURCES

Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me. Dr. Al Carlisle's Utah State Prison evaluation, 1976. Florida State Attorney records on the Chi Omega prosecution. Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth, The Only Living Witness.

Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

Got a haunted story of your own? Send it to terrortalkpodcast@gmail.com and we may read it on the show.

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