The Women Taking Back Their Lives From Ted Bundy
For six years, Elizabeth and Molly Kendall shared their world with the serial killer. Now they’re ready to tell their story.
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In the fall of 1981, 36-year-old Elizabeth Kendall was visiting New York City from her home in Seattle. She was there for a junket for a memoir she’d just published with a small press. After one of the interviews, a reporter asked Kendall how she would spend her last few hours in Manhattan. She talked about wanting to see a movie, but she was frightened to go to a film by herself. “People tell me, ‘Be careful, you can get mugged in New York…’ I’m someone who had her worst fears come true.”
Kendall’s worst fears had already been exceeded in unfathomable ways. Her memoir, The Phantom Prince, described the years she and her daughter, Molly, spent in the company of Ted Bundy. Elizabeth was 24 when she first met Bundy in 1969 and would become his long-term girlfriend; her daughter Molly was three at the time. Bundy was in and out of their lives until 1975, the year he was arrested in Utah. He killed scores of women throughout his six-year relationship with Kendall. The tension between belief and doubt, between what Kendall knew and did not know, what she denied and could not deny, would torture her for years.
Nearly 40 years after her memoir was published, Kendall is reissuing The Phantom Prince in conjunction with a new documentary film, Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, featuring Elizabeth, 74, and Molly, 53, speaking out on camera for the first time. For decades, interest and news coverage about Ted Bundy focused on Bundy as a killer, privileging his perverse pathology and overweening ego over anyone else.
Now the focus has shifted to the women whose world Bundy inhabited: Those who died and those who survived, those whose lives intersected through random luck—and the women whose lives were bound up with Ted Bundy like family, kept apart from the unimaginable but living everyday horrors of their own. Women like Elizabeth and Molly Kendall.
The Kendalls’ participation in Falling for A Killer, produced and directed by Trish Wood, might not have happened had it not been for the announcement of a different film by a different filmmaker. In May…
