Novel sheds light on serial killer’s victims

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This article was published 21/10/2023 (1081 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Many of us have heard of American serial killer Ted Bundy, who was executed in 1989 for the kidnap, rape and murder of over 30 women and girls. In her novel Bright Young Women, Jessica Knoll choses to write a fictionalized account of how Bundy abruptly ended the lives of three of his many victims, and how their horrific deaths impacted their friends and families for years afterward.

Knoll is the author of New York Times bestsellers The Favorite Sister and Luckiest Girl Alive, which was made into a Netflix movie. She’s been a senior editor at Cosmopolitan and articles editor at Self.

Bright Young Women begins with Pamela Schumacher’s account of the night of Jan. 15, 1978, when Bundy broke into her sorority house on the University of Florida campus in Tallahassee, brutally murdering two students and severely injuring two others. Pamela is sorority president and feels responsible for watching over all her sorority sisters. She awakens in the middle of the night and heads downstairs to make a sandwich, discovers that the back door has been left open, then hears a thud coming from the second floor followed by running footsteps. She sees a man hurry down the stairs and pause by the front door; he’s holding a piece of wood covered in blood. For a few seconds she thinks the man is Roger Yul, the boyfriend of her closest friend, Denise, then realizes the man is a stranger.

After the man leaves, Pamela goes upstairs where she finds two roommates have been badly beaten. She tries to wake a third girl and doesn’t comprehend that she is dead. Finally, she visits Denise’s room where she tries to wake her friend, not realizing she too has been killed.

When Pamela tells police that she saw the murderer, she’s taken in for questioning. Unfortunately, she mentions that she first thought the man was Denise’s on-again and off-again boyfriend. After this, she has a hard time convincing police that the killer isn’t Roger, especially when Roger is found to have lied about his past.

Following Bundy’s capture, Pamela is sickened to discover he had been arrested for kidnapping and murdering young women in Washington State, Colorado and Utah. He escaped from jail twice, heading to Florida after his second escape from a high-security prison in Colorado. It seemed like the police, media and many others were taken in by Bundy’s all-American good looks and his false persona of being an intelligent young law student.

When visiting the hospital room of one of her injured sorority sisters, she meets Martina Cannon. Martina (or Tina) is obsessed with tracking down Bundy’s victims because he abducted and murdered her lover Ruth in Issaquah, Wash. in 1975. She and Pamela try to find out how Bundy managed to escape from prison. With the help of a young reporter, they discover incompetence and criminal actions on the part of those who were responsible for guarding Bundy.

The chapters in Bright Young Women revolve between Pamela’s life after being an eyewitness to the sorority house attack and murders and Ruth’s life leading up to her fatal encounter with Bundy. At times, the repeated switching of narrator and time frame is somewhat hard to follow, but Knoll’s characters are well developed and their individual stories compelling.

At the heart of Bright Young Women is the real-life shocking story of how police and others in the legal and penal systems failed more than once to prevent Bundy, a true psychopath, from taking the lives of numerous women and girls. These victims’ lives ended brutally, along with their future promise.

Andrea Geary is a freelance writer in Winnipeg.