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Rediscovered photos rekindle memories of Ted Bundy’s Vail victim

Randy Wyrick rwyrick@vaildaily.com
Ted Bundy is led through the PItkin County Courthouse in this 1977 photo.
Glenwood Springs Post Independent

VAIL – Julie Cunningham just wanted to help the man struggling with his crutches in Vail back in 1975.

She looked like many of Ted Bundy’s 36 known murder victims — young, slender, pretty and white, with long brown hair.

When the Glenwood Post Independent cracked open a safe last week that contained photos of the infamous serial killer, interest in his trail of terror was rekindled. Part of that trail passed through Vail.



BUNDY’S VAIL VICTIM

Bundy was driving a Volkswagen Beetle and stopped in Vail. He pretended to have an injured knee and was using crutches, but poorly.




It was spring and Cunningham, 26, worked in a Vail ski shop. She was walking to a local restaurant on March 15, 1975, to meet a friend when she saw Bundy.

She walked over to Bundy’s car to offer to help, and he asked her to carry his ski boots. She had no idea who he was, how evil he was or that she was about to die. No one did. It was still early in Bundy’s five-year string of murders.

Bundy was charming, as the evil often are. According to Bundy’s jailhouse confession, they exchanged pleasantries, Cunningham, moved closer to help Bundy, who appeared to be struggling with his crutches.

When she was within reach, Bundy snatched her to him, knocked her unconscious, handcuffed her and stuffed her in the trunk in the front of his Volkswagen.

He got back on Interstate 70 and drove west to the desert, where he yanked her out of the trunk and strangled her to death.

He dumped her body in the desert. She was never found.

A month after he killed her, he said he went back and buried her remains.

“I don’t know why. I just sometimes do that,” Bundy told Vail police detective Matt Lindvall when he confessed.

1990 CONFESSION

During a three-hour hour session with Lindvall on Jan. 24, 1989, Bundy confessed to how he killed Cunningham and more. Bundy was executed that night in a Florida electric chair.

Bundy described Cunningham’s death in excruciating detail to Lindvall, who had traveled to Florida to question Bundy about three murders.

Lindvall later said Bundy’s 11th-hour confessions were an attempt to prolong his life.

Bundy said he wanted a “deal” before he’d confess to Cunningham’s murder. He wanted Lindvall to approach the governor on his behalf, asking him to postpone the execution.

Lindvall wanted to talk to Bundy about three different cases, but Bundy insisted on starting with Cunningham because her body had not been found.

Bundy was originally brought to trial in Garfield County for murdering a Snowmass woman, whom he had killed in January, before he killed Cunningham in March.

On Jan. 12, 1975, a 23-year-old registered nurse named Caryn Campbell decided to retrieve a magazine from her room in the Wildwood Inn at Snowmass.

Campbell and Cunningham could have been sisters, they looked so much alike.

Campbell’s fiancee watched her enter the elevator in the hotel’s lobby; friends saw her emerge from it upstairs.

She vanished somewhere along a well-lit hallway between the elevator and her room. Her nude body was found a month later next to a dirt road just outside Snowmass. Bundy had beaten her to death.

Bundy escaped from the Garfield County jail before the trial concluded. He stole a car in Glenwood Springs, and when it broke down in Edwards he hitched a ride into Vail, where he spent the night in a hotel lobby. The next day, he got on a bus that eventually took him to Jacksonville, Florida. He committed several more murders in Florida before his final arrest in 1978.

Staff Writer Randy Wyrick can be reached at 970-748-2935 and rwyrick@vaildaily.com.