Ted Bundy: Girlfriend's daughter wonders why he spared her as his last victim was her age, looked like her
To this day, Ted Bundy remains one of America's most notorious serial killers, not just for the staggering number of women he killed but also the sadistic and sociopathic way he went about them, often grooming and performing sexual acts with the victims' decomposing corpses until no further interaction was possible.
Before he was put to death by electric chair in 1989, he confessed to 30 murders, though some estimates put that number in the hundreds. It was clear from the profiles of the victims that he had a type. Most of the women he targeted were between 18 and 24, attending college, and very pretty.
So, authorities were equally shocked and appalled when, after they caught him for good in 1978 in Florida, they found that his last victim was also seemingly his youngest: Kimberly Diane Leach, who was just 12.
This had happened after Bundy had escaped the authorities in Colorado for the second time and made his way to Florida, where he brutally murdered two women at Florida State University's Chi Omega sorority house in January 1978.
He had then driven 150 miles to Jacksonville, where his attempt to kill 14-year-old Leslie Parmenter, the daughter of Jacksonville Police Department's Chief of Detectives, was foiled by her brother who was nearby, before backtracking 60 miles to Lake City.
On the morning of February 9 that year, Leach, a student of Lake City Junior High School, was summoned to the homeroom by a 'teacher' who informed her she had forgotten her purse. She was never seen again.
Her partially mummified remains were found seven weeks later in a pig farrowing shed near Suwannee River State Park, 35 miles northwest of Lake City. She had been raped and killed.
While one can only speculate why Bundy suddenly targeted someone much younger than the women he usually went for — Bundy had abducted and murdered teens, but the youngest before this had been 15-year-old Molly Kendall, the daughter of his then-longtime girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall — suspects it may have had something to do with her.
Molly had written recently in a reissue of her mother's 1981 book 'The Phantom Prince' of her relationship with the psychopath and how, despite his disturbing behavior, she thought of him as the father she never had. She recalled him taking her skiing, teaching her how to ride a bike, and his uncanny ability to make a boring merry-go-round so much fun.
Molly did, however, reveal that he had been inappropriate with her on numerous occasions. She said he would put her into "a kind of a crotch hold" while they were playing together and that there were "a couple of times his fingers had slipped inside my underwear and touched me." She shared that he had also crawled with her into bed one time and that she thought he had "peed" because she was too young to realize it could be a different bodily fluid. Another time, he allegedly rushed into the bathroom and snapped a naked photo of her, telling her she would appreciate it.
Speaking on 'Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer,' Amazon Studios' take on the serial killer's crimes from the perspectives of the women affected by his killings, she again admitted there had been a time when she thought fondly of Bundy, but that the murder of Leach forever changed her.
The young girl shared a likeness to Molly and left her wondering why she had been spared, a haunting feeling that she said still follows her to this day.
"It took me a long time to take it in, what that means to me," she said. "It was hurtful in the same way that every single murder he committed, every attack that he carried out was hurtful to me."
"But this girl [Leach] could be my twin. We were the same and I really grappled with, 'Does this have anything to do with me?' and that's devastating," she continued, trying to hold back tears.
If Leach had been alive, she would have been the same age as Molly today.
"It's hard to find words for how devastating it is, the loss of this girl, and the things that he did to her," she said during a '20/20' interview. "It's been a lifelong source of agony, thinking about her parents, her friends, and… just the loss of a personal relationship that we thought we had to this person."
'Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer' is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.