The Trail of Ted Bundy: Digging Up the Untold Stories

A summary of this book:

Read my other book, The Bundy Murders (Which I’m going to mention it about 50+ times throughout this book.)

Every place that Bundy committed crimes, I visited, and they pretty much look the same (nearly every location description).

I wrote another book called The Bundy Murders. Did I mention that already? Well, just in case you didn’t know, I wrote another book called The Bundy Murders.

I took photos of places, but they aren’t included here – I just want you to know that pictures were taken.

At the end of each chapter are just laughable transitions (“But then, something super not good happened.”)

Overall, this book was a complete waste of two hours of my life. It felt like reading a transcript of a live podcast with absolutely no logical flow. In addition, it was a shameless, redundant plug for the author’s previous book, which as another reviewer stated, the author mentioned at least 46 times. Don’t waste your money – buy Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule.

PS: I wrote The Bundy Murders (my previous book, called “The Bundy Murders”)

If you haven’t read any other books about Bundy, do NOT begin here. The information provided is very specific and detailed. To truly appreciate the contents of this short companion piece to the author’s earlier book, you must go back to books like The Stranger Beside Me, by the late Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally, I would also highly recommend The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy, by Elizabeth Kendall (known as Liz). It is no longer in print, but there are copies still available through private sellers here on Amazon. She and Bundy for all intents and purposes virtually lived together throughout his killing spree in Washington State and they were still involved during his time in Utah. Through her eyes you will see the public/private side of Bundy that he wanted to portray. He was manipulative, always in control of the relationship, and he lived off of her money. At the same time he was killing, he was playing with Liz’s young daughter and treating their threesome like a family, cooking for them, taking Liz on an expensive long weekend in Canada, charming the socks off of her parents, proposing marriage and then backing out time after time. He depended on women his entire life, and he hated women as much as he needed them. Liz Kendall went to the police because she was scared that the man she loved and wanted desperately to marry was a serial killer. She called Utah authorities as well, when he moved to Salt Lake to attend law school and she started reading and hearing about the same kinds of missing women stories that she read about in Washington. I think for a beginner and for the informed, her book completes the entire picture. I apologize for rhapsodizing Ms, Kendall’s book, but I really feel very strongly that her book, and Ms. Rule’s book are excellent depictions of the times and of Ted, painting the general picture. I believe you need those books under your belt so that highly detailed books like this one (and the original that this one references) will be more easily understood, and the incredible amount of detail this writer has accumulated through interviews with witnesses, detectives and investigators, transcripts of psychological testing in Utah, and transcripts of meetings with Bundy on death row shortly before his death warrant was to be affected, in Stark, Florida, fill in so many details and gaps for people who have studied this most well known serial killer in America. The transcripts of those tapes, largely known as “The Confession Interviews”, brings about as true of a reckoning as it is possible to get from a sociopath. He finally began to confess because his appellate process had run its course in Florida. He wanted to confess to his other murders in Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Washington State and Oregon, perhaps California as well. All of the investigators from these states believe the victim count to be much higher. After his death, one of his lawyers broke silence and in an interview stated that Bundy told him about 100 and he believed him. Nevertheless, Ted only did these confessions to try to arrange a deal with any of these other states’ Governors or Atty Generals to stop his execution. Obviously that didn’t work, but in this book you can read quite a good sample of what he said to state and federal investigators in the last couple weeks of his life.
The author talks about visiting many of the places where Bundy lived and where he stayed along his way to Florida, as well as where he most likely laid in wait for his intended victims. I confess that at this late date, with many of these places no longer existing, the author spends too much time describing them. He also tends to drift into strange observations of his own, such as “feeling leftover negative energy” near a particular house, and how he felt when standing in the “exact” places where Ted picked out and grabbed two coeds at Lake Sammamish in one day in Washington State. The author uses words like monster, evil, crazed. All the adjectives you expect to see in thriller fiction books, or cheap and poorly written true crime books. I’m not sure if he’s just using these words to try to up the emotional ante, or what, but again it seems odd like the trips to all the “monuments” whether they were houses, campuses, resorts, or a beach. It just seemed to me to be very counterproductive to the wealth of factual information vs personal observations and feelings. There are also so many references to his first book about Bundy, along with teasers in the form of, “here’s a little of the whole that’s in my original Bundy book”, that frankly I found to be not only distracting, but annoying in a way, like a door to door salesman or an infomercial. The kind that say, “But wait! There’s more!” It was very off-putting to me. Those personal memories of places visited and how he felt when he was there, and the pushing of his more expensive original book that has been re-released before when new information has been uncovered, are the reasons I gave this 4 stars. If you are a stickler for well edited and proofread material, this one will also get under your skin a little bit, but then again I’ve been seeing a lot of that in Kindle Books, some that I’ve already read a few times in hardback are really sloppy in Kindle.
Nevertheless, the original book and this companion piece are crammed with specific witness accounts, transcripts of letters written by Bundy, investigators’ reports, psych evals, hair and trace evidence, and parts of the confession transcripts. Once you are familiar with the general story as it is laid out in the earliest books about Ted Bundy, if you want to really get a better handle on the timing of events, and answers to a lot of the questions left hanging for so many years, here is your go to author.

I read Mr Sullivan’s The Trail of Ted Bundy in a day and I was utterly disappointed. The book felt like a 155 page ad for Mr Sullivan’s other Ted Bundy book; although I’m delighted he’s written other books I don’t need to be reminded of this other and better book while I’m reading this one. While overall the book is a good read, the constant quotes from his other Bundy book, his constant references to something he already covered in his other Bundy book and the few times he stated “I already covered that in my other Bundy book and won’t repeat that information here” became exhausting and frustrating for me. The only other time I was this disappointed was when I read Polly Nelson’s “Defending the Devil”, where she repeats over and over about this crush she had on a fellow lawyer – a possibly valid point but inappropriate to the story of Ted Bundy that she was promising to tell. Overall this book is nothing more than an ad to buy his other book; and thus I feel I wasted my money buying this book.

I have now read all three books on Bundy by Kevin Sullivan. It was very good to have these events documented and see some of the original police reports to better understand the case of the time. To interview some of the people involved before they depart this earth was also important. I was 7 living in Tallahassee when the maniac swept through Tallahassee and (both my parents were involved at the university) and then he left Kim Leach only 15 minutes from my grandparent’s home Things were never the same in our city or the country for that matter. I still have so many questions but I learned new things from all three of Sullivan’s books, I was actually not ready for either book to end. I do hope that someone can get to the bottom of the unknown hitchhiker victims. But likely too much time has passed.

Great book to add fascinating additional information about Ted Bundy and his victims. People who aren’t familiar with Bundy should read The Bundy Murders by Kevin Sullivan first but anyone who knows about Bundy already will understand everything in this book. I myself have been fascinated by the Ted Bundy case for close to 30 years and I really enjoyed reading the series of 4 (soon to be 5) books about the case written by Kevin Sullivan. He’s a rare combination of a talented writer and gifted researcher and reading his books I have learned a lot more about Ted Bundy. I very highly recommend his books to anyone interested in the Bundy case

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