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Deborah Harry, the lead singer of the 1970s new wave band Blondie, has maintained many times over the last three decades that she once had a close encounter with Ted Bundy, narrowly escaping abduction (and presumably worse) at the hands of that notorious serial killer in the streets of New York in the early 1970s. Here's how the story was related by her early on, in a 1989 newspaper account: However, Debbie Harry's recollections (related many years after the fact) don't fit the details of what is known about Ted Bundy's life and criminal activities. For example, her 1989 account opened as follows: Ted Bundy was born to an unwed mother on 24 November 1946 in Burlington, Vermont, he lived in his grandparents' Philadelphia home for the first three years of his life, and then moved with his mother to Tacoma, Washington. After graduating high school in 1965, he spent the summer working for the Tacoma City Light utility company to save money for college, attended the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma during the 1965-66 academic year. The next summer he worked at a Washington sawmill, then transferred to the University of Washington (UW) to study Chinese before dropping out of that school in early 1968. After leaving UW, Bundy worked at various minimum wage jobs in Washington state, served as a volunteer in the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaign, traveled to Colorado, visited relatives in Arkansas and Philadelphia (enrolling for one semester at Temple University), and possibly undertook a trek to Burlington to obtain a copy of his birth certificate, before returning to Washington by the fall of 1969 to re-enroll at UW as a psychology major. He remained in the Pacific Northwest, attending school and/or working in the area (committing his first documented assaults and murders in Washington and Oregon in early 1974), until relocating to Salt Lake City to attend the University of Utah Law School around August 1974. In January 1975 Bundy visited Seattle briefly during a school break before returning to the Utah-Colorado area. He was finally arrested (for the first time) in a Salt Lake City suburb in August 1975 and convicted of kidnapping and assault (for the first time) in Colorado in March 1976. So here we come to the first problem with Harry's tale: the chronology just doesn't work. Ted Bundy is not known to have been in New York City in the early 1970s (or at any other time in his life), nor to have begun abducting and killing women prior to early 1974 (and then only in the Washington-Oregon and Utah-Colorado-Idaho areas until after he escaped from a Colorado jail at the end of 1977 and fled to Florida, where he attacked and killed more women before his re-arrest in February 1978). Given that Harry maintains her encounter with the mystery man who offered her a ride took place in the lower east side of the Village in the early '70s when she wasn't even in a band, that incident must have occurred prior to the end of 1973, as Harry was definitely in a band (the Stillettos) by then. But there's no evidence that Ted Bundy was either in New York or attempting to abduct women at that time. The other problem with Harry's account is that Bundy was never known to have driven or used a totally stripped out MurderMobile of the type she described, one devoid even of door handles and window cranks. During his Seattle and Salt Lake City murder sprees, he drove a normal-appearing vehicle, a light brown Volkswagen Beetle. The only modification he made to this car was to occasionally remove the passenger seat and place it across the back seat in order to facilitate the carrying of cargo. As Ann Rule, author of the Ted Bundy study The Stranger Beside Me noted, young women who later (erroneously) claimed to have narrowly escaped the clutches of Ted Bundy are a not uncommon phenomenon: That said, we can't claim it's absolutely impossible Deborah Harry could have encountered Ted Bundy in New York in the early 1970s, as his every movement and activity wasn't thoroughly tracked and documented, and he told conflicting stories to different people about when and where he began assaulting and killing women, as noted by Wikipedia: Also, during his time in Philadelphia and (his claimed time in) Ocean City, Bundy would theoretically have been just a few hours' drive away from New York City, but still no reliable account — not even his own — ever put him in that metropolis or in possession of the type of stripped-out, death-trap automobile described by Harry. Deborah Harry's later retellings of the story introduced even more anomalies, such as this account from the 2012 Blondie biography Parallel Lives: Harry's remains the sole personal account that ever put Ted Bundy in New York City, pegged him as possessing terrible body odor, or represented him as driving a car with an interior stripped completely bare — which makes it all the more puzzling how she might have read a magazine article describing a detail (e.g., the [stripped down] inside of his cars) that no one but she ever reported. Harry summed up the predominant reaction to her tale as follows: Of course, what's really wrong here is that Ted Bundy couldn't have escaped before Deborah Harry claims to have encountered him, because at that time he hadn't yet ever been jailed, or arrested, or even suspected of a crime. Quite possibly something like Harry's tale did happen, but it probably didn't involve the most famous serial killer of the time.
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