Author releases new book about Ted Bundy’s ‘Six Days in Aspen’

“Down the street, dispatcher Nancy Baxter was trying to stay focused on her typing. She found herself distracted by Sergeant Horan, who was using a small tool to dig inside the bowl of his pipe. He smoked tobacco called Mac Barons Latakia, and the aroma permeated the air. Nancy watched as Horan tamped it down on the edge of the counter.

A garbled transmission came over the radio, and Nancy’s attention was redirected.

“10-9,” she said, requesting a repeat of the transmission. “I couldn’t understand you.”

“Bundy escaped!” Deputy Westerlund repeated excitedly.”

This is a passage from Ric Conrad’s new book, “Six Days in Aspen: The 1977 Manhunt for Ted Bundy.” He began his talk on Wednesday at Explore Booksellers in Aspen by reading some excerpts from the book.

“As Detective Chandler sprinted past Hotel Jerome on Main Street, he could hear details of Bundy’s escape over his radio. He dashed inside the building emblazoned with the sign, The Aspen Times. It was the same building where KSNO Radio Station made its broadcasts. Staff at the station had no idea why the detective was there, but they knew who he was and didn’t stop him as he stormed into the announcing booth.

“I need to get on the air right now,” he said plainly. “Get up from your seat.”

The passage goes on to explain how Aspen Police Department officers sent out a description of Bundy on the radio airwaves and continued searching for him around town. Dozens of reports of sightings came flooding into the Aspen Police Department, and eventually, they were able to piece together his escape route from the front lawn of the courthouse.

According to previous reporting from The Aspen Times, Bundy kidnapped and murdered Caryn Campbell, a Michigan nurse, from a Snowmass Village hotel in January 1975. He then jumped out of a second-story window at the Pitkin County Courthouse in June 1977 during a court recess after he had been extradited to Aspen to face charges in the woman’s death. He was on the lam for six days.

Bundy also escaped from the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs on Dec. 30, 1977, after removing a light fixture from the roof of his cell, squeezing through the small hole, and vanishing into the night.

During his months in Glenwood Springs and Aspen in 1977, Bundy — who acted as his own attorney — and prosecutors with the 9th Judicial District were preparing to go to trial for the murder of Campbell, who was abducted from the Wildwood Inn in Snowmass Village. The trial never happened because of his Glenwood escape and subsequent execution in Florida in January 1989 for three murders he committed in that state.

At the time, Bundy denied killing Campbell and told The Aspen Times in an Aug. 4, 1977, article headlined “Who is Ted Bundy?” that “I’m extremely confident and firmly believe in my own innocence.”

Bundy also worked his notorious charm on reporters, law enforcement personnel, and others at the courthouse, reportedly referring to his leap from the courthouse as “The Great Escape” and telling a reporter he enjoyed reading an account of it, according to the same article.

One Aspen Police Department rookie recalls his brief interactions with Bundy after being on the job for just six weeks.

“A couple conversations I had with him, you know, he was very gregarious,” former APD Officer Chet Zajac said. “He has a great sense of humor. He’s handsome. He was a fun guy. His brain was kind of tweaked … He was extremely smart … I just think he had kind of an off switch, so that when you’re talking to him, he just decided he wasn’t gonna talk anymore. He would just stop talking and turn around or walk away or do whatever.”

Zajac was a part of the manhunt effort to find Bundy when he initially escaped. APD believed Bundy would head up to the houses on Red Mountain, as most of them at that time were vacant. The weather was cold and rainy. Zajac stopped at the Aspen Thrift Store, in the same spot now as it was then, and bought a rain slicker that was two sizes too big. Armed with the raincoat, flashlight, shotgun, and peashooter handgun, he made his way up to Red Mountain.

Zajac, who after 23 years with APD now lives in Washington, peeked in windows and searched for broken doors for 48 hours but to no avail.

While Zajac was not in attendance at Explore Booksellers, several other former APD officers were, including Detective Michael Chandler and Officer Terry Quirk who aided in Bundy’s capture. All three of these men were interviewed for the book.

One officer was working a night shift, patrolling Aspen, looking for any misbehavior.

He and his partner eventually got a call from dispatch that there was an attempted sexual assault. They headed to the hospital. His partner, a woman, was sent inside, but he went back out to the streets.

“We’re going to stop everything that moves,” he said. “And this is where my mind takes me.”

The officer thinks that Bundy staged the sexual assault to drop the number of officers on the streets in and around Aspen.

“He knew enough about after being in jail here; he knew enough about the police department and the sheriff’s department,” he said. “I suspect Cemetery Lane (where Bundy stole his escape car from) was an easy five minute walk from where that was staged.”

After Bundy stole the Cadillac, he attempted to take Independence Pass. Unbeknownst to him, a traffic landslide up there had closed the pass.

“So he was trying to escape. He would have been long gone by the time. So, we got really lucky,” the officer said.

The deputies out at the pass stopped Bundy, and he was recaptured.

“I got there, I took one look, and I looked at his eyes,” the officer said. “Maureen was talking to dispatch. I knew everybody in the world would be there within about three minutes.”

“I haven’t slept for 50 years,” he said. “I’m not a child anymore, but I slept with these memories for a lot of years.”

Before Bundy was executed in Florida in January 1989, however, he admitted to killing Campbell. He told a Pitkin County Sheriff’s Office investigator that he went to the Wildwood Inn on crutches in hopes of luring a young woman to help him carry his ski boots to his car, according to a January 1989 Aspen Times article.

Conrad got the idea to write a book about Bundy’s time in Aspen by watching a Netflix documentary on the 30th anniversary of Bundy’s execution.

“We were children at the time, we remember these crimes,” he said during the talk. “But how much do you really know?”

Conrad said the docuseries only devoted 13 minutes to Bundy’s escape. This immediately got him hooked. He was interested in the ups and downs of the manhunt and the interesting yet creepy nature of Bundy’s time on the run.

Conrad has written other books, including one about an early climbing group in Mount Hood in Oregon that were instrumental in forming the mountain’s search and rescue team, as well as one about the 1986 Mount Hood tragedy, where nine people died on a field trip from Portland.

Regan Mertz can be reached at 970-429-9153 or rmertz@aspentimes.com.