Officer recalls Bundy's '75 capture

WEST VALLEY CITY — The patrol car's headlights drowned the Volkswagen Beetle in light and the officer trained his gun on a shaggy-haired suspect in a black turtleneck.

"I didn't want to shoot the guy," said highway patrol Sgt. Bob Hayward. "I wish I had."

Hayward didn't know he had collared America's most notorious serial killer. By then, Theodore Bundy had already killed at least 25 young women in four states, preying on good girls from average households.

Hayward was sitting in his cruiser outside his home at 3 a.m. on Aug. 16, 1975, finishing a shift log when he noticed the tan Volkswagen drive by. Minutes later, his radio crackled with a call for assistance and Hayward responded.

He took a wrong turn leaving the subdivision and stumbled on the VW parked in front of a

neighbor's home. Hayward knew the owners were on vacation and their teen-age daughters were home alone.

When Hayward's lights hit the car it fled, careening through the neighborhood and barreling onto a main road before pulling into an abandoned gas station. Hayward was close behind, his gun drawn.

"I'm lost," Bundy said, his hands raised. He said he had been at the drive-in, watching "Towering Inferno." But Hayward knew that movie wasn't playing.

Hayward searched the car and found pantyhose, a ski mask, a crowbar, an ice pick, and handcuffs.

"Back in 1974, everybody's daughter was getting killed," said Robert Keppel, a lead Bundy investigator in Washington.

By August 1975, the county homicide team had already spent months struggling with the disappearances of three 17-year-old girls.

There was Melissa Smith, who vanished from a shopping mall and was found dead in the woods, and Laura Aime, who left a Halloween party to buy cigarettes and turned up frozen a month later in Provo Canyon.

And then on Nov. 8, 1974, Debi Kent vanished after leaving a school play to pick up her 11-year-old brother at a roller rink.

In the high school parking lot, investigators found a key to the disappearances — literally. The key matched a set of handcuffs someone had used to try to kidnap 19-year-old Carol DaRonch earlier in the day.

DaRonch was shopping at the same mall Smith had been at when a handsome young man posing as a police officer told DaRonch her car had been broken into and she needed to go with him.