Ted Bundy Survivor Reveals How Passing Car Saved Her From Certain Death

Surviving a serial killer is a tale, only a few have the opportunity to share. Kathy Kleiner Rubin managed to come out of the harrowing night of 1979 alive when Ted Bundy sneaked into her sorority house and went on a murder spree, The Independent reported.

Bundy became a fugitive in 1977 when he escaped from jail in Colorado, where he’d been awaiting trial for kidnapping and murder, the Independent reported. He fled to Tallahassee, Florida to escape law enforcement authorities. Despite being on the run, Bundy did not stop with his killings. On January 15, 1979, he followed a group of Florida State University sorority sisters as they walked home to the Chi Omega house from a bar.

Bundy managed to slip into the house due to a broken lock, the Independent reported. His first target was Margaret Elizabeth Bowman, who he caught while she was sleeping and repeatedly beat with a piece of wood. He killed her by choking her with a nylon stocking.

The serial killer then made his way into the room of Lisa Janet Levy and beat her unconscious, the Independent reported. He strangled the victim to death and sexually assaulted her with a hairspray bottle.

After murdering two women, Bundy entered Rubin's room where she was staying with her roommate, Karen Chandler, the Independent reported.

Rubin reminisced what went down the night she came face to face with the notorious serial killer in her own room, the Independent reported.

"I heard this loud noise of someone kicking the foot locker we had between our beds. I open my eyes but the room is so dark and all I see is a silhouette of someone standing right next to my bed," she said. "He raised his arm up over my head, and he had something in his hand, and it turned out to be a log, an oak log from outside."

Rubin was shocked by the hitting and was numb for a while, but after some seconds, an excruciating pain set in her body, The Independent reported. Bundy turned away from her and started beating her roommate with the same log.

"I was moaning and groaning and I thought I was yelling and screaming for help but all I was doing was making gurgling sounds from all the blood in my mouth," Rubin said, the Independent reported. "He came back over to my side of the room so I tucked myself into the smallest ball. I thought if he didn’t see me, he wouldn’t kill me."

Just when he raised a hand to hit Rubin a bright light came through the window, the Independent reported. "He got real antsy and started moving around. Then he ran out of the room," Rubin said.

Rubin's room was in front of the parking lot and the light was from a car that had just pulled to the site, the Independent reported. "Because of that light, he left the house and he didn’t get to go down that hall and kill more women," she said. "That light saved my life."

The next thing Rubin knew was that she was being tended to by a police officer and being taken to hospital for further treatment, the Independent reported. "I woke up and a police officer was standing at the head of my bed looking at me," she said. "I touched my face and it was warm with blood. I was in excruciating pain – it felt like daggers and knives. But he just told me ‘It’s going to be OK.'"

In February of the same year, Bundy killed his final victim, a 12-year-old girl named Kimberly Leach, Oxygen reported. The law authorities caught up to him a few days later, when he was pulled over for driving a stolen car in Pensacola. He tried to flee on foot but was eventually captured and arrested.

The incident left Rubin traumatized, and for a while gave her a fear of men, the Independent reported. For years, she did not make her experience public, but that changed in 2018 when she interviewed with Rolling Stones. She followed it up with a memoir titled, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, which also sheds light on the lives of other victims who lost their lives at the hands of Bundy.

Bundy was identified as a perpetrator in the Chi Omega house attack by a survivor, Oxygen reported. 

Rubin appeared as a witness in Bundy's trial in June 1979, The Independent reported. "I went to the witness box, was sworn in, and looked around and saw Bundy sitting at the defense table. He was not upset or anything. This was just a waste of time for him because he thought he was going to be acquitted," she said. "But he didn’t scare me. When I looked at him, I felt strength because I was in a good place. I knew he was going to go down."

Bundy was sentenced to death for the murders of the two students, as well as the attempted murders of various victims in July 1979, the Independent reported. He was executed in the electric chair on January 24, 1989.

Rubin took the call of writing the book because she was disappointed in the way Bundy's victims were handled by the media, in their various retellings about the serial killer, the Independent reported.

"His victims may be mentioned in the books and movies about him," Rubin said, the Independent reported. "But it’s like one paragraph — it’s just everyone’s name separated with a comma — and that hurt me so much because I knew they had a life and they had things to look forward to, and it wasn’t fair that people didn’t know that. It was important for me to explain who they were – to tell their hopes and dreams." 

Rubin, since Bundy's attack, has gone through a bank robbery at gunpoint and breast cancer, but has persevered through all challenges, the Independent reported. She is now enjoying her retired life with her husband and grandchildren in South Florida.