Those who have watched Netflix’s Ted Bundy biopic, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, or have engaged with the case in any way, have likely found they’ve been left with more questions than they have answers.
But one of the major question marks about the film, which was based on the memoirs of Bundy’s longtime girlfriend, Elizabeth Kloepfer, is how she managed to live with the serial killer for years without being murdered herself.
Kloepfer, who in the movie is referred to as Liz Kendall and is played by actress Lily Collins, makes it through the entire film unharmed (physically speaking, that is), while her domestic partner murders dozens of women right under her nose.
Aside from one very creepy scene involving a torch under the sheets, the Netflix version of Bundy doesn’t make any attempt to take Kloepfer’s life. However, the real-life version is another story entirely.
Did Ted Bundy try to kill Elizabeth Kloepfer?
In her 1981 memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy, Kloepfer recalled asking Bundy whether he’d ever tried to kill her in a phone call following his 1978 arrest.
Following a long silence, Bundy admitted he had felt the urge to end her life “coming on” one night.
“I closed the damper so the smoke couldn’t go up the chimney,” Bundy apparently told her. “And then I left and put a towel in the crack under the door so the smoke would stay in the apartment.”
Bundy also threatened Kloepfer when she questioned him about women’s underwear she had found in their home.
“She said ‘what is this?’ And he said to her, ‘if you ever tell anyone this I’ll break your effing head’,” Kloepfer’s close friend, Marylynne Chino, told media.
How did Elizabeth Klopefer survive?
It was likely sheer luck that led to Kloepfer’s survival. In her book, she said she remembers the night Bundy tried to kill her.
She said she woke up in a panic after a night of drinking and was unable to breathe, so ran to the windows to open them as the apartment filled with smoke.
Did she believe bim?
In her book, Kloepfer wrote that she didn’t exactly buy Bundy’s claim that he only tried to kill her once, and somewhat halfheartedly.
“I almost didn’t believe him,” she wrote. “It didn’t fit in with the murders. I thought that maybe he wasn’t willing to talk about any more serious attempts to kill me.”
Why didn’t he try again?
There are plenty of theories as to why Bundy didn’t make Kloepfer one of his 30 victims (and that’s just the number of murders he confessed to).
From Kloepfer’s perspective, she believed he may have used her as his one link to normalcy in between his killings.
In his post-arrest phone call, Kloepfer asked her ex-boyfriend whether he used her to “touch base with reality” given he often spoke or reached out to her before or after killing someone.
“Yeah, that’s a pretty good guess,” he responded, according to her book. “I don’t have a split personality. I don’t have blackouts. I remember everything I’ve done… The force would just consume me. Like one night, I was walking by the campus and I followed the sorority girl. I didn’t want to follow her… I’d try not to, but I’d do it anyway.”
Some believe Bundy used Kloepfer as his cover in order to maintain his image of regular, non-dangerous suburban guy. Plus, if she was found dead he would automatically become a prime suspect, placing him at risk of being discovered for his other killings.
Finally, it’s believed Bundy genuinely loved Kloepfer and this made her distinct from his other anonymous victims. By Bundy’s own admission, he loved Kloepfer to the point of imbalance.
“I loved her so much it was destabilising,” Bundy once told journalist Stephen G. Michaud. “I felt such a strong love for her but we didn’t have a lot of interests in common like politics or something, I don’t think we had much in common.”