SEATTLE -- Ted Bundy, the condemned sex murderer suspected of killing as many as 30 women, told his ex-girlfriend he was consumed by 'a force' that drove him to kill, it was reported Sunday.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported Sunday that Bundy's ex-girlfriend said in a book to be published by a Seattle firm in October that the handsome former law student confessed during a 1978 telephone conversation to three murders in Washington state and Utah.
She said he confessed to the killings when he telephoned her from Florida after his arrest in 1978 for the brutal sex slayings of two Florida State University coeds and a 12-year-old girl.
'There is something the matter with me. It wasn't you. It was me,' she said Bundy told her. 'I just couldn't contain it. I've fought it for a long, long time ... it got too strong.
She said she was Bundy's girlfriend for six years, and she made the claims in a book titled, 'The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy.'
The author, who used the pseudonym 'Elizabeth Kendall,' said Bundy told her he once tried to kill her, too.
In the book, Ms. Kendall said Bundy told her 'the force would just consume me' until he murdered. He said the urge made it hard for him to do well in law school, she said.
She said Bundy calmly 'took me out for hamburgers' late one night in July 1974 after he allegedly killed two women who disappeared from Lake Sammamish State Park near Seattle.
Bundy, who grew up in Tacoma, Wash., was arrested in Florida in February 1978, six weeks after his New Year's Eve escape from a Colorado jail where he was awaiting trial for the murder of a young nurse.
He was sentenced in 1979 and 1980 to three death sentences for the Florida killings. His case is now on appeal. He is on death row in a Florida prison.
Authorities said he was a suspect in as many as 30 sex-related slayingsthroughout the country. The victims included several young women who disappeared from parks, taverns, and sorority houses in western Washington in 1974.
Bundy was never charged in those killings and he, his friends and family maintained his innocence in all the cases.
However, Ms. Kendall said Bundy admitted he killed Denise Naslund, 19, and Janice Ott, 23, who both disappeared from Lake Sammamish July 14, 1974.
He also confessed to killing Debra Kent, 17, in Bountiful, Utah, Nov. 8, 1974, and to the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch the same day in Murray, Utah, she said.
She said he told her he once was sleeping with her at her house and tried to kill her by closing the damper on a burning fireplace and stuffing a towel under the door so she would suffocate.
However, Ms. Kendall said, she woke up choking after Bundy left and stuck her head out a window for air. She said she later chided Bundy for what she assumed was an accident. But she said he told her in the phone call 'he wanted me to die that night.'
