TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Ted Bundy was 'out of place' among the crowd of Florida State University students guzzling beer at Sherrod's in January of 1978 and several young women remembered his 'unnerving stare.'
'He was scanning all the girls,' Connie Hastings told a jury at Bundy's murder trial. 'It was a stare that kind of bothered me.'
Several other young women at Sherrod's the night of Jan. 14, 1978, told of a 'strange-looking person' with an 'unnerving stare.'
Lisa Levy was at Sherrod's that night and may have come under Bundy's eye. She and Margaret Bowman were slain hours later in a bloody rampage through the Chi Omega sorority house in which two other women were severely beaten. An aspiring ballerina who lived nearby also was attacked that night.
Bundy was sentenced to death for the Chi Omega murders and the slaying three weeks later of 12-year-old Lake City schoolgirl Kimberly Leach.
Several sorority sisters noticed things slightly amiss when they returned to the Chi Omega house in the early morning hours of Jan. 15, but it was Nita Neary who sounded the alarm after kissing her date goodnight at the back door at 3 a.m.
The door was unlocked and the lights were on downstairs. Neary turned off the lights as she walked toward the stairs to the second-floor bedrooms. That's when she heard a 'thump.' Then she heard someone running in an upstairs hallway and coming down the carpeted staircase.
As she approached the foyer, 16 feet from the big double front doors of the house, she saw the profile of a man crouched low by the doors holding what looked like a club wrapped in dark cloth. In an instant, he was out the door and gone.
Neary ran upstairs and awakened her roommate, Nancy Dowdy. They went downstairs, made sure all the doors were locked, and were recounting the incident to house president Jackie McGill when Karen Chandler staggered from her room, blood spewing from her smashed face.
Neary ran down the hall shouting, 'Get up! Get up!' Dowdy phoned the police.
McGill went into Chandler's room and found Kathy Kleiner, sitting cross-legged on the bed gurgling blood from her mouth and moaning.
Ambulances, squad cars and detectives converged on the house. Ray Crew, a Tallahassee policeman, opened the door to Levy's room and found her lying on her bed on her stomach. She did not respond when her name was called.
He turned her over on her back and saw her neck was twisted in an inhuman fashion. She was dead on arrival at Tallahassee Memorial Hospital. She had been strangled with pantyhose, her jaw was broken and she had been sexually abused. There was a vivid bite mark on her left buttock.
Bowman was the last to be found. She was killed with several blows to the head and possibly was strangled. Her underpants were torn from her with sufficient force to leave a burn mark on her thigh.
Bundy apparently then broke into a duplex six blocks away on Dunwoody Street and strangled and clubbed Cheryl Thomas, an aspiring ballet dancer from Virginia. Her balance was so damaged by the attack that she gave up a dancing career.
Mary Crenshaw, who was and still is the house mother at the Chi Omega sorority, said she cannot shake the horror of the night.
'I've tried as best I can to forget it but it just will not leave,' Crenshaw said. 'I would give anything if the memory would just leave my mind. Better, if it had never happened. It was horrible. All those pretty young girls -- ruined.'
