Ted Bundy and the Murder of Kimberly Leach

This transcript is the episode script as written and fact-checked, timed to the recording. Timestamps are approximate within a sentence.

0:05 What's up guys, welcome back to CrimeTimeSnacks. A missing twelve-year-old girl's mummified remains were discovered nearly two months later in an abandoned Florida hog shed. That's where this story ends. Today we're going back to the beginning — to understand how it got there. Ted Bundy is believed to have murdered at least 30 young women between 1974 and 1978. His crimes spanned Washington, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Florida. That's not a spree. That's a campaign, carried out over four years, across half a dozen states.

0:34 The modus operandi was methodical. Bundy would approach his victims while wearing an arm sling or cast, using a false pretext — asking someone to help him carry books, for example. Once he had them close to his Volkswagen Beetle, he'd bludgeon them unconscious, typically with a crowbar, then drive them to a pre-selected secluded location. What the evidence actually shows is a man who understood how to weaponize trust. He looked approachable. He asked for help. And by the time a victim understood what was happening, it was too late.

1:02 That pattern held across state lines, across years, and ultimately, it held in Lake City, Florida, in February 1978. Let's unpack it. The timeline leading up to Lake City is crucial. In early 1977, Bundy was in custody in Colorado, facing a murder charge. He was acting as his own attorney. That gave him access to the law library at the Pitkin County Courthouse. On June 7, 1977, he jumped from a second-story window while the guard was on a smoke break. He vanished into the mountains for six days before being recaptured.

1:33 Six months later, he did it again. On December 30, 1977, he slipped through a gap in the ceiling of his cell at the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs. He boarded a flight to Chicago, took a train to Michigan, drove to Atlanta, and caught a bus to Tallahassee. He made it to Tallahassee before anyone knew he was gone. He was added to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on February 10, 1978, over a month after his escape. That brings us to February 9, 1978. Kimberly Diane Leach was twelve years old.

2:00 She was in the seventh grade. That morning, she vanished from her junior high school in Lake City. The case file shows that multiple eyewitnesses came forward. They reported seeing a white van circling the school. More importantly, they saw an adult man leading a young girl to that van and driving off. Six days after Kimberly disappeared, a police officer in Pensacola spotted a suspicious car at 1:30 in the morning. He ran the plates. The orange Volkswagen was stolen. After a brief scuffle, the driver was arrested.

2:28 He refused to give his real name, handing over a stolen driver's license and claiming he was an FSU student named Kenneth. It took two days in custody before he finally revealed his true identity to authorities. Investigators quickly connected him to the disappearance in Lake City. They found a stolen white van tied to him. Fiber analysis showed a two-way transfer. Analysts found fibers matching Kimberly's clothing inside the van. Fibers from his clothing were later found on her body.

2:54 The physical evidence was locking into place. To understand how a man ends up driving a stolen car through Pensacola with a fake ID, we have to look at where the timeline actually starts. The record points to early 1974. That winter, young women began disappearing at an alarming rate across the state of Washington. The first was a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at the University of Washington named Lynda Ann Healy. On February 1, she vanished from her basement room in Seattle.

3:22 The case file shows this was the only disappearance in the early cluster that left behind physical evidence. Investigators found a blood-stained mattress and a nightgown left behind in her room. Just over a month later, the pattern repeated further south. On March 12, nineteen-year-old Donna Gail Manson disappeared in Olympia. She was a student at The Evergreen State College who vanished while going to attend a campus jazz concert. Building a timeline for her last known whereabouts was incredibly difficult for law enforcement.

3:51 She was not reported missing for six days. Her peers knew she frequently hitchhiked to nearby towns, so they initially assumed she had just traveled without sharing her plans. Detectives also knew she was depressed, meaning they could not completely rule out the slim possibility that she had left to end her own life. The disappearances kept happening. On April 17, eighteen-year-old Susan Elaine Rancourt vanished in Ellensburg. She disappeared off the Central Washington State College campus right after leaving a dorm advisors meeting.

4:18 With no bodies found and very few clues to go on, law enforcement officials were baffled. Given the limits of forensic technology in the 1970s, these cases were incredibly complex to piece together. But detectives began to notice undeniable connections between the missing women. The victims shared very specific physical characteristics. They were all young, slender Caucasian women who parted their long hair in the middle. Healy had waist-length chestnut hair, and Manson had long dark brown hair, though Rancourt stood out slightly with blonde hair.

4:46 They all came from stable backgrounds and were considered gifted or of above-average intelligence. During the times they vanished, all of them were reportedly wearing slacks. They were taken in the hours of darkness, always within a week of a midterm or final exam at a local college. Strangely enough, investigators also noted that construction work was being done on each girl's respective campus when she disappeared. The radius of the disappearances was about to expand. On May 6, twenty-year-old Oregon State University student Roberta Kathleen Parks vanished in Corvallis.

5:16 She left her dormitory that evening to meet friends at a local coffee shop and never arrived. Captain Herb Swindler was convinced her disappearance was linked to the others. She had hip-length hair parted in the middle, though hers was ash blonde. But other law enforcement officials doubted the connection, feeling Corvallis was simply too far away from the Washington colleges. Police also knew Parks had a history of mood swings and was feeling homesick. She had recently broken up with her boyfriend.

5:42 Just two days before she went missing, she got into a verbal altercation with her father, who suffered a near-fatal heart attack that exact same day. Because of her mental state, investigators couldn't rule out the possibility that she had taken her own life. They briefly considered the nearby Willamette River as a place of interest. The river was dragged, but searchers found absolutely nothing. Less than a month later, the timeline shifts back up to Washington state. On June 1, twenty-two-year-old Brenda Carol Ball disappeared in Burien.

6:09 She was last seen leaving a place called the Flame Tavern. Like some of the earlier cases, Ball wasn't reported missing right away. She was known to have an adventurous spirit. People in her life thought she might have just taken off on a whim, delaying the start of any official search. Ten days later, the pattern struck the University of Washington again. Eighteen-year-old Georgann Hawkins vanished in Seattle on the night of June 11. She disappeared from an alley right behind her Kappa Alpha Theta sorority house.

6:34 Hawkins was a former Daffodil Princess and a straight-A student who dreamed of becoming a broadcast journalist. She was petite, standing just five feet two inches tall, with long brown hair. She had a steady boyfriend at a nearby fraternity and rarely walked around the campus alone at night. The case file shows she had clear, concrete plans for her immediate future. She had just secured a summer job back in her hometown of Tacoma to help pay for her second year of studies. She intended to head home just two days after she disappeared, and her job was set to start on June 17.

7:04 The missing persons reports were piling up, and the summer was just beginning. The missing persons reports were piling up, but the Washington disappearances ultimately culminated on a single Sunday. The date was July 14, 1974. The location was Lake Sammamish State Park. Janice Ann Ott was a twenty-three-year-old probation case worker. She was married, and she was spending the day lying on the beach. Witnesses noticed a handsome man approach her. He was wearing tennis shorts, a white shirt, and tennis shoes, and he had his arm in a sling.

7:33 The man asked Janice for help. He told her he needed to load his sailboat onto his car, which was parked at his parents' house in Issaquah. Janice hesitated because she had her bicycle with her and didn't want it stolen, but the man assured her the bike would fit in his trunk. People nearby overheard the exchange. Janice agreed to help and walked away with him. She was wearing cutoff jeans and a white shirt tied over a black bikini. As they left, one witness heard them exchange names, with the man introducing himself as Ted.

7:58 Four hours later, the exact same park became a crime scene again. Denise Marie Naslund was a nineteen-year-old computer programming student. She was at Lake Sammamish having a picnic with her boyfriend, another couple, and her dog. Around 4:30 that afternoon, Denise left her group to use the restroom. She took her dog with her. She was wearing cutoff shorts and a blue halter top, leaving her sandals behind on the beach. Sometime later, her dog found its way back to her friends alone.

8:24 Nobody actually saw Denise leave the park with a man in a sling. But people who knew her told investigators she had a tender-hearted, friendly personality. They said she would have gladly helped an injured stranger without a second thought. That generated an absolute media frenzy. Suddenly, several other women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six came forward with their own stories. They told police they had been approached at the park by a man named Ted who spoke with a slight British accent.

8:50 He asked for help with a sailboat. One witness actually walked with him to the parking lot. She told investigators he led her to a metallic brown Volkswagen Bug. When she pointed out there was no sailboat on the car, he claimed it was just up the hill at his folks' house. That witness backed out, telling him she had to wait for her husband. The aftermath of Lake Sammamish changed the entire investigation. That massive media frenzy finally gave detectives a concrete profile to work with.

9:15 They were no longer looking for a ghost. They were actively hunting this 'Ted', who used an arm sling to lure women with a fake sailboat. The case file shows just how brazen this campaign was. A friend of earlier victim Georgann Hawkins, a woman named Phyllis Armstrong, later shared a terrifying detail. She said the man had actually approached her, asking for help with his car, just a few days before Hawkins vanished. He was testing his methods in plain sight. But just as the public in Washington went on high alert for a man named Ted driving a brown Volkswagen, the geography of the disappearances shifted.

9:48 In the summer of 1974, he moved to Salt Lake City. He enrolled as a law student at the University of Utah. The change in scenery did not slow down the violence. It actually accelerated it. Over a span of just five weeks, four more young women were murdered in Utah. Sixteen-year-old Nancy Wilcox vanished in Holladay. Seventeen-year-old Melissa Smith disappeared in Midvale. Laura Ann Aime, also seventeen, was taken in Lehi. And seventeen-year-old Debra Jean Kent vanished in Bountiful.

10:14 What the evidence actually shows is that the tactics were evolving. He was not just relying on the injured arm routine anymore. On November 8, 1974, an eighteen-year-old named Carol DaRonch was at a shopping mall in Murray, Utah. A man approached her, but this time, he was posing as a police officer. He told DaRonch someone had attempted to break into her vehicle. He insisted she needed to come with him to the Murray Police Department to sign an official complaint. She trusted his authority, and they drove off in his Volkswagen Beetle.

10:41 They never made it to a police station. He eventually pulled the car over and tried to force handcuffs onto her wrists. He managed to get one cuff secured and threatened her with a gun. DaRonch fought for her life. She jumped out of the Volkswagen and flagged down a passing vehicle. An elderly couple picked her up and drove her straight to the authorities. For the first time, a victim had escaped, and she was able to give police a direct, detailed description of her attacker. Carol DaRonch escaping was a massive break in the investigation.

11:08 She gave police a direct, detailed description of the man and his Volkswagen Beetle. What makes that timeline so chilling is what happened next. The record shows that was just hours after DaRonch got away. We already know about the string of murders that hit Utah in the late summer and fall of 1974. We know he was behind the disappearances of Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Smith, Laura Ann Aime, and Debra Jean Kent. He was balancing his legal studies with a relentless, five-week campaign of violence.

11:34 By 1975, that campaign crossed state lines again. The geography expanded into Colorado and Idaho. On January 12, a twenty-three-year-old nurse named Caryn Campbell was vacationing with her fiancé in Snowmass Village, Colorado. She took the elevator up to their room while her family waited in the hotel lobby. She never came back down. Two months later, twenty-six-year-old Julie Cunningham was abducted in Vail. Then twenty-four-year-old Denise Oliverson was taken from Grand Junction.

12:01 The violence was accelerating, and the victims were getting younger. In May of 1975, twelve-year-old Lynette Dawn Culver vanished in Pocatello, Idaho. The following month, fifteen-year-old Susan Curtis disappeared while walking home from a banquet in Provo, Utah. Law enforcement agencies across multiple states were dealing with missing women, but they didn't have a name to connect them. That finally changed in the early hours of August 16, 1975. Utah Highway Patrol Sergeant Bob Hayward was finishing his shift in Granger.

12:28 He spotted a Volkswagen Beetle parked in front of a house where he knew two young women lived. He flipped on his bright headlights. The driver immediately took off. Sergeant Hayward chased the vehicle down and pulled it over. He started questioning the driver. That's when he noticed the passenger seat of the Volkswagen had been completely removed. He also searched a gym bag inside the car. The contents looked like a burglary kit. Hayward found rope, a ski mask, gloves, and a crowbar.

12:52 He found an ice pick, a pair of handcuffs, and pantyhose with holes cut out for the eyes and nose. The driver was arrested for evading an officer. The law student was finally in custody. We already know about the eighteen-year-old who fought for her life in a Volkswagen Beetle. Carol DaRonch escaping that fake police officer in Murray was the thread that finally unraveled this case. Remember, she flagged down that elderly couple just hours before Debra Jean Kent disappeared. She gave investigators a clear description of the driver and his car.

13:20 Now, in August of 1975, Utah Highway Patrol had that exact car impounded. The driver was sitting in a jail cell. Detectives organized a police lineup and brought DaRonch in to take a look. The case file notes that he actually made attempts to alter his appearance before standing in that lineup. It did not work. DaRonch looked at the men and identified him as the person who attacked her. On October 2, he was officially charged with aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault.

13:44 The man who had been hunting young women across multiple states was finally facing a bench trial. That trial took place in 1976. The evidence held up in court. He was found guilty of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to serve between one and fifteen years in a Utah state prison. While he was sitting in that cell, the broader investigation was gaining momentum. Sheriffs from neighboring counties, including up in Washington, were looking closely at the Utah inmate. They strongly suspected he was the same man responsible for the string of unsolved murders in the Pacific Northwest.

14:16 But it was Colorado that made the first definitive move. Investigators executed a search of his impounded Volkswagen Beetle and found hairs inside the vehicle. The record shows that one of those hairs was a match to Caryn Campbell. She was found murdered near Snowmass in February. Based on that physical evidence, he was officially charged with first-degree murder in Campbell's death. Authorities transferred him from the Utah state prison to a jail in Aspen, Colorado, to stand trial.

14:41 He was granted permission to assist in his own defense. That decision came with unprecedented privileges. The judge actually decreed that the defendant did not need to wear leg shackles or handcuffs in the courthouse. He was allowed to walk freely into the courtroom and up to the second-floor law library. What the case file adds are the details of that first escape. It took roughly ten minutes for anyone to realize he was gone. Police threw up roadblocks at both ends of Aspen and searched every single vehicle leaving town, but he had already fled into the mountains.

15:10 He broke into a cabin and hid there for several days. Eventually, he walked right back into Aspen and stole a car that had been left unlocked with the keys in the ignition. A deputy spotted the stolen car weaving along the road and pulled it over. Six days after jumping out the window, he was back in custody. He immediately started planning his next move. The record shows he dropped twenty to twenty-five pounds. His cell had an unsecured grate in the ceiling and a light fixture that had not been welded shut.

15:36 He used that oversight to his advantage. He carved the opening in the ceiling wider so he could fit through. On the night of December 30, he arranged law books and pillows under his blankets to look like a sleeping body. Then he crawled up into the ductwork, dropped down into an empty jailer's apartment, put on civilian clothes, and walked out into the night. What the case file adds is that Caryn Campbell was a nurse visiting from Dearborn, Michigan. She was staying at the Wildwood Inn with her fiancé and two children.

16:02 She stepped into a hotel elevator and was simply gone. The timeline shows the violence in Colorado moving incredibly fast. You know Julie was abducted on March 15. The record points to April 6 for the next disappearance. That is when Denise was taken. Investigators later learned Oliverson was killed in a secluded location. Three women were taken from three different Colorado towns in under three months. The geography kept shifting, making it nearly impossible for local authorities to see the bigger picture at the time.

16:30 The violence eventually pushed back into Idaho and Utah. We know Lynette vanished. What the notes add is that he eventually confessed to taking the girl to his motel room and killing her there. We also know Susan disappeared. Her body was never found. He waited until the eve of his execution to confess to her murder. After he escaped Colorado and made it to Tallahassee, the violence exploded. On the night of January 15, 1978, he attacked four women at the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University.

16:56 He assaulted another student just blocks away that exact same night. He was eventually charged with three counts of attempted murder for attacking Karen Chandler, Cheryl Thomas, and Kathy Kleiner. The trials were a media spectacle. The first murder trial opened in Miami on June 11, 1979. It was moved from Tallahassee because pretrial publicity had completely saturated the local jury pool. The Florida Supreme Court had recently authorized cameras in courtrooms statewide. The judge denied a request to block the coverage.

17:25 It became one of the first nationally televised murder trials in the United States. He actually represented himself for portions of that trial. He cross-examined witnesses. The strategy did little to undercut the prosecution. The most gripping piece of evidence was a bite mark left on Lisa Levy. Investigators had photographed the wound to scale at the crime scene. Three months later, they got a search warrant to compel dental impressions. A forensic odontologist named Dr. Richard Souviron made wax and stone molds of his mouth.

17:52 The molds showed a set of lower teeth that were twisted, turned, and jammed together in a very distinctive pattern. At trial, prosecutors put enlarged photographs of the impressions right next to the wound. The pattern was a match. On July 24, 1979, the jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of burglary. He received two death sentences. The second trial began in Orlando in January 1980. This was for the murder of Kimberly Leach. He did not represent himself this time.

18:20 The jury deliberated for less than ten hours. They convicted him of kidnapping and first-degree murder. He received his third death sentence on February 10, 1980. In his final days, he confessed to approximately thirty murders across seven states. He gave the state-by-state details to FBI Special Agent Bill Hagmaier. On January 24, 1989, he was strapped into the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke. He was pronounced dead at 7:16 in the morning. We know it reached those states by the late spring of 1975.

18:49 The timeline in the case file shows exactly how fast this happened. Between January and April, the geography shifted again. On May 6, the pattern hit Pocatello, Idaho. That is the exact date she vanished. As I mentioned earlier, he later confessed to abducting her and ending her life inside his motel room. Less than two months later, the hunt moved back to Utah. On the night of June 27, she was attending a banquet. She disappeared while walking home from that event. What the evidence actually shows is a man targeting increasingly younger victims just weeks before his first arrest.

19:20 That June disappearance was the final one before Sergeant Bob Hayward pulled over that Volkswagen Beetle in August. The timeline was accelerating right up until the moment he was caught with the ski mask and handcuffs. We already know how the traffic stop in Granger played out on August 16, 1975. You know Hayward pulled over that fleeing Volkswagen and found the passenger seat missing. We talked about the gym bag inside holding the ice pick, the handcuffs, and the altered pantyhose.

19:44 We also know the direct result of that arrest. The charges came after Carol DaRonch picked him out of a police lineup. That identification gave them the thread they needed to start tying him to the unsolved 1974 murders. But the case file reveals something incredible about the timing of that Granger arrest. Detectives in Seattle were drowning in paperwork. The sheer volume of the Washington investigation had completely outgrown what human investigators could sort by hand. Law enforcement was looking at 41,000 registered owners of Volkswagens.

20:13 They had to cross-reference those vehicles against a list of roughly 3,500 possible suspects in the Washington disappearances. They decided to use a computer to sort through more than 300,000 names to produce a ranked list of suspects. That computer program actually worked. It generated a shortlist of the most likely suspects. The law student sitting in a Utah jail cell came up seventh on that list. A correct answer sitting at number seven is still a correct answer. The technology had successfully narrowed down hundreds of thousands of files to a handful of men.

20:43 But before Seattle detectives could act on that ranking, a routine traffic stop in Granger beat them to it. The gap between identifying a suspect on paper and physically tracking him down is where the danger lives. If Sergeant Hayward had not noticed that parked car, or if the driver had not sped off, the timeline might look very different. The computer had the name, but a patrolman on a late shift is what actually took him off the streets. The fallout from that traffic stop moved quickly.

21:08 Because of the massive media presence surrounding the case, the defendant actually requested a bench trial for the kidnapping charge. That meant a judge would decide the verdict instead of a jury. The trial began on February 23, 1976. The prosecution built their case around two key people. They relied on Carol DaRonch detailing her escape, and they relied on Sergeant Hayward explaining exactly what he found in that gym bag. The strategy worked. A week later, on March 1, the judge found him guilty.

21:35 That conviction is what finally put him in a state prison with a sentence of one to fifteen years. We already know he was transferred to Colorado to stand trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell. What the case file adds is the timeline of those legal proceedings. In late January 1977, he was officially extradited to face the charges. He pleaded not guilty and acted as his own attorney. The preliminary hearing started in early April of that year. It dragged on for several weeks.

22:00 We know he used that time to access the courthouse law library, leading up to that June 7 escape during a court recess. We talked about how he hid in a cabin before getting caught in a stolen car. What the notes add is his own account of that first escape. He later told a man named Carlisle that he had no money, no help, and absolutely no plan. He spent those six days wandering aimlessly in the wilderness, exhausted and hungry, before returning to Aspen on June 13. He dropped the weight to fit through a ceiling grate.

22:27 His former defense attorney, John Henry Browne, actually visited him there and noticed the drastic weight loss. Browne later said he wondered why his client was doing it. The answer came on the night of December 30. Browne later compared the breakout to a movie, noting how his former client crawled right through the ducting. We already discussed the cross-country trip that followed. But the record shows exactly how he got out of Colorado. After breaking into the jailer's closet and stealing civilian clothes, he walked out the front gate.

22:54 He found another vehicle to steal and drove it all the way to Denver. That is where he boarded the flight to Chicago. He was a fugitive with a massive head start. He managed to successfully flee across the country, landing in Florida weeks before the murder of Kimberly Leach. The case file shows how investigators built the timeline leading up to that final abduction. Columbia County prosecutors, led by George R. Dekle, Sr., worked to trace his movements. They taped a statement from a man named Farhat.

23:20 He owned a Jacksonville sporting goods store. He claimed he sold the fugitive a Buck knife for twenty-six dollars on February 8, just one day before Kimberly vanished. What the record adds is the sheer volume of that physical evidence. Those fibers were all over Kimberly's socks, her jeans, her bra, and her purse. They also matched her blood to a bloodstain discovered inside the van. That evidence was presented in Orlando in January 1980. The trial was originally scheduled to take place in Live Oak but was moved.

23:48 His defense lawyer, Julius Africano, tried to dismiss the evidence in his opening statement. He called the prosecution's case a chain of circumstances. The prosecutors answered that by putting Kimberly's mother, Freda Leach, on the stand to testify about the day her daughter disappeared. Then they brought in Jacques Moore. He was one of three eyewitnesses who placed the defendant near the school. The chain of circumstances was actually a web of physical and eyewitness proof. We know a twelve-year-old girl was taken from her junior high school on February 9, 1978.

24:17 But when you look at how the public actually reacted that morning, the record gets incredibly frustrating. One witness was a city firefighter who saw that white van blocking traffic around 8:30 in the morning. He watched a man lead a distraught young girl toward the passenger side. The girl was wearing a football jersey, and she was clearly upset. That witness was an emergency medical technician. He was literally trained to help people in crisis. But the case file shows he decided he simply did not want to get involved.

24:44 He waited a full six months before finally reporting what he saw to the authorities. That delay was incredibly unhelpful to a desperate search. Other people on the street that morning also saw the van circling the school. A crossing guard noticed the driver staring hard at the building multiple times over the course of an hour. Another driver was nearly run off the highway by a white van, noting the man behind the wheel was bobbing his head with a slack jaw. By the time the suspect was arrested in Pensacola, the local press was swarming the story.

25:13 The coverage completely saturated Lake City and the surrounding counties. Public interest exploded when authorities held a press conference to announce the fugitive had checked out of a local motel on the exact morning of the abduction. Law enforcement continued to feed that media frenzy instead of keeping the details quiet. A local sheriff went on the record to tell reporters exactly what the state crime lab was testing. He publicly discussed the large bloodstain found on the carpet of the stolen van.

25:38 The news coverage even detailed how sand had been tossed over that bloodstain to try and conceal it. Reporters broadcasted the theory that the soil came from a nearby river flood plain. The public was getting a real-time, unfiltered look at a horrific crime scene before a trial even started. It was a circus, and it complicated an already fragile investigation. We already know a Pensacola officer spotted that stolen Volkswagen. What the case file adds is how violent that traffic stop actually got.

26:04 Patrolman David Lee originally pulled the car over because the driver had his headlights off. When Lee realized the vehicle was stolen, he ordered the man out, but the suspect punched the officer right in the face and took off running. Lee chased him down, aiming his revolver and shouting for him to stop. The officer fired a single shot, and the fugitive collapsed. Lee thought he had incapacitated the man. But as he approached, the suspect lunged for the officer's gun. They fought for control of the weapon.

26:30 Lee had to pistol-whip the man three times just to get him in restraints. The fight was completely drained out of him. During the drive to the police station, the suspect looked at the officer and said he wished Lee had just killed him. We talked about how he eventually dropped his fake ID. The record shows he only revealed his true identity in exchange for a phone call to his girlfriend in Seattle. Detective Norman Chapman practically begged him to help them find Kimberly's body.

26:52 The man refused, telling Chapman the site was simply too horrible to look at. The search dragged on for nearly two months. It finally ended on April 7. That is when Kimberly's remains were discovered in that abandoned hog shed, located roughly thirty miles west of Lake City. We know the Orlando jury convicted him in 1980. He spent the rest of the decade filing multiple unsuccessful appeals from Florida State Prison. He tried to use a bones-for-time strategy. He purposely withheld the locations of victims, hoping to trade those secrets to delay his execution.

27:23 Governor Rob Martinez signed the final death warrant on January 17, 1989. The inmate spent his final days talking to people like detective Robert Keppel and FBI profiler William Hagmaier. He did a taped interview with Reverend James Dobson, blaming pornography for shaping his violent urges. He even confessed to necrophilia for the very first time. But he completely refused to talk about Kimberly Leach. He held onto that secret until his last-minute clemency request was finally rejected.

27:50 After years of absolute denial, he confessed to her murder on the eve of his execution. Read the file. Form your own conclusion. That's it for this one. Thanks for hanging out with me. This has been CrimeTimeSnacks, and I'll catch you next time.