https://www.rollingstone.com/cultur...y-kleiner-living-victim-serial-killer-784780/
Kathy Kleiner was one of two women who survived a brutal attack by Ted Bundy in January 1978.
Courtesy of Kathy Kleiner Rubin, Mark Foley/AP/REX/Shutterstock
Every now and then, Kathy Kleiner Rubin likes to duck into a bookstore with her husband, Scott, and head straight for the true crime section. She’ll scan the shelves until she spots it: a book on the serial killer Ted Bundy. The Stranger Beside Me, maybe, or perhaps The Only Living Witness. Whatever it is, she’s probably read it already, but she’ll grab it off the shelf anyway and flip through it until she finds her name. Then she’ll look at her husband and grin.
“Now you find a book with your name in it,” she’ll say.
You wouldn’t know, watching her joke around, that Kleiner is holding a book about the man who almost killed her. She was 20 when Ted Bundy crept into her bedroom at Florida State University, 22 when he was sentenced to death, and 32 when he was finally strapped into Old Sparky, Florida’s electric chair. As the years went on, Kleiner could have tried to forget him, but instead she decided to figure him out — which is why she’s so comfortable in the true crime section of any bookstore.
There are so many books about Ted Bundy that Kleiner has been able to dedicate an entire section of her library to them, and books are just the tip of the Bundy iceberg. This “Bundy binge,” as the killer’s defense lawyer John Henry Browne has called it, comes in the form of movies, documentaries, Oxygen Channel specials, T-shirts, greeting cards, Tumblr fan accounts, rap lyrics, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, socks, a new Netflix docu-series called Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, and a much-hyped Sundance flick called Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Much of the Bundy content declares, somberly, that Bundy was horrible, and yet there’s an undeniably flattering undertone to some of it, given that Bundy’s good looks and superficial boy-next-door charm have become a core part of his legend. The year he was arrested, the New York Times called him “Kennedy-esque”; forty-one years later, Zac Efron is playing him at a prestigious film festival. At points, the onslaught feels pitiless. In 2018, Kleiner signed up for Twitter, and a Ted Bundy fan account responded to her first tweet: “Oh, there you are, Kathy.”
But Kleiner doesn’t mind the movies and the T-shirts. In a way, she’s glad that people are still talking about the man who tried to kill her. “He was, and he lived, and he breathed, and he did what he did. And at some point he was — ” she laughs, “possibly a real person. I think it’s good for people to read books about Bundy. I really do. They need to know that there’s evil out there, but they can control it.”
Kathy Kleiner was one of two women who survived a brutal attack by Ted Bundy in January 1978.
Courtesy of Kathy Kleiner Rubin, Mark Foley/AP/REX/Shutterstock
Every now and then, Kathy Kleiner Rubin likes to duck into a bookstore with her husband, Scott, and head straight for the true crime section. She’ll scan the shelves until she spots it: a book on the serial killer Ted Bundy. The Stranger Beside Me, maybe, or perhaps The Only Living Witness. Whatever it is, she’s probably read it already, but she’ll grab it off the shelf anyway and flip through it until she finds her name. Then she’ll look at her husband and grin.
“Now you find a book with your name in it,” she’ll say.
You wouldn’t know, watching her joke around, that Kleiner is holding a book about the man who almost killed her. She was 20 when Ted Bundy crept into her bedroom at Florida State University, 22 when he was sentenced to death, and 32 when he was finally strapped into Old Sparky, Florida’s electric chair. As the years went on, Kleiner could have tried to forget him, but instead she decided to figure him out — which is why she’s so comfortable in the true crime section of any bookstore.
There are so many books about Ted Bundy that Kleiner has been able to dedicate an entire section of her library to them, and books are just the tip of the Bundy iceberg. This “Bundy binge,” as the killer’s defense lawyer John Henry Browne has called it, comes in the form of movies, documentaries, Oxygen Channel specials, T-shirts, greeting cards, Tumblr fan accounts, rap lyrics, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, socks, a new Netflix docu-series called Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, and a much-hyped Sundance flick called Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Much of the Bundy content declares, somberly, that Bundy was horrible, and yet there’s an undeniably flattering undertone to some of it, given that Bundy’s good looks and superficial boy-next-door charm have become a core part of his legend. The year he was arrested, the New York Times called him “Kennedy-esque”; forty-one years later, Zac Efron is playing him at a prestigious film festival. At points, the onslaught feels pitiless. In 2018, Kleiner signed up for Twitter, and a Ted Bundy fan account responded to her first tweet: “Oh, there you are, Kathy.”
But Kleiner doesn’t mind the movies and the T-shirts. In a way, she’s glad that people are still talking about the man who tried to kill her. “He was, and he lived, and he breathed, and he did what he did. And at some point he was — ” she laughs, “possibly a real person. I think it’s good for people to read books about Bundy. I really do. They need to know that there’s evil out there, but they can control it.”
