OPINION | This article contains the author's opinion.
Serial killer Ted Bundy committed a series of murders, taking the lives of at least 30 women from 1974 to 1978.
Kleiner Rubin, now 65, barely escaped this horrific event and has written a book about it.
In 1978, Bundy invaded the Chi Omega house at Florida State University, where he killed two sorority sisters, Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman, as they slept in their beds.
She survived one of Ted Bundy’s most infamous attacks – a savage massacre at a Florida sorority house. Tomorrow, Kathy Kleiner Rubin opens up about that fateful night. pic.twitter.com/lWAB5UBUQO
— Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz) May 21, 2019
“Bundy gripped the oak log he had grabbed from the firewood pile by the back door. I saw him raise his left arm into the air. He slammed the log onto my face with tremendous force,” Rubin says in her memoir, “A Light in the Dark: Surviving More than Ted Bundy.”
“My responses were primal. I wanted to scream for help, but I could not.”
“I didn’t yet know that both my jaw joints were broken and disconnected from my cheekbone. My chin was so badly smashed that it shattered, and my cheek had been ripped open as though I had been hit by a bullet,” she writes. “My teeth were still in my jaw, but the intense force of the blow had pushed my molars forward. They were like cars on the highway that had been rammed forward in a massive, multicar pileup.”
Under the brutal assault of Ted Bundy, Rubin suffered severe injuries, nearly biting off her tongue as he smashed a log against her head while she slept.
The arrival of a Chi Omega member in the early morning disrupted Bundy’s intentions, prompting him to flee the scene.
When police and paramedics arrived later, they initially believed Kleiner Rubin had been shot in the face due to her injuries.
“I wasn’t able to broach the subject on my own given that my mouth was wired shut and my tongue was split nearly in two,” she writes. “The surgeon had decided to allow my tongue to heal naturally and said the tissue would renew itself over time. Until then, I had to experience the disgust of feeling that shredded muscle in my mouth.”
During an interview, Rubin discussed her book and highlighted its unique perspective on Ted Bundy.
“He killed because he wanted to keep their souls,” she said. “He would have sex with the bodies afterward. He’d go and put makeup on the dead corpses. But then tomorrow, he could be a charming person. He was very manipulative. He wanted to be what he wanted to be when he wanted to.”
“It feels good because in the book I mention all the women, the dozens of women that he killed,” she said. “And that has been very important to me because usually there’s a paragraph with all our names written with commas. And that just wasn’t right. I was living, I had a life, and they had dreams and things they wanted to do.”
Rubin mentioned that she hasn’t received any communication from her sorority sisters since the attack.
“It hurt a lot … and I thought I needed their reinforcement and for them to tell me … I didn’t do anything, and it just never happened,” she said. “It’s my life and that’s the way it’s been. I don’t need them now.”
Bundy was sentenced to death in 1989. “I had married months after Bundy was executed,” she explained. “I boxed up my memories, moved to a new state, and pushed forward with my life,” she writes. “More than thirty women and girls never did the same. Bundy viciously cut their lives short. I often worried that these women had become nameless shadow figures while Bundy had become legendary.”