She Survived an Attack by Ted Bundy — and Rejects Killers Glamorized Portrayal: 'Sad Little Man'

Kathy Kleiner Rubin was a Florida State University student when she survived an attack by serial killer Ted Bundy that killed two members of her sorority

Saturday morning started off slow for Kathy Kleiner Rubin.

The 20-year-old Florida State University student was nursing a hangover after partying with a friend the night before.

However, by the afternoon, she was attending a wedding followed by a potluck dinner at a friend’s home. She decided to make it a relatively early night and returned to the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee to study for a calculus test she had on Monday.

She went to bed around 11:30 p.m. and her roommate Karen soon followed.

Just a few hours later, in the early morning hours of Jan. 15, 1978, an intruder grabbed an oak log from a nearby firewood pile and entered the backdoor of the two-story ranch style house.

Related: Ted Bundy Survivor Finds Strength in Speaking Out: 'When I Tell My Story, I Heal'

The man crept up the stairs and entered the room of Margaret Bowman, 21, and then Lisa Levy, 20, viciously beating both to death.

He then made his way to the room Kleiner Rubin shared with her roommate.

“We had one of those little foot lockers between our beds, and he stumbled over it because he didn’t know it was there,” Kleiner Rubin tells PEOPLE. “Now, I’m awake, and I see the figure of something standing next to me. I saw the arm being raised, and the log in his hand, and that’s when he attacked me with it.”

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The man bashed Kleiner Rubin's head with the log, breaking her jaw, shattering her chin, ripping open her cheek and almost detaching her tongue. Then, he attacked her roommate, hitting her twice in the head.

When he heard Kleiner Rubin gurgling and whimpering, he turned back to finish her off, but stopped in his tracks when a bright light shined through their bedroom window. It was a car pulling into the parking lot at the back of the house.

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“There was a car bringing home a date late that night, and the light had shown up into our room,” Kleiner Rubin recalls. “He started stumbling around and just ran out the door.”

If the car hadn’t pulled up, she says, “He probably would’ve killed me, and gone back and killed my roommate. He could have gone down the hallway opening and closing a door and attacking women. We don’t know how far it could have gone, but it ended at my room.”

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She didn’t know at the time, but she and her roommate survived an attack by serial killer Ted Bundy, who had escaped a Colorado jail a month earlier, in Dec. 1977. At the time of the attack, Bundy, who murdered more than 30 women and girls in Washington State, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Florida between 1974 and 1978, was living at a nearby boarding house under an assumed name.

Kleiner Rubin’s ordeal and its aftermath including having to testify against Bundy, is the subject of her new book, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More than Ted Bundy, out now from Chicago Review Press.

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Kleiner Rubin, who also writes about how she survived Lupus at the age of 13 and later breast cancer, hopes the book, which was co-authored with Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi and published on Tuesday, will help end the glamorized portrayal of Bundy in the media as a charming and brilliant law student who nobody would have guessed was a serial killer.

Related: 'Girl Who Got Away': The True Story of Ted Bundy Survivor Carol DaRonch and Her Life Now

Bundy, she says, was a "deviant" — a creepy law school drop out who was "sick."

"He wanted people to see what he wanted them to see," says Kleiner Rubin, a motivational speaker who recently spoke at CrimeCon 2023 in Orlando, Fla.. "He portrayed himself as the good guy. Then at night, he would turn into another thing. That’s when he would go hunting for women. He killed most of his victims in their bedrooms at night. He wanted to take their souls, and keep them, not face them and fight them.”

The book also puts a spotlight on the woman and the girls who were killed, she says.

“I brought a voice to every one of them, because as you read things now in the media, it’s just one paragraph with [victim’s] names and commas — it’s just so sad," she says.

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"I’m okay, but they never had a chance to live and be okay. They were all taken away from us so soon out of this world. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair," she adds.

After the attack at the Chi Omega sorority house, Bundy went on to attack another student a few blocks away and kill 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, who went missing in Feb. 1978, before he was finally caught. He was indicted for the attacks on Kleiner Rubin, her roommate and the other student as well as the murders of Bowman and Levy in July 1978.

He was convicted in July 1979 and executed by electric chair on Jan. 24, 1989.

About turning down the offer to watch Bundy die, Kleiner Rubin says she had moved on and Bundy was “out of my life.”

“It wasn’t necessary,” she says. “He was a sad little man.”

A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy is out now from Chicago Review Press.

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