Meet the Woman Who Married Ted Bundy and Had His Baby While He Was on Death Row
Look, it’s no secret that Ted Bundy is having a posthumous pop culture moment right now nor is it a secret that certain problematic corners of the internet think he’s hot. But it’s not like anyone would actually voluntarily date a convicted serial killer, right? Actually, nope, wrong!
Bundy was known for manipulating people with his charismatic charm, and so, somewhat understandably, several individuals stuck by him even after he was arrested-including his girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer, although she felt suspicious enough to call the police on him three times during their relationship. But only one person actually married him and had his baby while he was sitting on death row, and that woman’s name is Carole Ann Boone. Here’s the deal with their whole...thing.
She met Bundy at work, which is normal!
When Boone first met Bundy in 1974, she was newly divorced from her second husband, having an affair with a “large, unpleasant man,” and raising her son James. The pair connected thanks to working at the Washington State Department of Emergency Service, where-in a highly disturbing twist-Bundy was helping with the official search for several of the missing women he’d killed.
“I liked Ted immediately. We hit it off well,” Boone recalled, according to The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy. “He struck me as being a rather shy person with a lot more going on under the surface than what was on the surface. He certainly was more dignified and restrained than the more certifiable types around the office.”
Bundy obviously earned Boone’s trust because they started dating while Bundy was technically still with Kloepfer. Awk!
^FYI, this is Bundy and Boone with their daughter. But we’ll get to her in a moment.
She married Bundy while he was on trial...quite literally
Boone was, in essence, Bundy’s ride-or-die. Despite the fact that he had, quite obviously, traveled around the country viciously killing women, she appeared to believe in his innocence and visited him in jail regularly.
After Bundy was arrested in Florida for a series of highly disturbing sorority-house murders, Boone moved to the Sunshine State from Washington so she could be close to him. She’s given very few interviews, but this one offers some interesting insight into her mind-set at the time:
In 1979, Boone testified on Bundy’s behalf as a character witness...and they got married that very moment. No, literally, there’s a weird Florida law (*sigh*) that allows people to declare themselves married in a courtroom with a judge present, and Bundy did just that-presumably in a last-ditch effort to appeal to the jury’s softer side and avoid the death penalty. Of course, Bundy tried to deny this, telling the jurors, “We didn’t do this for your benefit. It was the only chance to be in the same room together where the right words could be said. It was something between she and I.”
After their marriage, Boone would frequently visit Bundy in jail, and she even smuggled in drugs for him vaginally. You heard me. “His wife, Carole, would take drugs into Ted vaginally,” journalist Stephen Michaud confirmed in Netflix’s documentary series Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. “And then he would take the drugs back to his cell rectally.”
She got pregnant while Ted was on death row
In one of the more shocking twists of Bundy and Boone’s relationship, she ended up getting pregnant and giving birth to a baby girl named Rose in October 1981. No, conjugal visits weren’t allowed in Bundy’s prison, but again-this dude was good at manipulating people and it wasn’t hard to get the guards to turn a blind eye. “After the first day they just, they didn’t care,” Boone said of Bundy’s prison guards in a taped recording used in The Ted Bundy Tapes. “They walked in on us a couple of times.”
She broke up with Ted before his death
Boone believed in Bundy’s innocence in part because he always maintained publicly, and to her, that he was innocent. But once he began approaching the date of his death sentence, he changed his tune. Boone was apparently horrified by Bundy’s confession-at least according to his lawyer Polly Nelson’s book, Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer. In it, Nelson says Boone felt “deeply betrayed” and was “devastated by his sudden wholesale confessions in his last days.”
There were also rumors that Bundy had started a relationship with Diana Weiner, another one of his lawyers. Apparently, Boone was NOT here for that, and Nelson says the speculation made her feel “hurt.”
Boone ended up divorcing Bundy in 1986 and moving back to Washington with their daughter. According to an archived People report, she hadn’t visited Bundy for two years prior to his execution in 1989, and although he tried to reach her by phone on the day of his death, she didn’t answer his call.
She’s totally off the radar today
No one has any idea where Boone (or her daughter) is, and for good reason. After what she’s been through-being totally manipulated by a serial killer, to be clear!-it makes sense that Boone wants to stay out of the public eye, although who knows if that’ll change with all the buzz around Zac Efron’s new Netflix movie, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.
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