Glad to see discussions on rape victims & how they are treated – more education and training is needed in law enforcement

I am going to sound bitter and angry but I am and I have a right to be:  My experiences in coming forward now for nearly 20 years mirrors what other survivors have been saying in general.  We have a long way to go in society when it comes to dealing with rape.  I came forward to several departments of the WA State justice system for over a decade starting in 2001.  My experiences are supported by case facts and the person who raped me was a serial rapist and killer.  I was coming forward long before this was  a national conversation.   I was coming forward before other young people held in captivity were being empowered to talk of it.  I was coming forward before severe trauma was understood; before rape trauma and stalking trauma were understood and before captivity trauma was recognized as unique – it still isn’t.

I was ridiculed by a few detectives, told I only wanted publicity, defamed by Keppel repeatedly behind the scenes [who’s not been forthcoming about the actual case facts for decades now] and treated badly by the AG Office as well.  I was told in one email by an official that I only “thought” I’d been abused by Bundy when in reality my memories time and date stamped lined up to details in the case that had never been released and were in a sealed area.  If the case had been protected instead of being publicized for media attention I could have had a better chance of being heard: what I was telling them was important to unsolved cases.

Even more devastating than not being believed was the manipulation of me during the time I was severely traumatized -the time the memories were returning and I was suffering from delayed severe PTSD.  My memories had been delayed for decades – not only due to the severity of the psychological trauma of being kidnapped, raped repeatedly, stalked and held captive unable to escape, but also by the physical trauma of drugging, imbibing with alcohol while in captivity and being hit on the head repeatedly.  All of this is borne out and supported by the memory fragments I presented with – they lined up to original case files which had been sealed.  I wasn’t coherent, I was often stumbling through memory fragments of that time period that were out of alignment and all over the board – but the sad thing and tragedy for me is that they were accurate then and are accurate now to the specific never published details of the case much more so than the narrative that was being put forward publicly as “truth”.

Instead of being helped in a vulnerable period of my life when I was desperately trying to testify, I was being manipulated, coerced, and discounted.  I was removed from the protection of the police as I was refused an interview for years and not assigned a case number and I was removed from protections of victims rights. I begged for help with counseling because no one would believe me and I couldn’t afford the high fees of professional psychiatrists who were versed in PTSD and captivity trauma and Stockholm Syndrome and rape trauma.  The severity of the trauma had cost me my career, my relationships and essentially my life though I lived.    I was removed from a rape counseling facility shortly after I gave them permission to contact Keppel and Rule and I was removed under false pretenses by my advocate at the time.  My records, according to the administrative staff years later, were removed as if I had never been there.  But I have the emails saved to server still proving that I was there.

I was “interviewed” out of the facility where things were taken out of context that I said and also I was led in directions. For example, Ann Rule told me one time in an email…I was having fantasies about Bundy raping me, that Bundy never had a car, that he lived “close to Liz” and that my memory of him driving a blue VW when I was raped in 1971 was false as “he never had a car”.  She obviously didn’t know records had been sealed as I lived 3 blocks from Liz at college, my memory of the blue car was spot on as he drove Liz’s car often in 1971 per multiple witnesses, and he was reported for another rape around the same time period.   Additionally, I was manipulated by Keppel’s interference behind the scenes blocking me from the police and interfacing with a private detective I was meeting with [he told me Keppel was trying to block me] as well as my advocate who removed me from the facility.  She, at lunch one time,said “you know you never had a relationship with Bundy”.  I thought she meant I was being raped and there was no relationship so I said “yes” and I suspect she was taping the conversation as her phone was out and she looked at me like she’d gotten a final statement. I had been led into a false statement and I realized it shortly after we left as it didn’t feel right that we didn’t discuss anything after that – so, I even emailed her later and told her I thought she meant dating him when I’d been raped by him multiple times and that’s what she meant by relationship.

It’s a terrible betrayal to suffer all these events at the hands of people you thought you could trust and couldn’t.  I know it sounds like I’m confused about what happened back then but I was back then and my memories were all jumbled up and fragmented…Ted was manipulating me all the time – between acts of violence and acts of kindness.  He set it up when I was in high school and he continued it until the summer of 1974. It took me years to sort through the memories to make sense of them and even more years to go through the original sealed records to understand all that had happened.  Bundy knew I had no stable home life with both of my parents out dating and separated and I was new to the whole area of WA State having just moved there from the Bay area of California so I had no friends who knew me or that I was close to in order to confide in.  I was in proximity to him nearly all of those four years.  He kept tabs on me.  My parents were not supportive of their children during that tumultuous time in their lives.  My memories shattered from the extreme stress and anxiety of all that was happening – I wasn’t a worldly girl and I couldn’t cope – I’m not sure anyone can cope with rape no matter how old you are or how many relationships you’ve had – I had never even had a boyfriend – we moved too much.

I begged for help from the police to put the fragments together so I could heal and was essentially ridiculed and denied any access – they wouldn’t even interview me in person nor take any information from me.  The same was true of the FBI – so they cannot claim they support victim rights – the regional office in Seattle sure doesn’t.  They turned me away repeatedly even though my memories lined up in very specific minute details to the original case records.  I gave them complete victim impact statements direct to the regional victim advocate of the FBI as I was told to do by the  Department of Justice yet they refused to give me a case number and told me on the phone literally to go away.  An attorney I was trying to get even called them and was told I wasn’t legitimate and didn’t have a case number.  She told me she only “helps victims” and turned me away – I was devastated – she had been referred by the national victim association.  No one to this day has ever EVER reviewed my information in total.  It has me concerned for what they are doing behind the scenes – this was a cover up with several people involved – is that cover up continuing with “fixing”the evidence to reduce public damage?

The one “interview” I had with the AG Office and the officer never even looked at it – in fact when I tried to move it over to him he pushed it away.  He told me several times I was wasting his time and yet I still felt grateful for being given a chance to be heard and I left feeling better.  In hindsight I hate them for making me feel grateful for more abuse like that.  It happened frequently – the police jurisdictions refused to talk to me telling me I only wanted publicity.  How can you judge that when you’ve never seen the evidence – when you know fully well that evidence back then was destroyed per an internal order and that action is documented by internal memos?

I am who I say I am and I am going to fight until my experiences back then are public and until what has been stated publicly by WA State is acknowledged as false.  The lies put out by WA State and others about Bundy cases in WA State are harmful to the families who’ve lost loved ones in addition to my own turmoil.  My locations and proximity to Ted on multiple levels would be difficult to match to any other person even the traveling that I was doing back then.  It’s more than coincidental – it supports my contentions fully that he was stalking me over a four year period.

I had withdrawn my book initially due to the backlash and ridicule it received but I am going to re-release the original version as I had tried to express what had happened to me and was still in the throes of trauma.  I will not let WA State get by with what they’ve done to me – denied me my existence; ridiculed me in public [empowered Ann Rule to write a defamatory narrative about me in her book which she states she had permission to do but which she did NOT EVER have permission to do and it wasn’t accurate and had been totally contrived to make me look bad].  Behind the scenes I’ve been told repeatedly that Keppel has blocked me and discredited me with statements like “there is no survivor” and so forth but the whole time Keppel was hiding his own secrets – his book “Riverman” is not true to the original case files and has errors, misstatements of case facts, and is embellished throughout.  It is not a work of nonfiction.

It’s time that I was able to be heard and my case looked at it for what it is:  the testimony of a severely traumatized survivor of multiple kidnappings by Ted when I was just 16-19 years old and from a broken home with nowhere to go.  What has happened to me needs to be in the public awareness not only for its understanding of the case as it actually was but also because of how victims continue to be treated by the justice department and by aspects of the public as well.  It’s not right – serial cases leave survivors and Bundy’s cases are not being analyzed truthfully or correctly to all that happened back then.  I can state that publicly as I have the original records that support what happened to me. Those original records dispute the narrative put out by Keppel and do not support his version of events.  It’s time for equal time for the original records and for myself to be heard and put into context of that time period.