He was a law student, a former social worker and suicide hotline volunteer. He had a girlfriend, political aspirations and — as the newspapers would later say — "a winning smile."

And from 1974 to 1978, wherever Ted Bundy went, women disappeared.

Like a phantom, he slipped through sorority rows, preyed outside of schoolyards and ski resorts, and proved that you don’t really know the person next to you.

But could Bundy — and his reputation as one of the country's most depraved killers — have been stopped cold in Colorado?

Two days into a week-and-a-half ski trip, Caryn Campbell left her fiance in the lobby of their Snowmass, Colorado, hotel, boarded an elevator and was last seen walking toward her second-floor room in search of a magazine.

She didn't come back, and a few hours later, around 10:30 p.m., her fiance called the police.

More than 100 people were interviewed, and local authorities and hotel staff scoured the lodge's 140 rooms. They peeked into elevator shafts and crawl spaces. Snowmass ski patrol combed the surrounding, snowy terrain.

But Campbell, a 23-year-old nurse from Dearborn, Michigan, was gone. Her nude, frozen body wouldn't be found for more than a month — when a driver spotted it in a snowbank off of a roadside about 4 miles away.

She had been murdered.

Julie Cunningham had just returned to Vail from a two-week trip to Idaho. It hadn't gone as planned — something about a boy — and she told her mom as much over the phone that night.

After hanging up, she headed out to meet her roommate for a drink at a bar a couple of blocks away from their Vail apartment.

She was 26 at the time and a part-time ski instructor in the resort town. She was well-liked there — "outgoing, but not loose," investigator's notes would later read.

After Cunningham didn't show up for drinks and was reported missing, Vail police analyzed her tidy bedroom. Everything was there: car keys, toiletries, special face wash for a skin problem, her diaphragm.

Cunningham was dependable, her friends told investigators. She wouldn't just disappear. But, like Campbell two months before, that's exactly what she did.

She has never been found.

Denise Oliverson was on her bike.

Was she riding to her parent's house? It's been largely reported that she had just gotten into a fight with her husband. Is that what happened?

More than 40 years later, the former Grand Junction detectives who worked her case stretch to remember the specifics.

One detail is clear, though: 24-year-old Oliverson set off on a bike ride and was never seen again.

Her yellow bicycle and shoes were found a day later under a bridge in the midsize Western Slope city.

Missing person posters went out with Oliverson's wedding picture.

She had long brown hair, blue eyes, an acne problem and no reason to disappear.

"The more people we interviewed, the more concerned we got," former Grand Junction detective Jim Fromm recalled this past December. "It just ... it did not make sense."

Between 1974 and 1978, dozens of women and girls disappeared under similar, mysterious circumstances across at least six states — many without a trace.

Their nude bodies or skeletal remains would sometimes turn up, but not always.

Authorities in Washington then Utah, Colorado then Idaho scrambled for leads. Young women were told to be careful.

Tell people where you're going, they were instructed. Don't walk alone at night.

When Bundy, then a 28-year-old Utah law student, was arrested during a traffic stop outside Salt Lake City in August 1976, the pieces started falling into place.

Authorities began tying Bundy to the trail of terror: First a kidnapping in Utah, next Campbell's murder in Snowmass.

By 1977, when Bundy was extradited to Aspen and later locked in a Garfield County jail cell in nearby Glenwood Springs as the Campbell trial neared, he was far from a phantom.

Over the next two years, Bundy would escape from Colorado law enforcement twice — leaping from an Aspen courthouse window in 1977 and shimmying through a hole in his Glenwood Springs jail cell ceiling the following year.

He would slip out of the state and go on to commit his most brazen string of attacks in Florida, cementing himself as one of the most notorious and depraved serial killers in U.S. history.

He was smart, everyone parroted. "A diabolical genius," newscasters later said. "Killer with a winning smile."

But Bundy was something else.

"He understood that normal people are not thinking about people like him tracking them and hunting them," crime author Kevin Sullivan told the Coloradoan.

"But that's exactly what was going on," he added. "Bundy was a hunter."

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At the end of this story, you can also check out "Hunted," the Coloradoan's special, three-part podcast that delves into Bundy's crimes.

Long, dark hair, parted in the middle.

It's what Jay Whearly remembers most.

That was the common denominator — "a unifying factor in a bunch of murders of young women, even teenagers" — in Washington, Utah and Colorado, Whearly recalled.

And in 1976, Whearly — then a young investigative reporter for The Denver Post — set out to investigate each murder or missing persons case in Colorado where the victim fit that description.

It was a fool's errand, he was later told.

"There were more women with that hairstyle than without it at the time," Whearly explained.

But he kept at it and, that fall, published the results: a story buried on Page 3 of the Post. "3 Colorado Murders Very Similar to Coast," the headline read.

He had discovered that a string of Colorado murders mirrored eight similar cases in the Pacific Northwest — a highly-reported spate that started with the Feb. 1, 1974, disappearance and murder of a 21-year-old Seattle woman named Lynda Ann Healy.

Whearly's story went into Campbell's Jan. 12 murder in Snowmass the following year. It mentioned two other unnamed female victims in Colorado, whose murders also bore similarities to those in Washington and Utah.

The victims were all beautiful, in their late teens or early 20s with brown or dark hair often parted in the middle.

"It’s eerie,” an unnamed source told Whearly. “Most of the girls could pass for sisters, some of them for twins.”

Whearly's final two paragraphs noted that the Colorado law enforcement agencies in the jurisdictions where the murders occurred had suddenly gone quiet. They were mum on any details to the press.

That sudden silence corresponded with the Aug. 16, 1976, arrest of Bundy, who had been pulled over while creeping his 1968 Volkswagen Beetle through a Salt Lake City suburb early that morning.

By that fall, Bundy was being held for the kidnapping and attempted murder of Utah teenager Carol DaRonch, who had escaped Bundy's clutches during a November 1974 attack.

Soon, he'd be the No. 1 suspect in Campbell's Colorado murder.

"I wondered if I was onto something here," Whearly said.

But, at the time, Bundy's potential link to the other Colorado disappearances was tenuous, at best, Whearly said.

"This was all speculation ... 90 percent speculation," he explained.

"I mean, I can tell people I worked on at least the Colorado angle of the Ted Bundy story in the mid- to late-70s and people say, 'Oh, what an incredible story,' " Whearly said. "But at the time, it really wasn't."

►Behind the story: Would I have been one of Ted Bundy's victims? My mom? My friends?

When Chuck Leidner first met Bundy at the end of 1976, he wasn't impressed.

Even now, decades later, when questioned about Bundy, the Denver attorney almost scoffed.

"What is it about Bundy?" he asked.

By the end of 1976, Leidner was a public defender based out of Glenwood Springs.

With Bundy soon facing charges in Campbell's murder — investigators were able to match hairs found in Bundy's car to the slain nurse — Leidner said he knew he would likely be one of the public defenders assigned to represent Bundy.

At the time, Bundy was sitting in Utah State Prison, serving a sentence of one to 15 years for the kidnapping and attempted murder of DaRonch.

"He was every bit of what was described, which was basically a narcissistic, egocentric individual who was much smarter than everybody else and knew much more than everybody else," Leidner recalled. "... Thought he could talk his way out of everything."

So he was smart?

Leidner laughed.

"No," he said. "It was all smoke and mirrors."

Bundy was extradited from Utah to Aspen at the beginning of 1977, where he sat through pretrial motions and arguments in the ski town's imposing, red brick courthouse.

Immediately, he was a media star in the mountains, Leidner said, and he loved being the center of attention.

Despite having a few semesters of law school under his belt, Leidner recalled Bundy never seemed interested in or aware of the procedures of the court.

"He wouldn't listen to the facts of the case, he just wanted to talk about Ted," Leidner said. "What he'd done in his life, where he's going, how he's going to be successful, what his future held ..."

"Everything that transpired was, 'Hey, look at me, look at me, look at me,'" Leidner said.

On June 7, 1977, after a morning of death penalty arguments, Leidner recalled the judge calling a morning recess.

"I went out in the hallway smoking a cigarette and chit-chatting with people and a (Pitkin County) sheriff's deputy came by and asked me if I'd seen Bundy," Leider said.

"And I looked at him — I remember this clearly because it was a bizarre conversation — I said, 'Yeah, it's not my turn to watch him.' "

Leidner would soon learn Bundy had gone into the law library just off the courtroom after being excused for the recess.

"Nobody was guarding him, nobody had him, he wasn't manacled, he wasn't confined or restrained or anything," Leidner said. "And he just jumped out the courthouse window."

Kathy Silver watches all of them.

Anytime she comes across a documentary about Bundy — a TV show, a movie, anything — she settles in and soaks them up.

And, typically, she's disappointed.

"They would always leave out the part about Aspen, which I could not understand," Silver said. "... It was always such a fascinating kind of story that always got, like, on the cutting room floor for some reason."

Why would they leave something like that out, she wondered.

An accused murderer leaping from a second-story courthouse window and vanishing into the sylvan vastness of a picturesque Colorado ski town?

It was unreal.

Now 68 and living in her native California, Kathy Silver was Kathy Earl back then — a 26-year-old traffic control officer for the Aspen Police Department.

By June 7, 1977, she had only been on the job for a couple of months and was on the street that morning, ticketing cars or doing a training session.

Suddenly, all hell broke loose.

Town residents and sheriff's deputies clamored in downtown Aspen. Roadblocks went up, men of the Roaring Fork Valley set off on horseback trying to find Bundy. Silver was frantically tasked with handing out flyers featuring Bundy's picture.

"You felt a little bit like, God, this must really be a bad guy," Silver said. "I don't think I even knew that much about him at the time."

The search was on for Bundy, but those first moments passed with no sign of him. They turned to minutes, then hours, then days. Seven days.

Silver didn't recall being afraid. She didn't live alone and, as part of the police department, she knew help was always a radio call away.

"But I do remember it was the talk of the town," Silver said.

On June 13, Bundy was finally recaptured. He had spent the previous week roving Aspen Mountain, breaking into summer cabins and subsisting on what little food he could find.

He made his way to the outskirts of town, where he stole a car and tried to drive it out. He was spotted by a pair of deputies who mistook him for a drunken driver and pulled him over.

Soon, he was identified, arrested and back in the custody of the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office, which sent out its daily bulletin that afternoon.

"Need I say it," the last line read. "Teddy is home."

"Hopefully to stay this time."

Following Bundy's escape in Aspen, security tightened around the accused murderer as he returned to court in Pitkin County.

Deputies were issued new guidelines for guarding Bundy.

They were to be aware of what he was doing at all times. They had to move their holstered guns to the side facing away from Bundy when transporting him.

Any unnecessary stops when transporting Bundy were banned — "in other words, don't stop at the 7-Eleven," a memo read.

He was to be searched constantly.

"He moves only when you tell him to move," they were instructed. "Don't let him deceive you!"

Given his newly-discovered desire to run, Bundy was moved to a solitary confinement cell in the Garfield County jail about 40 miles from Aspen in Glenwood Springs.

Two deputies were tasked with transporting him daily to court in Aspen.

"I've dealt with some evil people and some bad people and your interaction with them is ... you just know they're a bad person," one of those deputies, Leon Murray, recently recalled. "You wouldn't have got that off of Ted."

In 1976, Murray was a deputy with the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office and often tasked with transporting Bundy to and from court. He'd later move over to the Aspen Police Department before retiring from law enforcement.

"Just the words he used," Murray said. "You could tell he was intelligent. That's how he got this all to happen. He could talk anybody into his close quarters."

On their daily drives to and from Aspen, Murray remembers Bundy's constant questions from the back seat.

"Hey, Leon, where does that road go?"

"Hey, Leon, how deep is the snow up that road?"

"What city's in that direction?"

"I would just tell him, 'Ted, shut up. I'm not talking to you. Shut your mouth,' " Murray said. "And five minutes later, more questions."

"To me, it was obvious," Murray said. "He's planning his next escape, and he's trying to get a better geographical fix on where he's at and how to get away."

By the end of 1977, Bundy remained in the Garfield County jail as his trial neared. An Aspen judge had recently decided to change the venue of the trial to Colorado Springs.

But Bundy had no intention of going willingly.

On the night of Dec. 30, 1977 — after seeing an opportunity and starving himself down — Bundy squeezed through a 12-inch-by-12-inch opening left in his cell ceiling by a loose light fixture.

He crawled around above his cell block until he got to a jailer's apartment. With the jailer and his wife out for the night, the apartment was empty. Bundy busted his way through the ceiling of a closet, changed into street clothes and walked out the front door.

By the time jail staff realized he wasn't in his cell the following day, Bundy was in the wind.

Murray recalls hearing the news. It was a cold, snowy day and he and his wife were taking their dog for a run around a local reservoir.

"I heard on the radio and was like, 'Oh heck,' " Murray said. "Here we go again."

Later, in his own words to investigators, Bundy would explain how he walked out of the jail doors to a beautiful, snowy Colorado night.

He trudged through the snow and ice, leaving footprints that would later be measured and photographed, and found a car, which he stole and drove out of Glenwood Springs.

After it died roughly 40 miles outside of town, he hitched a ride to Denver, Bundy told them.

Then he hopped on a plane at the since-shuttered Stapleton Airport, flew to Chicago and took an Amtrak train to Ann Arbor, Michigan. From there, he stole another car and drove to Atlanta, where he got on a bus and ended up in Tallahassee, Florida.

"By the time he got to Florida, he was not the refined killer of 1974, (19)75 — this handsome young man (who) would draw women to him like a magnet," said Sullivan, the author.

Instead, on Jan. 14, 1978, one week after arriving in Tallahassee, Bundy visited a bar called Sherrod's near the Florida State University and "he was repelling them," Sullivan said.

"They're telling the police later, this guy was creepy, his eyes were weird," he added. "It was like a repulsion coming from him."

After being spotted at the bar, Bundy sneaked into the nearby Chi Omega sorority house in the early morning hours of Jan. 15. Entering through a broken rear door, he savagely attacked four sorority members in their beds, killing 21-year-old Margaret Bowman and 20-year-old Lisa Levy.

He slipped out of the sorority house and attacked another FSU undergrad in her basement apartment eight blocks away. She survived.

Less than a month later, on Feb. 9, Bundy abducted his final victim, 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, from her Lake City, Florida, middle school. Her body was found seven weeks later.

Back in Colorado, questions still swirled about Bundy.

"As people would do, conversations would turn to, 'Where do you think Ted is? What do you think Ted's doing?' " Leidner recalled. "And I had no idea."

"... But then, when the killings in Florida took place, we were out to dinner with some people and I said, 'You know, I bet Ted Bundy's in Florida,' " Leidner added. "It just smelled of him."

On Feb. 15, 1978, authorities closed in on Bundy one last time.

After killing Leach, Bundy stole another car and headed west, this time to Pensacola, Florida.

It was there that a police officer noticed Bundy driving suspiciously around 1 a.m. He called in his plates and confirmed the car was stolen.

Bundy was pulled over and, after a struggle, was arrested.

He'd remain a mystery man for a few days, refusing to give police his real name. Eventually, he did.

"Theodore Robert Bundy," he told a Pensacola investigator.

Bundy's killing spree was over.

But people's fascination with him was just beginning.

In 1979 and 1980, respectively, Bundy was tried for both his Chi Omega murders and the murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. He was found guilty in both trials and given death sentences for each — events that attracted hundreds of reporters from around the world and was covered on national TV stations.

A long-hunted serial killer is found — he's handsome, charismatic, not at all what you'd imagine. And after escaping law enforcement twice, he slips away, lurks in plain sight and goes on to commit his most brutal attacks? The story was sensational.

Whearly, then an assistant city editor at the Denver Post, begged his bosses to send him to Tallahassee to cover Bundy's 1979 trial for the newspaper, which he did briefly before it was moved to Miami.

He'd reach out to the prosecutors and Florida authorities for interviews and comments. He'd say he was from The Denver Post.

"And just the mention of being from Colorado, I thought I was cast an evil eye," Whearly said. "And maybe I wasn't, but it was like, 'You're from Colorado, you're the people that let this guy go to kill other people.' "

►More:Netflix releases Ted Bundy docuseries 'Conversations with a Killer' on execution anniversary

"It's pretty amazing that people are still interested in this," Joe Berlinger said.

But, as the director of "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" — a Bundy bio-pic starring Zac Efron that recently premiered at Sundance — and the director and producer of Netflix's new docuseries, "Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes," Berlinger can confirm that they are.

In a country that has churned out its fair share of serial killers, "just for some reason, Bundy has risen to the top," Berlinger said. "... He was charming and good-looking and taps into our most inner fear that you don't really know the person next to you."

Besides defying the typical image of a serial killer, Berlinger said Bundy fascinated the country by denying his crimes after his arrest, through his trials and almost up until his death.

"Usually, serial killers, once they're caught, they just spill their guts," Berlinger said. "But he uniquely kind of denied it all the way until a few days before his execution."

That was when, in 1989 — as he awaited death in the electric chair for Leach's murder — Bundy started contacting investigators and offering up 11th hour confessions in an effort to extend his life in prison.

"Bones for time," Sullivan called it.

Bundy ultimately contacted Mike Fisher — an investigator with the state attorney's office at the time of the Colorado murders — and Matt Lindvall, who had been a Vail police detective at the time of Cunningham's disappearance.

In Florida, Bundy confessed to the murders of Campbell and Cunningham, according to news reports from the time. Later, in a taped confession just before his Jan. 24, 1989, execution, he also confessed to the murder of Oliverson in Grand Junction, Sullivan said.

Bundy had long been the top suspect in Oliverson's April 6, 1975, disappearance after investigators were able to use gas receipts to place Bundy at a service station Oliverson would have passed on her bike that afternoon, retired detective Jim Fromm recalled.

According to the Grand Junction Police Department, they haven't been provided any official records detailing Bundy's confession in the Oliverson case and, as of last month, their investigations commander was working to obtain such records.

What we know is on Jan. 12, 1975, Campbell disappeared while walking toward her second-floor Snowmass hotel room. It was a crowded resort, investigators surmised. She would have had to go willingly with Bundy, at least at first.

Due to Bundy's final escape from Colorado, he was never tried for her murder.

On March 15, 1975, Bundy told Fisher and Lindvall that he was using fake crutches — a common tactic of his to feign an injury — when he came across Cunningham walking through Vail. He asked for help carrying his ski boots to his car and, when she obliged, he incapacitated her, drove her out of Vail, raped and murdered her.

And on April 6, 1975, Bundy reportedly told a tape recorder that he abducted and killed Oliverson before dumping her body in a stretch of the Colorado River west of Grand Junction.

Given that Cunningham and Oliverson's bodies were never found, their respective missing persons cases remain open and — often like the state they vanished from — cold.

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