Kathy Kleiner Rubin, the author of “A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy," survived being attacked by Ted Bundy at her sorority house in 1978.
Women across the United States breathed a sigh of relief on the morning of Jan. 24, 1989. That day marked the end of any possibility that they could ever come face to face with Ted Bundy, as the notorious serial killer was executed at Florida State Prison. He was sent to the electric chair for three of his crimes: the 1978 rape and murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach of Lake City, Florida, as well as the killings of Florida State University students Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy.
The Chi Omega sorority sisters were beaten to death by Bundy, who had escaped from a Colorado jail two weeks earlier and embarked on a deadly rampage that led him to the Tallahassee sorority house on Jan. 15, 1978.
"The door was broken," Kathy Kleiner Rubin tells Inside Edition Digital. "[Bundy] saw the door was broken, picked up a piece, a log that was by the fireplace and went through the sorority. He went upstairs and the first room he got to was Margaret Bowman's room. He attacked her and beat her with that log that he had picked up. He then went across the hall and killed Lisa Levy with the same log that he had killed Margaret with. The next thing he did was cross the hall and come into my room."
Then 20, Kleiner Rubin and her friend Karen Chandler were asleep when they woke to Bundy stumbling over a trunk on the floor of their bedroom. But that commotion still did not give the young women any time to react to what was happening.
"I look up and I see the silhouette, the shadow of someone standing next to me. And I saw him raise his arm up over his head and he had that log, the log he killed Margaret and Lisa with, and he slammed it down on my face. He slammed it so hard that he shattered my chin, he shattered my jaw. I received cuts in my cheek that opened up and you could see my mouth on the inside of my teeth," she says. "All of a sudden our room became bright. It shone a light, it was bright in the bedroom, and now I could see this person clearly. And as I stood there in the light, he saw himself and he started getting antsy and paced back and forth."
As Kleiner Rubin and Chandler fought for their lives, a fellow sorority sister was dropped off at the home by her boyfriend, whose car's headlights illuminated the scene of the attack and scared Bundy enough that he ran off.
"He turned in the driveway and that's when the room turned dark again. And I'm still in my little ball and I'm hurting and it feels like knives and everything you can think of in my face, and I'm still walled up in this little ball waiting for him to come back," Kleiner Rubin says.
Kleiner Rubin and Chandler survived the attack, but they had a long road ahead to reach a point of healing. Kleiner Rubin says recovery was tough and she didn’t know if she would survive the trauma she experienced, but still, she did not hesitate to agree to sit down for a deposition in the case against Bundy.
What she wasn't expecting during the deposition was to be sitting in the same room as her attacker. "And at the end of the table, after I sat down, I looked up and there was Bundy, who was sitting at the other end of the table and he was like, come on, let's get over this," she says.
Bundy had the same demeanor during his trial in 1979 trial. It was there that he was sentenced to death. Bundy died by electrocution after less than two minutes in the electric chair. Kleiner Rubin chose to not attend Bundy's execution.
"I had given him enough mental energy. I was not going to give him another time to face me or me face him and see him die," she says. "I know he killed so many women and I heard that he whimpered when it was time for him to die and he cried and he said, 'Please don't kill me. Please don't kill me.' And I imagine those were the words that the victim said just as he was about to kill them. All those beautiful women, they're crying, 'Please don't kill me.' And he did kill them and he was electrocuted."
Though Kleiner Rubin decided to not attend in person, she watched news coverage of Bundy's death, which also deeply impacted her.
"And as he was executed, there was a white flag that shown up above the prison. And I looked at my husband and I started crying and crying and I wailed and I wasn't thinking of me. I was thinking of all the 32 women he had killed, mutilated and taken out of this world so young. And then I thought of Margaret and Lisa, my sorority sisters, they suffered and they shouldn't have either. And I cried for them as well," she says.
Kleiner Rubin says that her book, “A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy,” sets the record straight on who Bundy really was and all the women he took from the world. Bundy is known to have killed 32 women and girls in Washington state, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Florida between 1974 and 1978, but some believe he was responsible for the killings of additional victims.
"The book itself tells a bit of my story, but mainly it focuses on telling that Bundy was not the cute guy that everyone thought he was. He wasn't smart, he wasn't good, he was just a bad person," she says. "He would kill to collect the souls of the women he killed and he killed up to 32 that we know of. And in my book I talk about each of the women, all 32 of them, and I tell a little bit about them, each of their loves, their dreams, what they wanted to do, things that were important to them. I wanted to bring a voice to them so that they were not forgotten."
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