Debbie Harry has been a lot of different things in her life.
Secretary at the BBC, Go-Go dancer, Playboy Bunny, singer for a world-famous band, hugely successful solo artist and icon, but one of the things she hasn’t been is a Ted Bundy victim.
Though, by all accounts, it wasn’t for the want of his trying.
For years now, Debbie Harry has claimed that Ted Bundy once tried to abduct her before she was famous, and that she managed to escape.
According to Debbie Harry in a 1989 interview;
“This was back in the early ’70s. I wasn’t even in a band then. I was trying to get across town to an after-hours club. A little white car pulls up, and the guy offers me a ride. So I just continued to try to flag a cab down. But he was very persistent, and he asked where I was going. It was only a couple of blocks away, and he said, ‘Well I’ll give you a ride.’ I got in the car, and it was summertime and the windows were all rolled up except about an inch and a half at the top. So I was sitting there and he wasn’t really talking to me. Automatically, I sort of reached to roll down the window and I realized there was no door handle, no window crank, no nothing. The inside of the car was totally stripped out.”
Realizing that she might have gotten herself into a seriously dangerous situation, and noticing that the window was cracked open a little, she thrust her arm through the gap and started pulling on the handle from the outside, trying to wrench the door open.
As she explained;
“As soon as he saw that, he tried to turn the corner really fast, and I spun out of the car and landed in the middle of the street.”
It wasn’t until Bundy’s execution in 1989 that she put two and two together as to who she had been sharing a car with that night, saying;
“It was right after his execution that I read about him. I hadn’t thought about that incident in years. The whole description of how he operated and what he looked like and the kind of car he drove and the time frame he was doing that in that area of the country fit exactly. I said, ‘My God, it was him.’”
People have gone out of their way to disprove Debbie Harry’s story over the years, and it seemed that Harry herself wasn’t completely sold when she spoke to RuPaul about it in 2016, admitting it wasn’t the same VW that Bundy was famous for using, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t still believe that it was him, stating;
“I’ve been debunked, actually, by those people that debunk you, or whatever. They say he wasn’t in New York at that time, but I think they’re really wrong because he had escaped and was traveling down the East Coast. I think that nobody has ever really investigated that. I didn’t know until later who it was. It was pretty scary.”
