After just recently finding out about this book, I got it and read it. The foreword by Ann Rule was a surprise and a delightful one. RIP Ann, you are missed. The book is a testament to the woman who wrote it, and what a survivor she is. Rhonda Stapley, when she was going to college in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1974, had a life-changing encounter with Ted Bundy one day while waiting for a bus. With her jaw hurting from dental surgery, she just wanted to get home. The bus was late, and when an attractive guy in a VW bug stopped to ask her if she needed a ride, and said he was going to the same place she was headed, she accepted.
That good looking guy turned out to be Ted Bundy, and she nearly lost her life that night. She resolved that no one would ever know that she'd been so foolish to get in a stranger's car and have this happen to her. She made up a cover story and laid low to hide her injuries, blaming part of her bruises on the dental surgery and avoiding people and missing classes for awhile. Despite the huge trauma, she managed to graduate and become a licensed pharmacist. After a rough period of reckless behaviors where she went out running alone at night to try and quiet her panic and battling through a dependency on drugs, Rhonda eventually managed to build a good life with a husband and 2 daughters and a job she loved. And then one day it all came tumbling down when her boss screamed and berated her over the phone. It brought the whole nightmare back to her, throwing her into an awful tailspin.
This book shares how she got through it all with the help of a great counselor, and dealt with the PTSD that was destroying every aspect of her life. It was threatening her job as an assistant pharmacy manager, her long term marriage, her belief in her Morman religion, and her relationships with family and friends. It was heartbreaking reading about all that she went through, he really devastated her life for a long while, and in ways it took her decades to begin to understand, and is probably still working on it to this day. But she's still here, and Bundy sizzled out long ago, so she gets the last laugh on him. Him with his cocky attitude that he can take her to the brink of death repeatedly, just for his sadistic kicks, then jerk her right back into this world as she started to expire. Like a game made just for him.
I found the book moving, terrifying, and very enlightening. I commend Rhonda Stapley for her incredible bravery, then and now.