Reconstructing Sara: The Lost Victim of Ted Bundy

by Sara A. Survivor

This book is a testimony of a series of interactions over a four year period between evolving serial killer Ted Bundy and Sara, who became a target of his at the age of 16 and who sustained an ongoing victim-Stockholm Syndrome induced “relationship” with him for the next four years, culminating in the death of one of her friends and resulting in a series of escalating violent kidnappings that left her with brain damage –psychologically the brain damage was caused by severe stress and physically it was caused as a result of repeated concussive injuries as well as internal injuries.

Sara is written in the fragmented, confused and repetitive order in which most of these events and the emotions that are associated to them still exist in her mind. It is a testament to how PTSD in a severe context presents to authorities and to family. Counseling cannot correct all of these symptoms as some are functional – they are a result of structural damage to her brain. What is remarkable about Sara’s story is that she survived the kidnappings and that she regained at least partial memory from the damaged area of her brain. Her memory fragments documented in emails over a fourteen year period and dating back to 2001 contain specific details of the Bundy case that were never publicly released. Her physical features, locations, travels and proximity to Bundy in high school and in college also line up to the case overall.

While law enforcement maintains online that they need information in the Bundy cases as well as in other cases to help with unsolved crimes associated to him, they refused to interview Sara or provide a case number or victim services for over 14 years and to this day refuse to acknowledge her as a victim. They have never provided her with a case number; nor a thorough investigation of her claims. She has never been given the opportunity to review and contribute to an investigation or to verify that information they may receive is accurate. People in general have trouble remembering events that were that long ago – people who were severely traumatized like Sara have areas of memory that are negatively impacted missing or disjointed or are so sharp in detail that it is as if the events occurred yesterday. This type of intermittent memory lapse and clarity is a well documented PTSD associated condition.

In 2014 and 2015, Sara received over 1000 pages of case files via FOIA and these files show that the case in WA was peppered with problems. Evidence was lost or misplaced, documents couldn’t be found in some instances, and witness statements were not factored into the entire spectrum of the case in a consistent cohesive manner.

What happened to Sara, both with Ted Bundy and with law enforcement, needs to be publicly reviewed. Bullying, cover up of materials [moving them into sealed areas during the time Sara was coming forward], and deciding who gets access to the justice system and who doesn’t are not elements of a democracy. They do not represent what the justice system of the United States was intended to be.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction

360 pages, Paperback

First published September 13, 2016

About the author

The photo that is provided with my author page was taken in 1973 for a modeling assignment. It was taken during the time I actually dated Ted in the fall of 1973. I had given him a copy of this photo in smaller size, wallet or similar as I had several copies made for friends at the time. The relationship if you can call it that with Ted was one started with phone contact in high school and mirrored his evolution and spiral into deviancy.

I was denied victim rights in WA State for over a decade. I fought to be heard so that my experiences back then could be factored into other cases that may have been associated. It was not for publicity - in fact for years I fought against publicity just wanting closure. I finally started trying to be heard through media and by other authorities than the WA State police jurisdictions because I was consistently being shut out and bullied. i knew the narrative being put out by Robert Keppel was false but I couldn't prove it and no one would listen to me. I knew it was false because I'd lived through what happened back then and some of what he was saying was "fact" was not right.

It wasn't until 2014 and 2015 when records were released to me from a sealed area of the Archives that I realized just how much "fact" put before the public as "truth"was essentially embellished supposition at best and outright lies n other circumstances. Lies such as what was found at Taylor Mountain - it was not just skulls and jawbones and those girls found there were not decapitated. There were also other girls, three of them per skeletons, that were found and either "lost" or thrown away.

The same old narrative that has existed for years is not supported by actual evidence and there is no actual evidence ever really cited. The single car at Taylor Mountain which is often shown had to have been staged or selected purposefully as there were many people on site during the several days searches were conducted and they were not kids but professionals. There are multiple reports of skeletal remains and other critical evidence by those professionals that was sealed.

Issaquah also and nothing has ever been talked of regarding all the witness statements that put Bundy as active long before 1974. He had a car, he was working within the highest levels of the justice departments of the State of WA and he was learning how to avoid discovery by working among them. Bundy should have been charged by WA State but he wasn't.

My book, "Reconstructing Sara" was originally released as testimony not as a "book". I was being silenced and was fighting back. I am reworking it as an option I thought I had did not pan out. It's hard to be "heard" by media to get another viewpoint and facts out to the public when authorities work with media to suppress it. These types of outlets are all I have.

Reviews

[Valerity (Val) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book a while back and have been meaning to read it. I recently saw something saying that it’s been pulled in its current form and is being rewritten because it's pretty disjointed and needs a lot of editing. So it got me very curious and I dug it out and decided to give it a read now. It is a bit of a plow to get through, repetitious at times and jumps around a lot, but there is some fascinating Bundy stuff in it, my friends. Oh, what this poor woman endured and this is back before she was fully even a woman, still in high school. He was playing all kinds of mind games, phone games, and stalking games back before stalking was even coined as a thing.

And “Sara” as she calls herself in her book was one of his earliest victims, back before any of his known killing activity had begun. He was following her back when she was in high school in 1970. They had the most bizarre “relationship” if you can call it that. He groomed her as a friendly father figure at first on the phone, then lured her out to meet him. She was also friends with murder victim Georgeann Hawkins, which Bundy was aware of. Later he began violently kidnapping her repeatedly off and on. She went through so much stress from all that he put her through that before it was over 4 years later, she lost her memories of it for more than 30 years. She suffered from PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury, Stockholm Syndrome, not to mention horrific internal injuries that nearly kept her from being able to carry a child later, and required several surgeries to repair the damage.

When the memories finally began coming back to her in 2001, decades after in floods and bits and pieces, in a random fashion she contacted the authorities to see if they could validate any of her memories and she was not taken seriously or believed. She was basically revictimized again in her opinion, as instead of offering her help and validating her memories, she was told that she was fantasizing about Bundy and menopausal and pretty much blown off for years. The authorities figured since Bundy was dead they didn’t want to bother with the case or look at it to see where they may have been wrong about when he had really begun. A fascinating read with some things that apparently haven’t been revealed publicly before.

She had to fight for years to get the files through the FOIA and was able to learn that they backed up much of what she was remembering. Luckily she kept emails she’d written to various authorities along the way recounting her returning memories which were date and time stamped showing that her memories predated her getting the files as they came along. Because some tried to say she was building her “memories” from the files as she got them as some sort of ploy for attention. I’d recommend this one when it is reissued for Bundy fans and true crime fans for sure. It’s a bit of a slog in its current condition but the content kind of made up for the mess at times. I look forward to the improved version though.

Published Sept. 16, 2016 by Grass Butterfly Books

[Judy Tarver · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am sorry to say that I wish I had never spent money to buy this book. It is not well written at all as it jumps all over the place and the author tries way too hard to try to prove that she was a Bundy victim but this book is just not believable at all. She may have indeed been attacked and survived by someone and there is nothing I can say or do to prove that it was not Bundy but in my opinion it just doesn’t make much sense for it to have been him.

[Edith Rennes · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received this book in exchange for an honest review.
I unfortunately could not get into this book.
It was, as the author stated, very disjointed and for that very reason I found it not to my liking.