“Ted Examining The Unconfirmed Survivor Stories,” is the first publication to collate the known and frequently discussed stories of those individuals who shared their encounters with Ted Bundy decades after the execution of the serial killer. It compares these reports with data compiled by investigators, psychologists and contemporaries of Ted Bundy, as found in police files, psychological assessments and relevant literature. Includes thorough investigations into the accounts of “Blondie” singer Debbie Harry, Rhonda Stapley, Sara A. Survivor, Sotria Kritsonis, as well as numerous other unconfirmed survivors. Features the self-debunked story of a woman who had previously believed to be a Ted Bundy survivor. Delves into the possible motivations of deliberate and indeliberate victim-players, as well as Dr. Elizabeth Loftus' discoveries of the malleability of human memory. Erin Banks, who was mentored by Ted Bundy expert Kevin M. Sullivan, previously contributed a chapter to the author's sixth book on the case, “The Enigma Of Ted The Questions And Controversies Surrounding America's Most Infamous Serial Killer.”
Erin Banks is a Northern German-born autistic author who began writing publicly on blogs such as CrimePiper, with a focus on true crime and criminal psychology. Their nonfiction book Ted Bundy: Examining the Unconfirmed Survivor Stories—also translated into German—grew out of that interest.
Their debut novel, ABOUT RAGE, is a psychological horror drama centered on a female serial killer. It blends action-thriller pacing with forensic realism and emotionally charged, existential themes. The book’s unnerving detail and psychological accuracy has led to some readers speculating that they are a serial killer who wrote it as a “duping delight diary.” (They’re not—unless the autistic meticulousness counts as a criminal offense.) They also co-wrote the original ABOUT RAGE soundtrack, available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and YouTube.
Banks has contributed to several poetry and dark fiction anthologies, wrote the foreword to Bruce LeMaster’s Mentally Caged, a book on mental healthcare in US prisons, provided a chapter for True Crime author Kevin M. Sullivan’s The Enigma of Ted Bundy, and co-authored the murderotica trilogy A Killer's Pleasure.
They are currently working on the sequels ABOUT REVENGE and ABOUT-FACE, Other projects include ongoing experiments in blending or bending genres.
The books First Music, and Access Control were authored by another Erin Banks.
Saying that I enjoyed the book isn’t really the right word because it’s plain disturbing how many women there are who make up these scenarios of being Ted Bundy victims for fame. I knew about two before reading Erin Bankses book but never thought too much about it and didn’t understand the wider implications. Erin Banks starts out with a woman called Rhonda Stapley who told a very elaborate story of survival and the following PTSD in her autobiography. I read maybe half of it when it came out and couldn’t get through it because something about it didn’t sit right with me that I couldn’t put into words. Now that I read ‘Examining the unconfirmed survivor stories’ it’s as if everything falls into place – the author captured everything I was subconsciously sensing or thinking but couldn’t really clearly see and put into words myself. I would have never known where to even start checking into the truth of this story. It’s just one of these things where you go, ‘Could be, could not be, there’s nothing to go on,’ just like she writes. But Banks then went and analyzed every single little thing Rhonda had claimed. Was the moon really not out? (Who even thinks of that?!? That cleverness and out of the box thinking was astonishing to me.) What was the temperature that day? What was the water level like? What is the area like during the day, are there people there or not like Rhonda Stapley wrote? What about the door handle, the broken ribs with which she claims she went running marathons every night after escaping Ted? It just goes on and on and feels like an epiphany at the end of the first chapter because it all clicks suddenly: This is how you do it. You have to ask these questions to find out what really happened. Or even if you can’t determine what happened then you still have to at least leave these questions there for the world to see and ask themselves or ask these “unconfirmed survivors.” And it’s true, why did these women seek fame instead of closure by going to the police? The excuse that they were ashamed or just doesn’t fly when you know underage girls are literally DYING on the streets and in ditches. The criticism of the #metoo movement was actually justified. I never thought I’d ever say that because I was such a staunch supporter of it but I realized when reading the book that Banks is right in her claim that the movement has some major severe issues. I liked the chapter that included the many different stories the best because some of these women’s stories were not tragic but just outright funny. (I’m not laughing at anyone who says they were attacked, beaten and raped! I’m really just laughing at the absurdity of someone saying Ted Bundy chased them around a lake in a suit with a briefcase in hand.) I do feel like the book could have done with some editing. I saw that Banks published on Kindle (Amazon) so that means it was her first book and I was actually surprised to learn that she wasn’t American and English wasn’t her first language. Her English is proably better than most Americans I know, LOL, but the book does need some touching up here and there. That said, I feel like it would have been a better reading experience to put the last chapter as the first chapter just because it would have explained where she was going to go with all this. It’s like the last chapter was the big BOOM mic drop moment and I understand that but I still would have done it the other way around.
I have to say that I’m usually not doing this but I saw that Banks is obviously the target of a smear campaign on here (and I’m guessing Amazon). The two reviews of reviewers making really shitty claims about her as a person are so absurd when seeing how the reviewers themselves conduct themselves it’s nauseating. I’m disappointed this is allowed on Goodreads and the reviews have not been reported by anyone or if they were then this page is doing a shit job at protecting the authors from libel and hate speech. You can’t call that anything else if you read the reviews. I also noticed that those two reviews were done just hours apart on the same day and were done by people who have totally blank profiles and only reviewed this one book. So it’s probably even just one person. Grudge much? Honestly, this makes me think that Banks is probably on to something and has caught the attention of either one of these unconfirmed survivors or someone’s REAL envious that she wrote a book on something no one else even ever touched or maybe was too much of a wimp too touch.
TL;DR: It’s a book with many aha-moments and breathes new life into an old and mostly tired old topic. Needs an editor but still a good reading experience!
This is an odd book. On the one hand, it is important to use discernment when someone claims to have encountered Bundy. Because of his widespread notoriety, he has a tendency to creep into the memories of not only those who are purposefully deceiving others as to their experience, but into the memories of those who genuinely believe they encountered him. It is also quite possible that some of the women discussed in this book were assaulted, but superimposed Bundy over their actual attacker.
Such is the malleability of memory. As the author notes, the work of Elizabeth Loftus has shown how easily manipulated recollection can be. However, the field has so lionized her that any notion of disassociation, repressed memory, etc is automatically dismissed. This does a disservice to the field of mental health but most importantly to victims.
Which brings me to the tone of this work. The author spends an inordinate amount of time discrediting victims at least in part because they did not go to the police to report their assaults immediately after they occurred. I do not know how anyone could still hold this belief, especially because the author notes that they themselves are a survivor of sexual assault. In fact, the author goes so far as to lay blame on these women, since (apparently) if they had reported what happened perhaps Bundy would have been apprehended sooner and therefore more lives could have been spared.
It is not the responsibility of survivors to curtail a predator's behavior. The blame is on the predator, period. Instead of constantly decrying women for not reporting, perhaps focus on fixing (or better yet burning down and building anew) a justice system that routinely re-traumatizes, uses, and discredits victims of even assaults that come with mountains of evidence. This constant victim-blaming really put me off this book.
That said, yes it is important to note that those who do fabricate fantastical claims of abuse can harm survivors and can distort the narrative about the perpetrator. In the true crime community related to the murder of Beth Short (the Black Dahlia) there is one such fabricator. She wrote a book entitled Daddy was the Black Dahlia killer which is simply untrue. She held many groups hostage with her narrative, becoming intractable and hysterical if not agreed with.
As you might imagine, this became a serious barrier to, at the very least, a reasonable discussion of the case. But I do think it is important to note that people who unknowingly fabricate are often the victims of some sort of assault and have attached themselves to something famous (or infamous for that matter) due to their mental illness. This doesn't mean we should allow them their harmful narratives, but our approach should be a more gentle one.
So, I am left feeling torn. There is a good and useful discussion of why people fabricate, but it's hard to get to through the bamboo forest of victim blaming.
I always think there's nothing else to say about Ted Bundy... but authors keep publishing. This book has been missing from the Ted Bundy world. It asks hard questions and good questions. Who are the people who contact media or write books 50 years after? Can the stories be true? Or maybe only parts true? Or maybe nothing in the stories is true? Erin takes a deep dive here in the book. And looked at medical which can be responsible for faulty memory. She looked at psychiatric reasons. And even compare water level, weather charts, moon light (? I don't know how to say, sorry!) So really she took much time, much effort to write this book. Who recreates some of this stories?! She did that. Crazy! But crazy good. I like that she is often neutral enough, so you can make your own opinion. But she shows what parts make no sense and the humor in this incredible stories by some of the women is good. We need that. It lightens the mood. And it shows HOW strange (couldn not have happens) some things are there. I recommend the Ted Bundy book to everyone who is interest in crime, real crimes, true crimes. And Ted Bundy.
The author has a very stilted writing style that makes reading this a hard slog. Possibly the result of translating from the German? Her research *appears* broad. But her whole technique is focusing on details to such an extent she excludes any sense of a bigger picture.
I don't recommend this Bundy book, either on content or readability.
Where to start. This book left me speechless and made me ask myself a few uncomfortable questions that I'm not sure how to answer a day later. I wasn't even sure how to rate this book and I guess the truest rating would be a 3.5 for me and I'll explain why:
Subject I cringed when I read the description of the book after I saw it posted in a Facebook group asking for honest reviews in exchange for the free e-book a few days ago. Who goes out to question people that survived a serial killer who abducted and raped them? was my first reaction. So I wasn't unbaised when I read the "Preview" on Amazon but the "Introduction" chapter and first chapter ("Rhonda Stapley") convinced me to give it a shot - the first chapter showed Erin Banks had done her homework and gone out of her way to look at these survivor cases from all angles. Kudos to her for making this her first book because from the comments online I could tell she might have fucked herself over a bit because it's a subject that attracts many emotional responses. So my prediction is that she'll have a hard time building her audience. Good luck to her I mean! I definitely think if that was her first book she'll probably find more niche aspects to explore, be that Ted Bundy related or any other crime case.
Length It's a short book with only 154 pages (-it's less because there's a long list of sources at the end-) which means you can easily read it within a day or two. She doesn't drag it out like some other true crime authors do and doesn't repeat herself, so you need to pay attention. It's all pretty much to the point though.
Style This is probably where I thought she went wrong because reading her book was a bit like reading a classic novel. It just gives you this medieval vibe. If you have a learning disability or English isn't your first language you might find this a bit hard to read.It seemed to me that since this was a passion project of a niche topic, she might have expected not many people to read her work, or not considered that she could have reached a wider audience if she did jsut... I mean, not dumb it down but basically make it more accessible for a younger audience and us with learning disabilities.
Formatting I think there was a miscommunication about the formatting because (-when I contacted her to get a free copy-)Erin told me that Amazon KDP had changed the formatting, or she said messed it up. But I think I got her original manuscript, unless she re-downloaded a copy from Kindle and sent it to me, so there was nothing wrong with the formatting to me. (-All photos in place, evenly spaced text-.) But I saw in the Amazon "preview" the title page looked botched so I dont know how it affected the rest of the book. It just really seemed to stress her out and confused me at first about the formatting. (-She seems nice but just really anxious and like a people pleaser which you wouldn't guess from her book. It's not like she's unfair in there or mean or anything, but the book is very "in your face" with all the facts, so sometimes being very logical comes across as cold in tone in text.)
Conclusion I recommend this book because it forces you to question beliefs that in today's world are so normal that people (-me too-) can react with hostility when someone doesn't toe the line and brings something to the table that basically "shames you." I struggled until about halfway through the book because it was so ingrained in my brain that you don't question rape or murder survivors. And I think that my feelings havent caught on to my mind yet because the sensation is still such that I feel uncomfortable but keep thinking about how her arguments make a lot of sense.
Rating 3.5 of 5.
I'm a StoryGraph person but since Erin asked the readers to write a review for Goodreads I complied. Now that I'm here if you want to connect- send me a message or friend me so we can talk BOOKS. I always need recommendations and my interests are true crime and horror!
I have never read any books on Ted Bundy but I watched a few documentary programs on Netflix. This book was a nice addition to those as I have wondered about the other victims and stories of those who claim to have had encounters with him. I hope this author writes more books like this on true crime stories.
I was surprised when reading this book because the author covers a subject that hasn’t been focused on much in other books about this case. It is very interesting and I really enjoyed reading it. Her style of writing is educational and unique and can tell she really did her research and even conducted experiments to help prove some of the points she made in the book. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in Bundy and true crime.
As the book went on the author became less and less compassionate, often outright making fun of people claiming to be victims for their lack of writing/editing skills.
It was downright cruel at some points.
It's a good thing to examine the facts to see if there could be truth to the story. But often generalizations and personal opinions got in the way.
For example: In the case of Rhonda Stapley, the author of this book states that it wouldn't be possible for Rhonda to be pulled out of school by her mother if she were to admit she had been assaulted and raped because she was so close to graduation.
Unless the author has interviewed the mother of Rhonda she cannot say this with any certainty. I'd be more inclined to believe the daughter of that person.
The author also often makes fun of people giving their accounts in ways she doesn't find pleasant to read. Using the term "word salad" several times.
Just because someone isn't eloquent doesn't mean they aren't a victim, those things are completely unrelated.
This book would have been so much better if the author had stuck simply to facts of the account vs reality.
I felt bad for the people "investigated" in this book, they received no compassion from the author whatsoever. In my personal opinion a lot of the people discussed in this book need more compassion and help, not to be made fun off.
I was fortunate enough to read this greatly written and well researched book. It is hands down one of the most unique and thought-provoking books on Bundy because it doesn't just look into his crimes or life but the ones who claimed to have been almost victims. It looks into the claims and debunks and or proves them. I was given a copy of this book by a great friend of mine, and I am happy i was lucky enough to read it. Highly suggest this to anyone interested in adding more to the Bundy story
This book dissects the numerous survivor stories and surrounding myths related to Ted Bundy in an easily understood, intelligent and reasonable way. I recommend it especially if you are interested in Bundy's case.
The writer's skill and knowledge bleed through the pages as she scrutinizes accounts. Unflinching in its approach, I recommend that anyone read it for its perspective. Not all accusations made of monsters are true, so they should be studied.