Ted Bundy shocked the world with his sick and twisted mass murder of women in the 70s – but his wife stood by him until he confessed, and vowed to keep their daughter away
He was one of the world’s most notorious serial killers – and his daughter was born shrouded in secrecy.
Ted Bundy led a parallel life as a husband and father as well as one fo the most twisted killers in history. He and his then-wife Carol Ann Boone welcomed their daughter Rosa Bundy in 1982 while he was behind bars. A young baby who was none the wiser of who her father truly was but loved him anyway.
The couple split up in 1986 after Bundy confessed his crimes to his wife, who had long believed he was innocent of killing around 30 victims.
Bundy had brutally raped and killed at least 30 women and girls between 1974 and 1978,
Last week, the family of a teenage girl who died decades ago got closure as Bundy was found to be responsible.
READ MORE: Ted Bundy’s chilling 11 final words before his execution
New DNA testing definitively linked the unsolved death of a Utah teenager Laura Ann Aime, in 1974. The 17-year-old went missing on Halloween night 51 years ago after she left a party alone to go to a local store. About a month later, her body was found on the side of a highway, bound, beaten and without clothing.
Investigators long suspected that Bundy was responsible – police said he verbally acknowledged his culpability leading up to his execution – but the case remained open until they could be sure.
After his initial confession, Boone vowed to keep her daughter away from the violent murderer. Investigators believe the number was a lot higher than he had admitted.
He was then executed aged 37 on January 24, 1989, and wasn’t able to say bye to his wife and daughter. Here we take a look at Rosa Bundy’s life now 37 years after her father’s execution.
Rosa was born while Bundy was in prison, on October 24, 1982, where she and her mother lived “on the edge of poverty” in Florida, according to The Only Living Witness, a book about Bundy’s heinous crimes. But while not many details about her childhood have been revealed, it’s believed she was in contact with her father in her early years.
In the 2020 Amazon Prime Video docuseries Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, a drawing and note from Rosa was shown, that simply said: “I love you Daddy.” Rosa would also go and visit her father in prison too.
In the docuseries, Boone’s friend Diane Smith revealed Boone was getting tired of Bundy, and had described him as being “exhausting, obsessive, moody and demanding, as if [Boone] didn’t have enough to do.” She said the mother’s letters started to become less frequent to him as the years went on.
But when Bundy confessed to the mass murders, she left him and stopped him from communicating with her and her daughter. Smith claimed Bundy asked his wife if he could – in a bid to get a delay on his execution date – give details on where his victims remainds were left.
“That was his way of telling her – that there were bodies that he knew about and that he had actually killed all those people. That call was just devastating for her. She was really angry. I am surprised she talked to him at all. And he wanted to talk to Rosa, and she said no. So there was no goodbye for Rosa.”
After the execution, Boone and Rosa moved away, and lived an extremely private life. According to author Ann Rule who worked with Bundy and wrote The Stranger Beside Me, she detailed why she never wrote about the mother and daugter.
“I have deliberately avoided knowing anything about Ted’s ex-wife and daughter’s whereabouts because they deserve privacy. I don’t want to know where they are; I never want to be caught off guard by some reporter’s question about them,” as reported by PEOPLE.
The author added: “All I know is that Ted’s daughter has grown up to be a fine young woman.” But as Rosa remained anonymous, speculation rose she changed her name after her mother remarried, and took on the same surname. Boone passed away in 2018 in Seattle in a care home.
Boone first met Bundy when the pair worked together for the Department of Emergency Services in Washington. At the time they were both in other relationships but became good friends. In the 2005 book The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy, Boone said: “I liked Ted immediately. We hit it off well. He struck me as being a rather shy person with a lot more going on under the surface than what was on the surface.”
They didn’t become romantically involved until he was put behind bars, where she belived he was innocent – and moved from Washington to Florida to be closer to him while he was on trial. After Bundy being found guilty in 1980, the pair married in a courthouse. Bundy proposed to Boone right in the middle of his trial.
Bundy hadn’t been allowed conjugal visits so people were left baffled when Boone became pregnant. People also speculated whether the child was actually even Bundy’s, but Boone responded to the claims as to how Rose was conceived telling The Deseret News in 1981: “it’s nobody’s business.”
Some people said Boone became pregnant behind one of the vending machines in the visiting room by bribing a guard to turn the other way. Others said Boone passed an empty condom to Bundy when they kissed, which he filled up and returned back to her.
In 2024, a family member of Ted Bundy has shared correspondence with the evil mass killer for the first time, showing how he compared his jail time to that of Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi. Edna Cowell Martin, Bundy’s cousin, has revealed the letters for the first time ahead of the publication of her book ‘Dark Tides: Growing up with Ted Bundy’ which contains the letters she exchanged with Bundy as he awaited execution on death row.
Edna is the first member of Bundy’s family to publicly share what it was like to grow up with the world’s most infamous serial killer for a relative.
She shared the stories of their youth together and the letters she exchanged with her cousin, 50 years on from his arrest in 1975, showing notes begging him to reveal the locations of his victim’s bodies as his execution date drew near.
“I will tell you this much, I have not killed anyone,” Bundy, who Martin told the Mail on Sunday was more of a ”brother”, said in one of his death row letters. “I have no guilt, remorse or regret over anything I’ve done. What’s done is done.”
Describing life in jail he said: “‘We’re down to basics here. It’s like most everything the experience of being in prison can liberate or entrapped [sic]. Gandhi found his jail experiences to be uplifting, humbling.
‘I’m stripped of so many things and being thus deprived I am free to see myself as I was not able to before. I was awakened at 5:30 a.m. for a breakfast of cold scrambled eggs, grits, white bread, and milk.”
