Ted Bundy’s Sorority House Attacks: Chi Omega, Trial, Survivors

Ted Bundy’s attack on the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University happened in roughly fifteen minutes on the morning of January 15, 1978. He broke into the house in Tallahassee, Florida, sometime around 3:00 a.m., beat four sleeping women with a club fashioned from a tree branch, and killed two of them: Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20. He then walked several blocks to a duplex on Dunwoody Street and beat a fifth Florida State student, Cheryl Thomas, nearly to death. He was a fugitive at the time, having escaped a Colorado jail two weeks earlier, and was arrested a month later in Pensacola.

What Happened Inside the Chi Omega House

Between roughly 3:00 and 3:15 a.m., Bundy entered the Chi Omega house carrying the wooden club and moved through the bedrooms of sleeping women. Prosecutors later described the assaults as a frenzy of violence.¹

Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy were beaten and strangled. Court records describe Bowman’s skull as “crushed and literally laid open.” Levy was also bitten during the assault, and that bite mark would become one of the central pieces of physical evidence at trial.²

Two other women in the house survived. Karen Chandler, 20, was beaten in her bed and later said “pretty much” every bone in her face had been broken, along with her arm. Kathy Kleiner, also 20, had her jaw broken in three places; a responding officer described it as hanging off one side, held on by a single hinge.¹

The attack ended because a sorority member came home. Nita Neary, returning to the house that night, saw a man coming down the stairs and slipping out the front door carrying what she recognized as a club. Her account would be the only eyewitness identification of Bundy at the scene.³

The Attack on Cheryl Thomas

After leaving Chi Omega, Bundy walked four or five blocks to a duplex where Florida State dance student Cheryl Thomas lived. He climbed through a kitchen window beside her bedroom and attacked her while she slept. Investigators later theorized that Thomas’s home may have been his original target: he may have been spooked earlier by a man working on a broken-down car nearby, gone to the sorority house instead, and returned to the duplex after Neary interrupted him.⁴

Neighbors heard pounding and moaning and called police. Officers found Thomas bloody and unconscious. She had five skull fractures, a dislocated shoulder, and a jaw broken in two places. The beating put her in a coma and left her permanently deaf in her left ear, ending her hopes of a professional dance career.⁴ She later told investigators her attacker had worn a pantyhose mask, which he dropped on her floor.¹

How Bundy Ended Up in Tallahassee

Bundy was in Tallahassee only because he had escaped custody in Colorado. On December 30, 1977, he broke out of the Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs by carving through a light fixture opening in his cell ceiling and crawling out through the jailer’s apartment above. He piled objects under his blanket to look like a sleeping body, and by the time anyone noticed, he had already reached Chicago by plane. From there he took a train to Ann Arbor, drove a stolen car to Atlanta, and took a bus into Tallahassee.⁵ It was his second escape from Colorado custody that year; in June 1977 he had jumped from a second-story courthouse window in Aspen before being recaptured.⁶

He arrived on January 8, 1978, using the name “Chris Hagen.” He rented a room at a boarding house six blocks from the Chi Omega house and spent the week at a disco next door to his lodging. Sorority members later said they had noticed a man staring at them from the bar; they identified him afterward as Bundy.⁷

How He Was Caught

Bundy remained free for another month after the Tallahassee attacks. On February 15, 1978, Pensacola police officer David Lee pulled over a Volkswagen Beetle on West Cervantes Street after running its plates and finding it stolen. Bundy resisted arrest, and Lee fired two warning shots.⁸ He gave a fake name and did not admit his identity for nearly two days.⁹ The Volkswagen contained identification belonging to FSU students and stolen credit cards.¹⁰

The Evidence That Convicted Him

The prosecution built the case on three pieces of evidence.

The first was Nita Neary’s identification. In court, Neary, an art student from Aurora, Indiana, pointed at Bundy and said, “Yes, he is.” The defense attacked her testimony because police had hypnotized her on January 23, 1978, in an effort to sharpen her memory. The trial court allowed the identification anyway, finding that her descriptions had stayed consistent before and after the session and that her memory was independent of the hypnosis.³¹¹

The second was the bite mark on Lisa Levy’s body. Forensic odontologist Dr. Richard Souviron testified that the impression matched Bundy’s teeth, which were unusually crooked on the bottom and gave the comparison distinctive features to work from. Dr. Lowell Levine and Dr. Norman Sperber independently backed the analysis.¹² The bite mark evidence was widely credited with sealing the conviction.¹³

The third piece was physical evidence from Thomas’s duplex. Hairs found on a knotted pair of pantyhose there were determined to be microscopically consistent with Bundy’s hair, tying him to the second attack that same morning.¹¹

The Trial and Sentences

The 1979 trial was moved from Tallahassee to Miami because of pretrial publicity and presided over by Dade County Circuit Judge Edward D. Cowart. Bundy faced two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted first-degree murder, and two counts of burglary.¹¹¹⁴

It became the first nationally televised murder trial in the United States. A month before it began, the Florida Supreme Court had unanimously authorized cameras in state courtrooms. Bundy tried to bar them and Judge Cowart refused, saying, “We’re conducting the public’s business, gentleman, and we’re going to conduct it in the sunshine.” Reporters came from all fifty states and nine foreign countries.¹⁵

Bundy insisted on serving as lead counsel for his own defense, though he had never finished law school. He fought with his court-appointed lawyers, who believed the case was unwinnable. Attorney Margaret Good pointed to his “erratic, impulsive, and strange” behavior in questioning his competency to stand trial, and Ed Harvey, another attorney on the team, later testified that Bundy’s participation “devastated” the defense. Prosecutor Larry Simpson recalled Bundy once filing what he called a “motion for a change of menu” over grilled cheese sandwiches in jail.¹⁶¹⁷

On July 24, 1979, the jury convicted him on every count. Judge Cowart imposed two death sentences for the murders of Bowman and Levy.¹¹ At sentencing, Cowart told him, “You’d have made a good lawyer. I’d have loved to have you practice in front of me. But you went the wrong way, partner.”¹⁴

A separate 1980 trial in Orlando convicted Bundy of murdering 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, who had disappeared from her Lake City, Florida, junior high school on February 9, 1978, in the weeks between the Chi Omega attacks and Bundy’s arrest. He received a third death sentence.¹⁸ Bundy was executed by electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989, at 7:16 a.m.¹⁹

Questions About the Bite Mark Evidence

The bite mark testimony that helped convict Bundy has not aged well as science. Dr. Souviron himself has said that with thirty more years of experience, his testimony would have looked different.¹³ Experts have since attributed the strength of the Bundy identification largely to the unusual crookedness of his lower teeth rather than to the reliability of the method itself.²⁰

In 2016, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology concluded that “the prospects of developing bitemark evidence into a scientifically valid method are low.” A 2022 report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology stated that forensic bite mark analysis “lacks a sufficient scientific foundation.” Forensic dentist Mary Bush of the University at Buffalo has documented at least 26 wrongful convictions built primarily on bite mark evidence, three of which produced death sentences. No court has formally banned the technique, though some jurisdictions have stopped using it.¹³

The Survivors

The three women who lived through the January 15 attacks carried lasting injuries. Cheryl Thomas went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in dance and a master’s in deaf education, despite the permanent hearing loss and balance problems left by the beating.²¹ Karen Chandler, later Karen Pryor, refused to look at Bundy during the trial, saying, “I didn’t want to give him the feeling that he was of any importance to me.”²²

Kathy Kleiner, now Kathy Kleiner Rubin, published a memoir in October 2023, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More than Ted Bundy, co-written with Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi. She wrote it in part to push back against the way Bundy has been portrayed in film and television, and against the idea that his victims were somehow lured. “The Bundy victims have been treated like cartoon characters who saw a handsome man, developed red hearts in their eyes, and then idiotically trailed behind him to their own deaths,” she wrote. Most, she noted, were attacked from behind or while they slept.²³

Chandler has spoken of Bowman and Levy in memorial terms: “All you can do is just celebrate that they were there and that you knew them and they will always be in our memories.” Kleiner called them “both beautiful, wonderful people” and said that after Bundy’s execution, she felt they were “finally at peace.”¹

1
ABC News. Chi Omega Survivor on Ted Bundy Murders
2
Florida State University Law Library. Bundy v. State, No. 57772
3
The New York Times. Student Says Bundy Fled Murder Scene in Florida
4
CBS News. Ted Bundy Serial Killer Survivor Stories
5
Good Morning America. Timeline of Ted Bundy’s Brutal Crimes
6
ABC News. How Notorious Serial Killer Ted Bundy Escaped Custody
7
Audioboom. What Did a Sorority Sister Find After She Saw Ted Bundy on the Stairs at 3 AM
8
WKRG. Ted Bundy Infamous Serial Killer Arrested in Pensacola
9
WEAR-TV. Bundy’s Last Stop: Recounting a Serial Killer’s Arrest 40 Years Later
10
Florida Sheriffs Association. Remembering Ted Bundy and the Chi Omega Murders
11
Justia. Bundy v. State, 455 So. 2d 330
12
Dentalcare.com. Bite Marks
13
University at Buffalo. Bitemark Evidence
14
The New York Times. Edward D. Cowart, Judge in Florida Trial of Ted Bundy
15
Oxygen. Why Was Ted Bundy’s Trial Televised
16
Esquire. Ted Bundy Trial Lawyer True Story
17
Orlando Sentinel. Lawyers Say Bundy Irrational at Trial
18
Florida State University Law Library. Bundy v. State, Appellant’s Main Brief, No. 59128
19
Britannica. How Did Ted Bundy Die
20
National Museum of Dentistry. The Most Infamous Bite Mark Case
21
Daily Mail. Ted Bundy Survivors Recall Monster’s Frenzied Attacks
22
Oxygen. Ted Bundy Survivors Share Stories
23
People. Ted Bundy Survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin Book