Ted Bundy's Is the World's Most Notorious Volkswagen Bug
Rick Garzaniti was relaxing at home with his wife and toddler when his life intersected with that of convicted serial killer and escaped convict Ted Bundy. As the family watched the ABC Sunday Night Movie, Gator, with Burt Reynolds, Bundy was outside their Tallahassee, Florida, residence, stealing Garzaniti's orange 1972 Volkswagen Super Beetle.
It was February of 1978, and Bundy, who would eventually confess to killing more than 30 young women in four states, had recently escaped from his Aspen, Colorado, jail cell. It was his second escape in seven months. Just days before stealing the Bug, the 31-year old had walked into a Florida State University sorority house and savagely attacked four female students, killing two.
Bundy's theft of the VW Bug shouldn't have surprised authorities. America's most notorious mass murderer—played by actor Zac Efron in a new Netflix movie, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile—had a liking for the air-cooled German cars. In 1974, long before he topped the FBI's Most Wanted Fugitives list, he had bought a tan 1968 VW Beetle in his hometown of Tacoma, Washington, where his killing spree began.
For two years, Ted Bundy's Volkswagen Beetle became part of his modus operandi as he performed dozens of murders, first in Washington and Oregon, then in Utah and Colorado. He had removed the Bug's passenger seat and its inside door handle, trapping his victims inside the car, where they were often handcuffed to the Beetle and strangled.
The first time Ted Bundy was arrested, he was behind the wheel of that very car on the night of August 15, 1975. Utah highway policeman Bob Hayward stopped him at around 2 a.m. for a routine traffic violation in a residential area around Salt Lake City. Bundy was driving the Beetle without its headlights on. After Hayward spotted the car's missing passenger seat, Bundy consented to a vehicle search. An ice pick was found, along with masks, handcuffs, rope, a pry bar, and pantyhose.
Many refused to believe the law student was such a monster. Like the character played by Christian Bale in the 2000 movie American Psycho, Bundy didn't fit the profile. He was intelligent, articulate, and well educated. He had graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in psychology. He was also charming, and quite handsome with soft blue eyes and an infectious smile, all weapons the narcissistic psychopath used to beguile his victims.
Out on bail, Bundy scrubbed the tan VW and sold it to a Utah teenager, but police seized the car in October when they charged Bundy with the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, who had identified him in a police lineup. In November of 1974 DaRonch had managed to escape while Bundy, claiming to be a police detective, tried to handcuff her to the inside of his Volkswagen.
Despite Bundy's car-washing efforts, a forensics search revealed blood stains inside the tan VW and hairs from three slain women. Bundy was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to one to 15 years in Utah State Prison.
Extradited to Colorado to stand trial for murder, he escaped from his Aspen cell three years later, and on February 15, 1978, he was arrested again, this time in Pensacola, Florida, while behind the wheel of Garzaniti's orange Volkswagen. Bundy was detained by police officer David Lee around 1 a.m., after what was described as a high-speed chase and a violent resist of arrest.
"He grabbed my wrist and we had a struggle for control of my revolver," the officer told reporters. Bundy was carrying 21 stolen credit cards, many of which belonged to female FSU students.
The following year, Bundy would be convicted of three killings in Florida, including the slaying of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, who vanished from her junior high school in Lake City, Florida, on February 9, 1978. He would die in that state's electric chair in early 1989.
Netflix acquired distribution rights to Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile after it debuted at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, just as the company was airing its own four-part documentary series, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, timed to coincide with the 30th anniversary of his execution.
When authorities returned the orange Bug to Garzaniti, who would later testify at Bundy's trial, the VW's back seat was missing, and the entire car was covered in fingerprint dust. "I didn't think about it too much because I had a feeling that Kimberly Leach might have been in that car," he recently told a local television reporter.
After driving the car for a few months the massage therapist decided to sell, but he was uninterested in turning a profit on the car's infamous past. It was sold to a man in nearby Orlando for just $1300. The buyer wanted it for his 16-year-old daughter. It was going to be her first car. Garzaniti says he was clear about the Volkswagen's history, but they happily bought it anyway.
"I thought about it later that I should have put it in the National Enquirer, and some screwball might have given me $20,000 for it," he told the Pensacola News Journal in 1997. "It would be like having something Bonnie and Clyde owned."
While Bundy was on death row, former Salt Lake City sheriff's deputy Lonnie Anderson purchased his tan 1968 VW with just such profiteering in mind. Paying $925 for the car at a police auction, he stashed it in a storage yard for nearly 20 years. In 1997, with most of its interior still missing from the forensic investigation, he attempted to sell it, asking $25,000 for the VW in the New York Times classified ads.
Although the whereabouts of Garzaniti's orange VW Super Beetle seem to be unknown today, Ted Bundy's '68 Beetle has become one of the crime world's most treasured pieces of "murderabilia." In 2001 it was purchased by Arthur Nash, a known crime-memorabilia collector. In 2010 it was leased to the National Museum of Crime and Punishment in Washington, D.C., where it was prominently displayed in the lobby for four years. That museum has since closed.
Theodore Robert Bundy's affection for VW Beetles is as inexplicable as his murderous acts. Today his tan 1968 VW Beetle, still owned by Nash, is among the star attractions at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where it sits alongside John Wayne Gacy's Paintbox and O.J. Simpson's white Ford Bronco. Adult tickets start at $24.95. Children under seven are free.
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