The Bundy Murders: A Comprehensive History by Kevin M. Sullivan Read Free Book Online

his key, he took his right hand and pretended to be feeling for it. "Do you think you could find it for me," he asked, "because I can't feel with this thing on my hand?" Kathleen wasn't about to bend down and start looking for that key while he hovered over her. "Let's step back," she suggested, "and see if we can see the reflection in the light." "So we stepped back," she said later, "behind the car, kind of behind the car to the side, and I squatted down and luckily I did see the reflection of the key in the light." After quickly picking up the keys and dropping them into the palm of his hand, she wished him a speedy recovery from his injuries and hurried away. Kathleen believed he said "thank you" as she left. Why he didn't attack her as she squatted to look for the key is anyone's guess. The soon-to-be-married Kathleen Clara D'Olivo was very lucky to be alive.
    Eighteen-year-old Susan Elaine Rancourt was a pretty girl with long, blond hair parted in the middle. A studious young woman, she had remained behind in Washington to attend the college in Ellensburg when her family moved to Anchorage, Alaska. As a freshman at Central Washington State College, she showed herself to be a serious student with an eye to the future; a future that might have included a career in medicine. Although it couldn't have been easy for Susan to maintain a 4.0 average while working full-time at a nursing home, she did it; but she had planned to leave her job at the nursing home and seek employment as a waitress at one of the local restaurants. It was also her desire (apparently against her family's wishes) to remain in Washington after graduation. But graduation was a long way off, so whatever heated discussions she might have had with her parents, it was probably not enough to cause a rift between them. Much could happen over the next threeplus years to change her mind. Everyone knew this. Susan, who had a fair complexion, spent the afternoon of April 17 sunbathing in the city park.

    A little before 8:00 P.M., and only moments before Kathleen D'Olivo would be entering the Bouillion Library for two hours of uninterrupted study, Susan Rancourt placed some clothes into one of her dorm's washing machines and walked to Munson Hall, located at the southern end of the campus, where she attended a meeting for those wanting to be dorm counselors. The meeting was due to end about 10. The last people to see Susan said she was wearing a yellow, short-sleeve sweater, grey corduroy pants, a yellow coat, and a pair of brown Hush Puppies. At 10:15, as Barbara Blair was crossing Walnut Street at Eighth Street (the location of Munson Hall and close to the library, which is also on Walnut), she saw a man "in a green ski parka, who acted as though he were in a daze," as well as a young white female "wearing a yellow coat going north on the Walnut Mall." This was no doubt Susan on her way home, on a path which would take her past the library, where she would turn right, and keeping to the sidewalk between Black Hall and the Bouillon Library, take a left on Chestnut and continue north towards Barto Hall where she lived. She was, in fact, traveling almost the exact route Kathleen D'Olivo had taken a short time earlier. But Susan never made it to her residence. And like Lynda Ann Healy and Donna Gail Manson, Susan Elaine Rancourt appears to have vanished into thin air.
    But unlike Donna Manson, the disappearance of Susan Rancourt was not taken lightly. That she did not retrieve her clothes from the dorm's laundry room, coupled with her failure to return home, was a clear signal to all who knew this girl that something was terribly wrong. By 5:00 P.M. the next day, Susan's roommate Diana Pitt filed a missing persons report with the campus police department. Upon hearing the news, the Rancourts took the first flight back to Washington. Another family had entered that terrible world of fear, panic, helplessness, and despair. When the family examined her room, everything