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Liz Kloepfer met the love of her life in a bar. He turned out to be Ted Bundy.

 

One night in 1969, Liz Kloepfer sat in a Seattle bar with a close friend.

Over a few drinks, they chatted about their week. Liz had recently moved to the area with her young daughter, after leaving her husband.

Then Liz’s friend, Marylynne Chino, noticed a man had been staring at them.

Watch the official trailer for Amazon Prime’s upcoming docuseries, Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, below. Post continues after video.

“That guy has been staring at you all night,” she told Liz, who turned to look.

“I’ve never forgotten this,” Chino later told KUTV. “I walked in, and across the room, I saw Ted for the first time. I will never forget the look on his face, it wasn’t evil but he was staring, nursing a beer.”

Liz, who wanted to meet someone new, walked over to the man and struck up a conversation.

The mysterious man in the bar turned out to be Ted Bundy.

The pair quickly became entangled in each other’s lives, with Bundy moving into Liz’s house almost immediately.

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Liz’s real name is Elizabeth Kloepfer. She changed her name to Liz Kendall after Bundy was caught. Her time with Bundy plays a significant role in the Netflix series, Conversation with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, which was released last Thursday. The new movie, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vilewhich will be released in Australia later this year, is told from her perspective.

Liz would go on to write a memoir called The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, detailing her tumultuous relationship with Bundy.

“I handed Ted my life and said, ‘Here. Take care of me’,” she wrote.

“He did in a lot of ways, but I became more and more dependent upon him. When I felt his love, I was on top of the world; when I felt nothing from Ted, I felt that I was nothing.

“We would be getting along fine and then a door would slam and I would be out in the cold until Ted was ready to let me back in. I’d spend hours trying to figure out what I had done or said that was wrong. And then, suddenly, he would be warm and loving again and I would feel needed and cared for.”

ted bundy girlfriend
Elizabeth Kloepfer in Amazon Prime's Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer. Image: Amazon Prime.
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The couple stayed together for six years. After they had dated for about a year, Liz suggested to Bundy that they should get married. She was worried about what her conservative parents would think of her living with a man out of wedlock.

However, Bundy refused. He said if she was so worried about what her parents thought, she wasn't ready to get married.

After they had broken up, and Bundy was finally captured in 1978, he used his only call to phone Liz.

"He told me that he was sick and he was consumed by something that he didn't understand," she said of their conversation in the third episode of the Netflix series.

"He just couldn't contain it... he was preoccupied with this force."

Liz would later recall how she had her suspicions about Bundy when they were together. The reports of the murders seemed to line up with the times Bundy would leave the house.

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At one point, she actually tried to turn him into the police. The single mother approached the police and told them her boyfriend had a tendency to stalk women. She also told them she had found a bowl of women's underwear, and a knife, in their house.

The police didn't have enough to arrest Bundy at the time, and Liz stayed with him.

ted bundy girlfriend
Ted Bundy, Elizabeth Kloepfer and Molly Kloepfer were portrayed in Netflix's Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Image: Netflix.

One night, while they were still together, Liz unknowingly almost became another one of Bundy's victims. While he was in prison, the serial killer told his ex-girlfriend that one night he closed off their home's chimney and started a fire, hoping the smoke would kill her.

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"I remembered that night well," she wrote in her book.

"My eyes were running and I was coughing. I jumped out of bed and threw open the nearest window and stuck my head out. After I had recovered some, I opened all the windows and the doors and broke up the fire the best I could. I had gotten on Ted the next day for not coming back with the fan."

Still, Liz remained loyal to Bundy. For years, she found it hard to reconcile her version of Bundy, with the monster she saw on the news reports.

"I pray for Ted, but I am sickened by him," she wrote in her book. "The tragedy is that this warm and loving man is driven to kill."

Little is known about what Liz's life is like now. She went into hiding shortly after Bundy was arrested and has kept a low profile ever since.

Feature Image: Netflix.

Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer will premiere on Amazon Prime on January 31, 2020. Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile are available to watch on Netflix now.

This post was originally published on January 29, 2019. It was updated on January 30, 2020.

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