Deborah Harry, the lead singer of the 1970s new wave band Blondie, has maintained many times over the last three decades that she once had a close encounter with Ted Bundy, narrowly escaping abduction (and presumably worse) at the hands of that notorious serial killer in the streets of New York in the early 1970s. Here’s how the story was related by her early on, in a 1989 newspaper account:
The way Deborah Harry recounts the story is absolutely frightening. The rock singer, best known for her work in the post-disco, New-wave band Blondie, was just trying to hail a cab. It nearly ended in disaster.
“I was trying to get a cab on the lower east side of the Village in New York, and it was kind of late,” Harry said. “This was back in the early ’70s. I wasn’t even in a band then … I was trying to get across town to an after-hours club …
“A little white car pulls up, and the guy offers me a ride. So I just continued to try to flag a cab down. But he was very persistent, and he asked where I was going. It was only a couple of blocks away, and he said, ‘Well I’ll give you a ride.’
“I got in the car, and it was summertime and the windows were all rolled up except about an inch and a half at the top. So I was sitting there and he wasn’t really talking to me. Automatically, I sort of reached to roll down the window and I realized there was no door handle, no window crank, no nothing. The inside of the car was totally stripped out.
” … I got very nervous. I reached my arm out through the little crack and stretched down and opened the car from the outside. As soon as he saw that, he tried to turn the corner really fast, and I spun out of the car and landed in the middle of the street.”
The driver, Harry concluded more than 15 years later, was serial killer Ted Bundy, who was executed last January [1989] in Florida’s electric chair.
“It was right after his execution that I read about him,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about that incident in years. The whole description of how he operated and what he looked like and the kind of car he drove and the time frame he was doing that in that area of the country fit exactly. I said, ‘My God, it was him.’”
Harry said it frightens her more now than ever.
“Very scary,” she said. “Truthfully, I hadn’t thought of the incident in 15 years. I’m one of the lucky ones.”
Between the incident and the time she fully digested what had happened, Harry had come and gone as a music superstar.
However, Debbie Harry’s recollections (related many years after the fact) don’t fit the details of what is known about Ted Bundy’s life and criminal activities. For example, her 1989 account opened as follows:
“I was trying to get a cab on the lower east side of the Village in New York, and it was kind of late,” Harry said. “This was back in the early ’70s. I wasn’t even in a band then … I was trying to get across town to an after-hours club …