Harry has always identified herself as a feminist, and there is a quiet strength in the way she presents herself, a sense that here is a woman very much in control. Before she was famous, she was on her way home from a club one rainy night in New York.1. Did that really happen?
“It was two or three in the morning and I couldn’t find a cab. A car kept coming round and offering me a ride, so I accepted. Once in the car I noticed there were no door handles on the inside, which made me wary. I don’t know how, but I managed to put my hand through the window and open the door from the outside.”
The driver swerved to try to stop her escaping, but that gave her the momentum to throw herself out of the moving car. She thought no more of it until years later, when she saw the driver on the news. It was Ted Bundy, the serial killer who eventually confessed to murdering at least 30 women. “I always say my instincts saved me.”
2. What does being a feminist have to do with it? If only those 30 women who died had been more feminist, maybe they'd have figured out how to interpret and deal with the absence of interior door handles?
3. Why does the headline refer to punk, not retiring, and old people still having sex but not the time she escaped from Ted Bundy?
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58 comments:
I think Althouse is setting a trap for me on this one.
I am Laslo.
Brian Williams move over!!
Who in the UK knows who Ted Bundy is?
Debbie has normal memories for the wild 1970s NYC 2:00AM lifestyle. Can she help it if she remembers them.
There's always the temptation to make a good story better. The Debbie Harry brand is not about resisting temptation.....If Debbie Harry gets offed by a serial murderer, let's hope it's by a celebrity serial murderer like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, not some obscure wannabe like Laslo......As a career move, death by a celebrity murderer would be huge. Overdoses and plane accidents have been done to death,
I am fairly well versed in the history of Ted Bundy. Perhaps best not to explain why.
Anyway, I don't recall any stories of him being in NYC, so I looked it up: At no time during his years as a murderer did Ted Bundy show up in New York City. .
I am Laslo.
At no time during his years as a murderer did Ted Bundy show up in New York City. He made a trip to visit relatives in Philadelphia and to look up his birth record in Vermont in early 1969, but even that was five years before he began kidnapping and killing young women.
Ted Bundy also (in his Seattle and Salt Lake City days) drove a normal-appearing car. It wasn't the stripped-out MurderMobile Debbie Harry describes; it was a battered-looking VW. The only modification he made to his vehicle was to occasionally remove the passenger seat and place it across the back seat in order to facilitate the carrying of "cargo."
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/debharry.asp#gXzeJeZb9wo0bBqE.99
"I'm not a robot" Captcha: liewf (lie white female)
The exact same thing happened to Brian Williams.
Back in the day, more than a few times I fantasized about kidnapping Debbie Harry, taking her back to my place, giving her a good, thorough scrubbing with soap and hot water, and then letting her go.
Maybe it was Al Bundy.
"I think Althouse is setting a trap for me on this one."
Right: "sex at 69" is Laslo bait.
Son of Sam was happening in NYC in 1976, but he didn't kidnap women, nor look much like Ted Bundy.
Maybe this was the guy's first try, and, in failure, gave up the Dream.
Plausible.
I am Laslo.
I will defend Little Debbie from this hostile calumny. I can only hope that when she needs a ride at 2:00 AM in Atlanta she calls me, being my age and all.
The music has held up pretty well.
"If only those 30 women who died had been more feminist, maybe they'd have figured out how to interpret and deal with the absence of interior door handles?"
Leads to the old joke format:
Q: How many feminists does it take to figure out how to interpret and deal with the absence of interior door handles?
A: 31, evidently.
I am Laslo.
"Back in the day, more than a few times I fantasized about kidnapping Debbie Harry, taking her back to my place, giving her a good, thorough scrubbing with soap and hot water, and then letting her go."
Debbie Harry always looked kempt and clean.
Myself, I've always been partial to The Zodiac: Panache.
Plus he didn't have sex with the dead bodies of his victims. That is just wrong.
I am Laslo.
Common sense says that for every successful serial murderer there must have been several that tried, got the girl in the car, but then found they couldn't pull the trigger, as it were.
Being a sociopath is a lifetime commitment.
I am Laslo.
I talked to a woman at a party once who told me of her encounter with Ted Bundy. Hers was more benign, she'd talked to him at a bar or something. The trouble was, he'd already been arrested for the final time and had been in jail for a number of years when this supposed encounter took place. But she believed it.
Some real survivor stories.
I am Laslo.
I've heard this story of Debbie Harry's before, and also, being skeptical, looked into whether there was any information that Bundy had ever been in NYC, and saw that he had not.
Most likely, she was picked up by someone and, being alarmed about the person or his car, she bailed out. Her identification of the man as Bundy is simply a mistaken identification on her part. (Mistaken identification is much more common than supposed, so "eye-witness accounts" at trial are to be considered as suspect.)
Less likely, she made up the whole story, and nothing like it ever happened.
Even less likely, Bundy DID make his way to NYC and he DID pick her up.
MY (negligible) CONNECTION TO TED BUNDY:
I was in my last semester of college--at UF in Gainesville, FL--when Bundy was caught. Although Bundy's sorority girl murders were at FSU in Tallahassee, his killings gripped our campus with horror.
A couple of months after I graduated, I traveled back to Gainesville to join my ex-roommate as he and other musicians prepared to drive to Tallahassee to perform on the FSU campus as a "punk band." (I was just along for the ride and the experience; I wasn't going to be performing.) We were going to be staying at a boarding house, in the room occupied by a friend of my ex-roommate, as he had been the one to arrange FSU's "first punk concert." This fellow claimed that Bundy had been a resident of the boarding house, and described him as a cordial person who kept to himself.
To those who might be skeptical of this claim, as I was, here's a video taken of The Oaks, where Bundy had resided. This is, in fact, the place we stayed.
1. Did that really happen?
Guys removing inside door handles and picking up hitchhikers is a very old dodge. I heard about it in high school, way before Ted Bundy. I'm surprised they don't tell young women about it as a regular part of "how to be safe" lectures.
Or don't they do those anymore because it's empowering to be trapped and raped and murdered?
2. What does being a feminist have to do with it?
Nothing. See below.
If only those 30 women who died had been more feminist, maybe they'd have figured out how to interpret and deal with the absence of interior door handles?
Or if someone included the absence of interior doors as a bright red warning sign back in the day. Of course back in the day women were coached by feminists -- yes! feminists! -- to lay back and take it, not to fight back, and let themselves be raped and murdered.
3. Why does the headline refer to punk, not retiring, and old people still having sex but not the time she escaped from Ted Bundy?
Perhaps because it might not have been Ted Bundy. He wasn't the only serial rapist running around back in the day.
I just treat old memories as if they never happened for sharing purposes, especially on the internet.
Interior door handles is so 1970's. Now with automatic locks, the driver can control which doors can open and which can't. Also, many car doors now won't open until the car is in park.
We still say "roll down the window," but hardly anybody under age 40 remembers what that really means.
Heroically running away from danger is feminine thing, not a feminist thing.
Just think of how many lives would have been saved if she had beaten him to death with a tire iron. Now that would be the act of a feminist hero(ine).
What man hasn't driven his car aimlessly at night, seeing all the young girls walking alone on dark rainy streets, and realizing how relatively easy it would be to invite them into the warm dry car, casually lock the doors, and then drive off to some remote spot in the woods where no one would hear a sound?
Or is this just a Seattle thing?
I am Laslo.
Has any story appeared asking where Scott Walker was that night? We have the right to know!
I actually got to know Debby Harry through my work in the early 80's. She's a beautiful woman with a beautiful soul. I see no reason to believe she would just make up this story.
It's 11:59 and I want to stay alive.
"Or is this just a Seattle thing?"
Yes. Beta, I've said it before and I'll say it again. You're a comic genius.
My ex gf actually met and had a short date with TB early in his career as a serial killer. She was working in a shop in Seaside Oregon when he came in and charmed her into a simple walk on the beach. His yellow bug with no back seat unnerved her and she cut the date short and saved her life.
If Sharon Tate were alive today, she'd be a plump divorcee and forgotten starlet. Now she'll always be remembered as a woman of beauty and promise. Still her death came too early. It would have been far better if she had completed a few good movies before her untimely death. James Dean is the role model for this kind of career arc......I don't think that Debbie Harry had recorded any hits when this incident happened, so it would not have advanced her career. But a little further along, her death would have been beyond Morrison in terms of pushing record sales. Both Elvis and Michael Jackson have had lucrative post mortem careers. There is no down side for the record company when the artist dies. Makes you wonder who put the hit out on Tupac and provided Elvis with his industrial strength drugs......But, sadly, Debbie has reached that age where she can no longer have a tragic, career burnishing death. She might just as well stick around and see 100. Even with the pun, sex at 69 with Debbie Harry sounds more dutiful than salacious.
My moment to shine!
A few years back I stumbled across Blondie on Youtube and became a huge fan. (Great band but not appreciated enough). So I started reading everything about them, coming across this story which Debbie has told consistently for years going back at least into the 1990s. It has always been the same: that it happened late one night in NYC in the very early 70s (1971-72), that the guy was very handsome with dark hair but that he smelled of alcohol, that he pestered her repeatedly to give her a lift, and that after she agreed she luckily realized that something was amiss and barely escaped. It is a consistent story.
But then I stumbled across a website that claimed to "debunk" this story. It's thesis was that allegedly there was nothing to tie Bundy's killing spree to the Northeast. But upon simple investigation this argument is false. Bundy was born if I recall in Vermont (or at least spent time in an orphanage there), had relatives in Philadelphia and even went to school there for a while, and is suspected of murders in New Jersey and also Burlington Vermont which he apparently returned to after he had moved to the Northwest. Nor were Bundy's methods always the same. It is perfectly possible that Bundy was visiting his old stomping grounds in the Philadelphia/NJ area, got the urge to kill and drove to Manhattan where Debbie made a tempting target. And realistically once it becomes clear that the guy did travel who is to say where is was day to day in that period. It wasn't exactly that hard to travel to NYC.
So did it happen? Who knows? Could have been some other psycho. But it certainly was never debunked and her story does fit. And it is the type of story that if you tell you get that polite smile, so it doesn't exactly benefit her to tell the story.
Of course it happened. It was seared into her memory like a trip to Cambodia or bullets flying in Bosnia.
So, why didn't Bundy have the windows rolled up? Not much point to having the handles off if the windows are open. Maybe Debbie was the first person abducted with the missing handles routine and he then corrected his error. All those victims after Debbie could have been saved if she had come forward to report it to the police.
What is also interesting is that in addition to the crude idea that because there is no positive proof that Bundy ever visited NYC this means he could not have (although there is strong evidence that he did go to Burlington and Philadelphia (visiting family) after he had moved to the NW), that somehow the method was too crude. Yet this is a guy who on occasion just broke into homes to kill and admitted earlier failed abduction attempts. I guess I never realized that serial killers would be so regimented and predictable in their ways. LOL.
Like I said, who knows, but the debunking efforts have been very subpar.
1. Did that really happen?
Bundy's car was a VW with no rear doors.
I became suspicious when she said that she jumped out of the car and used Uber instead.
It is possible to drive to Vermont from Philly without driving through NYC, but it is plenty easy to drive through NYC on the way too. Especially if you wanted to go someplace lawless to try out an idea. This was the early '70s.
Let’s try the following experiment. (1) Roll the passenger-side window of your car down an inch and a half, which is how far down she says it was in the version Snopes quotes, and see if you can stick your arm out. (2) If not, roll it down until you can (after all, maybe it was lower than she thinks), and stick your arm down. (3) Find and grab the outside door handle. (4) Unlatch the door. (5) If you got this far, which you didn’t, try throwing yourself out of a car while it’s accelerating around a corner in Manhattan. Ten miles an hour, let’s say. Really late at night, so let’s say there’s no traffic to concern yourself with. (Let’s say that, even though when I lived on the Lower East Side (1976-84) it was not the way to bet.)
I think the results of this experiment will be edifying. And it doesn’t even address the unstated but apparent factor that she’s hurtling out of the car while her arm was still jammed out the window. I don’t think even a professional stunt man would try that, although if the money’s right you never know.
But it’s okay, Debbie. I love you anyway. I never get sick of watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjejqJVUYOU.
I had never heard this story before! I have to say I think this saying we don't know that he operated in NY doesn't mean he didnt, but it seems more likely that it was some other psycho who scared Debbie.
I suppose it could be made up, certainly. (I'm kind of mistified at these women who jumped into the car with strangers but I guess it was a different time!) However, I don't think we have to have proof of vague stories from years ago. I had a similarish story of someone creepy following me around, but I sure never got in the van and nothing ever happened. I think most people just kind of say 'whew, glad that didn't end badly!' and move on in those circumstances.
(1) Roll the passenger-side window of your car down an inch and a half, which is how far down she says it was in the version Snopes quotes, and see if you can stick your arm out. (2) If not, roll it down until you can (after all, maybe it was lower than she thinks), and stick your arm down. (3) Find and grab the outside door handle. (4) Unlatch the door.
It seems like windows used to have more of a weird curve to them when you rolled them down? So you might have enough of the window down on the side to stick your arm out. Probably not an inch and a half, but but a few inches? Maybe.
What man hasn't driven his car aimlessly at night, seeing all the young girls walking alone on dark rainy streets, and realizing how relatively easy it would be to invite them into the warm dry car, casually lock the doors, and then drive off to some remote spot in the woods where no one would hear a sound?
Or is this just a Seattle thing?
Or it could be a Chappaquiddick thing. Although, I suppose we could say that Harry wasn't killed by Ted Kennedy either.
BTW, Mary Jo would be 74.
- Krumhorn
I think this saying we don't know that he operated in NY doesn't mean he didn't
In the sense that we "don't know" if Ted Bundy assassinated JFK, we don't know if Ted Bundy tried to abduct Debbie Harry.
What we do know is that there is no evidence for it, and it is entirely inconsistent with what we do know about Bundy's MO and whereabouts.
I’m sure creepy guys, even good looking creepy guys, have been hitting on Debbie Harry since she was 12, probably daily. Probably she had some close calls. Maybe her memory for faces is so good that she can remember a guy she saw for a couple of minutes at two in the morning 15 years earlier, during an event so traumatic she hadn’t given it a thought since then. But everything about the escape from the car screams improvisation in the face of skepticism. What made you suspicious? There were no door handles or window cranks inside the car! Wow! How did you escape?? I jumped out of the car! But—there were no door handles or… The window was open just wide enough for me to open the door from the outside!
At that point it becomes impolite to ask ‘why was the window open?’ because the answer is obvious.
Maybe she meant McGeorge Bundy.
Bored at work, we looked up Ted Bundy in the database and found nothing, but we did find Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer.
One guy talked about renting a bus and doing a package serial killer tour.
'Who's that handsome gentleman strolling up ahead, ladies, strolling through the dusk?'
Maybe Harry bought shoes from Al Bundy...
At no time during his years as a murderer did Ted Bundy show up in New York City.
Maybe she rode in Ted Bundie's car?
I understand the Vermont / NYC proximity thing.
When Scarlett Johansson comes to Seattle to fuck me she actually flies into Portland and then drives a rental car the rest of the way.
We check into hotels as 'Laslo & Lila McFunbaggs': she came up with the name, but I added the extra 'g' to make it especially sneaky.
Virtually untraceable, this.
I am Laslo.
I'm dubious of this story. Yes she might have been in a car with someone who tried to attack her, but the odds that it was Bundy are prettly slim. Especially considering there is little evidence of him going to NY.
though, if she was in her prime and told me that story I'd tell her I believed her completely, Since I'd want to get in her pants.
Chrissie Hynde kicked me in the head in a rock dive in indianapolis 1981 or 2..thought I was hooking her drinks (cherry bomb) ..she had presence
Back in the 80s, Debbie Harry once forced me into her car, drove me to an abandoned mine (how Freudian!) and forced me to have sex with her. I think that she intended to to kill me afterwards, but of course she passed out when I really got going.
They all do.
While I was making my escape I saw several skeletons chained to the wall of the mine. Their groinal areas had been pulverized.
Poor bastards.
I once did get picked up by Bundy. I recognized him, but I thought "No big deal -- I'm a dude!" Also, I needed a ride. When he asked my name I gave him a fake one -- just in case.
As soon as I got in the car, he made me drink poison. I was feeling a little woozy, but I managed to jump out of the car at a stop sign. He follwed me and shot me, three times. I was a pretty tough young guy at the time. When he saw that the bullets didn't do the job, he beat me up with a club. That put my lights out, and when I came to I was almost drowned -- he had tied me up and thrown me into a river.
I kind of wondered why Bundy would do this to me, since I was a dude, then I remembered that the fake name I had given him was "Rasputin."
I will probably never strangle or smother Scarlett Johansson.
Not fatally, at least.
The Special Pillow of Secrets, etc etc.
I am Laslo.
Those who do not believe in astral projection and the immortal soul can disregard the rest, but:
I communed with the Spirit Essence of Ted Bundy, and he said:
"Bitches, if you got in my car then I alone know where your skulls are."
He might be hanging out with Tu-Pac up there, I don't know for sure.
I am Laslo.
"Bitches, if you got in my car
then I alone know where your skulls are
On my arm I wore a fake cast
because I hadda hadda, hadda get to that ass
My VW bug had no back seat
and now I'm duct-taping your feet
what pretty polish on your toes
you still got dat even after your clothes
have been thrown in a rest-stop garbage bin
and under my nails is a bit of your skin
I scratched out my VW automobile VIN
and kept your necklace
I wore it at breakfast
at the Mc'D's in Colorado
In murder I speak Esparanto
I fear prison cuz'
I don't want a cell-mate named Giganto
of serial killers I'm Robert Plant-o
Florida squuezed my lemon
Till the juice ran down my leg.
What can I say: Son of Sam was a better rapper. Or at least his dawg.
I am Laslo.
Whenever I pick up a girl hitch hiker, I show her my gun, handcuffs, rope, etc, so the girl will know that if we run into a serial killer, we'll be able to handle him.
You would not believe how safe they feel after that!
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