The Night Ted Bundy Came for My Sister with a Knife
By Cynthia Rosi
Express on Sunday Magazine (UK)

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MY mother had a spiritual approach to home security. Since Dad’s death, God had taken on many of my father’s jobs. As a single mother of four kids, Mom was wiped out by 8pm every night. So some things got delegated Upstairs. Like checking the whole house was locked before we went to bed.
Including the basement.
All I knew of Ted Bundy as a 10-year-old girl were the posters of his victims. At that time, Ted Bundy’s name mattered just to his family. Ted stalked his beautiful young prey, creeping into their homes and waiting until the dead of night to slit their throats or stab them through the heart. Only we didn’t know that yet. We lived in a state of innocence.
The police knew, but they were still too horrified to tell.
I read one of the posters at the A&P on California Avenue while I waited for the grocery boy to finish packing for Mom. MISSING it said. The West Seattle High School girl in the picture wore brown, flipped-back hair. I thought she looked pretty.
“Why do you think she went away?” I asked. I wore flared jeans that year, the legs so wide they tripped me up in high winds. And a polyester shirt the colour of red wine, static electricity clinging it to my training bra.
Mom looked at me, judging whether she should fob me off, tell me the truth or distract me with a Big Hunk. The Big Hunk worked. But as the grocery boy wheeled the cart out to our Checker station wagon, I decided I needed to know. “Do you think that girl ran away?” I asked, my mouth oozing nougat.
“She’s been gone a very long time.”
“Oh.” I stared out at the gravel as my mother reversed.
Then she stopped the car to pull the big silver gearshift on the steering wheel into ‘drive’. “She might have been murdered.” Mom pulled a sour prune face.
Useless to ask more. Someone getting murdered…well, it didn’t happen to us. That kind of thing happened to the Food Stamp people who drank beer and smoked and swore. Heck, they probably even let their daughter have pierced earrings like a gipsy!
The next time I went with Mom to the Post Office, I noticed that the girl with the flipped-back brown hair had a poster companion. Now there were two beautiful High School girls missing. I checked their ears. Nothing. But the new one wore a teeny-tiny gold cross which came up white on the over-blacked Xerox. Maybe she was Catholic and went to the school on the hill where they rang the bells every morning. I hoped the girls had really run away.
As our business at the PO turned from Christmas cards to July’s birthday cards, the pictures didn’t come down. They yellowed and brittled and the tape aged and lost its sticky, and the paper tore when a nameless somebody laid over another piece of tape. The following Christmas new posters of the same posters appeared and the date got older.
Still no one knew Ted Bundy’s name.
Our house was the coolest house – during the day. Each of the four upstairs bedrooms had walk-in closets, narrow corridors which snaked and bent, their dark,