The Mysterious True Story of the 'Extremely Wicked' Ted Bundy Movie

Elizabeth Kendall's memoir was released in 1981 to little fanfare and it's been out of print for decades. Now, it's being made into a highly anticipated Netflix movie. [ view in browser.   add esquire@newsletter.esquire.com to your address book ]             FOLLOW US       Ted Bundy's Girlfriend Had Something to Say. Nobody Listened—Until Now.   In the late 1970s, a young woman with fair skin and long, light-brown hair walked into the offices of Madrona Publishing in Seattle's newly renovated Pike Place Market. She had started writing her memoir and was looking for a publisher. Her ex-boyfriend had been all over the papers, and reporters and private investigators had begun contacting her. She wanted to tell her own story. The woman's name was Elizabeth, and her ex-boyfriend was Ted Bundy, who was sitting on Death Row in Florida after being found guilty of multiple murders. Elizabeth began dating the notorious serial killer in 1969, around the same time his brutal murders of young women began. They stayed together through 1974, the year Bundy moved to Salt Lake City and continued his murders in Utah, but they stayed in touch as Bundy went through trials in Utah and Florida. The book she wrote, The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy, offers haunting insight into the mind of a killer from the rarely-told perspective of a victim. She details meeting Bundy at a bar, their domestic life with her young daughter, the first time she recognized her boyfriend's face in a police sketch, calling the cops with her suspicions, and their revealing prison phone calls as Bundy awaited trial for murder, including his admission that he once tried to kill Elizabeth as she slept. But the book, which was published in 1981, was met with little fanfare. There was nearly no press coverage of it, and it's been out of print since the late 1980s. "The book sold well, but nothing spectacular," Elizabeth's editor, Sara Levant, tells me. "We had some huge books, but that wasn't one of them." In the ensuing decades, the book has found an avid, if small readership among people who've tracked down and shared it on Reddit. Used copies of the book are also available on Amazon, where some are going for thousands of dollars. (I read the PDF I found online.) And now, all these years later, Elizabeth's story is getting a second life. The writer Michael Werwie adapted the book into a screenplay, which became the movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Vile and Evil, airing on Netflix May 3, starring Zac Efron as Bundy and Lily Collins as Elizabeth. This is the story of how Elizabeth came to write the book and conceal her true identity along the way, and how, decades later, a book relegated to libraries, dusty consignment shops, and far-off corners of the internet was turned into a movie receiving considerable buzz. 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