NetflixTed Bundy with his long-time girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall, who wrote the memoir on which Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is based.
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.
AmazonElizabeth Kendall’s memoir was released in 1981.
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.
Brian Douglas//NetflixZac Efron as Ted Bundy and Lily Collins as Liz Kendall in the Netflix movie "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile."
“What I love about the book, and why I wanted to make a movie, is there have been many stories about how a serial killer kills and the procedure of tracking the serial killer down and the escalating body count,” says the film’s director, Joe Berlinger. “I've not seen a film from the POV of a victim, which is why I wanted to do it. Of course, Elizabeth is a victim.”
Elizabeth was a 24-year-old single mom when she met Bundy during a night out drinking in Seattle with a friend in October 1969. Her memoir begins when a handsome young man with an indiscernible accent asked her to dance.
“The chemistry between us was incredible. I was already planning the wedding and naming the kids,” she writes. “He was telling me that he missed having a kitchen because he loved to cook. Perfect. My Prince.”
NetflixBundy and Kendall met at a Seattle bar.
The book details their years of dating, including Bundy’s emotionally abusive behavior, and eventually the clues that he was involved in a string of unsolved kidnappings and murders. The couple had been in a serious relationship for nearly four years when Elizabeth first saw a police sketch of a suspect named “Ted” who looked like her Ted. When she heard the suspect had a cast on his arm, Elizabeth remembered finding plaster of Paris in her boyfriend’s desk, which he justified by saying, “A person never could tell when he was going to break a leg,” along with other obvious-in-hindsight clues over the years that pointed to Bundy’s involvement. Elizabeth tried numerous times to warn police, but she was told Bundy had been checked out and cleared. So she remained in the relationship.
Elizabeth was never identified in the press before the memoir’s release, and when she wrote her book, she used the pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall. Though she wanted to keep her identity hidden, she was determined to share her story. She writes in the book’s preface:
Writing this book has been like having a tumor removed from my brain. Naively, I thought I would carry my involvement in Ted’s arrest to the grave, but it wasn’t long after his conviction that reports, writers, and private investigators began showing up at my office and home, all with their own reason why I should tell them what really happened. I declined. I knew my decisions and motivations would never be understandable unless I told my own story from beginning to end.After finally cutting off communication with Bundy while he was in a Florida prison, Elizabeth went to Madrona Publishing, a small, local publisher in Seattle run by husband and wife team Dan and Sara Levant. As Sara remembers, it was Dan who first talked to Elizabeth about publishing the memoir.
Getty ImagesA wanted poster for Ted Bundy, who escaped from prison multiple times while he awaited trial for kidnapping and murder.
“He was quite surprised,” Sara says about Dan, who died in 2012. “He certainly thought it was salable and a good idea, because Ted Bundy started [his crime spree] here. [Our daughter] Maria remembers that shortly after Dan signed up Elizabeth for the book, he commented that wow, she had the long hair that seemed to be exactly what Bundy was stalking.”
Elizabeth had a portion of her manuscript completed with she brought it to Madrona, and then Sara worked with her on edits. “Elizabeth was pleasant, though not polished, small-town college educated, and her use of ‘should of’ for ‘should have,’ made me cringe, which I still remember," says Sara, who was the one who went to the Seattle courthouse to confirm that Elizabeth and Bundy had, in fact, applied for a marriage license, as she details in the memoir.
Courtesy of Sara LevantDan and Sara Levant (with their children Maria and David) ran the small Seattle-based publishing house Madrona Publishers, which published Elizabeth’s memoir.
Sara doesn’t recall Elizabeth having any hesitations about telling her story, though in the book’s preface, Elizabeth recounts being confronted by someone who read her manuscript. She found the incident disturbing. “You’re asking people to feel sorry for you,” the person said. “My God, people died! You’re one of the lucky ones—you lived!”
Elizabeth writes: “I want to answer that. Never did I forget that real women had been murdered for no other reason than they were attractive and friendly. The hideous reality of their deaths became my reality, too. Their tragedy was my trauma. For a long time I lived with the guilt of wondering if Ted saw me in these women, if killing them was a sick, compulsive effort to kill something he hated in me.”
After the book was published in 1981, Elizabeth didn’t do press for fear of revealing her identity. According to Sara, the book sold modestly well. Sara says she and Dan were surprised by how little attention the book got, considering what a significant story Bundy was at that time, as he awaited the death penalty after his much-publicized trial, which was one of the first to be televised.
NetflixElizabeth was 24 years old when she met Bundy.
In 1988, the Levants closed Madrona, selling off the rights to the books. The Phantom Prince’s colophon—the page in a book that lists all the publisher and copyright information—lists Elizabeth Kendall as the copyright holder as of 1981. The memoir went out of print when Madrona shuttered, and Elizabeth continued to stay out of the public eye—until last year.
Screenwriter Michael Werwie learned about Elizabeth’s book nearly a decade ago while he was researching a new project. “The Phantom Prince is referenced in several books about Ted Bundy so it became one of many that I read during my initial research period around 2010, 2011,” Werwie tells me in an email. “I found several copies available in nearby libraries.”
Werwie’s script for Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, based on Elizabeth’s book, earned him a spot on the prestigous Black List in 2012, a compilation of the best unproduced screenplays. Then it made its way to Joe Berlinger, the filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated film Paradise Lost.
“I was sent the finished script, loved it, and then read the memoir and loved that as well,” says Berlinger, who also made the Netflix docu-series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, released earlier this year.
Brian Douglas//NetflixEfron and Collins film a scene depicted in Elizabeth’s book, in which she visits Bundy in prison.
Once a director, cast and financing were lined up for the project, the film’s producers were in contact with Elizabeth about getting her permission to proceed with the project.
“She was very ambivalent,” Berlinger says. “I think that's why the book continues to be out of print. She does not want the spotlight. For example, she didn't want to come to Sundance. She doesn't want to participate in the press. She wants to remain anonymous. She trusted us with her story. She agreed to do the movie, obviously, so it's not being done without her cooperation.”
After agreeing to let Berlinger move forward with the film, Elizabeth met with Lily Collins, the actress cast to play her in the film. “She was willing and passionate about meeting me—her and her daughter, too,” Collins told E! News.
Getty ImagesBundy waves to the TV cameras after he’s indicted for the murders of two Florida State University students.
During the meeting, Elizabeth shared with Berlinger and Collins old photographs of her, her young daughter, and Bundy, as well as love letters written on a yellow legal pad he’d sent her through the years. In her memoir, Elizabeth describes one written by Bundy after his escape from an Aspen prison: “I feel you there, looking over my shoulder, a very powerful force in my life. Even though it is winter in my life; I still need you.”
“You thumb through these photos and it's just this happy family unit. Birthday parties, skiing, camping trips, pony rides, and yet that man in that happy family unit is Ted Bundy,” Berlinger says. “It gave us the chills.”
The film, which follows the narrative of Elizabeth’s book pretty closely with a few notable exceptions, including Elizabeth finding clues that linked Bundy to the crimes before his first arrest, premiered at the Cannes and Sundance film festivals in 2018. In the film’s press materials, Elizabeth is referred to by the name Elizabeth Kloepfer—instead of her book pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall. The surname Kloepfer is consistent with a 2017 press report in which an old friend of Elizabeth’s named Marylynne Chino spoke to a local Utah news station about her best friend Elizabeth’s relationship with Bundy —Chino's description of Elizabeth Kloepfer matches the one in the memoir—down to the Seattle bar in which Elizabeth meets Bundy. (In the book, Elizabeth says she was with a friend the night she met Bundy at Sandpiper Tavern but uses the name Angie for the friend.) Chino did not respond to a request for comment, and, through a Netflix rep, Elizabeth declined to comment for this piece.
Though Berlinger referred to Elizabeth’s surname as Kloepfer when I spoke with him, the press materials Netflix is circulating for the movie now refer to Elizabeth’s surname as Kendall, and Collins’ character is listed as Liz Kendall in the movie’s credits.
Brian Douglas//Netflix"Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" producer Joe Berlinger with Efron in character as Bundy.
“I can only be 90 percent sure that Kloepfer was her name,” says Levant, who didn’t know a movie was being made based on the book she edited and published until I reached out earlier this month. “My 99 percent recollection is that Elizabeth didn’t want people to know about that part of her life.”
After the film festivals, Netflix bought the film for a reported $9 million. When it premieres Friday, May 3, interest in Elizabeth and her story will surely surge. In fact, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association says an editor from a major trade press had been in touch recently looking for information on My Phantom Prince. But those hoping to read the book will be out of luck. As of this week, used copies are being sold for as much as $2,000 on Amazon, and, according to Berlinger, Elizabeth has no intention to release it again—at least not yet.
The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy
“I told her she should republish the book. I think a lot of people would be fascinated to read it,” Berlinger says. “She may republish it. She hasn't decided, but she's certainly not doing it in time for the movie.
“I think she has a lot of ambivalence. Look, it's a painful experience for her and she's put it behind her."
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