After the trials, after he was convicted of several unthinkable crimes—including the murders of 30 women—Ted Bundy was locked away in a Florida prison, where he sent one final letter to the family he nearly ruined.
According to Amazon’s documentary series, Ted Bundy: Falling for a Killer, which is available to stream today, the note was addressed to Elizabeth Kendall (a pseudonym), the woman he dated from 1969 to 1974. But her daughter, Molly Kendall, got to it first. In the letter, she says in the documentary, Bundy wrote that he’d found God—a startling intuition, considering her mother was also focusing on her spirituality at the time.
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“It was like this person over thousands of miles would intuit what she wanted to hear,” Molly Kendall says. “And there was no way I was going to let him have that hook into her again. There was no way. I put it in the fireplace and I set it on fire. And I never mentioned that it arrived.”
Falling for a Killer focuses on the perspectives of Molly and her mother Elizabeth Kendall (who wrote the memoir, The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy, that became the Zac Efron-led film Extremely Wicked and Shockingly Evil,) as well as the families of Bundy’s victims. Over five episodes, director Trish Wood expertly and humanely allows the Kendall family, and the other families he devastated, tell their side of the story.
Amongst the documentary’s many revelations—which is saying a lot, considering how many Ted Bundy-related movies and documentaries that have been produced in the past few years—is Molly Kendall’s story. We briefly learned of her time with Bundy when she wrote an additional chapter for her mother’s book in 2019, but nothing to this extent. In the series, she’s startlingly and bravely honest, admitting to having loved Bundy, the man who taught her how to ride a bike, before she learned of his crimes (Bundy also had a biological daughter who has never been identified).
Who is Molly Kendall, and when did she first meet Ted Bundy?
Molly Kendall met Bundy shortly after her mother did, in 1969 when Elizabeth met him at a bar—Molly was only three years old at the time. Bundy became somewhat of a father figure to Molly, just before he began committing the crimes that would rattle an entire country. She first remembers him reading her favorite children’s book, Teddy Bear from Pumpkin Hollow, and later, teaching her how to ditch training wheels and ride a bike.
“He gave you his entire self,” Molly Kendall says in the documentary. “We were like a family, that’s what I remember.”
The pseudo-family—Elizabeth, Molly, and Ted—had, according to Elizabeth, a happy few years without much incident. But as reports of the murders of several young women in the Pacific Northwest circulated in the news, and police drawings of the killer startlingly resembled Bundy, he began acting abnormally with the Kendalls.
“I remember we were playing hide and go seek is how this started,” Molly says. “He had hid under a blanket and I came out to the living room, and I pulled the blanket off him, and I say in shock, you’re naked. And he’s like, yeah, it’s because I can turn invisible but my clothes can’t. And I didn’t want you to see me."
Molly says that things “devolved” from there. After Bundy was jailed for the first time in 1975 for aggravated kidnapping and attempted assault—and this was before Bundy was fully linked to and convicted of the murders—Elizabeth and Molly had to seriously reckon with the increasing likelihood that Bundy was the monster we know him as today.
“It’s just like, where do you get disbelief at that point? I couldn’t find it, and I loved him very much… At that time, yes I loved him very much,” she says.
The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, Updated and Expanded Edition
What does Kendall reveal about herself and her family’s relationship with Bundy in Amazon’s documentary?
Molly Kendall remembers the exact moment one part of her life ended, and the other began—the time of her life when she’d have to reckon with the knowledge that her one-time father figure was a serial killer.
“I remember my mom picked me up at my friend’s house and took me to this nearby park and told me now he was being suspected of attempted kidnapping,” Molly says. “And that mystified me too—it just made no sense. And I had such grief about it. It was so terrible to see him accused of these things. And I thought it was a terrible mistake.”
Bundy would laugh it off when Molly asked if he actually murdered those women. In Falling for a Killer, she admits, through tears, how long it took her to grapple with what all of this meant to her—at one point in her life, even trying to drink her way through it.
“It took me a long time to take it in—what that means to me,” she says. “I mean it was hurtful in the same way that every single murder that he committed, every single attack he carried out, was hurtful to me. This girl could be my twin. We were the same. And I really grappled with, does this have anything to do with me? And that’s devastating.”
Near the end of Falling for a Killer, we see Molly and Elizabeth Kendall sit next to each other for the first time, mother and daughter, survivors of a deadly man and unthinkable circumstances. The Kendalls talk about the letter Molly burned. Elizabeth was upset when she learned that a final correspondence existed—but Molly, fighting to protect her mother, says destroying the letter was for the best.
“I wasn’t sorry,” Molly Kendall says. “I’m not sorry at all. And I’m especially not sorry that he went to his death wondering why she never wrote back. Good. Maybe she’s done with you.”
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