On a sun-drenched Sunday, July 14, 1974, 18-year-old Denise Marie Naslund, a female who was studying to become a computer programmer, was enjoying the day with her boyfriend and another couple at Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah, Washington. The park was bustling with people, with an estimated 40,000 visitors, many attending a large company picnic. At some point in the afternoon, Denise left her friends to go to the restroom and was never seen again.
Her disappearance was not immediately connected to another woman who had vanished from the very same park just four hours earlier.
Earlier that day, several young women at the park had been approached by a charming and handsome man who called himself "Ted". He wore his arm in a sling and asked for assistance in loading a sailboat onto his tan or bronze-colored Volkswagen Beetle. While most women refused his request, his ruse eventually worked. The first victim that day was 23-year-old Janice Ann Ott. Later, he approached Denise. Known for her kind and helpful nature, friends and family believed she would have been the type of person to help someone who appeared to be injured.
For nearly two months, the fate of Denise and Janice remained a mystery, intensifying a growing fear in the region as several other young women had recently disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The break in the case came on September 6, 1974, when two grouse hunters stumbled upon skeletal human remains on a remote hillside near a service road in Issaquah, just a couple of miles from the park where the women had vanished. Investigators soon confirmed the remains belonged to Denise Naslund and Janice Ott. Alongside their remains, parts of a third body were discovered, which were later identified as belonging to another missing woman, Georgann Hawkins. Due to the condition of the remains, a definitive cause of death for Denise could not be established, but her death was ruled a homicide.
The investigation into the string of disappearances eventually led police to a clean-cut law student named Theodore Robert Bundy. Though he was identified as a potential suspect early on by several people who knew him, he was initially dismissed as an unlikely perpetrator. Bundy was first arrested in 1975. After a series of escapes and further horrific crimes in other states, he was eventually apprehended for the final time in Florida. Shortly before his execution by electric chair on January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy confessed to the murders of dozens of women, including Denise Marie Naslund. He told investigators that after abducting both women from Lake Sammamish, he had murdered one in front of the other.
