In the winter of 1975, a 23-year-old female nurse named Caryn Campbell was looking forward to a ski vacation in Snowmass Village, Colorado, with her fiancé and his children. On the evening of January 12th, after dinner at a restaurant near their lodge, the Wildwood Inn, Campbell decided to walk back to their room alone to get a magazine. She was never seen alive again.
Her sudden disappearance sparked a search, but the bitter cold and snow of the Rocky Mountains held her secrets for over a month.
On February 17, 1975, as the weather began to warm, a passing motorist discovered Campbell's nude and frozen body on a dirt road just outside the resort town. An autopsy revealed she had been brutally beaten to death with a blunt object, with distinctive grooved depressions on her skull. There were also indications that she had been tied up, raped, and strangled. Due to decomposition and animal predation, she was identified through her dental records the following day. Investigators believed she was likely killed shortly after she was abducted.
The investigation into Caryn Campbell's murder soon connected with a string of disappearances of other young women across multiple states, including Washington, Utah, and Idaho. The prime suspect in these cases was a man named Ted Bundy. Evidence began to mount against him in the Campbell case. Hair samples found in Bundy's Volkswagen matched Campbell's, as well as those of three other victims. Furthermore, the impressions on her skull were consistent with a crowbar found in Bundy's possession at the time of an earlier arrest. A Colorado ski country guide from the 1974-1975 season was also discovered among Bundy's belongings, with a small "x" marked next to the Wildwood Inn, the very place Campbell was last seen.
In October 1976, authorities in Colorado officially charged Ted Bundy with the murder of Caryn Campbell, and he was transferred to the Garfield County Jail in April 1977 to await trial. However, the legal proceedings were fraught with disruption. Acting as his own attorney, a move that granted him more freedom of movement within the courthouse, Bundy escaped in June 1977 by jumping from a second-story window of the law library. He was recaptured after six days. Six months later, in December 1977, he escaped from the Garfield County Jail again and fled to Florida, where he committed more murders. Following his final capture in February 1978, he was tried and convicted for his Florida crimes. Shortly before his execution, Bundy confessed to dozens of murders, including that of Caryn Campbell. He admitted to striking her with the crowbar and killing her in his car away from the inn. Due to his escape and subsequent convictions in Florida, Ted Bundy was never tried for the murder of Caryn Campbell in Colorado.
