Was Blondie’s Debbie Harry really abducted by Ted Bundy?
There are several urban myths surrounding the lives of famous musicians. Take, for instance, the claims that Keith Richards snorted his father’s remains or that the first Kiss comic book is infused with the band members’ blood. There is also the claim that Debbie Harry of Blondie was once abducted by the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.
Of the subject, Harry once explained: “I was trying to get a cab on the lower east side of the Village in New York, and it was kind of late. This was back in the early 1970s. I wasn’t even in a band then. I was trying to get across town to an after-hours club. A little white car pulls up, and the guy offers me a ride. So I just continued to try to flag a cab down. But he was very persistent, and he asked where I was going. It was only a couple of blocks away, and he said, ‘Well, I’ll give you a ride.'”
She added: “I got in the car, and it was summertime, and the windows were all rolled up except about an inch and a half at the top. So I was sitting there, and he wasn’t really talking to me. Automatically, I sort of reached to roll down the window and realized there was no door handle, no window crank, no nothing. The inside of the car was totally stripped out.”
Regardless of the mysterious person, it must have been a frightening experience for a young Harry. Getting into a car with a stranger who had no escape route immediately spells out trouble. Upon reflection, in later years, Harry felt adamant that the man was Bundy. She continued: “I got very nervous. I reached my arm out through the little crack and stretched down, and opened the car from the outside. As soon as he saw that, he tried to turn the corner really fast, and I spun out of the car and landed in the middle of the street.”
Detailing the incident further, Harry added: “It was right after his execution that I read about him. I hadn’t thought about that incident in years. The whole description of how he operated and what he looked like and the kind of car he drove and the time frame he was doing that in that area of the country fit exactly. I said, ‘My God, it was him.'”
However, many people have argued that Harry’s account does not match up with the other reports of Bundy’s whereabouts. Bundy was not known to have been in New York City in the early 1970s, nor was he said to have started abducting women until 1974. The fact that Harry says she wasn’t in a band at the time suggests that her story took place no later than 1973, a time in which she joined the Stilettos.
Bundy was also not known to have driven a “stripped out” vehicle without door handles and window levers. During the killing sprees in Salt Lake City and Seattle, Bundy was said to drive a normal-seeming Volkswagen Beetle. However, Harry still believes that the man who gave her the lift was Bundy. She said: “I’ve been debunked, actually, by those people that debunk you, or whatever. They say he wasn’t in New York at that time, but I think they’re really wrong because he had escaped and was travelling down the East Coast. I think that nobody has ever really investigated that. I didn’t know until later who it was. It was pretty scary.”
