Elizabeth Kloepfer Biography
Elizabeth Kloepfer is an American author, controversial personality and Administrative assistant from Ogden Utah, best known as Ted Bundy’s ex-partner. She was born in 1946, in the USA.
Ted was an infamous American serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, burglar and necrophile. Elizabeth used to work as a secretary at the University of Washington School of Medicine, where Ted attended school. She had a degree in Business & Family Life.
Elizabeth was divorced when she met Ted Bundy and had a daughter, Tina, from her previous marriage. Tina was 3 years old when her mother started dating Ted Bundy. The relationship moved very quickly, and that was partly because Elizabeth Kloepfer wanted a father figure for her three-year-old daughter.
In 1981, she wrote a book, The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy, detailing her turbulent, six-year relationship with the infamous serial killer, who had led a double life as a loving partner and a serial killer.
Elizabeth Kloepfer met Ted Bundy at a bar in Seattle, Washington on September 26, 1969. She describes herself in the book as a shy, insecure and lonely single mom, divorced, and struggling with alcoholism.
When she moved from Ogden, Utah to Seattle, it was mainly to try and change the course of her unhappy life. She desperately wanted to be loved and married, and have a father for her young daughter, Tina.
Elizabeth, a few years older than Ted, fell in love with him and she often loaned him cash to help with his schooling. Ted even gave her a rose every year on September 26, the anniversary of their meeting.
He became a father figure for Elizabeth’s daughter. They went camping, rafting, and sailing together.
One of the book’s most gripping accounts is when Ted called Elizabeth at 2 a.m. from his Florida prison. He confessed that he tried to stay away from her when he “felt the power of his sickness building in him,” but couldn’t resist his compulsion.
At one point in their stay together, Ted even tried to kill Elizabeth. He had closed the fireplace damper so the smoke couldn’t go up the chimney. He then put a towel in the door crack so the smoke would stay in the apartment. The two parted ways permanently, during the penalty phase of Ted’s murder trial.
The author was actually one of the people who reported her ex-husband as a possible suspect when she recognized his likeness in a police sketch in July 1974. She became even more suspicious of Ted once several women turned up murdered in Utah, where he had relocated.
So she called the police to report him twice–once in November and then again in December 1974. Elizabeth also told police that her ex-husband threatened to break her neck, and at times woke up to him looking at her body with a flashlight under the covers. Amazingly, after all this, she still let him live with her while he was awaiting trial.
When Ted finally admitted to the extent of his crimes, he told detectives that he burned a woman’s head in Elizabeth’s fireplace. He added that he had done a list of bad things to her but that was the least likely his wife would forgive him for.
Since their divorce, Elizabeth battled alcoholism, struggled to be close to people and relied on her faith to guide her through dark times. A movie about Ted’s crimes told from Elizabeth’s perspective, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2019. The film is titled Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. It is a biographical crime thriller film directed by Joe Berlinger.
The film is based on Elizabeth’s book, The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy. It stars Zac Efron as Bundy, Lily Collins as Elizabeth Kendall, Kaya Scodelario as Bundy’s wife Carole Ann Boone, and John Malkovich as Edward Cowart. Edward was the presiding judge at Bundy’s trial. The title of the film is a reference to Edward’s remarks on Bundy’s murders while sentencing him to death.
Elizabeth Kloepfer Age
Elizabeth was born and grew up in Ogden, Utah in the year 1946. As of 2019, her body defies her age as she is 73 years old but looks younger.
Elizabeth Kloepfer Extremely Wicked
In Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Elizabeth Kloepfer, played by Lily Collins, is a single mother living in Seattle in 1969, when she first meets Ted Bundy, played by Zac Efron, at a bar and begins dating him. He seems to be the perfect husband and father figure for her and her toddler daughter Tina, willing to cook dinner and help take care of her daughter.
We also see that Ted occasionally needs to borrow money from his wife. But when a frightening murder spree begins in 1974, and police start releasing details about the suspect—believed to be a handsome, well-dressed man named “Ted,” who drives a VW Beetle, Elizabeth becomes suspicious of her own Ted.
The film’s script, by Michael Werwie, is adapted from Elizabeth’s 1981 memoir The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy. But in order to fit her story into a roughly 100-minute film, there were elements of the real story that had to be discarded. For the full movie’s plot, see here.
It is a biographical crime thriller film directed by Joe Berlinger. The film is based on Elizabeth’s book, The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy. It stars Zac Efron as Bundy, Lily Collins as Elizabeth Kendall, Kaya Scodelario as Bundy’s wife Carole Ann Boone, and John Malkovich as Edward Cowart. Edward was the presiding judge at Bundy’s trial. The title of the film is a reference to Edward’s remarks on Bundy’s murders while sentencing him to death.
Elizabeth Kloepfer Now
Elizabeth is using a pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall and enjoying life out of Ted’s shadow. She has been living completely under the radar with her daughter, known best in Extremely Wicked as “Molly” and in Elizabeth’s book as “Tina.” An old audio interview of her speaking openly about Ted was used in Netflix’s documentary series titled Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.
Meanwhile, director Joe Berlinger of Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile, told Vanity Fair that Elizabeth showed him family photos of her time with Ted and even private letters he wrote her. Joe Berlinger said that Ted wrote them with such a force that, instead of them just being pen on paper, it was like his handwriting was deeply carved into the page.
The director says he sought Elizabeth’s permission before agreeing to make the film, and she hesitantly agreed. Elizabeth does not want the spotlight. For example, she didn’t want to go to Sundance. She trusted Joe with her story and agreed to do the movie. So it was not done without her cooperation. After Elizabeth published her book, she retreated from the public eye.
She has not given any new interviews since the book was released and sometimes uses different names, such as Liz Kendall. When asked about Elizabeth watching the movie, Joe said that he was not sure because it’s difficult. He, however, mentioned that within the filming process, Elizabeth came on set and was a positive light on-set. Elizabeth is very ambivalent because she doesn’t want attention to herself today.
Elizabeth Kloepfer Daughter
Elizabeth and Tina’s biological father were divorced by the time Kloepfer met Bundy in Seattle. According to Oxygen, the biological father was a convicted felon.
In Extremely Wicked, directed using Elizabeth’s aid, Ted, played by Zac Efron, showers Molly with affection, helping her cut her second birthday cake, preparing meals for her and her mother. He lovingly calls her “monkey” as she jumps into his arms for a hug. The imagery depicts a happy man living a serene life with his nuclear family.
Few people seem to know exactly how Tina feels about her experiences with her stepfather, Ted Bundy, for both the happy times and the horrifying. Elizabeth published her memoir in 1981 when Tina was just a teenager, and since then, both women have kept relatively low profiles, avoiding most conversations about Ted.
It’s not hard to comprehend why Tina might want to remain out of the spotlight. She was just a child when she lived with Ted and is now forever tied to him. Like all of his victims, she didn’t have a say in how he’d obstruct their lives or how he would distort their memories. Despite not speaking publicly, Tina and Elizabeth did share some of their memories with actress Lily Collins. Lily plays Elizabeth Kloepfer in Extremely Wicked.
For now, we can only hope Tina and Kloepfer are given the opportunity to continue living their lives as they want, even if that means we never hear their full stories on what it was really like to live with Ted Bundy.
Elizabeth Kloepfer Interview
Joe Berlinger had the rare chance of interviewing Elizabeth Kloepfer and her daughter Tina. He did this because of the movie he directed, Extremely evil, that was all about Elizabeth’s stay with serial killer Ted Bundy.
Elizabeth explained that she initially wanted to keep her involvement with Ted a secret but reporters, writers, and private investigators tracked her down. If she was going to tell her story, however, she wanted to do it on her own timing and terms. She added that in spite of all the destruction Ted had caused around himself, she still cared what happened to him. She has accepted that a part of her will always love a part of him.
Listen to her full audio interview with Robert Keppel below.
Elizabeth Kloepfer Pictures
Elizabeth Kloepfer And Carole Ann Boone
After divorcing Elizabeth, Ted Bundy got together with Washington State DES coworker Carole Ann Boone. They met in Olympia, Ted Bundy proposed in court in 1980 and they wedded while he was on trial for the murder of most women in different states. Carole married twice in her life but took divorce from both of them. She started dating Ted around 1974. Carole testified on Ted’s behalf during his trials as a character witness.
The two tied the knot in 1979. According to Ann Rule, best-known for “The Stranger Beside Me” (a book about the serial killer Ted Bundy) Carole had carefully laid out the marriage plan, and she succeeded.
She moved to Florida to be close to Ted, changing her name and generally avoiding the spotlight. In 1981, Ted and Carole Bundy got blessed with a daughter named Rose Bundy. They later divorced in 1986, and Ted was electrocuted in the Raiford electric chair on January 24, 1989. Before he died, he gave long, detailed confessions of his crimes, which reportedly left Carole devastated.
Photos of Ted, Carole Boone, and Rose can be found on the internet from the family’s visits with the serial killer ahead of his execution. It’s widely believed Ted confessed to Carole just before his death.
Elizabeth Kloepfer The Phantom Prince
This book by Elizabeth Kloepfer is available on online platforms like Amazon but you can always download its pdf or listen to its audio file.
Ted Bundy’s longtime love Elizabeth Kloepfer almost made it onto his list of victims one night, as she wrote in her book “Phantom Prince,” under the pen name Elizabeth Kendall. The book gives readers a rare quick look into the intimate relationship the two shared from 1969 until his final arrest for the mass murder of multiple women at a Florida sorority house in 1978.
They made love every time they got a chance and went window shopping together while strolling through the university district as the relationship between the couple began to grow. “It was a happy time,” she wrote. But there were also cracks in the relationship. Ted would often disappear for days at a time — sometimes admitting to being with other women —throughout the course of their relationship.
These disappearances and frequent arguments between the couple would leave Kloepfer, a self-described alcoholic, feeling self-conscious and insecure.
“One night we finally talked about our future and assured each other that we’d stay together,” Elizabeth wrote after Ted had decided to move to Utah to attend law school. “But even then, I suspected that we were saying these things to each other because neither of us was willing to face the truth: that Ted was bored with me; that I was socially inadequate for the political circles he traveled in; that he would soon be looking for someone new.”
She also detailed several incidents in the book where Bundy’s anger was on full display, including a rafting trip they made to the lake one July Saturday. To get the whole story and more featured in the book, read here.
Elizabeth Kloepfer And Lily Collins
Lilly Collins and Joe entered Bundy’s world through family photographs and legal-pad love letters Ted Bundy sent Elizabeth from prison. Lilly portrays Elizabeth in the film. It was her first time portraying a character based on a real-life person who is still alive. According to Newsweek, Joe Berlinger loved the idea of the two meeting up because it was a powerful opportunity for both of them, which solidified the direction of the film.
“One of the more memorable experiences I’ve had on any projects was that Lily Collins and I went to go meet with the real Liz during prep,” Joe explained. “For Lily, it was a really moving, incredible experience because she’s never met with the living person of a character she’s portrayed before.”
Besides Elizabeth Kloepfer, Joe and Lilly also got to interact with her daughter, Molly. Part of Joe’s biggest hope was to instill a sense of trust between Lilly, Elizabeth and himself. He said for Lilly, it was easy to form a quick bond with the real-life subject that inspired her character.