Was Debbie Harry almost kidnapped by Ted Bundy?
People keep talking about how “New York City ain’t what it used to be” like that’s a bad thing.
Now, to be clear, I know I’m being hyperbolic here. The New York City people fondly reminisce about pre 9/11 is one when people could afford to live in. Where the majority of its natives weren’t being gouged out of their own homes by gentrifiers and landlords seeking to make a quick buck by uprooting people who’ve spent their whole lives in the five boroughs. That’s what they’re referring to when they talk about “Old New York” with a dewy-eyed nostalgia.
The problem is that all that dew in your eyes prevents you from seeing clearly. Yes, New York City was more down-to-earth back in the day. It had more soul, more real people, rather than privileged yuppies ruining everything. However, it is also worth bearing in mind that for years, New York City was rough as fuck. The people who look back on those dirty streets and scummy back alleys with rose-tinted glasses probably weren’t the people who had to walk through them with a set of keys clenched between their fingers.
It’s true, the Big Apple was a very dangerous place, and there’s a host of examples proving this. Among the most chilling is one that Blondie frontwoman Debbie Harry talked about in her memoirs, Face It, where she claims to have narrowly escaped from one of the most notorious serial killers in American history on the streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
Did Debbie Harry escape from Ted Bundy?
Late one summer night in the early 1970s, Debbie Harry was making her way to a club across town and trying to hail a cab. A man in a white car spotted her and offered her a lift. Sensible girl that she was, Harry refused. However, it was the early hours of the morning and there were no cabs around. Feeling like she had no other choice, Harry hopped in and almost immediately realised her mistake. The inside of the car was rancid and boiling hot.
She turned to roll down the window and realised that the door on the passenger’s side of the car had been stripped completely bare. There was no window crank and, terrifyingly, no door handle. In an interview with The Telegraph, she detailed what she did next, saying, “The hairs on the back of my neck just stood up. I wiggled my arm out of the window and pulled the door handle from the outside. I don’t know how I did it, but I got out. He tried to stop me by spinning the car but it sort of helped me fling myself out.”
When Bundy was executed over a decade later, Harry saw his photo in the papers. She swore blind that it was the man she had escaped from that fateful night in New York City.
She swore this despite the fact that there’s actually reason to believe it wasn’t Bundy. There’s no evidence that he ever operated in New York. He did drive a white car, but never altered the insides. His method of ensnaring victims was very different, and the first credited Bundy murder wasn’t until 1974, while Harry’s story happened years before then.
Was Harry’s attacker actually Ted Bundy? Possibly, but the true terror of this story is the fact that a maniac trying to abduct Debbie Harry in the early 1970s doesn’t really narrow the list of possible perpetrators down all that much. The man responsible for it doesn’t have to be someone we know the name of today. It could have been anyone on the streets of New York City.