Kathy Kleiner
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Kathy Kleiner was 20 when Ted Bundy snuck into her room at the Chi Omega sorority house of Florida State University on Jan. 15, 1978 and attacked her.
Kleiner, now 61, is one of five known victims to survive Bundy — but being attacked by Bundy is one of the many hardships she has faced throughout her life. The 4’11½” Florida native has also suffered from lupus, had two miscarriages, survived breast cancer and lived through Hurricane Katrina.
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Kleiner shared with The News how she pushed through the many challenges life has thrown at her — and that she’s ready for whatever may come next.
“There might be something more out there for me,” Kleiner said. “But I always used to say: You’ve gotta keep running. Because you don’t know when God’s gonna put another hurdle in front of you – and I sure am not gonna slam that hurdle. I’m not running into it, I’m jumping it.”
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Born to a Cuban mother and English father in Miami, Kleiner’s father died when she was 5, marking the first of many difficulties she would face over her lifetime. She was then adopted by her stepfather at the age of 7.
At the end of 6th grade when she was 13, Kleiner was diagnosed with systemic Lupus erythematosus — an aggressive form of the disease that can attack the organs instead of just the bloodstream. Kleiner was hospitalized for three months and told she had a year to live. A Cuban doctor gave Kleiner an experimental dose of chemotherapy, which caused her to lose her hair but immensely improved her lupus.
She was home schooled until 7th grade and was bound to her house because of a weakened immune system from the chemotherapy. Finally, her mother allowed her leave the house to go to church, and she was happy.
Two weeks later, she developed shingles, which left scars on the left side of her face. Nevertheless, Kleiner pushed on, and in high school, fell in love with theater.
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She graduated high school in Ft. Lauderdale in 1976, and began college at Florida State University in Tallahassee that fall. She pledged to the university’s Chi Omega Sorority house, was initiated as a sister and moved into the sorority house in 1977.
As a carefree college student, Kleiner had never heard of Bundy before he snuck into her room. She woke in the middle of the night when someone opened the door to her room, which she shared with her sorority sister, 21-year-old Karen Chandler.
In this April 26, 1979, file photo, Ted Bundy leans back in his chair in the courtroom before his trial in Tallahassee, Fla. One of the most notorious serial killers in American history, Bundy is believed to have killed at least 30 young women across the U.S. in the 1970s. (Mark Foley / AP)
Kleiner, lying on her left side, heard someone stumbling over her and saw a silhouetted figure next to her bed — Bundy, who had escaped prison just two weeks prior on Dec. 31, 1977.
Before he got to her room, Bundy beat, strangled, and killed Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy.
She saw a figure looming over her bed, but could not distinguish who it was because the room was dark.
“Just as I was really looking with my eyes awake, he strikes me in the face with his log, and it was so hard it made like a thud, a heavy thud against my face,” Kleiner said.
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“[The blow] shattered my jaw. I bit my tongue almost in half and the blow when he hit me — it actually cut my cheek by my mouth so that it flapped open, almost to my ear. So it was just like this big hole in my cheek, which I guess helped to shatter my jaw more at the time.”
Kleiner laid in bed, and Bundy struck her again. Bundy — who seldom left witnesses alive — heard Kleiner’s roomate stir in her sleep, and moved on to attack Chandler with the same piece of wood as he tumbled over a trunk on the floor.
“At that point he heard me again, and Karen had passed out — so maybe he thought she was dead. I don’t know, but Ted didn’t leave any witnesses alive. All his victims, he killed. So he came back to my side of the bed to go ahead and hit me enough until I died.”
Kleiner would not have the same fate as the 36 — and possibly dozens more — victims Bundy killed, however.
The bedroom faced the back of the house, and a light from the back parking lot — which Kleiner suspects from a car — shone through the window. Kleiner believes this light scared Bundy away, as he thought either the girls or the car saw him. So he ran out of the room.
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“I remember sitting in the bed touching my face because now instead of the thud, it was just pins and needles and knives. It really started hurting. And I remember grabbing my face, I sat up in bed, I put my hands on my face, it just hurt so bad and I remember there was sticky stuff all over my hands and I didn’t realize it was my blood that was flowing out of my cheek and my mouth.”
Chandler regained consciousness and left the room to seek help. Kleiner sat in her bed, rocking and holding her face.
“I remember in my head, I was screaming… ‘Help, help, help me,’ — and really all I was doing was making just noise, because I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t scream these things I thought I was saying,” Kleiner said.
Kathy Kleiner is pictured here in her Chi Omega sorority yearbook. (Courtesy of Kathy Kleiner)
Kleiner’s jaw was broken in three places from the attack, and in addition to her cheek being torn open, she had a number of cuts and her shoulder was fractured.
For weeks and weeks, Kleiner said, no one knew Bundy was the attacker. Kleiner left the university and returned home to recover in Miami.
After the attack, Kleiner’s jaw was wired shut. When she returned to Miami, an oral surgeon discovered it was not aligned correctly — and he had to rebreak her jaw and place pins in it and wire the bones around her chin to help it heal correctly.
She has had a number of surgeries on her jaw since the attack, the last which was two years ago.
Despite attempts to call her Chi Omega sorority sisters after the incident, no one returned her calls, Klener said. To this day, she has not been contacted by the sorority.
Kleiner had a fear of men after being attacked — and decided to take a job as a cashier at a lumberyard to overcome that fear.
“I figured that’s where I’m going to see the most men I don’t know in a quick amount of time,” Kleiner said with a laugh.
In June 1978, Kleiner was married to her first husband, David Deshields.
Next, Kleiner took a job at a bank as a teller — where she would face another traumatic experience.
One day while she was working at the bank, she was robbed at gunpoint. A coworker called the police and the robber bolted. After a shootout, he was taken into police custody and Kleiner later identified him from a police lineup.
She returned to work the next day.
Shortly after being robbed, Kleiner knew the fear she would conquer next: hospitals. Because she was hospitalized as a child with lupus and later, after Bundy attacked her, she couldn’t set foot in hospitals out of fear and would merely sit on the bench outside.
To overcome that anxiety, she took a job at a hospital where she ended up working for nearly two decades.
In 1981, despite being told she would have difficulty becoming pregnant because of lupus, Kleiner became pregnant and gave birth to her son, Michael.
In this Jan. 15, 1978 file photo, an unidentified woman peers through drapes on the second story balcony of the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla. Two sorority sisters, Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, were brutally beaten to death by Bundy.
Kleiner and her husband divorced, and she became a single mother for eight years until she married her high school friend, Scott Rubin, in 1989 — the same year Bundy would finally be executed.
Kleiner recalled the first time she saw Bundy after the attack when the grand jury was called before trial. Prosecution was on one side of the table, defense on the other. Bundy sat at the head of the table.
“I sat there and I looked at him, and he had his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands, and he looked at me. I just sat in a chair, straight up, and looked at him. And we stared each other down,” Kleiner said.
Kleiner answered questions as she was asked them, and kept her eyes on him, making sure he knew he could not “take anything away” from her.
“He tried. He tried to kill me. But now I was in control, and he’s the one that was gonna be the victim — and that gave me so much internal power that afterwards,” she said.
She recalled feeling like she was going to vomit after she left the building.
During Bundy’s trial in Miami, Kleiner was called again as witness and answered questions from the prosecution — until they asked one she could not definitively answer.
“Is this the man you saw in your room that night?” the prosecution asked Kleiner.
“And because the room was so dark, he had dark clothes and a knit hat on, I could not say I saw his face, I could not say ‘Yes that’s the man in my room.” And that killed me inside. And once they asked that, they said ‘No more questions,’” Kleiner said.
She choked back tears, recalling a feeling of guilt that she didn’t help put her attacker in jail.
“I didn’t help. I didn’t help enough to put this animal away. He was sitting there at the table, just looking at me, and I looked at him. As things were progressing and I knew he was getting further and further getting into jail… It was just — that was cool. I just looked him down.”
“You just turned everyone’s life into hell and it’s your turn now,” Kleiner thought to Bundy. “And that was just empowering. And I didn’t want him to think he had any power over me at all.”
The verdict was announced that Bundy was serving life in jail until his execution — which she could not wait to be over.
Bundy kept asking for stays of execution — delays as he kept attempting to put off his execution.
“I know [the judges] were doing their job, but in my little spot of the world, that was just hideous to me — that he got so many and was allowed to keep going... when his victims all had that one night with him,” Kleiner said.
Jan. 24, 1989. Kleiner got a call that Bundy would not receive another stay. He would be executed that morning. Kleiner sent her 8-year-old son to her mother’s house because she did not know how she would react to the events.
Florida State University's Chi Phi fraternity celebrates the execution of Ted Bundy in 1989 with a large banner that says, "Watch Ted Fry, See Ted Die!" as they prepare for an evening cookout where they will serve "Bundy burgers" and "electrified hot dogs."
She sat in her apartment with Rubin — who she would marry later that year — when she got the call before the media was alerted that he had been executed and was dead.
“I remember sitting on the sofa and just crying and crying. And I just — I thought of Lisa and Margaret and all the other women and how their lives ended,” Kleiner said.
“And how he was dead and he wasn’t going to do this anymore, and I cried… all of it out of me, and I got a deep breath and I looked at Scott, and I said, ‘You know what, I’m hungry. Let’s go to breakfast.”
Kleiner and Rubin did just that, and ended up going shopping. They later came home and went to the pool.
“It was a normal day after that. I got Bundy and everything else out of my system and said, ‘Woo, let’s keep going.’”
Five years later, Kleiner was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer. She would have a radical left mastectomy, endure nine rounds of chemotherapy, and four other related surgeries.
“Every time I had chemo, I said I had one more to go through,” Kleiner said.
Rather than thinking about the total she had ahead, she would think she had just one more round of chemotherapy to go through.
A year later, she suffered two miscarriages two months apart — until she decided to try stop having children and got a new “baby.”
“We got a boat and called her Sally, and that was our new baby,” Kleiner said. “That was a new thing to look forward to.”
She found a love for sailing with her husband.
In 2005, Kleiner was faced with another tragedy — but this time, she was one of millions affected.
Hurricane Katrina forced her and her husband to leave their house in New Orleans with their three dogs in their rag-top Jeep Wrangler in August. Luckily, their house was not damaged when they returned in October— but they lived for months without electricity, and they lost friends in the storm.
“You don’t expect to hear that — to lose someone in a storm and hear their body was just floating in the water,” Kleiner said.
This tragedy affected her differently than the others she has faced throughout her life.
“It’s hard to get over that one, because it wasn’t just me. So many people were affected by it,” she said.
Despite facing tragedies that are unimaginable for many to endure in one lifetime, Kleiner faces each new day bravely.
“All my life it’s like, ‘OK, I’ve done this. OK,’ I think, ‘I can do this.’ And that’s in my own mind, I know a lot of people who can’t get through this.”
She hopes others can find the strength within themselves to overcome challenges they face in their own lives.
“Have a happy spot in your head and have a dream,” Kleiner said. “Not a big dream. Just like ‘I’m gonna cross the street today.’ Whatever it is, have a dream that you can reach — and set another one.”
She told others to persist, no matter how difficult things may seem.
“My other thing is, as you see the big picture of the scary thing that you’ve gone through, if you take one step further, just take one little step, that means whatever you’re going through is one step behind you.”
“And keep taking those baby steps as long as it takes until whatever’s behind you is further behind and you’re going forward. And me, that’s a lot how I visualize things.”
