Meet Carole Ann Boone, The Woman Who Fell In Love With Ted Bundy And Had His Child While He Was On Death Row

Published September 15, 2023
Updated March 13, 2024

Carole Ann Boone met serial killer Ted Bundy in Washington in 1974 and became his wife six years later, while he was on trial for murder in Florida.

Ted Bundy remains one of American history’s most infamous serial killers. His expertly masked sociopathy helped him murder more than 30 women across seven states in the 1970s, but also to earn the affections of a young divorcee named Carole Ann Boone. Not only did Boone become Ted Bundy’s wife while he was on trial, but she even gave birth to their daughter Rose while he was on death row.

Carole Ann Boone Ted Bundy Wife

Netflix, Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy TapesCarole Ann Boone, Ted Bundy’s wife, at his trial in 1980.

Carole Ann Boone and Ted Bundy conceived their child while he was locked up and acting as his own defense attorney for the murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. The lovers carried on their relationship until finally divorcing three years before his death by electric chair on January 24, 1989.

This is the story of Carole Ann Boone, Ted Bundy’s wife and the mother of his child.

Carole Ann Boone And Ted Bundy's Daughter Rose

NetflixCarole Ann Boone, Rose Bundy, and Ted Bundy.

Carole Ann Boone Meets Ted Bundy

Carole Ann Boone’s fascinating entanglement with the killer began in 1974 — long before she became Ted Bundy’s wife — as a harmless office relationship in the Department of Emergency Services in Olympia, Washington.

According to Stephen G. Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth’s The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy, Boone was a “lusty-tempered free spirit” who was going through her second divorce when she met Ted. Though both were still in relationships when they met, Bundy expressed a desire to date her — which Boone refused at first in favor of a platonic friendship she began to cherish dearly.

“I guess I was closer to him than other people at the agency,” said Boone. “I liked Ted immediately. We hit it off well.” She didn’t know that Bundy was already kidnapping, raping and murdering young women.

Ted Bundy Trial

Bettmann/Getty ImagesTed Bundy on the third day of jury selection at the Orlando trial for the murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, 1980.

While it would appear strange for someone to take so quickly and affectionately to a mass-murdering criminal like Ted Bundy, it’s important to keep his sociopathic charm in mind. Bundy kept the women in his life — those he didn’t kill — at a distance, as to not blur the lines between his nightly bloodlust and his friendly daytime persona during work hours.

As with Elizabeth Kendall, Bundy’s prior girlfriend of seven years for which he served as a de facto father figure to her daughter, his qualities as a potential partner seemed to stem from a mysterious allure. Women felt that there was something substantive to him that was unspoken. But that this mystique was rooted in killing and mental distress, of course, wasn’t obvious at the time.

“He struck me as a rather shy person with a lot more going on under the surface than what was on the surface,” Boone explained. “He certainly was more dignified and restrained than the more certifiable types around the office. He would participate in the silliness parkway. But remember, he was a Republican.”

Bundy was vehemently opposed to the hippie and anti-Vietnam movements of the time and appeared socially conservative in contrast to many of his peers. Perhaps this, an image of respectability and stoic manliness, was a fair portion of what drew Carole Ann Boone into his life.

Ted Bundy's Volkswagen Bug

Wikimedia CommonsTed Bundy’s infamous Volkswagen Beetle at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, D.C.

In 1975, Ted Bundy was arrested in Utah when police found pantyhose, a ski mask, handcuffs, an ice pick, and a crowbar in his iconographic Volkswagen Beetle. He was ultimately convicted of the kidnap and assault of a 12-year-old girl.

Nonetheless, Carole Ann Boone and Ted Bundy’s relationship slowly grew stronger. The two exchanged letters and Boone visited the state for seven days to see him. Carole Ann Boone wasn’t yet Ted Bundy’s wife, but they were getting closer and closer as time went by.

Two years later, Bundy was extradited to Colorado to finish his 15-year sentence. With the help of money smuggled in by Boone, Bundy concocted an impressive prison escape. He then fled to Florida where he committed the two most significant acts on his criminal record — the murder of Chi Omega sorority girls Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, and the kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Kimberly Leach. Ever loyal to her friend Ted, Boone moved to Florida to attend the trial.

A Relationship Blooms Between Boone And Bundy

Nita Neary Testifying At Ted Bundy Trial

Bettmann/Getty ImagesNita Neary goes over a diagram of the Chi Omega sorority house in the Ted Bundy murder trial, 1979.

Carole Ann Boone seemed unwavering in her loyalty to Ted Bundy. “Let me put it this way, I don’t think that Ted belongs in jail,” said Boone in a news clip employed in the Netflix documentary. “The things in Florida don’t concern me any more than the things out west do.”

When asked if she believed the murder charges were “trumped up,” she smiled and gave the reporter an either misinformed or purposefully disagreeable response.

“I don’t think they have reason to charge Ted Bundy with murder in either Leon County or Columbia County,” said Boone. Her convictions in that sense were so strong that she decided to move to Gainesville, about 40 miles from the prison, and began to visit Ted on a weekly basis. She’d bring her son, Jayme, along.

Carole Ann Boone

Serial Killer ShopCarole Ann Boone and Ted Bundy with their daughter, Rose Bundy.

It was during Bundy’s trial that he expressed the relationship between the two had become a “more serious, romantic thing” in recent years. “They were crazy together. Carole loved him. She told him that she wanted a child and somehow they had sex in the prison,” wrote Michaud and Aynesworth in The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy.

The evidence, of course, was in Boone’s documented visits, which were often conjugal in nature. Though this wasn’t technically permitted, Boone explained that one of the guards was “real nice” and often turned a blind eye to their activities.

“After the first day they just, they didn’t care,” Carole Ann Boone is heard saying in the Netflix series. “They walked in on us a couple times.”

Ted Bundy In Court

Wikimedia CommonsTed Bundy in court, 1979.

Ann Rule, a former Seattle police officer who had met Bundy as a coworker at Seattle’s suicide hotline crisis center and wrote a definitive book on the killer, details how the bribing of guards in order to secure private time with visitors was not uncommon at the prison. It’s even believed that Boone would sneak in drugs by tucking them up her skirt. Michaud and Aynesworth explained that even less secretive methods of having sex in prison were largely successful and ignored by guards.

“Touching was permitted, and from time to time, intercourse was possible behind a water cooler, in the restroom, or sometimes at the table,” they wrote.

How Carole Ann Boone Became Ted Bundy’s Wife

Ultimately, Ted Bundy, the clever ex-law student that he was, figured a way to marry Carole Ann Boone while incarcerated. He found that an old Florida law stated that as long as a judge is present during a declaration of marriage in court, the intended transaction is legally valid.

According to Rule’s book The Stranger Beside Me, Bundy bungled the effort on his first try and had to rephrase his intentions differently the second time around.

Boone, meanwhile, made sure to contact a notary public to witness this second attempt and stamp their marriage license beforehand. Acting as his own defense attorney, Bundy called Boone to take the witness stand on Feb. 9, 1980. When asked to describe him, Boone classified him as “kind, warm and patient.”

“I’ve never seen anything in Ted that indicates any destructiveness towards any other people,” she said. “He’s a large part of my life. He is vital to me.”

Bundy then asked Carole Ann Boone, on the stand in the midst of his murder trial, to marry him. She agreed though the transaction wasn’t legitimate until Bundy added, “I do hereby marry you” and the pair had officially formed a union of marriage.

At this point, Bundy had already been sentenced to death for the sorority murders and was about to rack up another death sentence for the murder of Kimberly Leach. This trial did result in Bundy’s third death sentence and he would spend the next nine years on death row.

Only a few years before his inevitable execution in 1989 would Ted Bundy’s wife reconsider her marriage.

Carole Ann Boone Gives Birth To Ted Bundy’s Daughter, Rose Bundy

Margaret Bowman And Lisa Levye

Wikimedia CommonsChi Omega sorority girls Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman.

For the first few years of his time on death row, Carole Ann Boone and Ted Bundy remained close. It is believed that Carole Ann smuggled in drugs for him and their physical intimacy continued. Two years into his stint, the couple’s daughter, Rose Bundy, was born.

It is believed that Rose is the only biological child of Ted Bundy.

Carole Ann Boone And Ted Bundy

TwitterCarole Ann Boone and Ted Bundy with their daughter in the 1980s.

Four years later — three years before Ted Bundy’s execution by electric chair in 1989 — Boone divorced the infamous killer and allegedly did not see him again before he died.

What Happened To Ted Bundy’s Wife After His Execution?

Little is known about Carole Ann Boone’s life thereafter; she’s mostly remembered today simply as Ted Bundy’s wife. She moved out of Florida with her two children, Jayme and Rose, but has presumably maintained as low visibility to the media and frenzied public as possible.

Of course, that hasn’t prevented the efforts of curious internet detectives and their need to know what the infamous Ted Bundy’s wife is up to, and where she lives. Message boards are filled to the brim with theories and naturally, some are less convincing than others. One posits that Boone changed her name to Abigail Griffin and moved to Oklahoma. Others believe she married yet again and led a quiet, happy life.

Few details were grounded in fact until reports surfaced that Carole Ann Boone had been living quietly in Seattle before dying in a retirement home there at age 70 in January 2018.

Though little is known for certain about what happened to Carole Ann Boone after she ceased to be Ted Bundy’s wife, one thing is for certain: they had one of the most grimly fascinating marriages in modern history, a dark union that will likely remain puzzling forever.


After reading about Ted Bundy’s wife Carole Ann Boone, read up on Ted Bundy’s infamous car. Then, learn more about the victims that Ted Bundy killed.

author
Marco Margaritoff
author
A former staff writer for All That’s Interesting, Marco Margaritoff holds dual Bachelor's degrees from Pace University and a Master's in journalism from New York University. He has published work at People, VICE, Complex, and serves as a staff reporter at HuffPost.
editor
John Kuroski
editor
John Kuroski is the editorial director of All That's Interesting. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history, earning a place in the Phi Alpha Theta honor society for history students. An editor at All That's Interesting since 2015, his areas of interest include modern history and true crime.