SALT LAKE CITY — By many accounts, Ted Bundy was a rather unassuming man when he lived in Utah, and several of those who had run-ins with him could not believe what he was capable of doing.

Bundy, one of America’s more notorious serial killers, was executed in Florida on Jan. 24, 1989. His run of terror included the deaths of dozens, including several attacks throughout Utah in the mid-1970s — a time when he was living in the state and attending law school at the University of Utah.

Now, decades later, a trio of graduated University of Utah students are putting together a documentary to examine the lives of his victims and how a man who had a charm with him could be one of Utah’s most infamous criminals.

“Obviously Salt Lake was a playground of his, but it just seems that you talk to locals about Ted Bundy, you’re bound to hear a story or sometimes a connection with him,” said Celene Calderon, who is directing the documentary.

Sean McKenna and Tim Psarras, also U. alums, are producers for the project. The trio hopes to have the documentary ready for possible submission to the 2019 Sundance Festival.

Calderon planned on making a documentary regarding the subject in a few years but was encouraged to work on the project immediately by those at Sundance Film Festival, where she had volunteered and been in their documentary program the past few years. The documentary process is currently about a month in and several leads have been made since.

Of course, it’s a tedious process. Unlike other documentaries about Bundy, Calderon wants to focus on completely different aspects of Bundy’s crimes — the victims and also Bundy's personality.

“We want to talk to the victim’s families to get their side of what life was like before the situation, obviously during and now in the current state but equally so the people who did have great interactions with (Bundy) that did see him as a wonderful person and never saw this side of him. That’s what I want to hit on as well,” Calderon said. “For myself, my kind of journey on this is just really deciphering who was he really? You have your other serial killers like (Jeffrey) Dahmer and (John Wayne) Gacy and there are no real stories like that. That’s what makes Bundy so unique.”

That’s where there is the shift from other documentaries, McKenna said. The focus on those are mostly the crimes and skip through people’s positive social interactions with the man that really showed how two-faced he was. That said, the group would like to also focus on the victims who they believe are portrayed as nothing more than just names on Bundy’s list.

“We’re not trying to glamorize anything he did on any level. We’d like to give the families a platform to express their family’s situation throughout the process as well as being able to bring a fresh set of eyes to the situation itself,” McKenna said.

“We want to give (the families of the victims) a platform to really give them an opportunity to really tell them who their daughters were and they never got their justice,” Calderon added. “It’s always just how they were killed, how their bodies were missing and I can’t imagine for a mother that that’s all you get for your daughter.”

She’d like to focus on who the victims were and what they were like. McKenna said the group is currently interviewing people’s stories of running into Bundy and going on to vet stories to make sure each encounter is accurate.

Those wishing to submit their own personal encounters with Bundy for consideration are encouraged to do so through the group's social media pages.

The victims

Two days before he was executed, Bundy met with a Salt Lake County Sheriff’s detective for a 90-minute interview, where he confessed to eight attacks in Utah.

However, investigators narrowed it down to less than that, days after his death. During the interview, Bundy confessed to murdering Nancy Wilcox, Melissa Smith, Debi Kent, Laura Ann Aime and Debbie Sue Curtis, who all disappeared in a timeframe from October 1974 to June 1975.

Last year, Utah resident Rhonda Shipley came forward with her encounter with Bundy in 1974 while both were students at the U., saying that she was beaten and raped by Bundy before she was able to escape.

Four missing persons cases popped up in Holladay, Midvale, Lehi and Bountiful that were eventually linked to Bundy in a two-month span around that time. A fifth case in November 1974 was thwarted by the potential 18-year-old victim named Carol DaRonch.

Bundy was arrested in August 1975 in West Valley City after attempting to evade a police officer. Police eventually found handcuffs a ski mask and pantyhose with eyes cut out in the car he was driving. Bundy was eventually tried and convicted of kidnapping in the DaRonch case in 1976.

He was then charged in Colorado with killing Caryn Campbell, who had disappeared from Aspen, Colorado. In 1977, Bundy escaped jail twice — being caught once — and fled to Michigan. He then took a bus to Tallahassee, Florida, where he went on to commit three more murders in February 1978.

In 1979, Bundy was convicted of the three Florida murders and sentenced to death. In addition to the Utah cases, he confessed to dozens of other murder cases in Washington, Idaho and Colorado.

The other side of Bundy

The stories of those who knew one side of Bundy and not his dark side make his story more complexing.

One Deseret News article that ran the same day Bundy was executed came from those who described a completely different person.

The article quotes two former bishops for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who knew Bundy because he had been a frequent visitor at the church.

"The girls were quite taken with him, and the fellows liked him, too. He just impressed all of us,” said a bishop of the student branch Bundy frequently visited. He joined the LDS Church just before his arrest, the article notes. "He commented he would like to see what a Mormon family in our own setting was like. He had commented on what lovely girls we had."

“I thought he was a great guy. I lined my sister up with him,” said one former classmate of Bundy’s.

Another story comes from a woman who said she was disappointed then that Bundy didn’t ask her out — of course, didn’t mind after knowing what he ended up being convicted of.

A chilling final quote from a former classmate in the 1989 Deseret News article seems to sum up the Bundy case.

"Once it sank in, I thought here is a man that sits by you in law school . . . I mean, who can you trust? If this man is a mass murderer, if this guy can pull it off, what do you tell your daughter? Who do I tell her to look out for? Who do I tell her to avoid?"

One thing that captivates McKenna decades later is thinking that someone as villainous as Bundy once lived so close to where he now lives and walked through the same parts of campus as him.

That’s another aspect of the Bundy case in Utah: he was just another guy that didn’t seem threatening.

“All of the residences (Bundy) held were within walking distance of where I currently live and the thought of him roaming around campus — the same walkways I’d be walking at night time is a bizarre thought in of itself,” said McKenna, who added his father worked with a woman that managed to escape from Bundy in the ‘70s. “The fact that it happened in Utah, which is this unsuspecting society, it’s very sheltered and one of the last places you would think that something so horrific could ever really take place.”

Calderon agrees and that’s why it’s an aspect of the documentary she wants to focus on.

“The stories about him are so up and down,” she said. “That’s kind of the uniqueness to Bundy in the sense that he was so charismatic and a people person but then on the flip side here he was a complete monster and a murderer.”

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