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Good Day, Sir: Are You Wondering Where Ted Bundy’s Daughter Is Now?

Photo credit: Getty Images
Photo credit: Getty Images


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Let me guess: You’ve just watched No Man of God, the new Ted Bundy movie, and you're stuck in an internet deep dive of anyone and everyone related to Ted Bundy’s life. We get it. The new movie focuses on Bundy's (Luke Kirby) life while on death row, when he formed a weird relationship with FBI agent Bill Hagmaier (Elijah Wood) as he detailed all his crimes.

And while sometimes it's fun to get into the mind of a serial killer for a second, you might be more curious about what happened to the other people in Bundy's life. Bundy's longtime girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer and her daughter, Molly, have been featured in other Bundy-related shows and movies. And Bundy was a father figure to Molly in her younger years, but they’re actually not biologically related. However, he did father a child while he was on death row. His actual daughter, Rose, was born in 1981. Her life is understandably a mystery, but here’s what we do know about her:

First, a little about Rose’s mom

Bundy met Carole Ann Boone during the height of his murder career in 1974, when they were both working at the Washington State Department of Emergency Service. And get this: He was actually helping to search for several missing women...whom he’d killed. Woof.

“I liked Ted immediately. We hit it off well,” Boone recalled, according to The Only Living Witness: The True Story of Serial Sex Killer Ted Bundy. “He struck me as being a rather shy person with a lot more going on under the surface than what was on the surface. He certainly was more dignified and restrained than the more certifiable types around the office.”

The pair started dating (while Bundy was technically still in a relationship with Kloepfer), and Boone seemed relatively unbothered when he was, ya know, arrested for potential murder. In fact, she regularly visited him in jail and gave him cash, which helped him plan one of his escapes.

Photo credit: Netflix
Photo credit: Netflix

Boone moved to Florida to be closer to Bundy during his trial in 1979 and testified on his behalf as a character witness. At which point—like, literally, at that very moment—he casually asked her to marry him and declared that they were legally wed thanks to a weird Florida law. Of freakin’ course.

Anyway, Boone gave birth to their daughter, Rose, in October 1981, despite the fact that conjugal visits were not allowed in Bundy’s prison. Guess that rule wasn’t anything some casual sneaking around couldn’t fix! “After the first day, they just, they didn’t care,” Boone said of Bundy’s prison guards in a taped recording used in Netflix’s docuseries Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes. “They walked in on us a couple of times.”

Right now, you’re probably wondering WTF Boone was thinking, but all I can say is that it seems like she genuinely believed in Bundy’s innocence. When he finally confessed before he was executed, she felt “deeply betrayed,” refused to take his call on the day of his capital punishment, and moved back to Washington state with her daughter. “She was hurt by his relationship with Diana [Weiner],” Bundy’s lawyer Polly Nelson wrote in Defending the Devil: My Story as Ted Bundy’s Last Lawyer, “and devastated by his sudden wholesale confessions in his last days.” Side note: Weiner, who I just mentioned a second ago, was another one of Bundy’s lawyers, and there’s been some speculation that their relationship took a turn for the romantic.

So, where is Rose today?

Out of the public eye, that’s where. At the age of 37 and allegedly using a pseudonym, Rose, understandably, doesn’t want her serial killer father’s shadow to haunt her forever.

According to author Ann Rule, who volunteered with Bundy at a suicide crisis hotline center and wrote The Stranger Beside Me, Rose is living away from the spotlight but doing well: “I have heard that Ted’s daughter is a kind and intelligent young woman, but I have no idea where she and her mother may live. They have been through enough pain.”

She added to this sentiment on her official website, writing, “I have deliberately avoided knowing anything about Ted’s ex-wife and daughter’s whereabouts because they deserve privacy. I don’t want to know where they are; I never want to be caught off guard by some reporter’s question about them. All I know is that Ted’s daughter has grown up to be a fine young woman.”

Photo credit: Netflix
Photo credit: Netflix

FYI, there’s speculation about who Rose is and where she’s living floating around some truly sketchy message boards, but since she’s clearly trying very hard to stay private, we won’t be linking to them here. As you were!

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