Ted Bundy’s cousin recalls chilling day she realised he was a serial killer, 50 years on

An April 2026 interview with Ted Bundy’s cousin has gone viral on TikTok this week, where she spoke about the chilling day she realised he was a killer. 

Ted Bundy was one of America’s most notorious serial killers, who kidnapped, raped and murdered dozens of women and girls between 1974 and 1978. He confessed to killing 30 people, but experts believe his true number of victims could be over 100. 

Edna Cowell Martin, who grew up with Ted, went on the What It Was Like podcast and recalled December 1975, when Bundy was out of jail on bail after being pulled over and arrested near Salt Lake City in Utah. Police searched Bundy’s Volkswagen Beetle and found strange items, including a crowbar, handcuffs, a ski mask, an ice pick and pantyhose.

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At this point, there were a lot of rumours circulating about him being involved in multiple disappearances, but Edna said she didn’t believe them and wanted Ted to “put her at ease” and tell her he didn’t do it. So, they got in touch. 

“He actually tracked me down and he said ‘Let’s get together. I can do it today’ and I said, ‘Ok let’s do it’. I was going to meet up with some of my ex-work buddies, and I said ‘Well, I can pick you up on the way if you don’t mind eating with some other people and then we can spend some time together afterwards’,” she recalled. 

They had a great meal and were all laughing until someone asked what Ted’s surname was. When he replied, “Bundy,” the woman sitting next to him “leaned away” in horror. 

“You have to understand that during that time, we were really freaked out. I mean, as women, none of us were walking by ourselves. Everybody was locking the doors and shutting their windows. And in Seattle during that time, during the summer, it would get warm, and there was very little air conditioning. So, we were all sweating, but we didn’t want to leave our windows open at night because that’s how he got into one or two places,” Edna said. 

Credit: Netflix

Her friend’s reaction bothered her so much that she abruptly ended the conversation, stood up and said they had to leave the restaurant. While they were driving, she turned to Bundy and asked outright: “So, Ted, did you did you kill those girls and abduct them and kill them?”

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He lied and told her he didn’t, and she felt relieved. Edna believed him in that moment, but when they pulled up to the university bookstore, things started to get strange. She got out of the car and asked Bundy to wait there. From the bookstore, she could see a lot of commotion outside, with people pointing at something. 

“I go, ‘What in the hell is going on?’ and he’s standing there in the middle of all these people with his arms out like he’s some kind of Messiah. And he’s slowly rotating, and he’s just kind of got his eyes closed, and he’s going ‘I’m Ted Bundy’ over and over again as he’s turning round. And I’m going, ‘Oh my god’. That moment I thought, ‘Who is this guy? I don’t know if I know who this guy is.”

She pulled him out of the crowd because people were starting to work out that this was the guy from the papers, took him across the street and threw him in the car. As they were driving away, she realised he was a killer.

Credit: Netflix

“Now I’m going to take him back to his girlfriend’s house. And I’m going, ‘This is the weirdest thing ever, and I put the car in gear and it’s only about a seven or eight minute drive to her house, and I start heading out, and I’m dealing with traffic, and I’m driving along. And then I look over, we’re not talking. I turn and I look at him and I’m just thinking ‘God, this is so weird now, who is this guy next to me?’ And I turn my head, and I look at him, and he’s looking back at me, and he’s smiling, and I go ‘Oh my god, he did it’.

“That’s when it hit me that this thing that’s next to me is possibly one of the most dangerous people in America. And most vicious and most horrible, and I literally planned that I was going to crash my car if he made a move.”

When they got to Bundy’s girlfriend’s house, he looked at her and shrugged before opening the car door and getting out. She immediately locked the car doors and broke down.

“I just put my head down on the wheel and went ‘Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. He did it.’ And that was probably the most freaky, scary moment of my life,” Edna said. Bundy spent the next two years in and out of custody before finally being captured for good in February 1978.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes are available on Netflix now. For all the latest Netflix news and drops, like The Holy Church of Netflix on Facebook.

Featured image credit: What It Was Like and Netflix