45 Years Since Ted Bundy Abductions At Lake Sammamish State Park

ISSAQUAH, WA — If you pass by Lake Sammamish State Park on Sunday, take a moment to remember Janice Ott and Denise Naslund.

July 14 will mark 45 years since those women were abducted in broad daylight at the park on a busy Sunday afternoon by one of America's most notorious serial killers.

Ted Bundy, his arm in a sling, approached Ott, 23, around noon as she was sitting on a blanket near the beach. After a brief chat, he convinced Ott to come help him move a sailboat. People nearby remember hearing him say his name, "Ted." Naslund, 19, met Bundy when she left her group of friends to use the restroom. He lured her away with the same story about needing help with a sailboat.

1974 was Bundy's most violent year in Washington. On Feb. 4, he attacked Joni Lenz as she slept inside a University of Washington sorority house, although she survived. About a week later, Bundy abducted and killed UW student Lynda Ann Healy. In March, he killed 19-year-old Evergreen State student Donna Gail Manson.

In April, Central Washington University student Susan Rancourt disappeared after leaving a meeting on campus. Eerily, the July 14, 1974, edition of the Seattle Times ran a story reporting that Rancourt had been spotted in Wenatchee. Her remains were eventually found near Taylor Mountain in Issaquah.

The disappearances did not go unnoticed in the Seattle area.

"Now, in the summer of 1974, the reading public knew of the pattern of missing girls; it was no longer a matter that concerned only detectives and the principals involved," Ann Rule wrote in her Bundy memoir, "The Stranger Beside Me." "And the public was terrified."

Although not the nation's first serial killer, Bundy's prominence helped serial killers enter mainstream culture. This year, Netflix released the Bundy biopic "Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile" depicting Bundy's final years in prison, and the documentary "Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes."

That prominence also motivated law enforcement to develop new techniques to deal with serial killers — efforts that have paid off. A tally of active serial killers kept by Radford University professor Dr. Mike Aamodt shows a drop in activity. He recorded 93 between 2010 and 2015. The 1980s were the peak time for them, with 692 in the U.S.

Bundy killed for four more years after the Lake Sammamish abductions (even with a few stints in prison), but advancements in technology would likely make it harder for a killer to be active for so long today.

Police now have access to powerful DNA analysis tools like the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). More recently, investigators in Washington have used DNA phenotyping — a way of tracking down a suspect's genetic lineage — to solve cold murder cases. William Earl Talbott II, 55, was convicted in June of murdering Jay Cook and Tanya Van Cuylenborg in Skagit County in 1987 using this type of evidence.

Gary Ridgway killed an estimated 71 women and girls in the 1980s and 1990s between Seattle and Portland. He was identified as a suspect in the Green River killings in the early 1980s, but he wasn't arrested until 2001 when the King County Sheriff's Office was able to match his DNA to a crime scene.

Complementing CODIS, the FBI has created the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP), a massive database of violent crimes that local police can use to see connections between crimes.

The FBI points to the case of serial killer Samuel Little, who is suspected of committing at least 90 murders between 1970 and 2005. Little was jailed in Los Angeles in 2012 on a narcotics charge, allowing detectives to test his DNA and tie him to the murders of three women. LAPD submitted Little's profile to ViCAP, and police in Texas found similarities between Little's Los Angeles murders and the 1994 murder of Denise C. Brothers in Odessa. Little eventually confessed to that killing and others in states across the South and Midwest.

"In the last few decades, the FBI has made significant advancements in law enforcement investigations using technology, forensic science, and key partnerships with federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners to improve and expand our investigative capabilities," an FBI spokesperson told Patch this week.

Information also travels much faster today. Naslund's boyfriend didn't report her disappearance until the night of July 14, and police didn't begin searching for her until July 15. The Seattle Times didn't publish a story on Naslund and Ott's disappearance until July 16, and even then it was just a few hundred words describing what the women looked like and what they were doing when they were last seen.

Naslund and Ott's skeletal remains were found in September 1974 along a rural road in Issaquah. Bundy admitted to killing them moments before he was executed in Florida in January 1989.