The Phantom Prince: My Life With Ted Bundy ~ Elizabeth Kendall

Shockingly, I decided to start off my 2021 reading very much in my comfort zone. Anything true crime is my go-to when it comes to reading and when my other half bought me this book for Christmas I just knew it had to be my first read of the year. I have been eager to get my hands on a copy of this book ever since I watched Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile which is a movie featuring Zac Efron and Lily Collins focusing on the crimes of Ted Bundy and the long term relationship he had with Elizabeth Kendall (Kloepfer). The film is majoritively based on The Phantom Prince which was originally published in 1981 by Kendall just a few years after Bundy was sentenced to death for his heinous crimes.

Due to it being published so long ago, back in 2019, it was particularly hard to purchase a copy of it. However, due to the popularity of the movie and Amazon Prime documentary Ted Bundy: Falling For A Killer, which both Elizabeth and her daughter Molly featured in alongside many of the victim’s families, Kendall decided to release an updated and expanded edition of her original book. Now with the 2020 re-release, I was even more eager to read this book and it went straight to the top of my Christmas wish list.

I knew this was going to be an intriguing read but it was honestly so much more eye-opening than I originally thought. Although the movie went into quite a bit of detail there was so much more in Kendall’s writing that I was just not expecting to read and feel. The original text, published in 1981, is still featured in full but Kendall has written an updated introduction and afterword where she tells you how she now feels about the book she wrote all those years ago. What I was most intrigued about going into this read was that Kendall’s daughter, Molly, had also written a brief recollection of what it was like to have Bundy as a father figure for the five years he was with her mother.

The difference between the way Kendall writes about Ted now and back then is striking. In the 1981 text, you can tell that she is very much still under the spell of Bundy and admittedly still loves him. Now in her more recent writing, you can really see the distance she has created between her and that part of her life. Molly’s brief story at the end of the book was probably the most shocking to me because other than her input in the Amazon Prime documentary I hadn’t really heard much about her experiences with Ted.

Overall, if you are an avid true crime lover like myself then I think this is a must-read. I gave The Phantom Prince by Elizabeth Kendall a 4.5 ⭐️ rating.

M🌸