Sandra Weaver
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Sandra Weaver
"Bundy has given information"
On Florida’s death row, serial killer Ted Bundy attempted to bargain for more time by giving up his secrets to detectives. He offered information on the unsolved murders of young women in several western states during the 1970’s, and one of the cases Bundy was questioned about was the death of Sandra Weaver, who was found in Colorado after her abduction from Utah.
Sandra Weaver: The Disappearance
Born on August 4, 1955, to Marlene and Bruno Weaver in Arcadia, Wisconsin, where she grew up in the family home alongside her two brothers and two sisters. Weaver attended the Western Wisconsin Technological Institute in La Crosse, and by June 1974 had finished her first year when she decided to travel to Utah with a girlfriend.
Weaver and Joan Elkins planned to work for a few weeks before returning home for the fall college term and the marriage of Sandra’s sister in late July. The girls hitchhiked to Salt Lake City, Utah, and there found residence at the trailer home of a young man they had met in Utah. Together they found work at a warehouse in Salt Lake City.
On the morning of July 1, 1974, Elkins reported in sick for work, and so Sandra, who was known as “Sandy” to family and friends, went in alone. She never returned to the trailer, and Elkins said the warehouse called in the afternoon to say that Sandra had not returned to work after she took a lunch break at about 10:30am.
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Joan Elkins then reported her friend as missing to the Salt Lake City police. She told officers she had no idea where or with whom Sandra may have gone. “We didn’t have anybody we knew in Salt Lake City,” she said. Elkins then stayed in Utah until mid-August, hoping to find Sandra, before returning to Wisconsin.
Salt Lake City police had no idea what had happened to 18-year-old Weaver, and initially suspected her disappearance temporary, and that she might reappear. During this time, there were several missing women reported in Washington, but nothing to connect the disappearance of Sandra Weaver to what was happened hundreds of miles away.
Sandra Weaver: The De Beque Jane Doe
On July 2, 1974, only a day after Sandra Weaver went missing, a body was discovered by tourists hiking in the De Beque Canyon in Colorado at about 3:00pm near the Colorado river on .S. 6-24 about 16 miles east of Palisade. The woman, found face down in some brush, had been beaten, and stripped naked, with no clothing found near the body.
It was estimated the young woman was between the ages of 15 and 21-years-old, white, between 5-7″ and 5-8″ tall, 120 to 135 pounds with dark shoulder length hair and a fair complexion. In addition to the lack of clothing found at the scene, there were no personal affects except for a gold chain with a one-inch wooden cross and a blue sapphire ring.
Possibly the most important information, and one that might help police identify the girl was the contact lenses worn by the victim, which were blue-tinted with red identification marks, and her teeth, which indicated extensive dental work. In an effort to identify the woman, Mesa County Sheriff’s Dept. deputies said the office had gotten a number of inquiries as a result of sent out across the United States.
The Montrose pathologist, Dr Thomas Canfield, conducted further tests in an attempt to learn the actual cause of death. It was determined the girl had been beaten with fists and had died of suffocation, then dragged to the spot in De Beque Canyon. After several months of fruitless searching, police eventually identified the Jane Doe.
In January 1975, Sheriff’s Investigator Milo Vig said that dental charts and contact lenses of the victim matched those of Sandra Jean Weaver. When police contacted Sandra’s family, her father Bruno Weaver confirmed to detectives that his daughter had left home in June 1974 and hitchhiked to Salt Lake City, Utah to find a summer job.
Sandra Weaver: A Ted Bundy victim?
Several months after the disappearance of Sandra Weaver, other young women started to go missing in Utah. In October 1974, three young women seemingly vanished. The first, Nancy Wilcox, was never found, while the bodies of two others, Melissa Smith and Laura Aime, were found nine and twenty days respectively after they disappeared. Smith and Aime had been beaten, raped, sodomized and strangled with nylon stockings.
Like Weaver, the bodies of Smith and Aime were found dumped in Canyons east of Salt Lake, and all three had been found naked and beaten, with Aime’s face beaten beyond recognition by her killer. As a result of these similarities, detectives suspected a connection between these cases and thought as many as five murder and an equal number of disappearances might have been committed by the same killer.
This serial killer theory was shared by detectives in Washington, where as many as eight young women had gone missing the previous year, with only scattered remains and bones that might indicate their whereabouts. Captain Pete Hayward of the Salt Lake Sheriff’s Dept said that officers were checking into the slayings of girls in other western states.
These were specifically Wyoming, Nevada and New Mexico, places where the bodies of young girls have been found or young women reported missing. In August 1975, over a year after Sandra Weaver had disappeared and several months after her body had been found, Utah patrolman Bob Hayward arrested a suspicious young man in a Salt Lake City suburb.
The man was identified as Ted Bundy, a student at the University of Utah Law School, and was driving a Volkswagen Beetle, a vehicle that was described as being at the scene of two abductions of young women that occurred on the same day at Lake Sammamish State Park in July 1974. The women, Janice Ott and Denise Naslund were never found.
At the time of his capture, Bundy was on a list of suspect that contained the names of Volkswagen owners named “Ted,” as well as suspected sex offenders. In his Volkswagen Beetle, police found number items such as a ski mask, rope, a pair of handcuffs, a crowbar and a pantyhose mask. These items were described as a “murder kit“. Bundy had moved to Utah in September 1974, several months after the disappearance of Sandra Weaver.
Ted Bundy was eventually charged with the attempted kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, and sentenced to between one and fifteen years. This was not the end of Bundy’s legal problems, and he was soon being investigated over the murder of nurse Caryn Campbell, who was abducted from a Snowmass ski resort in January 1975.
After his second escape from confinement, Bundy travelled to Florida in 1978, where he was suspected of orchestrating the Chi Omega murders and the kidnapping and murder of twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. For these crimes, Bundy would eventually be sentenced to death during two separate trials.
On death row, Bundy steadfastly refused to admit to his crimes, despite his many admissions to the FBI about his knowledge of serial murder and offer of assistance in the then unsolved Green River Killer investigation. As his execution date approached, Bundy tried desperately to gain more time by confessing to crimes.
After his execution in January 1989, details began to emerge of the crimes Bundy made confessions of his involvement. One of those was the Sandra Weaver case, which investigators had long suspected Bundy of committing. Mesa County Sheriff’s Lt. Riecke Claussen said after Bundy’s death, “Bundy did not confess to Weaver’s disappearance.”
“There was talk of him murdering a woman in Utah and then taking her to Colorado, but there was nothing to tie it to Weaver.” This admission matched the circumstances of Sandra Weaver’s abduction and murder, however there was never any evidence that connected Bundy to her case, apart from Bundy’s taped confession.
On that tape, Bundy was interviewed by detective Dennis Couch and other investigators, who said the serial killer gave Couch specific names, dates and places on some Utah murders, and gave less detailed information on others. “Bundy has given information,” he said. “that there were a total of eight Utah victims,” said Utah Sheriff Pete Hayward.
“Bundy talked in specifics about the fives cases we pointed out to him, but beyond that I don’t want to comment at this time.” Claussen later said that he heard “nothing more than rumours,” that Bundy had confessed to killing Weaver. “Bundy was a consideration at the time,” Claussen said, “We knew he had been in the area around that time because of a gas receipt…”
“… we were quite certain he was involved in the murder of a different girl. At the time we couldn’t really pin the Weaver murder on him.” With Ted Bundy‘s death, and his refusal to confess directly to the murder of Sandra Weaver, her murder remains unknown, however there are reportedly no other suspects considered in her case.
Written by Nucleus
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