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Bundy A Lake City SuspectTALLAHASSEE (UPI) — Police said today they are investigating new information that may link murder suspect Theodore Bundy to the disappearance of a seventh grade Lake City honor student who had just been elected to her school’s valentine queen court.Reports that a stolen credit card found on Bundy was used at a Lake City motel the night before Kimberly Diane Leach, 12, disappeared from her school campus spurred a new search for the child.FBI sources had said a week ago that Bundy was a suspect in the child’s disappearance. but Lake City Sheriff Glenn Bailey said he does not know if Bundy has ever been asked about it.“We think Bundy was in Lake City and we suspect foul play in the disappearance of the girl, but until we find her, we have no crime,” he said.“There are areas around here where no human has ever been,” he added, including 900 acres of national forest. ‘‘We’ve beensearching, but we can’t cover the whole county. It’s one of the longest in the state,” he said.Bailey said he has no plans to send investigators to question Bundy in Tallahassee where he is being held on car theft and burglary charges while investigators try to connect him to the Jan. 15 killings of two Florida State University coeds and the beating of three others.The man using the stolen credit card checked into the Holiday Inn at Lake City Feb. 8 using the name Ralph Miller, according to assistant innkeeper Karen Tadlock. He charged the $32 cost of his room, supper and draft beer and gin drinks at the bar, checking out Feb. 9, just an hour before Kimberly disappeared.“He seemed ordinary, no one here can remember anything in particular about him,” she said. Nothing was left in his room and he made no phone calls.But Tallahassee television station WCTV received ananonymous call Monday from a Tallahassee area man, who refused to give his name, but said he had spent part of the evening of Feb. 8 drinking in the Lake City Holiday Inn bar with a man resembling Bun-dy.Police have been unable to find the man.Police said some of Bundy’s stolen credit cards reportedly were used in Jacksonville, 50 miles from Lake City and 167 miles from Tallahassee, the afternoon of Feb. 8.Bailey said there is nothing to indicate the Leach child ran away voluntarily. She has not been seen since she left her first class Feb. 9 to run back to her homeroom to get a pocketbook she had left behind.Her father, Thomas Leach, said she would not have run away.“She had already picked out her dress for the Valentine dance Saturday night, but she never got to go get it,” Leach said* “My wife says she’s going to buy it anyway.”In Atlanta, Bundy's attorney, Millard Farmer, said in a telephone interview with a Tallahassee Democrat reporter that Bundy is being unfairly linked to the FSU mur*victed of kidnapping in Utah and indicted for the murder of a young Michigan woman m Colorado.He was arrested in Pensacola last week while driving a car stolen i n Tallahassee and transferred here Sunday for questioning about the coed murders.ders and 35 sex slayings in four western states.Bundy, 31, has been con
Newspaper Details
Sarasota Journal
Sarasota, Florida, US
Tue, Feb 21, 1978
Page 14
Full Page
Clipped by
Scott P.
USA 05 Apr 2025
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