Karen Chandler & Kathy Kleiner: Chi Omega Survivors of Ted Bundy

Updated September 8, 2024

January 18, 2023 ~ By Shari Rose

Chi Omega sorority sisters, Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner, survived Ted Bundy’s deadly attack in 1978 and went on the witness stand at his murder trial

Inside the Chi Omega house at Florida State University, serial killer Ted Bundy attacked four young women in a random, frenzied assault. Two students, Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner, survived severe skull and jaw injuries they sustained while sleeping in bed. But two of their sisters were horrifically murdered in the sorority house that night. Like other victims of Bundy’s violence who survived to later fight back, Chandler and Kleiner chose to testify in his murder trial and speak on behalf of the sisters they lost.

• Ted Bundy Murders Two Chi Omega Sorority Sisters
• Bundy Attacks Chandler & Kleiner After the Killings
• Karen Chandler & Kathy Kleiner Sustain Jaw, Skull Injuries
• Aftermath of the Chi Omega Murders
• Chi Omega House Trial & Bundy Conviction
• Ted Bundy’s 1989 Execution
• Karen Chandler & Kathy Kleiner Rubin Today

Ted Bundy Murders Two Chi Omega Sorority Sisters

In the early morning hours of January 15, 1978, young women living at Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in Tallahassee were asleep in their rooms. Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler were roommates, sharing dorm room #8. Kleiner fell asleep first, and Chandler went to bed shortly after. 

Fresh off his recent escape from prison just two weeks earlier, Ted Bundy made his way toward FSU’s Chi Omega house just before 3 am. He picked up a heavy piece of firewood as he approached the back door of the building. The door’s lock was broken, and he easily entered the sorority house. 

Bundy initially found 21-year-old Margaret Bowman asleep in her room, bludgeoned her with his wooden club, then strangled her to death with nylon stockings. He walked out of Bowman’s room and across the hall to 20-year-old Lisa Levy’s room.

Bundy crushed Levy’s skull with his firewood club and strangled her. He sexually assaulted her with a Clairol hairspray bottle and left a deep bite mark on her body, which became crucial evidence that investigators would later use to identify him as the killer.

After murdering Levy, the killer left her room and decided where to go next. Bundy entered the room next door with a number 8 on it.

Bundy Attacks Chandler & Kleiner After the Killings

Recounting the events of that night at Chi Omega in a later interview, Kathy Kleiner explained she heard a noise that stirred her from sleep. It was the sound of her front bedroom door opening. She said she heard the intruder trip over a trunk that sat near her twin bed. Now, Kleiner says she was wide awake as she listened to Ted Bundy walk through her room.

“As I look up, I see this dark figure with a hand up, club in his hand, and before I knew it, he brought it down on me and attacked my face,” she said in a 2019 interview. “I did not feel a pain … it wasn’t pain, it was more of a thud or a pressure at that point.” 

From the commotion of the assault, Karen Chandler woke up. Bundy then moved to her bed and bludgeoned her in the face with his firewood weapon. Then, the violence in the sorority house suddenly stopped. 

A light from outside the sorority sisters’ room shone through the curtainless window. Their room faced a parking lot, and a car’s headlights illuminated the small space. Bundy feared he had been seen, and he immediately fled from the Chi Omega house. 

“He got spooked and ran out, and I’m still waiting for the next blow to come,” Kleiner recounted.

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A few moments of silence passed, and the 20-year-old freshman started calling for help. But Kleiner’s jaw was completely shattered, hanging from just one joint on the side of her face. 

“I was in my bed now, screaming for help, yelling for help, and all I was doing was making a gurgling sound,” she said.

Karen Chandler & Kathy Kleiner Sustain Jaw, Skull Injuries

As the four young women at Chi Omega lay grievously injured in their beds, Nita Neary watched Ted Bundy escape through the sorority house’s front door just as she entered the building from the back. Neary had said goodnight to her date at 3:15 am, and walked through the entryway to see the darkened profile of her sisters’ killer escape the building, his wooden club still in hand. 

Neary ran to wake her roommate, Nancy Dowdy, and they awoke the sorority president. Then Karen Chandler stumbled out of her room and into the hallway, covered in blood. They comforted Chandler and found Kleiner rocking back and forth on her own bed, trying to use the telephone.

While on the witness stand, Kleiner said her first memory after the attack was her attempting to call her boyfriend as well as her pastor on the phone. But with her broken jaw, she couldn’t speak. 

The uninjured sorority sisters made multiple 911 calls to police from inside the Chi Omega house around 3:20 am.

Kathy Kleiner’s jaw was broken in three places, and several of her teeth were broken. Karen Chandler sustained a broken jaw, concussion, skull fracture, broken arm and broken finger. In a later interview, Chandler said that she could barely recognize herself in the mirror while recovering at the hospital. Her mother initially tried to cover the mirror in the bathroom so the young woman couldn’t see the extent of her facial injuries. 

Bundy’s two other victims at Chi Omega, Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, died of their injuries that night. 

Despite the horrific nature of the murders, none of the surviving women heard the brutal assaults on their sorority sisters. The only lead investigators had on this Chi Omega killer was a dental imprint he left behind on Levy’s body. 

Aftermath of the Chi Omega Murders

After surviving Ted Bundy’s assault, Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner spent nearly a week recovering in the hospital. Chandler took the rest of the academic quarter off, but later returned to Florida State University. She decided to live at the Chi Omega house again, much to her mother’s disbelief. With all the extra security measures, Chandler said she believed it would be the safest place for her on campus. 

Kleiner did not return to the sorority house or FSU. She left the university and moved to Miami to be close to family. After recovering from her injuries, Kleiner got married.

The night of the Chi Omega murders, Bundy assaulted another victim, a 21-year-old FSU student named Cheryl Thomas. He climbed into her apartment through a kitchen window, broke her jaw, and severed a nerve that caused permanent hearing loss. Thomas survived the attack. 

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Because authorities had no suspect or motive, they did not know if the vicious beatings were random or directly targeted on the sorority. As a result, the women were told to hide their affiliation to Chi Omega. They removed bumper stickers from cars and stopped wearing Chi Omega apparel. The traumatized sorority sisters were also told not to talk to each other so they did not influence each other’s testimonies of what happened that night.

A week after the attack, Kathy Kleiner was escorted back to the sorority house by police. She entered her bedroom and saw Chandler’s and her own blood sprayed across the room.

“At this point, the blood was dry and it was all over the place. That shocked me into knowing this really happened,” Kleiner said.

Ted Bundy evaded arrest for another 30 days. In that time, he kidnapped, tortured, and killed a 12-year-old girl named Kimberly Leach. But, finally, police were closing in on him. 

Bundy was arrested on February 15, 1978, and would remain in police custody until his death. 

Chi Omega House Trial & Bundy Conviction

At Bundy’s subsequent trial for the Chi Omega murders in June 1978, both Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner testified in court about their injuries and memories they had of the night their sorority sisters were killed. Chandler said on the stand that her first memory after the bludgeoning was “being lifted into the ambulance.” In the darkness of her dorm room at Chi Omega, she never saw Ted Bundy. 

Likewise, Kleiner testified that she did not get a good look at the man who tried to kill her. In a 2019 interview, she recounted her survival from Bundy’s beatings in the sorority house. 

“When it was my turn to go up and sit in the witness stand, I looked out and there was Bundy, sitting at the defense table,” she said. “I stared him down in the eyes. I don’t remember what the questions were … I felt like I had power now. He was on the other side of that table, and I was okay. I didn’t want him to think at all that he had any power anymore.”

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On July 24, 1979, Ted Bundy was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder. He was sentenced to death. For the following 10 years, multiple appeals and stays of execution delayed Bundy’s death. His victims, like Carol DaRonch, and their families grew weary of waiting for the justice they knew he deserved. 

Ted Bundy’s 1989 Execution

While Bundy remained on death row, Chandler spoke in an interview about the many delays to his execution. 

“I knew that it was going to be a long process. I knew that he was going to use everything within his means to stop the execution, so it doesn’t really surprise me at all,” she said.

Similarly, Kleiner expressed her frustration with the slow pace of court proceedings, saying in a television interview: “It’s drug out for so long, and it’s hard for everyone involved, for the victims, family, friends. It’s time to end it now. Let him have what’s coming to him, let’s put this past us.”

“He took two women, barely out of their teens. He took their lives, shouldn’t he give his?” Kleiner said. 

After a decade of waiting on death row, Ted Bundy was executed on January 24, 1989. When she heard news of his death, Kleiner said she finally felt relief from the pain of what happened at the Chi Omega house 11 years earlier. 

“I cried, and I felt for Margaret and Lisa, my sorority sisters, and all the women,” she said. “I cried for them as well because they now could rest in peace.”

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Karen Chandler & Kathy Kleiner Rubin Today

After both women recovered from their injuries, they eventually got married, had children, and the two Ted Bundy survivors carried on with their lives. In a 1989 interview with Chandler, she said she understood that Bundy had not attacked her personally, and that knowledge helped her heal from the trauma. 

“I felt that this was somebody who didn’t know me,” she said. “He wasn’t after Karen Chandler, he was after a female body.”

Soon after healing from the Chi Omega attack, Kathy Kleiner got married. However, the marriage ended in divorce within a short time. Kleiner said that no relationship at that point in her life would have lasted. She realized she needed to heal first, physically and emotionally, before having a serious relationship. 

Kleiner said that she had never been contacted by Chi Omega in the years following the murders. She suspects that members were told not to contact her in an effort to conceal the bloody past of the sorority. 

“I was always going to be a ‘Ted Bundy Chi Omega person’ and a connection to it, and new pledges weren’t going to join, and no new money was going to come into the corporation,” she said in 2019.

Today, Kathy Kleiner Rubin has remarried and says that she found solace in learning about the case – even even about Bundy himself. She read The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule and found it empowering because she felt she had a better understanding of the actual person who attacked her. As she recovered, she also relied on a mental exercise that helped her put space between the past trauma and her life as it is now. 

“One of my ways of healing was that I had this horrific thing in front of me, but if I took baby steps and walked away, I’d look behind me and see it was walking away,” Kleiner said. “So I had a goal, I had something I wanted to go to, and it was the beach. It took me forever to get there. But every time I did, I looked behind me, and there was nothing to be afraid of.”  

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