Imagine finding out the cousin you’d spent some of the best moments of childhood with grew up to be a serial killer.
That’s what happened to Edna Cowell Martin, Ted Bundy’s cousin, in the 1970s, she says in her new memoir, “Dark Tide.”
Martin, 72, is the first of Bundy’s relatives to write a book about growing up with the serial killer who murdered at least 30 women and girls between 1974 and 1978.Â
In her memoir, Martin recalls the moment she first knew her cousin was guilty. It was in 1975, after Bundy had been arrested for kidnapping and released on bail. Martin still wanted to believe the cousin she thought she knew was innocent.
TED BUNDY SURVIVOR REVEALS WHAT SAVED HER FROM SERIAL KILLER’S SORORITY-HOUSE RAMPAGE
Ted Bundy was accused of killing at least 30 women and girls between 1974 and 1978. (Bettman/ Getty Images)
Bundy was driving her to a bookstore near a university after lunch one afternoon so she could get something she needed.
“I ran in, and I got my stuff, and the cash register faced the window. So, I could see the street down below behind the store … and all these people were pointing and rushing down towards my left,” Martin recalled. “And I was wondering what was going on there. I just got a bad feeling that something wasn’t good.”
TED BUNDY 50 YEARS LATER: HOW INVESTIGATORS TOOK DOWN INFAMOUS SERIAL KILLER WHO TERRORIZED COUNTRY FOR YEARS
Edna Cowell Martin said she became close to her cousin, Ted Bundy, in adulthood. She was like his “little sister,” she said. (handout)
She exited the bookstore and saw people “milling all around someone, and then the crowd parted for a second.”
“I saw my cousin in the center of it, and he was standing there with his hands outstretched, like he was some kind of a messiah, and speaking loudly while he was slowly turning, saying, ‘I’m Ted Bundy’ over and over again,” Martin said. “That’s when it just hit me that no one would do that if they were innocent.”
“That was the chilling moment that I went from hoping beyond hope that this was all a big mistake, to realizing that this guy was a monster.”
She and Bundy had grown close in their adulthood, she said, and lived just a few blocks apart from each other. She had him over occasionally, and he would hang out with her friends and roommates. That made the news of his crimes so much harder to digest, she said.
Ted Bundy (center) pictured with his younger half-siblings. (handout)
“In January of ’74, young women right in my neighborhood started disappearing within walking distance of where I lived — within walking distance of where Ted lived,” Martin recalled. “Three of them disappeared and were later found to be murdered by him. One of them lived right across the street and around the corner from me. So, Ted would walk from his apartment, pass by the front door of my apartment building … around the corner to where she lived. And just when I found that out … it just made me so ill.”
FOLLOW THE FOX TRUE CRIME TEAM ON X
Martin opens the book with a jarring scene, the moment she first learned of Bundy’s first arrest for attempted kidnapping in 1975, prior to the bookstore incident.
Martin opens the book with a jarring scene, the moment she first learned of Bundy’s first arrest for attempted kidnapping in 1975, prior to the bookstore incident. (handout)
She was in her 20s at the time, packaging king crab legs in a remote area of Alaska in 1975 — an obscure job she took on with college friends for adventure’s sake — when she heard the news that the cousin she once “adored” had been arrested.
She remembers getting the call that changed the trajectory of her family’s life “in this remote place out in the wilderness — and it was a lot less settled then than it is now … on a ship-to-shore phone where anybody could tune into that frequency” and hear her conversation. It was Martin’s brother who called to break the news that their cousin had just been arrested.
TED BUNDY’S EX-GIRLFRIEND RECALLS HORRIFYING ENCOUNTER WITH THE SERIAL KILLER: ‘HE JUST LAUGHED’
Edna Cowell Martin and her cousins vacationed together at a remote cabin in Washington state in the summer. (handout)
“It just completely upended my life,” Martin said. “And that’s how kind of everything just kicked off
