How Debbie Harry narrowly escaped being kidnapped by Ted Bundy

n 1974, a rock band destined to make history was born: Blondie, a group fronted by the one-and-only Debbie Harry, who became the image of the band.

However, the story could have been quite different if a year earlier, Debbie Harry hadn't escaped from the person who would become one of the most famous serial killers of the 20th century: Ted Bundy.

Want to stay up to date with the best entertainment news and analysis? Follow us here!

For those not familiar with Ted Bundy, it's suffice to say that he confessed to 30 homicides in seven different states, between 1974 and 1978.

After a complex trial, the serial killer was sentenced to die in the electric chair, and the sentence was carried out on January 24, 1989, at Raiford Prison, Florida, USA.

Ten months later, US media published an interview that would stun the world. The way Deborah Harry tells the story is absolutely terrifying.

The story was told in the first person by the singer herself, who narrated the encounter she had with Ted Bundy a year before he began his killing spree.

Debbie Harry sets the scene on a street in the Lower East Side, in the Village of New York, on a dark night, while she was waiting for a taxi.

“A little white car pulls up, and the guy offers me a ride. So I just continued to try and flag a cab down. But he was very persistent, and he asked me where I was going. It was only a couple of blocks away, and he said, ‘well I'll give you a ride," said the singer, according to Dazed.

She described how she first got suspicious of the situation. Even though it was a hot summer night, the windows were closed. From there, things got worse.

Foto: Unsplash - Benjamin Disinger

She then began to panic after she realised that there was no door handle either and the car had been stripped down. He noticed her panic.

Want to stay up to date with the best entertainment news and analysis? Follow us here!

At this point, she says she was frantically trying to get out of the car. She noticed a hole where the radio and glove compartment should have been and said that she thurst her arm out of the window to open the door up from inside. Then, he made a move that might have saved her life.

“As soon as he saw that, he tried to turn the corner really fast, and I spun out of the car and landed in the middle of the street," she said.

When the events took place, in the summer of 1973, Debbie Harry was a mostly unknown musician. Everything was quite different in November 1989 when she remembered the story and shared it with the world.

But how did she know it had been Ted Bundy? “It was right after his execution that I read about him,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about that incident in years. The whole description of how he operated and what he looked like and the kind of car he drove and the time frame he was doing that in that area of the country fit exactly. I said, ‘My God, it was him.’”

Some have said Debbie Harry used that story to gain notoriety, but the truth is that, by that time, she was already a superstar and needed no extra publicity. Some say the story has been debunked since Bundy wasn't operating in New York at the time or killing women until 1974.

Since then, she has recounted this story on several occasions, in interviews and, not least, in her autobiography: 'Face It.'

And for those who doubt her story, Debbie Harry says in her autobiography that she couldn't care less what they think, because she knows what happened.

Debbie Harry: amazing photos of the Blondie singer, then and now

Was it really Ted Bundy who invited Debbie Harry into his car that summer of 1973? We may never know, but no one should doubt that, sooner or later, Hollywood will turn this story into a movie. Or at least they should take some inspiration....

Want to stay up to date with the best entertainment news and analysis? Follow us here!