Did Ted Bundy Carry Out the 1969 Garden State Parkway Murders?

Nineteen-year-old college friends Susan Davis and Elizabeth Perry spent Memorial Day weekend of 1969 in Ocean City, N.J., and disappeared when heading out of town the early morning of May 30. Davis’s Chevy was later found abandoned along the shoulder of the Garden State Parkway hours later, but three more days passed before their bodies were found in a wooded area just off of the road.

They’d been bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Perry was clothed, but her underwear was missing; Davis was stripped, yet her clothes were found nearby. Their jewelry, purses and suitcases weren’t taken. The only possible evidence left was a dive watch with no finger prints.

Davis and Perry’s family and friends have been left wondering who murdered their loved ones.

“After about 30 years, we just kind of figured it was never going to be solved,” Perry’s high school best friend, Pamela Holl-Ferderer, then a college student who learned of the murders while in the midst of her final exams, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “There's no DNA, so there's nothing that they would be able to really prove it with.”

While their killer has yet to be identified, prolific serial killer Ted Bundy has long been suspected of committing the double homicide, in part due to the manner of the murders and his ties to the nearby Philadelphia area where he grew up and briefly attended college.

Christian Barth, author ofThe Garden State Parkway Murders: A Cold Case Mystery, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that while on death row following his conviction for the 1978 murder of two Florida State University students and a 12-year-old girl, Bundy made two “deathbed confessions,” one to a psychologist, Art Norman, and the other to noted criminologist Dorothy Lewis. “In both instances he hinted at killing [Davis and Perry],” he says. “It's just shockingly bizarre and coincidental how he referenced certain parts of his own memory and how they jibed with the actual facts.”

At one point he told Norman about visiting the Jersey Shore during the early summer of 1969 and picking up two girls. Norman assumed Bundy meant he’d picked up and killed Perry and Davis.

Barth, who spent over a decade researching the case for his non-fiction book, agrees that Bundy’s typical modus operandi of approaching victims pretending he’s an injured motorist in need of help could fit the scenario. However, Barth views Bundy’s death-row confessions with a cynical eye since Bundy could have used details learned from another suspect as a bargaining chip he could trade to avoid, or at least delay, his execution.

That said, Barth notes that DNA testing recently connected Bundy to the 1974 Utah murder of Laura Ann Aime, which he also confessed to before his 1989 execution: “[She was killed] in a manner entirely inconsistent with Bundy's prior MOs, but they linked him with DNA.”

Barth notes that authorities actually identified several credible suspects.

“The craziness of the story is it’s like six degrees of serial killers,” Barth says when discussing key suspects in the Garden State Parkway murders. “There were indications that a serial killer would have done this based upon how the bodies were found. They weren't just traditionally killed. One of the girls, Susan, had her bra tied into her hair—a detail I found from a law enforcement official years ago that was never published.”

Links exist between Bundy and his fellow suspects, serial killer Gerald Stano, white supremacist Mark Thomas and drifter Thomas “Ronnie” Walden.

“Bundy was imprisoned next to Gerald Stano, a Florida serial killer and who also confessed to the Parkway murders to a Daytona Beach detective in 1980,” Barth says, noting if Stano were the killer he could have shared details with Bundy while they were in prison.

Stranger yet, Thomas and Stano lived near each other as teenagers. Walden’s connection to Bundy was less direct.

“He stole a car and went to Glenwood Springs, Colo., and was jailed in what turned out being the very same jail cell that Ted Bundy escaped from when he was in Colorado,” says Barth, who goes on to explain why these men are just as viable suspects as Bundy.

By the time of his 1998 execution, Stano—who operated during the same era as Bundy—had confessed to murdering 41 girls and young women and was prosecuted for 33 of those killings. In 2024, an additional victim was confirmed through DNA analysis. He would stab, strangle or shoot his victims and leave their bodies in remote areas. He occasionally killed victims in pairs, too.

However, Thomas prevailed as the leading suspect at the time of Davis and Perry’s killing, Barth says, noting Thomas later became a notorious and outspoken white supremacist who frequently appeared on shows like Geraldo. “I tend to think he was doing it more for ego gratification purposes, but he was the guy that took the lie detector test and gave ‘fuzzy answers,’” Barth continues. “Obviously, he gets the presumption of innocence, and I don't think he did it.”

And then there’s Walden.

“Walden was a drifter from Georgia. He was up in the Jersey Shore at the time,” Barth says. “Apparently there was a half a fingerprint found [at the crime scene] that matched him, but since it was only partial, they couldn't pin it on him.”

Although newspapers reported that Walden tried to hang himself after being interviewed by police in New Jersey, Barth later interviewed the jailer who claimed the suicide attempt occurred prior to the interview. “That suggests to me the guy had a guilty conscience,” Barth says, adding, “he wound up shooting himself in prison during a hostage takeover in 1989.”

Although he remains optimistic that the Garden State Parkway Murders will one day be solved, Barth says a stumbling block remains. He claims the Atlantic County Prosecutor’s Office and the Cape May County Prosecutor’s Office have been “extremely reluctant” to allow him, or other outsiders, to view the half-century old files. He filed legal paperwork with the New Jersey Superior Court to gain access to the records, but his request was denied. The Cape May County Prosecutor’s Office did not respond to A&E Crime + Investigation’s request for comment.

“The most frustrating aspect is the fact that they will not allow access to these documents, and as time goes by, they're just sitting there. It almost seems they'd rather see it go unsolved than it be solved by someone other than the prosecutor's office,” Barth says.

Holl-Ferderer adds, “I just wish that they would find whoever was. I watch Cold Case Files, and they find new things years and years later. But it's been 57 years, so I don't know if there's any real impetus to actually solve it. I would hope that they still want to solve it, but it's just been such a long time.”