Seriously making the rounds today on both various blogs and social networking sites is a story about Blondie singer Debbie Harry’s near brush with being abducted by serial killer Ted Bundy back in the early ’70s. It all originated from the frequently full of shit British tabloid The Sun, which quotes Harry as saying she accepted a ride from a stranger, then immediately “sensed something was wrong” as soon as she saw there were no handles on the inside of the door: “The hairs on the back of my neck just stood up. I pulled the door handle from the outside. He tried to stop me by spinning the car, but it helped me fling myself out. Afterwards I saw him on the news. Ted Bundy.”
Anyway, yes, a harrowing true story that would also be a fascinating bit of bizarre pop-culture trivia if it hadn’t already been debunked three years ago by Snopes, which picked up the exact same story from an interview Harry gave to a newspaper in 1989, then subsequently proved that Bundy was a) likely all the way across the country at the time, in the Pacific Northwest, b) never made it anywhere near New York City, and c) never actually drove a crazy AbductorMobile, but rather an ordinary VW bug, with the only modification being occasionally removing the passenger seat to better facilitate the transport of his kills. Yes, despite this evidence, Harry still clearly believes it was Ted Bundy who attempted to kidnap her, as she’s continued to relate the story in interviews (and here’s another one from 2003). But most likely, she and the people in your Twitter feed are wrong, and Debbie Harry was just nearly abducted by a regular, non-famous psychopath (which is still a worthwhile story, Debbie).