The night that Debbie Harry took a ride with Ted Bundy

During his Almost Famous music critic era at The Baltimore Sun, Nestor Aparicio interviewed hundreds of musicians and is unearthing lost tapes with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame immortals like this one from November 1989 with Debbie Harry, who was bringing her legendary band Blondie to Hammerjacks.

Debbie Harry discussed her current tour, which includes a mix of new and old songs, and clarified that it is not a Blondie reunion but the “Dirty Harry” tour. She recounted a chilling incident from the early 1970s when she almost got into a car with Ted Bundy, a serial killer. Harry described how she escaped by opening the car door from outside. This connection was only made clear to her after Bundy’s execution, when she read about his modus operandi and car matching her experience. She also mentioned her separation from Chris Stein but still collaborates with him.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Debbie Harry, Blondie tour, platform shoes, Ted Bundy, hitchhiking incident, white car, serial killer, New York Dolls, after hours club, door handle missing, window crank, escaped car, execution article, Vanity Fair, John Waters

SPEAKERS

Debbie Harry, Nestor Aparicio

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Nestor Aparicio  00:00

Hi, Debbie, hi. How are you? How is this tour going little more hectic than it was 10 years ago? I don’t know. I guess talking from the back of cars is not did you used to have to do that 10 years ago? I don’t know if they had to tell you. Selling your own career. So you seem quite busy to go around. Oh yeah, now you’re doing pretty much a club tour. Did you ever do that with blondie? Yeah. How many years had you done that prior to your success? I

Debbie Harry  00:39

don’t know. It’s hard to serve male. Sort of nail it all down. I started touring in 76 worked until 82 So somewhere in along there it was clubs.

Nestor Aparicio  00:52

Feel a little nostalgic to be doing it again.

Debbie Harry  00:57

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Vaguely. No, I don’t really think about it like that. I just think about it in terms of doing what I do.

Nestor Aparicio  01:03

Does it bother you when people say blondie is coming to town instead of Deborah?

Debbie Harry  01:08

Harry? No, I don’t. It doesn’t bother me at all. You’re not

Nestor Aparicio  01:13

trying to strike out some new image or anything. It’s pretty much the same thing, just trying to step beyond with with a new album? Well,

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Debbie Harry  01:21

I have to make sort of things clear. I mean, people don’t usually put it in print that I’m blondie. You know, a lot of people call me that, but this is definitely the Dirty Harry tour.

Nestor Aparicio  01:36

Dirty Harry tour. Why deaf, dumb blonde. I thought it was funny. I was funny. I kind of do too. That’s that’s the only connotation anyone should read into it. It’s just,

Debbie Harry  01:49

well, I think it’s sort of obvious what it is, and that’s done in blonde it’s sort of funny, and it’s sort of hip, and whatever what

Nestor Aparicio  01:58

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took to come back so long,

02:02

I don’t know what do you mean? Well,

Nestor Aparicio  02:03

I mean, you haven’t been on the road for a few years, and, I mean, there’s a lot of fans out there. That’s the one here, you know, call me and Heart of Glass and all that stuff. And haven’t been able to reach out and touch you, so to speak.

Debbie Harry  02:14

I guess, sort of switching labels and getting new management and etc, etc, took some time

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Nestor Aparicio  02:21

you were in Baltimore a couple years ago. Yeah, were you here for hairspray? Yeah, any fond remembrances of crab town? Oh,

Debbie Harry  02:30

well, when I was there, just remember it was like the Fourth of July, and we went down to this, up here, Wharf, down in the bay there, and we had a party, you know, the whole cast and everything, the crew and and got eaten alive by mosquito bites, by mosquitoes, I should say. And but there was, you know, great fireworks and everything. Really nice time. How long were you here? I think off and on for about a month.

Nestor Aparicio  03:06

Did you enjoy making the film? Yeah, more so than being on stage or just a different animal, just different okay, I read this crazy story about six months ago, something about Ted Bundy. Can you elaborate on that? Something about getting in a car with a crazed serial killer or something like that?

Debbie Harry  03:29

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Well, I don’t know. I I don’t really know if it was him, but after I read the story, I thought, my God, that sounds like something that almost happened to me. That was really

03:41

simple. What happened? Could happened?

Nestor Aparicio  03:47

I’m losing connection. What happened from from the beginning, where were you when you got picked up by this, this person? Well,

Debbie Harry  03:55

I was, it was a long, sad story. I was limping across. I had these platform shoes on. This was a long time ago, and had these really high platform shoes on, and I was trying to get a cab, and it was late at night, and I was on House

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04:11

Street, village, okay?

Debbie Harry  04:12

And as I was hitchhiking across or flag I was trying to flag down a cab going across town Street, and this little white car stopped, and it was like, sort of this little white car. And, and the guy was not bad looking at all, you know, and, and he said, What are you just, do you need a ride? And I said, Yeah. I said, I’m just going across town, straight across town, a couple of blocks. So I got in the car, and sometimes it was really hot, and the windows were all rolled up an inch and a half, maybe two inches at the top, and I looked to open, I realized doorknobs and so. Nothing.

Nestor Aparicio  05:16

Hello, I’m losing you. Hello, hi. Debbie Nestor from Baltimore, yes. Well, we’ll try again. Let’s hope at&t doesn’t cut us off this time. Now, we started on the corner of some street in Lower East Side of the village, or something, and then you were talking about being picked up in a little white car. So proceed, if you will.

Debbie Harry  06:42

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Well, I think it was probably the first and last time that I ever hitchhiked. When was this? I wasn’t really hitchhiking. I was trying to get a cab across town, and it was very late at night, and I was wearing these platform shoes. It was back in the 70s,

Nestor Aparicio  06:57

early 70s,

Debbie Harry  06:58

okay, and you weren’t a star, then you were just, I wasn’t even an abandoned you were just a citizen, you know, hanging around the New York Dolls. And I was trying to get across town to a club that was like an after hours club, and I couldn’t walk because my feet hurt so much in these stupid shoes. So I was trying to get a cab, and they’re standing there in the street, you know, trying to flag down a cab, and little car pulls up, little white car. Guy says, um, where are you going? I said, and I just like, I, you know, I tried to continue to try to flag a cat down, but he was very persistent. And I wasn’t getting anywhere. So he said, Well, he says, he said, Where are you going? I said, I’m just going a couple blocks across town to the west side. And he said, Well, I’ll give you, Ryan doesn’t matter. So I got in the car, and it was summertime, and the windows were all rolled up, except for, like, about an inch and a half at the top. And so I was sitting there, and I he wasn’t really talking to me or anything, and I was gonna, automatically, I just sort of reached to roll down the window, and I realized that there was no door handle, no window crank, no nothing. And then I started noticing, like the inside of the car was, like, really, totally stripped out, like, gutted.

Nestor Aparicio  08:26

Okay, so where was a little place where the handle was supposed to be there, there, but the handle not, you know what I mean? What are you talking about on the door? There’s always a little place where there’s supposed to be a handle, yeah, yeah. That just didn’t exist. Or there it was there, it was there, but there was no handle. Yeah, okay.

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Debbie Harry  08:43

The handle was removed. Okay. God, stickler for details. Now, the car was funky. It was stripped down. It wasn’t like a streamlined job or anything. It wasn’t, you know, done nicely. It was like the handle was ripped off. There was no handle. There was the bolt was there sticking out through the hole in the fucking interior of the car. But the inside of the car was all stripped out, and it was weird, you know, it’s like, you know, was funky. So I just got very I got very nervous as soon as I thought there was no door handle and no window crank. So I reached my arm up out through the little crack at the top of the window, and I stretched down, and I opened the car from the outside. And as soon as he saw me doing that, he tried to turn a corner really fast, and he in doing so, I spun out of the car and landed in the middle of the street, and he drove off really fast, and that was it. So

Nestor Aparicio  09:43

you didn’t spend two minutes in this car.

Debbie Harry  09:48

I don’t know how long it was. That’s

Nestor Aparicio  09:50

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pretty scary. Now, when did you realize this might be, you know, Ted Bundy, or

Debbie Harry  09:56

right after his execution, there was a big article, and. A Primer Newsweek, and I was reading it just came back to me at that point. I hadn’t thought about that in years.

Nestor Aparicio  10:10

Was it a little white car, though, that they were talking about time? Yeah,

Debbie Harry  10:14

exactly the same. The whole, the whole, exactly, the whole description of how he operated and what he looked like, and the kind of cars that he drove, and the time frame, the years that he was around doing that in that area of the country, exactly fit. And I said, Oh, my God, it probably was him. The description of him was the same. I mean, he was sort of a good looking guy with dark hair. They had on a white shirt. He looked, you know, pretty normal. That’s very scary, very scary. I’m telling you because, I mean, I hadn’t I really, truthfully, I had not thought of the incident.

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Nestor Aparicio  10:57

You try not to remember that stuff, you know, that’s what will give you nightmares. Well, I’m

Debbie Harry  11:01

just, I’m one of the lucky ones. There are any others I don’t know. Okay,

Nestor Aparicio  11:07

now, getting back to your shows a little bit. What songs are you doing on the tour?

Debbie Harry  11:11

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You got a mixture of 5050, of new and old and

Nestor Aparicio  11:16

and, like the old stuff, all the hits are there. You’re not just picking obscure old things.

Debbie Harry  11:19

Are you some some weird stuff and some big stuff. Okay,

Nestor Aparicio  11:24

you’re married to Chris Stein. I think I read that one. I’ve never

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Debbie Harry  11:27

been married to Chris. We’re not we’re separated. Now we don’t live together anymore, but we’re still partners, and we still work together. It’s just

Nestor Aparicio  11:34

like one of the things that said husband and I’m like, I didn’t know that. Okay. I was just trying to clear that up before I said something I shouldn’t have said, Well, I appreciate you giving me some time today and being so persistent, and I’m sorry I was so persistent about asking for details. I just think that’s a very interesting story,

Debbie Harry  11:52

and people strange, right? And I never told John, you know, because I never even thought of it, you know, when I was working with John, you know, I know, I know his interest in serial killers and John Waters, okay? And you know, I know, I know he’s interested in things, and I know that he’s interested in the trials of, you know, certain murderers and stuff like that. I never, even, never even crossed my mind, I’m telling you until right after the execution, there was this story in one of those big magazines, and I was reading it in the hair on the back of my neck. I swear to you, it just went right up. And they’re just like, wow, it just hit my brain.

Nestor Aparicio  12:35

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Well, the time you’re in this car, the short amount of time is it going through your month, this guy’s gonna try to kill you because there are no doorknobs and because he was, I just

Debbie Harry  12:43

got, I got was not where I wanted to be. And I said, there’s something going on here. And I got out, I’m so just lucky and thankful so. How

Nestor Aparicio  13:03

many reporters asked you about this? Nobody has really you talked to someone because I read it.

Debbie Harry  13:08

I read it. Did it in that Vanity Fair article. I talked to Jerry about it because I had just read the article shortly before, I talked to her, and I said that I think that, that I was had this run in with Ted Bundy, and I had never put it together before. There was no reason to, and

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Nestor Aparicio  13:31

this was nine months ago, something like that. Just realizes that’s pretty amazing story. Well, I’m glad I’ll at least get a story that hasn’t been written a whole bunch of times. Well. Thank you very much, and I guess maybe I’ll see you Monday night. Thank

13:47

you, bye, bye, bye.