What You Didn't Know About Debbie Harry
The notorious serial killer Ted Bundy first achieved a perverse type of fame in 1976, when he went to trial for the kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, per Crime and Investigation. Iconic rocker and frontwoman Debbie Harry did not begin her rise to fame until around 1979, when her band Blondie started topping the charts in America and the UK with their new single Heart of Glass.
Well before either of them were household names, however, their paths crossed one night in New York City in 1972. At least, that's the claim that Harry made in a newspaper interview in 1989, and she has stuck to that story ever since (via Interview Magazine).
According to Harry's memory of the evening's events, she was walking alone down Avenue C in the Lower East Side late one night, trying to catch a cab to an after-hours club, when a little white car pulled up next to her and offered her a ride.
The stripped out car set off Harry's alarm bells
At first, Harry remembered, "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,'" according to Dazed Digital. She relented and got in the car, but when she went to roll the window down, she realized something was wrong.
The car not only had no interior window crank, it had no door handle. It also had no radio, and there was just a gaping hole where the glove compartment should be. Frightened, she began trying to escape, and "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." Despite the harrowing experience, Harry says: "I was so lucky. At the time I didn't know anything about Ted Bundy." (via Dazed Digital).
'My God, it was him'
In fact, it wasn't until she saw Bundy's face in a magazine years later that she came to the upsetting realization that Bundy was the mystery man in the car. She recalled: "It was right after his execution that I read about him ... 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,'" via Interview Magazine.
Not everyone is convinced of Harry's version of events, however. For starters, Bundy was not believed to have been anywhere near New York during that time period, and by most accounts Bundy did not begin killing women until 1974, although this is impossible to verify for sure. The details of the car don't match up with Bundy's known vehicle, which was a normal, light brown Volkswagen Beetle, not a stripped out, creepy white car, per Snopes.
Over 40 years later, there's no way to truly confirm what went on that night, but Harry remains sure that the man she encountered was Bundy. And even if that man was just a very convincing Bundy lookalike, somebody tried to drive away with Harry locked in their car, which is certainly a terrifying encounter no matter who was behind the wheel.