40 Elbert Ln, Snowmass Village, CO 81615
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Author: Jewls Krueger
On the night of January 12, 1975, Caryn Campbell walked from an elevator toward her room at the Wildwood Inn in Snowmass Village, Colorado, and was never seen alive again. She was the first of Ted Bundy's known Colorado victims and the only one of the three whose body was ever recovered. The murder charge that followed brought Bundy to the Roaring Fork Valley, where he escaped custody twice before fleeing to Florida.
The inn still stands and still takes guests, now operating as the Wildwood Snowmass.
Caryn Eileen Campbell was 23 years old and worked as a registered nurse. She was born in Garden City, Michigan, in September 1951 and was living in Dearborn, west of Detroit, at the time of her death.
She had traveled to Colorado the day before she disappeared with her fiancé, Dr. Raymond Gadowski, a cardiologist attending a medical conference, and his two children. The trip was arranged so that the conference could double as a family ski vacation.
By January 1975, Bundy had already killed at least a dozen women and girls across Washington, Oregon, Utah, and Idaho, according to his later confessions and the investigations that followed. He had moved to Salt Lake City in August 1974 to attend law school at the University of Utah.
Downhill skiing was his one serious athletic pursuit going back to high school, which he pursued with stolen equipment and forged lift tickets. When police searched his Salt Lake City apartment in August 1975, they found a guide to Colorado ski resorts with a checkmark next to the Wildwood Inn.
Campbell rode the elevator up to retrieve a magazine she had left in the room. Two people who knew her from the conference saw her step off on her floor. Somewhere between the elevator and her door, she vanished. The magazine was still where she had left it.
Exactly how Bundy got her out of the building has never been established. In many of his abductions he wore a cast, a sling, or used crutches and asked women to help him carry something to his car, a tan Volkswagen Beetle with the front passenger seat removed. Two months later in Vail, he approached ski instructor Julie Cunningham on crutches and asked her to help carry his ski boots. He confessed to that one. He never publicly explained what happened at the Wildwood.
Gadowski reported her missing the next morning. Nothing turned up. He stayed at the inn for about a week hoping she would come back, then returned to Michigan.
On February 17, 1975, roughly five weeks after she disappeared, a passerby driving Owl Creek Road noticed birds circling a snowbank and stopped to look. Campbell's nude body lay a few feet off the road, near Sinclair Divide at the top of Owl Creek Road, close to what is now the Tom Blake trailhead. She was identified through dental records.
According to the coroner's report, she had been killed by blows to the head from a blunt instrument that left distinctive linear grooved depressions in her skull. Her body also bore deep cuts from a sharp weapon.
Book Recommendation
Ann Rule's 'The Stranger Beside Me' is required reading for any true crime fan. Anne Rule was tasked with writing about a series of murders, all while working with the murderer, Ted Bundy, at a suicide hotline.
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Bundy was arrested in Utah in August 1975 after a highway patrol officer stopped his Volkswagen. In September he sold the car, and Utah police immediately impounded it. FBI technicians took it apart and found hairs matching samples from Campbell's body, along with hairs consistent with two Utah victims. That evidence is what tied Bundy to Colorado.
In February 1976 he stood trial in Salt Lake City for the aggravated kidnapping of Carol DaRonch, who had escaped from his car in November 1974. He waived a jury, and after a four-day bench trial the judge found him guilty. He was sentenced that June to one to 15 years in the Utah State Prison.
That October, Colorado charged him with Campbell's murder. He was transferred to Aspen in January 1977. Because the Pitkin County Jail was small and overcrowded, he was housed at the more secure Garfield County Jail in Glenwood Springs and driven back and forth for court dates.
Bundy chose to represent himself, and the judge allowed him to appear without handcuffs or leg shackles. On June 7, 1977, during a recess at a preliminary hearing at the Pitkin County Courthouse, he asked to use the law library. Screened from his guard by a bookcase, he opened a window and jumped from the second story, spraining an ankle on landing.
The reaction in Aspen was immediate. Roadblocks went up at every major intersection, ranchers from Woody Creek organized a mounted posse, and roughly 40 women lined up at the town's only gun store to buy pistols before the police chief suspended sales. Bundy hid on Aspen Mountain, broke into a hunting cabin, got lost trying to reach Crested Butte, and was picked up six days later driving a stolen car through Aspen.
Back in Glenwood Springs, he began sawing at the ceiling of his cell. He lost 35 pounds so he could fit through the hole. On the night of December 30, 1977, with the jail on a holiday skeleton crew, he stuffed his bed with books, climbed into the crawl space, dropped into the chief jailer's empty apartment, changed clothes, and walked out the front door. Nobody noticed until midday on December 31. By then he was in Chicago.
He was never tried for Caryn Campbell's murder. Two weeks after the second escape he attacked the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University. He was executed in Florida in January 1989.
In April 2025, an entity controlled by hotelier Stephane De Baets purchased the Wildwood along with the neighboring Viewline Resort Snowmass and the Snowmass Conference Center for nearly $144 million. In early 2026, his firm Elevated Returns filed a land use application with the town of Snowmass Village proposing to consolidate all three properties and redevelop them into a Ritz-Carlton. The proposal was still moving through the town's review process at the time of writing.
The Wildwood sits in the West Village of Snowmass Village, just above the Snowmass Mall and steps from the slopes, about eight miles from downtown Aspen. It has 151 rooms across two buildings. Pitkin County property records show the original structure went up in 1967 and was rebuilt in 1985, so very little of what Caryn Campbell would have walked through in 1975 remains intact.
The hotel is private property and an operating business. You can book a room, and guests are welcome, but the staff are not tour guides and the property is not a memorial. If you visit, be a paying guest or stay in the public areas of the village. Do not wander hotel corridors looking for a particular room, and do not press employees for details about the case.
The site where her body was found is on Owl Creek Road between Snowmass Village and Aspen, near the Tom Blake trailhead. It is a public road and a popular trail corridor. Treat it as what it is, the place where a 23-year-old woman was left in the snow, and keep to the road and marked trails.
The Sorority House where Ted Bundy killed two women and severely injured two others.
The small apartment that serial killer Ted Bundy lived in while living in Utah
Ted Bundy escaped from the second story of this Aspen courthouse while awaiting a murder trial
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