UBC: Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I admit I have a blind prejudice against Ann Rule, because she is (1) prolific, (2) wildly popular, (3) published in paperbacks that look like the epitome of trashy true crime.

Now, I know better than all of this. I know prolific is no barometer of quality, I know popularity is likewise charted on a completely different axis, and holy freaking Jesus do I know that how a book is packaged has nothing whatsoever to do with the book itself. But of course that's how prejudice works; it's something that's wormed its way down past the rational intellect into the cognitive reflexes. You call yourself on it even as you think it, but you can't stop yourself thinking it in the first place.

It's very annoying.

I am trying to educate myself about true crime writing, having recognized thanks to reading William Roughead that it is a genre in nonfiction that gets denigrated much the way "genre fiction" does as "trashy" and "popular." It even has its token ambassadors to "serious literature" (e.g., Truman Capote) just as science fiction does, authors who are always cited as being brilliant despite the genre they work in. (Newsflash: if a writer is brilliant it is never despite working in a declassé genre. It is because they are working in a genre they love and value.)

So I've started trolling the used bookstores for classics. William Roughead and F. Tennyson Jesse and their colleagues are, sadly, beyond the resources of a casual search, but I've added to Donald Rumbelow and Victoria Lincoln, Jack Olson and Vincent Bugliosi and now Ann Rule.

Ann Rule is an incredibly compelling writer. I bought The Stranger Beside Me Friday afternoon and I finished it this morning (Sunday), despite the fact that it is 625 pages long, counting the Afterword (1986), The Last Chapter (1989), Update--20 Years Later (2000), and The Final Chapter? (2008). Ann Rule died last year, or I imagine the poor woman would still be adding to The Stranger Beside Me, still trying to convince young women that predators like Ted Bundy are NOT charming, NOT sexy, NOT romantic. They cannot be "saved" or "reformed" because what makes them kill is not something they can--or want--to control. I love the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast, but I think it is an incredibly dangerous paradigm because it teaches girls that beasts can be tamed. And there are some beasts that can't.

Rule's story is as much about Ted Bundy's long drawn-out fight with the legal system as it is about his murders (and that long-running brawl through the Florida court system actually catches Bundy the monster in the spotlight more than once), and always the motif running, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, of her fight to understand how a man she considered a close friend could be the monster he so clearly was. She is extremely honest and open about her own ambivalence and about the way Bundy manipulated her; she includes extracts from his letters to her where you can see it happening. You can see the way he understands that if he pushes this button, he gets that response. And you can see the way--as you could see with Jesse Pomeroy in The Wilderness of Ruin: A Tale of Madness, Fire, and the Hunt for America's Youngest Serial Killer--that he can't grasp the fact that the button won't always work. He can't grasp the idea that Rule--or anyone else--might be able to see what he's trying to do or that the efficacy of the button is dependent upon how Bundy himself is perceived. When he writes to her accusing her of exploiting him, she says:

Curiously, my immediate reaction was one of guilt. Emotion without rationale: What have I done to this poor man? And then I remembered that I had never once lied to Ted. I had my book contract months before he was a suspect, I told him about it when he became a suspect, and I reiterated the details of my contract to him many times in letters. [...] I believe that Ted felt that I could be manipulated into writing the definitive "Ted Bundy is innocent" book. [...] But the Miami trial had exposed his guilt with such merciless clarity. I had written what I had to write. Now, he was furious with me [...] That he had lied to me--probably from the first moment I met him--had not occurred to him. [...] then--for the very first time--I truly realized that he could not, would not, understand or emphathize [sic] or even care what my situation was. I had been meant to serve a purpose in his life; I had been the designated Bundy PR person--and I had failed to produce.
(520-21)

Bundy knew how to manipulate and--as his work with Rule at the Crisis Center where they first met demonstrates--he knew how to mimic compassion and empathy. And for some reason, for some part of his life, he got some sort of satisfaction out of doing so. (The fact that, when he first knew her, Bundy gave Rule some very insightful and helpful relationship advice will NEVER not be one of the creepiest things about him.) But he got more satisfaction, and something that was in some way deeply necessary to him, out of abducting, bludgeoning, strangling, raping . . . murdering young women who ticked off some critical number of attributes on an internal list.

This is an excellent book: readable, thoughtful, an honest depiction of the effect a serial murderer has, not only, most cruelly and obviously, on his victims and their families, but on law enforcement personnel, and on the murderer's own friends and family. (I am deliberately not using the term "loved ones.") And one of the saddest and most chilling parts of the whole doorstop book is in the afterwords and "final" chapters as Rule tries to sort through the women and girls who might have been killed by Ted Bundy--both the women who contact her because they think they encountered Bundy and escaped and the girls and women who are unsolved murders, unsolved missing persons, but whose cases fit Bundy's M.O. or who fit what investigators have been able to piece together of his timeline.

Or the murder he confessed to just before his execution in 1989, of a girl in Idaho who was apparently never reported missing and whose body has apparently never been found.

I watch the true crime shows I can find on Hulu. They occasionally do episodes with true crime writers, and the writers very rarely come off well. They tend to present as egotists or vultures or both, and I cringe for them, because I know that for 90% of them, that's not true. (I will not name names, because that's mean.) But Ann Rule didn't ( The New Detectives 3.1). She came across as an intelligent woman who was still struggling to understand something that no one fully understands and as someone who was trying to use her writing and her experience, and the social capital she'd accumulated, to advocate for victims and survivors and to try to educate people, especially women, so that they would not become victims themselves.

So, prolific? Yes. Popular? Yes. Trashy? No. Not at all.



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