UBC: Rule, You Belong to Me

You Belong to Me and Other True Crime Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



"You Belong to Me": I-95 Indian River County FL 1990: The Florida State Highway Patrol was found not liable in Lorraine Dombroski Hendricks' murder, but the more I think about it, the more I think that judgment was itself part of the exact same failure that let her be killed: there was more than enough evidence that State Trooper Tim Harris was not fit to be out alone, much less in a position of authority--the problem was that the vast majority of the evidence was his behavior toward his estranged wife Sandy, and that evidence was consistently discounted because (1) it was considered Harris' personal life and not the business of his supervisors, and (2) his (male) supervisors preferred (again consistently) to believe Harris' version of the situation, which was that his wife was a cold-hearted bitch, rather than the truth, which was that she was terrified of her abusive unfaithful stalker of a husband. (Also (3) Sandy Harris had been conditioned to believe that the problem was her, even when it was manifestly him, and she had no confidence that her version would be believed, and that again is part of the same problem of not thinking that men need to be held accountable for their behavior toward women.) If Harris' supervisors had taken the situation seriously as what it was--mounting (and mountainous) evidence that Harris, sworn to uphold the law, believed with perfect sincerity that the law did not apply to him (it's the most ridiculously blatant double-standard I believe I've ever seen, or it would be ridiculous if the consequences hadn't become so dire)--or even if anyone, at any point, had looked at the way Tim Harris talked about women, treated women (including street harassment in front of other (male) law-enforcement officers), and behaved toward his wife, and simply said, Something here is not right, instead of letting it slide and letting it slide, Lorraine Hendricks would not have died in 1990. Because when you look at the pattern of evidence that Rule describes, the only surprise is that Harris' victim wasn't his wife. He used his authority as a Florida state trooper to find a proxy. I don't think--let me be clear--that anyone except Tim Harris is responsible for Lorraine Hendricks' death, because I am not prepared to accept excuses for him, but there is a certain amount of quis custodiet ipsos custodes? that, yeah, actually, I do think we need to be asking.
"Black Christmas": Seattle 1984: a lawyer and his family are murdered because a young man (who was judged legally sane, but I'm not convinced) fixated on Communists as the cause of all his problems and decided to start killing them, and because he read and confabulated an old story about the lawyer's father--and that story wasn't even what he thought it was. David Lewis Rice used a steam iron to bludgeon the lawyer, his wife, and their two little boys to death.
One Trick Pony": Yakima WA 1975: This is the obverse face of Why Buy the Cow?: Murder Is Cheaper than Divorce. Man murders his wife and fakes the scene to look like she was kicked by one of her horses; determined efforts on the part of the woman's sister finally get people looking at her skull who know a HAMMER when they see its shape in someone's skull.
"The Computer Error and the Killer": Burien WA 1974 (and several other dates and places): Here's another Kill Me Twice. Gary Addison Taylor should never have BEEN in Burien WA to abduct and kill Vonnie Stuth; he'd been judged psychotic--criminally insane and demonstrably a public danger--in Michigan in 1957. And then again in 1961. But our legal system has a really crappy memory, and in 1970 he was transferred to outpatient care (the director of the clinic said he believed Taylor "was no longer mentally ill and would be dangerous only if he failed to take his medication" (382)) and the blindingly inevitable happened. And at that point, as if this story weren't already beyond what a novelist could get away with, when he stopped showing up for his appointment in mid-1973, he wasn't reported as an escaped mental patient for three months and that report didn't get into the national law enforcement communication system, a mistake which wasn't discovered until more than a year later. And then, when Michigan authorities realized that mistake, their urgent bulletin which was supposed to be released on November 6, 1974 . . . wasn't. Gary Taylor's name wasn't actually entered into the national system until January 13, 1975. Vonnie Stuth vanished on November 27, 1974. King County law enforcement was forced to release Addison when they had him in custody on December 6, because they checked the system and his name came up clean. Which meant that more women in Texas would be raped and terrorized before Taylor was finally arrested in May 1975. He eventually confessed to four murders, including Vonnie Stuth, but investigators were pretty sure he wouldn't have told them about any murders they hadn't already connected him to. Which means the actual count of his victims is unknown.
"The Vanishing": Seattle WA 1979: this one's a mystery without a murder. Stacy Sparks disappeared without a trace in 1979. Friends, family, police searched and searched without success. She and her car were finally found by construction workers in 1981 where she had gone off the Lacey V. Murrow Bridge, one of many victims of the bridge's infamous "bulge." No one saw it happen and the accident left no evidence above the surface of the water.
"The Last Letter": Bellevue WA 1985: This case makes a horrible sort of ring composition with "You Belong to Me." Bill Brand, like Tim Harris, was a possessive stalker; Jackie Brand, like Sandy Harris, didn't recognize the difference between possessiveness and love until it was too late. In one way, Jackie was lucky; she never had to learn what Bill really thought of her.

Lorraine Hendricks' awful death, one part narcissistic sociopath, one part societal blindness, and one part malignant synchronicity, stirred into an cocktail of rape and ligature strangulation, just makes me heartsick.



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