UBC: Rule, Worth More Dead

Worth More Dead and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Worth More Dead"

The bizarre and appalling career of Roland Pitre, who never liked to get his own hands dirty, but who conspired to kill his lover's husband (then turned state's evidence to testify against her, even though there doesn't really seem to be convincing evidence that she was the person conspiring with him), then conspired to kill his ex-wife, then hatched a grotesque plot to kidnap his teenage stepson and hold him for ransom, keeping him imprisoned in a tiny secret room Pitre built in the basement bathroom of his girlfriend's house. (Rule doesn't think the teenage boy was ever going to make it out of that plot alive, and I agree with her.)
"'It's Really Weird Looking at My Own Grave'": Timberlane WA 1979

One girl was raped and murdered; two others were raped and escaped with their lives. The surviving victims were able to identify William Gene Scribner as their rapist. When the police were processing the murder scene, they found evidence from one of the survivors. Scribner had taken both of the later (surviving) victims to the site of the murder to rape them.
"Old Man's Darling": Denver CO 2003

Teresa Perez, 40, murdered her lover, Justyn Rosen, 80 (no, not a typo, eighty) because he would not leave his wife for her. Since she chose to shoot him in the parking lot of a police sub-station (and shot a police officer for trying to intervene), she committed suicide by cop.
"All for Nothing": Issaquah WA 1989

Don't put it all on women. Hell hath no fury like a person scorned. Successful business man loses his shit and murders a woman he was dating (he much more seriously than she) and a man who may or may not have been having an affair with her. (The male victim was a popular Seattle news personality, Larry Sturholm, and Rule bends over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I dunno. When you are going to the Cayman Islands without your wife of twenty-two years, and you are taking with you a woman whom your wife has never heard of, and you somehow omit to mention to your wife that this other woman is going, letting your wife drop you off at the airport and then renting a car to go pick up your friend . . . I think it's not unreasonable to say your motives are less than pure.) Pawlyk, who'd never met Larry Sturholm before he killed him, stabbed each of his victims more than 100 times, then tried to commit suicide himself--but couldn't bring himself either to cut deeply enough or to actually take a lethal quantity of sleeping pills.
"A Desperate Housewife": Renton WA 1998

Every Woman's Nightmare, next verse, same as the first. Woman trapped in emotionally abusive marriage with a controlling, fault-finding, obsessively jealous spouse, asks for a divorce and gets killed for it. (Her (female) friends begged her not to talk to Bob alone; she told them she was sure Bob would never hurt her. Prosecutors think she was beaten to death with a baseball bat.) Bob Durall, like Steve Sherer (from Empty Promises and Other True Cases), hid his victim's body, then faked concern for his "missing" wife--but didn't fake it particularly well. At his trial, having insisted on testifying in his own defense, he told a story so implausible that I'm sure his attorney wanted to commit seppuku on the spot.


View all my reviews