Book-It '10! Book #21
The Fifty Books Challenge, year two! This was a library request.
Title: The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule
Details: Copyright 2009, Pocket books
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Utterly unique in its astonishing intimacy, as jarringly frightening as when it first appeared, Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me defies our expectation that we would surely know if a monster lived among us, worked alongside of us, appeared as one of us. With a slow chill that intensifies with each heart-pounding page, Rule describes her dawning awareness that Ted Bundy, her sensitive coworker on a crisis hotline, was one of the most prolific serial killers in America. He would confess to killing at least thirty-six young women from coast to coast, and was eventually executed for three of those cases. Drawing from their correspondence that endured until shortly before Bundy's death, and striking a seamless balance between her deeply personal perspective and her role as a crime reporter on the hunt for a savage serial killer - the brilliant and charismatic Bundy, the man she thought she knew - Rule changed the course of true-crime literature with this unforgettable chronicle."
Why I Wanted to Read It: The story was irresistible. One of the most notorious serial killers manages to cross paths with an aspiring crime writer?
How I Liked It: Firstly, I recommend getting the most recent edition available. The book was first issued in 1980, with updates in 1986, 1989 (Bundy's death), 2000 ("Twenty Years Later"), and in 2008 (with its 2009 paperback being the version I read), all with subsequent updates of information, some of it correcting earlier information. The book is issued with the complete first edition, and then each subsequent chapter of update.
The latest edition, unlike the previous updates (apparently), is headed by the update, not concluded with it. Rule muses on her life post-Bundy and the legend that has taken hold. She dispels myths both about him and herself and her involvement with him and acknowledges some inaccuracies in the book's previous editions which she replaces with correct information. She also jumps back in time to a point by point account (having fresh information by way of an eye-witness, one of the dentists instrumental to identifying the remains of one of Bundy's youngest victims) of Bundy's execution in 1989.
Getting through the meat of the book (the 1980 edition which follows after Rule's 2008 update preface), Rule jumps into Bundy's second escape attempt in the first chapter and then brings us up to his life story in the second and third, culminating (and after that point, continuing from) in Rule's first meeting Bundy in Chapter Four. It's a rather rickety beginning and the reader is shifted a little from true crime literature to memoir without much transition. Throughout the book, the reader is primed for the moment of the big reveal, the moment that Rule discovers her gentle and sensitive coworker and friend is the hideous serial killer she's writing about. The moment is almost agonizingly slow in coming and Rule doesn't give the reader much of a build-up which is fair to the events (as evidence mounts, she can only admit to not being certain of her friend's innocence) but a bit of a let-down, as callous as that sounds. The closest we get (at least in the 1980 version) is Rule viewing the coroner's photos of the victims at Bundy's second to last court trial and
"I had long since managed to deal with the photographs that are a part of homicide cases with a degree of detachment; they no longer upset me as they once did, although I make it a point not to dwell on them. By the time I stood in [court clerk] Shirley Lewis's office, I had seen thousands of body pictures.
I had seen pictures of [victims] Kathy Devine and Brenda Baker in Thurston County, but that was months before it was known there was a 'Ted'. Of course, there were no bodies to photograph of the damage done to girls young enough to be my daughters-- at pictures of damage alleged to be the handiwork of a man I thought I knew. That man who only minutes before had smiled the same old grin at me, and shrugged as if to say, 'I have no part of this.'
It hit me with a terrible sickening wave. I ran to the ladies' room and threw up." (pg 440)
From there, Rule almost exclusively keeps to a true-crime literature approach (and not a memoir) for the majority of the remaining chapters, however she dedicates a large amount (as it to be expected) in the final to sort out her feelings for what Bundy was to her: a much-needed friend during a difficult divorce and what she must've been to him. The 1980 edition ends with the circus-like quality of Bundy's final court trial after he'd received two death sentences (prosecutors responded to queries of "How many times can you kill a man?" with the need for certainty should Bundy's legal team somehow find appeals in the first two death sentences): an ostentatious drag queen makes a predictably flamboyant appearance, a young man flashes a "SEND BUNDY TO IRAN" shirt, and Bundy manages to marry his girlfriend, a character witness for his defense.
The 1986 update offers what Bundy thought of the book (he sent her a letter coldly accusing her of taking advantage of their relationship and opining it "only fair" that she share some of her "great good fortune" with Bundy's wife), as well as standard updates in the six years since the book's publication (including numerous times Bundy was saved from the electric chair by the appeals process), and Rule's required rue at her naivety of believing "the Ted Bundy story was over" and Ted being "locked away from the rays of the limelight" with which she had helped close the 1980 edition.
The 1989 update is the longest, with updates needed on both memoir and true-crime literature fronts: Bundy's execution. Rule takes us through her renewed contact with Bundy (certain he would meet his fate in the electric chair in 1986, Rule sent him a letter expressing that his "death would not go unnoticed -- or completely unmourned"-- by her to which Bundy offered that he held "no animosity" towards Rule-- after all but dismissing her work with serial murder as "oversimplified, overgeneralized, and scientifically unsupportable") revealing and segueing into Bundy's new career as an "expert" on serial killers (which leads to his contact with long-time investigator and antagonist Bob Keppel, to whom Bundy confessed). It's here we see the "promised" slow and lasting chill of the book. Rule comes to grips with the horror of who Bundy truly is: his laundry lists of victims through his confessions, the realization that during the period when they didn't correspond, Bundy was trying (in vain) to track down her home address to send her a letter, a chilling tactic (Rule acknowledged that he may have lost her address, but she'd had the same one for their entire correspondence) she believes was an effort to control her, the same consensus she reached when she discovered he been trying to find out his estranged former (longtime) girlfriend's home address. Rule professes her belief in Bundy's involvement in the case of a missing girl from 1961, an eight-year-old on fifteen-year-old Bundy's paper route. After hearing audio tape of some of Bundy's confessions, Rule notes
"The confessions came in bursts and despite long silences. They were horrific. Ted Bundy proved to be, as he had said years before in Pensacola and Tallahassee, a 'voyeur, a vampire,' a man whose fantasies had taken over his life. his aberrations and perversions were as ugly and sick and as deeply entrenched as those of any killer I have ever written.
They must have been there all the time I was spending Sunday and Tuesday nights alone with the clear-eyed young man of twenty-four named Ted. That thought makes me shiver, as if a rabbit had run over my grave." (pg 598)
By the 2000 update, Rule has understandably not as much to offer, save for more "near-misses" (women that escaped Bundy) professed to her and the revelation that she
"deals, as always, with separate Teds. As I sit in police seminars and watch slides of Ted's dead victims-- the ones who were found before they were skeletal-- I see the evidence that he returned to the scenes of his crimes to line dead lips and eyes with garish make-up and to put blush on pale cheeks. I accept that this was done by the second Ted. I accept that he engaged not only in cruel murder but in necrophilia. I can deal with this intellectually, but I try never to let it slip into the emotional side of my mind. Yet even writing about it makes my throat close and the skin at the back of my neck prickle." (pgs 618 and 619)
Lastly, it's interesting to see the direction Rule's marketing of the book goes in. She clearly rushed the 1980 version to the presses as quickly as possible, probably trying to catch what she felt were dying embers of the fire of public fascination with Ted Bundy. As the years wear on, she realizes her now vast audience and tries to direct the book (and fascination with Bundy) to safe behavior for women. By the 2009 update, she recounts the stories of more near-misses by listing the factors that made them near misses (and adding that she hopes her readers understand why they were near-misses):
"They screamed.
They fought.
They slammed doors in a stranger's face.
They ran.
They doubted glib stories.
They spotted flaws in these stories.
They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them." (pg xxvii)
All of these (save for the last, although it could be a directive of traveling in groups, not walking alone, et cetera) are all advice generally given by rape prevention classes.
She then details a story told in a rape prevention conference she attended. Detectives at the conference had arrested a man for the rapes and murders of several women. Finally, he confessed. One account he gave was of luring a woman into his car before pressing a knife to her ribs. He told her if she screamed, he'd kill her right there. Stopped at a red light on a four-lane highway, a police cruiser pulled up beside them in the right hand lane. It was a warm evening and the windows of both cars were down. The woman, according to Rule, could've reached out her arm and touched the police car's windowsill but just then the captor reiterated that if she screamed, if she called for help, he'd kill her. This lasted for about a minute and the woman remained quiet and still as instructed. The light changed and the police car went straight ahead, the captor and his victim turned left and went down the road about a half a mile; the captor parked the car and then raped his captive. He then killed her. The message inherent in the story is crystal clear.
There's something to be said for the fact the "treating" of Ted Bundys is not with what creates them so much as how women can adjust to them, therefore shifting control (and "blame") to the potential victim. Both Jessica Valenti and Inga Muscio have articulated the injustice of what is essentially the limitation of women's freedom (to walk alone, to walk at night, to not have to build one's schedule around a potential attack) in the effort to stop rape (again, placing the "blame" in the hands of the potential victim). However, Rule's actions are still responsible, given her audience. Aside from taking a bit of the mythological sheen from a serial killer by making it into a clear threat that requires action, Rule is attempting to inject conscience to what could be called "a book for serial killer fans" by suggesting actions to reduce the number of victims. Though it is undeniable that the entirety of the blame rests with Ted Bundy and his contemporaries, one can't help but wonder what would've happened had any of his victims attended a prevention course (the idea of such classes was still embryonic in the 1970s).
All in all, a challenging, in-depth, and memorable piece of true-crime literature.
Notable: The front cover of the 2009 book boasts "new photos" to the photo inset. As common in such books, when reading, I would flip to the photograph section when a name was mentioned to see the person's face. Bundy is, of course, the majority of the photographs. Various stages of his life, from his grimacing senior photo up through his final appearance in court, are all documented, along with various officials who've worked the various cases.
However, a big section is missing. Of Bundy's 34 victims (both dead and those that survived) Rule actually lists (to say nothing of the speculations like his young neighbor) and twice, only ten appear in the picture section, five of those in a poster being studied by an investigator. While the survivors are obviously omitted for privacy reasons (although one of Bundy's survivors appears in a large pic testifying in court), it seems misplaced not to include pictures (if they could be obtained) of the rest.
Rule herself notes
"Because Ted murdered so many, many women, he did more than rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their specialness too. It is too easy, and expedient, to present them as a list of names; it is impossible to tell each victim's story within the confines of one book. All those bright, pretty, beloved young women became, of necessity, 'Bundy victims.'
Only Ted stayed in the spotlight." (pg 602)
Aside from the fact the extent to which Rule describes each victim (when she describes them at all) is incredibly brief (somewhat understandable in a book of this length) most of the description hinges on their prettiness, as though it were a personality trait. Jessica Valenti has also written about the sexualization of rape victims (it sells) as though they aren't worth caring about if they aren't physically attractive. Rule mentions the ugly tactics of some reporters to get stories from the families with threats of publication of "unsavory rumors" (maybe the victim was a "casual pick-up" rather than a "good girl") which combined with a family's lack of explicit grief (to the reporters) might mean the public would stop caring and thus stop searching.
It is indeed impossible to tell the stories of so many victims in a single book. But a much better window into who they were (or at least a picture) isn't. And an acknowledgement doesn't cover that.
Title: The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule
Details: Copyright 2009, Pocket books
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Utterly unique in its astonishing intimacy, as jarringly frightening as when it first appeared, Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me defies our expectation that we would surely know if a monster lived among us, worked alongside of us, appeared as one of us. With a slow chill that intensifies with each heart-pounding page, Rule describes her dawning awareness that Ted Bundy, her sensitive coworker on a crisis hotline, was one of the most prolific serial killers in America. He would confess to killing at least thirty-six young women from coast to coast, and was eventually executed for three of those cases. Drawing from their correspondence that endured until shortly before Bundy's death, and striking a seamless balance between her deeply personal perspective and her role as a crime reporter on the hunt for a savage serial killer - the brilliant and charismatic Bundy, the man she thought she knew - Rule changed the course of true-crime literature with this unforgettable chronicle."
Why I Wanted to Read It: The story was irresistible. One of the most notorious serial killers manages to cross paths with an aspiring crime writer?
How I Liked It: Firstly, I recommend getting the most recent edition available. The book was first issued in 1980, with updates in 1986, 1989 (Bundy's death), 2000 ("Twenty Years Later"), and in 2008 (with its 2009 paperback being the version I read), all with subsequent updates of information, some of it correcting earlier information. The book is issued with the complete first edition, and then each subsequent chapter of update.
The latest edition, unlike the previous updates (apparently), is headed by the update, not concluded with it. Rule muses on her life post-Bundy and the legend that has taken hold. She dispels myths both about him and herself and her involvement with him and acknowledges some inaccuracies in the book's previous editions which she replaces with correct information. She also jumps back in time to a point by point account (having fresh information by way of an eye-witness, one of the dentists instrumental to identifying the remains of one of Bundy's youngest victims) of Bundy's execution in 1989.
Getting through the meat of the book (the 1980 edition which follows after Rule's 2008 update preface), Rule jumps into Bundy's second escape attempt in the first chapter and then brings us up to his life story in the second and third, culminating (and after that point, continuing from) in Rule's first meeting Bundy in Chapter Four. It's a rather rickety beginning and the reader is shifted a little from true crime literature to memoir without much transition. Throughout the book, the reader is primed for the moment of the big reveal, the moment that Rule discovers her gentle and sensitive coworker and friend is the hideous serial killer she's writing about. The moment is almost agonizingly slow in coming and Rule doesn't give the reader much of a build-up which is fair to the events (as evidence mounts, she can only admit to not being certain of her friend's innocence) but a bit of a let-down, as callous as that sounds. The closest we get (at least in the 1980 version) is Rule viewing the coroner's photos of the victims at Bundy's second to last court trial and
"I had long since managed to deal with the photographs that are a part of homicide cases with a degree of detachment; they no longer upset me as they once did, although I make it a point not to dwell on them. By the time I stood in [court clerk] Shirley Lewis's office, I had seen thousands of body pictures.
I had seen pictures of [victims] Kathy Devine and Brenda Baker in Thurston County, but that was months before it was known there was a 'Ted'. Of course, there were no bodies to photograph of the damage done to girls young enough to be my daughters-- at pictures of damage alleged to be the handiwork of a man I thought I knew. That man who only minutes before had smiled the same old grin at me, and shrugged as if to say, 'I have no part of this.'
It hit me with a terrible sickening wave. I ran to the ladies' room and threw up." (pg 440)
From there, Rule almost exclusively keeps to a true-crime literature approach (and not a memoir) for the majority of the remaining chapters, however she dedicates a large amount (as it to be expected) in the final to sort out her feelings for what Bundy was to her: a much-needed friend during a difficult divorce and what she must've been to him. The 1980 edition ends with the circus-like quality of Bundy's final court trial after he'd received two death sentences (prosecutors responded to queries of "How many times can you kill a man?" with the need for certainty should Bundy's legal team somehow find appeals in the first two death sentences): an ostentatious drag queen makes a predictably flamboyant appearance, a young man flashes a "SEND BUNDY TO IRAN" shirt, and Bundy manages to marry his girlfriend, a character witness for his defense.
The 1986 update offers what Bundy thought of the book (he sent her a letter coldly accusing her of taking advantage of their relationship and opining it "only fair" that she share some of her "great good fortune" with Bundy's wife), as well as standard updates in the six years since the book's publication (including numerous times Bundy was saved from the electric chair by the appeals process), and Rule's required rue at her naivety of believing "the Ted Bundy story was over" and Ted being "locked away from the rays of the limelight" with which she had helped close the 1980 edition.
The 1989 update is the longest, with updates needed on both memoir and true-crime literature fronts: Bundy's execution. Rule takes us through her renewed contact with Bundy (certain he would meet his fate in the electric chair in 1986, Rule sent him a letter expressing that his "death would not go unnoticed -- or completely unmourned"-- by her to which Bundy offered that he held "no animosity" towards Rule-- after all but dismissing her work with serial murder as "oversimplified, overgeneralized, and scientifically unsupportable") revealing and segueing into Bundy's new career as an "expert" on serial killers (which leads to his contact with long-time investigator and antagonist Bob Keppel, to whom Bundy confessed). It's here we see the "promised" slow and lasting chill of the book. Rule comes to grips with the horror of who Bundy truly is: his laundry lists of victims through his confessions, the realization that during the period when they didn't correspond, Bundy was trying (in vain) to track down her home address to send her a letter, a chilling tactic (Rule acknowledged that he may have lost her address, but she'd had the same one for their entire correspondence) she believes was an effort to control her, the same consensus she reached when she discovered he been trying to find out his estranged former (longtime) girlfriend's home address. Rule professes her belief in Bundy's involvement in the case of a missing girl from 1961, an eight-year-old on fifteen-year-old Bundy's paper route. After hearing audio tape of some of Bundy's confessions, Rule notes
"The confessions came in bursts and despite long silences. They were horrific. Ted Bundy proved to be, as he had said years before in Pensacola and Tallahassee, a 'voyeur, a vampire,' a man whose fantasies had taken over his life. his aberrations and perversions were as ugly and sick and as deeply entrenched as those of any killer I have ever written.
They must have been there all the time I was spending Sunday and Tuesday nights alone with the clear-eyed young man of twenty-four named Ted. That thought makes me shiver, as if a rabbit had run over my grave." (pg 598)
By the 2000 update, Rule has understandably not as much to offer, save for more "near-misses" (women that escaped Bundy) professed to her and the revelation that she
"deals, as always, with separate Teds. As I sit in police seminars and watch slides of Ted's dead victims-- the ones who were found before they were skeletal-- I see the evidence that he returned to the scenes of his crimes to line dead lips and eyes with garish make-up and to put blush on pale cheeks. I accept that this was done by the second Ted. I accept that he engaged not only in cruel murder but in necrophilia. I can deal with this intellectually, but I try never to let it slip into the emotional side of my mind. Yet even writing about it makes my throat close and the skin at the back of my neck prickle." (pgs 618 and 619)
Lastly, it's interesting to see the direction Rule's marketing of the book goes in. She clearly rushed the 1980 version to the presses as quickly as possible, probably trying to catch what she felt were dying embers of the fire of public fascination with Ted Bundy. As the years wear on, she realizes her now vast audience and tries to direct the book (and fascination with Bundy) to safe behavior for women. By the 2009 update, she recounts the stories of more near-misses by listing the factors that made them near misses (and adding that she hopes her readers understand why they were near-misses):
"They screamed.
They fought.
They slammed doors in a stranger's face.
They ran.
They doubted glib stories.
They spotted flaws in these stories.
They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them." (pg xxvii)
All of these (save for the last, although it could be a directive of traveling in groups, not walking alone, et cetera) are all advice generally given by rape prevention classes.
She then details a story told in a rape prevention conference she attended. Detectives at the conference had arrested a man for the rapes and murders of several women. Finally, he confessed. One account he gave was of luring a woman into his car before pressing a knife to her ribs. He told her if she screamed, he'd kill her right there. Stopped at a red light on a four-lane highway, a police cruiser pulled up beside them in the right hand lane. It was a warm evening and the windows of both cars were down. The woman, according to Rule, could've reached out her arm and touched the police car's windowsill but just then the captor reiterated that if she screamed, if she called for help, he'd kill her. This lasted for about a minute and the woman remained quiet and still as instructed. The light changed and the police car went straight ahead, the captor and his victim turned left and went down the road about a half a mile; the captor parked the car and then raped his captive. He then killed her. The message inherent in the story is crystal clear.
There's something to be said for the fact the "treating" of Ted Bundys is not with what creates them so much as how women can adjust to them, therefore shifting control (and "blame") to the potential victim. Both Jessica Valenti and Inga Muscio have articulated the injustice of what is essentially the limitation of women's freedom (to walk alone, to walk at night, to not have to build one's schedule around a potential attack) in the effort to stop rape (again, placing the "blame" in the hands of the potential victim). However, Rule's actions are still responsible, given her audience. Aside from taking a bit of the mythological sheen from a serial killer by making it into a clear threat that requires action, Rule is attempting to inject conscience to what could be called "a book for serial killer fans" by suggesting actions to reduce the number of victims. Though it is undeniable that the entirety of the blame rests with Ted Bundy and his contemporaries, one can't help but wonder what would've happened had any of his victims attended a prevention course (the idea of such classes was still embryonic in the 1970s).
All in all, a challenging, in-depth, and memorable piece of true-crime literature.
Notable: The front cover of the 2009 book boasts "new photos" to the photo inset. As common in such books, when reading, I would flip to the photograph section when a name was mentioned to see the person's face. Bundy is, of course, the majority of the photographs. Various stages of his life, from his grimacing senior photo up through his final appearance in court, are all documented, along with various officials who've worked the various cases.
However, a big section is missing. Of Bundy's 34 victims (both dead and those that survived) Rule actually lists (to say nothing of the speculations like his young neighbor) and twice, only ten appear in the picture section, five of those in a poster being studied by an investigator. While the survivors are obviously omitted for privacy reasons (although one of Bundy's survivors appears in a large pic testifying in court), it seems misplaced not to include pictures (if they could be obtained) of the rest.
Rule herself notes
"Because Ted murdered so many, many women, he did more than rob them of their lives. He robbed them of their specialness too. It is too easy, and expedient, to present them as a list of names; it is impossible to tell each victim's story within the confines of one book. All those bright, pretty, beloved young women became, of necessity, 'Bundy victims.'
Only Ted stayed in the spotlight." (pg 602)
Aside from the fact the extent to which Rule describes each victim (when she describes them at all) is incredibly brief (somewhat understandable in a book of this length) most of the description hinges on their prettiness, as though it were a personality trait. Jessica Valenti has also written about the sexualization of rape victims (it sells) as though they aren't worth caring about if they aren't physically attractive. Rule mentions the ugly tactics of some reporters to get stories from the families with threats of publication of "unsavory rumors" (maybe the victim was a "casual pick-up" rather than a "good girl") which combined with a family's lack of explicit grief (to the reporters) might mean the public would stop caring and thus stop searching.
It is indeed impossible to tell the stories of so many victims in a single book. But a much better window into who they were (or at least a picture) isn't. And an acknowledgement doesn't cover that.