The Stranger Beside Me / by Ann Rule

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American non-fiction author Ann Rule has made quite a career out of profiling true crime cases, illuminating the scene, the situation, the motives involved and, particularly, the intimate lives of the victims and villains. Yet a special twist is added to Rule's 1980 (and later 2000 reprint) book The Stranger Beside Me. Rule herself is, chillingly, one of the characters, having worked beside notorious serial killer Ted Bundy in a crisis center during her days as a Seattle policewomen, then considering him a "true gentleman" and "likeable co-worker". Only here does she reveal the shocking revelation of Bundy as not only a man she once referred to as "dear friend", but as a monster of unspeakable atrocities she herself can scarcely fathom.

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At first glance, no one would have taken Ted Bundy for a serial killer. His conventional, handsome visage, amiable demeanor and intelligent speech had everyone fooled, so much so that his killing spree ran into the dozens, covering 5 states prior to his initial apprehension. And even then, due to lazy police work, he managed to escape, committing at least three more grisly killings in Florida prior to his final capture, conviction and death sentence.

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A child born into rather unfortunate circumstances (the fact that his sister was actually his mother was hid from him until he was a teenager), Ted remained shy and introverted for most of his youth, never much of a troublemaker nor singled out by the institutional system as a potential problem for society. Through his stepfather's extensive collection of adult magazines, Ted had been exposed to assorted pornography, much of it particularly graphic, at an especially sensitive age, a symptom he would later attribute to sparking his acute interest in sexual violence. By his twenties, Ted had mastered a dual persona: well-mannered, socially-adept white collar professional vs. "the entity", his own term characterizing his pathologically motivated, sexually-driven need to kill. He effectively appropriated each in a more or less routine fashion, easily able to manipulate others (mostly women, all his victims were female) and conceal his motives and any criminal evidence after the fact. His first murder, an unidentified hitchhiker whose remains were never found, occurred in 1973 when Ted was 26. Successively in the years between 1974 and 1978, Bundy murdered over thirty women (the true count is still unknown), each killed in excessively brutal fashion, often bludgeoned to death, impaled, or otherwise sexually maimed.

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This book is actually two stories. One describes the gradual disintegration of a seemingly normal, affable, intelligent man into a sexual psychopath so evil, so preternatural in his vicious killings, that one wonders if he was human at all. The other story is that of Ann Rule herself, a decent, hard-working, middle-aged mother of four who meets and befriends a nice young man working beside her in a crisis clinic. The slow but inexorable realization on Rule's part that this man whom she'd accepted as a "dear friend" is in fact an unspeakably violent serial killer is almost painful to read, her new afterward penned in 2000 revealing that she still hasn't "recovered" and "moved on". Yet, all told, it makes for a great read for anyone interested in true crime.