Serial Killers Among Us

Posted by TK Kenyon Dec 12, 2006

Hundreds of true crime books are published every year, but few make the cut to becoming classics. Anne Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me takes the cake as the ultimate true crime story.

Rule was down on her luck, working part-time as a crime writer for magazines and getting divorced, trying to provide for her kids, when she landed a book deal to write about a series of sexually sadistic murders of pretty, young women occurring at that time in the Seattle area. She was to follow the homicide detectives and, hopefully, the killer would be caught while she was writing the book.

She was also volunteering at a suicide prevention hotline, talking to desperate people in the dead of night. Her fellow volunteer was Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy was, of course, the psychopath who killed pretty girls in his spare time.

You cannot make stuff like this up.

Ann Rule kept up a correspondence with him for years, until he was executed in Florida for yet more murders. Even now, twenty years later, she writes in a postscript that she has trouble reconciling the charming young man that she knew with the demon that brutally killed young women. This book, while horrifying, is most fascinating because Ted Bundy fooled everyone, including Rule, and this text demonstrates how fooled she was, and how fooled you might have been if you had met him.

Read more about this book and Helen Morrison's My Life among the Serial Killers in this article.

TK Kenyon