The Stranger Beside Me

About this book

Not long ago true crime writer Ann Rule recalls lying on an operating table. The anesthesiologist leaned over before putting her to sleep. "Ann " the anesthesiologist said softly "tell me what was Ted Bundy really like?" Despite meeting Floridas electric chair in 1989 the subject of Rules bestselling book continues to haunt her. Rule and Bundy were friends. They met in 1971 at a Seattle crisis clinic where they shared the late shift answering a suicide hotline. Their subsequent conversations meetings and letters spanned the rest of Bundys life as he evolved into one of the centurys most notorious serial killers. Its been 20 years since Rule first penned this chilling account. But the story--and her 2000 update--will still have readers reaching for their Xanax. No gratuitous gore here; just the basic bone-chilling evidence. In fact like a protective mother shielding us from horrors too awful to mention Rule seems to avoid delving too deeply into crime scene descriptions. She devotes one paragraph in her new afterword to her discovery that Bundy engaged in necrophilia and returned to the scenes of his crimes to "line dead lips and eyes with garish makeup and to put blush on pale cheeks." She tells readers that John Hinckley who shot Ronald Reagan and David Berkowitz the Son of Sam Killer traded prison correspondences with Bundy. And she hints that Bundys insatiable killer instincts may have started when he was a 14-year-old paperboy. (Ann Marie Burr an 8-year-old girl on his route mysteriously disappeared in the middle of the night and has never been found.) The skimpy update is over too soon leaving readers wanting more and offering further proof of the publics never-ending fascination with serial killers. --Jodi Mailander Farrell