There is an odd synchronicity in the way parallel lives veer to touch one another, change direction, and then come close again and again until they connect and hold for whatever it was that fate intended to happen. – Ann Rule

Ann Rule was practically my friend and she said as long as I didn’t call or visit, we’d stay that way.  We stayed that way.  When I last reached out, many years later, she was old and sick, but willing to help.  Special lady.  From August 21, 1991. – JDW

When the phone rang, I was going through my wallet for the second time.  Praying for enough money to buy a cup of joe and a cinnamon roll at the Fat City Cafe.  “Just got a tip,” the familiar voice purred.  Reminded me of Peter Lorre with a silk handkerchief over the mouthpiece.

“Ann Rule, the millionaire celebrity true-crime writer.  Heard of her?”

“Sure, hard-boiled, mass murder stuff,” I offered.  “New book’s already on the best-seller list.  What’s the angle?”

“You tell me,” my ever-helpful editor replied.

“I’ll need an advance.”  The line went dead.

A tip?  This could be the break I needed.  Or, it could be a setup.  What the hell.  It was work.

I took the case.

I followed my standard M.O.  Modus operandi, that’s Latin for ‘how I do stuff.’  First, I ordered ham and eggs with the roll, extra butter, and charged it to the magazine.  Then I checked the tabloids.  “Loving Grandma Stalks Serial Killers,” The Star headlined years ago.  I reviewed the videotape of Rule on Oprah’s show.  Make a note: auburn hair, bright red lipstick, one row of silver sequins on a swell-looking black and white dress.  Not shy.

For the inside skinny, I scanned People magazine, skimmed U.S.A. Today interviews and Wall Street Journal features.  Rule likes to garden.  Collects antique bottles.  Two big dogs.  Her house came with its own security system.  Drives a new Celica because she can’t see herself in a Mercedes.

She’s scared of rats.

I burrowed through the scrapbook of clippings – Rule knows Farrah Fawcett – and I sought the testimony of experts.  I interviewed relatives.  Seems Rule was – and is – a very good mother.

I read her newest blockbuster, If You Really Loved Me: A True Story of Desire and Murder.  Real page-turner.  She’s as skilled as any crime writer working today.  The Elmore Leonard of non-fiction.  A unique style, almost film noir.

Clues pointed in all directions.  Telling me there must be an angle in plain sight.  I pulled out the evidence file.  Photographs fell to the floor.

One was of Rule.  She didn’t look like a woman who got rich showcasing killers.  And there were the smiling portraits of her best-selling American psychos.  They looked normal enough.  Like the guy who sat behind you in high school.  A lot like my own graduation picture.

Instinct.  I could feel it in my gut.  A voice hollering silently, voice saying – people are not always what they seem.

Looks can be deceiving.

Sexually abused as a child, Elizabeth Diane Downs loved to be pregnant.  “I’ll be damned if there’s anything I’d want to do but be a mom,” the young blonde once said.  “I have faith it’ll all come together one of these days and I’ll get out of here.”

Let’s hope not.  Now serving life plus fifty (50) years, Diane Downs shot her own kids in cold blood.  Killed one, paralyzed another, handicapped a third.  Because they were inconvenient.  Small sacrifices to make for another woman’s husband.

Ted Bundy seemed the kind of charming young man you’d want your daughter to tow home for Sunday dinner.  A law student, he’d probably bring flowers for Mom.  “He is exceedingly bright, personable, highly motivated, and conscientious,” said one professor’s letter of recommendation.

“Mr. Bundy is a pleasure to interact with.”

Unless of course you were young, slender, attractive, long-haired, Caucasian and female.  Unless you looked like the first love of his life.  Because if you looked like Ted Bundy’s first girlfriend, you were as good as dead.

Authorities believe Bundy may have killed over fifty (50) women.

I made a call to an informant.  She had Ann Rule’s unlisted number.  The office, not the house.  I left a message.

Rule called right back.  She’ll talk.  But later.

Right now she had to go to the mall and buy something to wear for “The Joan Rivers’ Show.”

It’s later.  Sure, she knew Ted Bundy.  Liked him, too.

In her first book The Stranger Beside Me, she told of her friendship with the legendary serial killer.  “He was like a younger brother,” Rule told me.

The sadness still in her voice.

“Did I notice anything strange about Ted when we worked together?  No.  Nothing.  I would have trusted Ted Bundy with my own daughters.  The mask, the facade, the false front presented by this sadistic sociopath was flawless.”

Ann Rule looks like a grandmother.  Not Ted’s type.  Closing in on sixty, battling maybe twenty pounds, she writes with the heart and soul of a cop.

She’s the first to admit she lucked into the Bundy saga.  After Rule sold an idea for a book about a series of killings in the area, “The Zodiac Murderer” turned out to be her buddy Bundy.

Synchronicity.  She also points to fifteen years (15) sweating bullets over a typewriter.  Tenacity.

Hunger.  Starting as a single mother with four small children, her long climb to the lifestyle of the rich and famous was financed with true detective stories like “Does A Bride’s Incest Justify Murder?” and “Virgin Nympho Lied About Her Sex Killer.”

Her eyes roll with the memory; she had a family to feed.  And as her kids grew older, they ate larger portions.

Ann Rule wrote some fourteen-hundred (1400) stories for those pulp magazines.  Her editors made her use a male pen name – Andy Stack – because, they said, their readers wouldn’t buy the idea of a woman with such in-depth knowledge of police work.

She wrote ten thousand words a week.  10,000.

Rule also wrote not-so-true confessions for the ladies’ market.  “I Went To Prison To Sleep With My Sister’s Husband.”

“I Had To Have An Unspeakable Operation Before I Could Be A Real Woman.”

She admitted she did it.  “It’s a great way to get your start.  The magazines don’t care if you’re well-known or not,” Rule advises.  “It’s formula writing, and the formula is SIN, SUFFER, REPENT.  The heroine has to sin in some way, or have a character flaw.  And she has to suffer for it.  Once she repents, then there has to be a happy ending.  The stories are quite moral, actually.”

There was no time for writer’s block.  She made $35 her first year.  She tripled her income, reaching $105, the next year.  “Before that,” Rule recalls, “there were five years with nothing but rejections.”

Industry insiders suggest her latest contract will pay Rule over $1.5 million per book.  She’s worked for every penny of it.  Word by word.

All she ever wanted to be was a policewoman.  Idolizing her grandfather, a Michigan county sheriff, Rule served as a sex crimes detective in Seattle, when she was fresh out of college.  A change in vision requirement forced her to leave the department.

“I couldn’t see the big E on the eye chart.”  Rule was devastated.  “It was the biggest disappointment of my life.  It was five years before I could even drive to the Public Safety Building.”

So, Rule turned to a life of crime writing.  Today she’s wealthy and her name is in every talk show producer’s Rolodex.

“I am aware that I make my living writing about other people’s tragedies.  That really bothered me.  I felt guilty,” testifies Rule.  “A psychologist told me that half the world makes its living off the misfortunes of the other half.  ‘What matters is how you feel about people,’ he said.”

Ann Rule cares.  I asked her what she thought of “The Silence Of The Lambs.”  She didn’t mince words.  She thinks the movie is “an appalling example” of the commercialization of other people’s misfortune.  That’s not what she does.

The heroes of her books are never the psychopathic killers.  Never.  That would be missing the point.  She refuses to glorify the killer.  He’s not super-human.  He’s the monster beside us.

A woman who would rather go to a trial than a movie, Rule writes modern-day morality plays which humanize the victims.  Not just fodder for the Metro section, victims are portrayed as human beings.  The lady down the street, the tyke next door.

The killer, of course, could be a neighbor.

In Rule’s work, you’ll never meet a police officer you don’t like.  The prosecutors are all tireless crusaders.  Even the defense attorney has a heart of gold.  Scenes aren’t blood-drenched; she includes just enough horrific details to explain the central character.  Justice is always served.

The victims are still dead.

And the killer may live just down the street.  A respected psychiatrist once said that Diane Downs is not that different from thousands of other mothers.  Scary.

Fact.  “A recent study indicated that one percent of all females are psychopaths,” Rule says.  “That means, they have no conscience, no remorse.  They take what they want.  They live by their own rules.”  Three percent of all men are sociopaths.  Many of them are fathers.

If You Really Loved Me is the story of David Brown, family man.  Married six times by the age of thirty-two, Brown was a parent.  And a sexual predator.

As I read how Brown manipulated one girl-child after another, I began to rethink my position on the death penalty.  When Brown denied abusing one vulnerable eleven-year-old, saying she forced herself on him, I wanted to pull the switch myself.

In If You Really Loved Me, Rule paints an engrossing picture of Brown, a computer wizard with a hugely successful business who brainwashes his devoted young daughter into shooting her stepmother, so he can marry his teenage sister-in-law and collect the insurance money.

Then he lets the kid take the rap after she accidentally survives the suicide attempt he cons her into.  It’s chilling and it’s all true.  As I raced through the pages, I found myself rooting aloud for the police.

Rule nails the s.o.b.  “This was a man who felt very inadequate,” she told me.  “He had no reason to feel otherwise.”

Looking through all the material I’d gathered on the popular writer, I remembered the obvious.  Actually, Rule reminded me.  You can’t always judge a book by its cover.

If a close friend, trained in psychology and police work, couldn’t see the madman behind Bundy’s mask…. If a mother would shoot her own children to seduce a married mailman…  If Ann Rule didn’t need the money anymore and wasn’t writing about serial killers…

Then, what was she up to?  I put it to her straight.

“I want to know why one human being would choose to hurt another,” Rule explained.  “I want to know what happens to a child to make him grow up to be a killer.  Looking at the murderer and his victims, we may find some answers.”  And maybe save some lives.

“People expect murdering monsters to look like monsters.  They expect the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” says Rule.  “People expect they can spot a dangerous personality, because he would look dangerous.  In truth, many serial killers outwardly are very handsome, very strong, charismatic and cunning.  Yet there is no heart there at all.  Not only do they not feel another creature’s pain, they enjoy another person’s pain.

“With my books, I hope to warn possible future victims.  I’m not blaming the victim for being there where she was,” Rule pauses here.  “But, if you’re depressed, if you’re sick, if you’re running away from home or hitchhiking, if you’re looking down at the ground instead of around you, you may very well be what some serial killer is looking for.”

If you’re his type.

The woman who die are the ones who think it can’t happen to them.  “The women who have gotten away were able to perceive the danger at once and say, ‘This is happening to me, and I’ve got to something about it.’ ” Rule said.  “Those women fought for their lives.”

Rule went from baking brownies for the P.T.A. to lecturing at the FBI Academy.  Seemingly overnight.  Bundy made her a leading expert on serial killers, but basically she’s still a mom at heart.

“If You Really Loved Me, and the next book – set somewhere in the deep South – are both family murders.  So was Small Sacrifices,” Rule notes.  “I am very interested in looking at the interaction of the sociopath within the family.  By shedding light on the killer’s motivation, maybe someday we can prevent some of these violent, depraved acts.”

It is the gentlest among us who are most fascinated by the cruelest.  Ann Rule wouldn’t step on a bug.  “If I have a mission, it’s this,” her voice rose to emphasize her message, “WE HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF THE BABIES NOW.  Because if we don’t, we’re growing a whole new generation of sadistic sociopaths.”

Right then, I knew I’d misjudged her.  Sure she was rich.  Successful.  Sure she’d been on TV.  And she’d gotten lucky with the first book.  But she’d struggled for years.  She’d paid her dues.

When I understood that Ann Rule was writing about life – not death – I realized I had the angle.

Her work isn’t about the bad guys at all.  It’s about us.  The other 97% of the men and the other 99% of the women.  It’s about moms and daughters and dads and sons.  And the need for all of us to care and nurture each other.

She had time for one more question.  I threw her a curve.  “Just curious,” I said.  “Do you recall when Mr. Bundy was executed?”

“Yes.  January 24, 1989.”  She spoke so softly I didn’t know what to say in response.

In the silence that hung there, I heard her whisper.  “It was a Tuesday.”

Case closed.

Ann Rule, 83, Dies: Wrote About Ted Bundy (a Friend) and Other Killers

By William Grimes for The New York Times July 28, 2015.

Ann Rule, whose 1980 study of the serial killer Ted Bundy, “The Stranger Beside Me,” set her on the road to writing dozens of best-selling true-crime books praised for their insight into criminal psychology, died on Sunday at a medical center in Burien, Wash. She was 83.

The cause was congestive heart failure and respiratory failure, said Scott Thompson, a spokesman for CHI Franciscan Health, which operates the Highline Medical Center in Burien.

Ms. Rule’s articles had been appearing in the magazine True Detective for more than a decade when, in the mid-1970s, fate delivered her biggest subject to her doorstep. She was working on a book about a series of unsolved murders in the Seattle area when the police in Utah arrested the man they believed to be the killer, a former law student named Theodore Robert Bundy.

The name did more than ring a bell. In the early 1970s Bundy had been a close friend and colleague, answering the suicide hotline with her on the night shift at the Seattle crisis center where they both volunteered.

Initially, Ms. Rule refused to believe that Bundy was the killer. “For a long time I was holding out hope that he was innocent, that somehow this all was a terrible mistake,” she told The Houston Chronicle in 2003. “And it wasn’t just me, it was all the people who worked with him.”

After Bundy escaped from jail and went on a killing spree in Florida, Ms. Rule changed her mind, and the focus of her book. Published in 1980, it became an instant best seller, admired for its detailed accounts of police procedure, the work of criminal investigators and courtroom drama, not to mention the author’s jailhouse interviews with Bundy.

The book, updated several times, was made into a television movie, “Ann Rule Presents: The Stranger Beside Me,” broadcast on the USA Network in 2003. Barbara Hershey took the role of Ms. Rule, and Billy Campbell played Bundy, a man Ms. Rule described, in the 2009 edition of her book, as “a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human’s pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after.”

Ann Rae Stackhouse was born on Oct. 22, 1931, in Lowell, Mich. Her father, Chester R. Stackhouse, known as Stack, was a college football, basketball and track and field coach who took jobs all over the country, relocating the family again and again. Her mother, the former Sophie Hansen, taught special education.

As a child, Ann was surrounded by relatives in law enforcement: two sheriffs, a prosecuting attorney and a medical examiner.

On summer vacations in Stanton, Mich., where her maternal grandparents lived in the building that housed the county jail, she helped her grandmother prepare meals for the prisoners.

“I would pass the tray through the slot in the pantry to the prisoners, and they were so nice,” Ms. Rule told The Seattle Times in 2004. “So I would always ask my grandpa, ‘How come they’re locked up?’ I wanted to know why some kids grew up to be criminals and why other people didn’t. That is still the main thrust behind my books: I want to know why these things happen, and so do my readers.”

After graduating from high school in Coatesville, Pa., she earned a degree in creative writing in 1953 from the University of Washington, where she also took courses in abnormal psychology, criminology and penology.

She joined the Seattle Police Department as a provisional officer but left after a year and half when she failed the eye exam. She later earned an associate degree in criminal justice at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Wash.

When her husband, Bill Rule, left his job to go back to school, she began writing to make money. (They divorced in 1972.)

Ms. Rule started out freelancing for baby-care magazines, Sunday supplements and true-confession magazines before moving on to publications like Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest.

She began writing for True Detective in 1969 under the pseudonyms Arthur Stone, Chris Hansen and Andy Stack, using male names at her editors’ insistence. She wrote two 10,000-word articles a week for the next 13 years.

After the success of the Bundy book, which she wrote under her own name, Ms. Rule wrote three books on serial killers as Andy Stack: “The Want-Ad Killer,” “Lust Killer” and “The I-5 Killer.” She also wrote a novel, “Possession,” loosely based on a murder in Oregon.

Soon she settled into a productive routine, turning out about two books a year: a hardcover title dealing with the investigation of a single crime, and a paperback in the “Ann Rule’s Crime Files” series, which described a variety of cases. Perhaps not surprising, given her subject matter, she wrote with a wooden baseball bat and a gun at hand, telling interviewers that she saw the world as a dangerous place.

“To choose a book subject, I weed through about 3,000 suggestions from readers,” Ms. Rule told a fan in a CNN chat room in 1999. “I’m looking for an ‘antihero’ whose eventual arrest shocks those who knew him (or her): attractive, brilliant, charming, popular, wealthy, talented, and much admired in their communities — but really hiding behind masks.”

In a crowded field, she consistently led the pack, taking up most of the real estate in the true-crime shelves of bookstores. Reviewing “Dead by Sunset” for The New York Times in 1995, Walter Walker wrote that Ms. Rule “brings to her work the passion, the prodigious research and the narrative skill to create suspense from a situation in which the outcome is a matter of fact, known to many readers before they open the book.”

Her many books include “Green River, Running Red,” “Bitter Harvest” and “Small Sacrifices,” which was made into a television mini-series, broadcast on ABC in 1989, with Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett.

Her latest book, “Practice to Deceive,” about a 2003 murder on Whidbey Island, Wash., was published in 2013.

Ms. Rule, who lived in Normandy Park, Wash., is survived by her daughters Leslie Rule, a writer of paranormal crime nonfiction, and Laura Harris; her sons Michael and Andrew Rule and Bruce Sherles; and seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

To the end, Ted Bundy, and “The Stranger Beside Me,” haunted her. “I really thought in 1980, when I wrote this book, that I could get it all out of my head, it would be very cathartic, and I would never have to think about Ted Bundy again,” she told The Houston Chronicle.

“And yet, he just fascinated people, and he still does. I probably get two emails a day, many of them from women who think they got away from him, and some of them are so close, I think they did.”