You Belong to Me and Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files: Vol. 2) [Mass Market Paperback]

Ann Rule (Author)

Book Description

Series: Ann Rule's Crime Files | Publication Date: September 1, 1994

The author of The Stranger Beside Me presents a second collection of true-crime writings, including the story of Tim Harris, a Florida state trooper who hid bizarre and fatal fantasies behind his badge.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Rule (Everything She Ever Wanted) upholds her title as maven of the murder tale in this riveting second volume in her anthology series. Like A Rose for Her Grave, this collection consists of one book-length treatment and five shorter case histories from her true-crime files. Meticulous in her coverage, Rule demonstrates her signature, compassionate re-creation, when describing the numerous lives affected when Florida highway patrolman Tim Harris obsessively stalked his wife and then raped and murdered a female driver near I-95. Operating on many levels, it can be read as the psychological profile of a man for whom a wife was simply another possession or as a wonderfully detailed police procedural, complete with frustrating false leads and a brilliantly inspired interrogation scene. In each of the subsequent cases, Rule shifts the focus slightly, concentrating on an entangled forensics puzzle in one, on a two-year missing-person search complicated by a psychic goose chase in another. Rule's considerable reporting skills and hindsight analysis make her a gifted cautionary guide through the hazards of human folly. Yet, as she admits in the chilling "Black Christmas," when a picture-perfect family can be brutally murdered due to an absurd misunderstanding, all the little red flags in the world may mean nothing. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

'No writer in America has ever probed the dark heart of a killer so deeply' Edna Buchanan 'Master of the true-crime genre' CHICAGO TRIBUNE --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Books (September 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671793543
• ISBN-13: 978-0671793548
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #284,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am an author of true-crime books, and I'm now working on my 25th and 26th: NO REGRETS and TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE. I have lived in the Seattle Area for many years. Before that, I grew up in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and lived in Texas, Oregon, and near Niagara Falls, N.Y. I always wanted to be a police officer--because my grandfather was a sheriff in Michigan. I joined the Seattle Police Department when I was 21, worked a year and a half, but then I couldn't pass the eye test. After five years of rejection slips, I finally sold my first article for $35! Soon, I found my niche when I began writing for the fact-detective magazines like TRUE DETECTIVE in 1970, and I wrote more than a thousand homicide cases, and went to hundreds of trials. My first book, THE STRANGER BESIDE ME, was about Ted Bundy, but, amazingly, I had the book contract to write about an unknown killer six months before Bundy was identified as the "Ted Killer." And I had known him all along, and didn't realize it; he was my partner in the all-night shift at Seattle's Crisis Clinic! Oddly, I started out writing humor, but unless you are Erma Bombeck, Garrison Keillor, or Fanny Flagg or Dave Barry, it's hard to make a living. Now I write humor for fun and for my friends.

I graduated in Creative Writing from the U of Washington, with minors in criminology and psychology. I also have an AA degree in law enforcement, taking classes in crime scene investigation, arrest, search and seizure, crime scene photography and forensic science. I've lectured in seminars all across America to detectives, prosecutors, and even at the FBI Academy. My subjects have been serial murder, high profile offenders, and women who kill. I write two books every year--one hardcover single-case book, and one Ann Rule's True Crime Files original paperback. Although people tend to think I write only about the Northwest, I go wherever the cases are most interesting. I've written about murder cases in Florida, Georgia, New York, Kansas, Texas, Hawaii, and California, too.

I raised five children on my own--starting out with articles for baby care magazines, Sunday features, true confessions, and then "slicks" like Cosmopolitan, Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and Reader's Digest. Now, my children are grown.

I like to keep in very close touch with my readers, and I'm able to do that with a weblog and a guestbook on my website pages at www.annrules.com This also gives readers a chance to talk with each other, and its' a pretty lively spot--as I'm sure this page will be.

To choose a book subject, I weed through about 3,000 suggestions from readers. I'm looking for an "anti-hero" 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.

I'm a reader myself, and I always have several books going at once--one upstairs, downstairs, near the bathtub, in my car, and beside my hammock (in the summer, of course!)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's Better to Have Loved and Told Him to Get Lost, December 3, 2004

By 

E. A. Lovitt "starmoth" (Gladwin, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: You Belong to Me and Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files: Vol. 2) (Mass Market Paperback)

Ex-cop and true-crime writer Ann Rule has testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee and regularly presents seminars to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI Academy, as well as district attorneys and victim support groups. She has also served on the U.S. Justice Department task force that set up VI-CAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) to track and trap serial killers.

---AND she has designed a tee-shirt that reads "It's Better to Have Loved & Lost Than To Live With The Psycho The Rest Of Your Life." You can purchase one in the 'What On Earth' catalogue.

Just kidding about who designed the tee shirt, but Ann Rule should be buying these preprinted jobbies by the trunk-load and handing them out to the women she writes about. Her ill-fated, but young, beautiful, and innocent young women can't seem to leave those psychos alone.

Take the title story, "You Belong to Me." In this 192-page thriller, the wife gets the tee shirt, or at least its message in time and divorces her psycho policeman-husband. She lives in fear of him, is stalked by him, has her home invaded by him, has her phone tapped by him. Then he is finally arrested--not for stalking his ex-wife--but for the murder of a woman he had stopped for a traffic violation.

I'd guess the moral of this story is that stalkers should be taken more seriously by law enforcement, even (or especially) if they happen to be policemen.

The other five cases in this book are told in brief, punchy detail. I actually believe that the author tells a better story if she limits herself to twenty pages or so.

"Black Christmas"--A loner commie-hater kills the wrong family, believing they're Communist (wrong) Jews (wrong). The manner of death is particularly macabre. This is going to be the worst Christmas story you've ever read.

"One Trick Pony"--A beautiful cowgirl doesn't get her tee shirt in time, and is murdered by her alcoholic husband. He almost gets away with it, but continues to have bad luck with the women in his life. One of his girlfriends is shot in the stomach and her death is ruled a suicide even though "when the police got there they found Russ standing next to the dead woman, the gun in his hand."

"The Computer Error and the Killer"--The author included this case because she thinks that "it demonstrates how charming and benign the sadistic sociopath can be when he wants to appear that way." A monster slips through the cogs of the criminal justice system and kills again and again.

"The Vanishing"--A teenager who is about to go on vacation to Hawaii vanishes under strange circumstances. As the author states, "No one of us who searched for her could ever have guessed what [the teenager's] ending would be. Of all the possibilities, the truth was one that no one ever considered."

"The Last Letter"--Mistresses are suckers for unrequited romance. According to "The Last Letter," one of the unhappiest endings to a love story features a husband who actually divorces his wife and marries his long-time mistress.

20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ominous words, November 9, 2000

By 

Dennis Littrell (SoCal) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: You Belong to Me and Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files: Vol. 2) (Mass Market Paperback)

The words in the title "You Belong to Me" are words a woman may want to hear from the man she loves, but when they come from a violent psychopath, watch out.

True crime is one of my favorite genres, and Ann Rule is one of its outstanding practitioners. I love the genre because nobody could make up this stuff. Truth, at least in human affairs, really is stranger than fiction. I seldom find "mysteries" or crime novels as interesting as a true tale, however incompletely expressed, because I usually sense the contrivances in the work of the novelist. But in the best true crime, there is always a sense of coming face to face with the sordid realities of human nature, regardless of how banal and stupid, and from such an experience there comes the sense of knowing a little more about humanity.

Here we have a Florida state trooper who likes to stop the girlies on the freeway and show them his shiny belt buckle and his well tailored uniform. Problem is he actually hates women and only gets off when he does them violence. His long-suffering wife finally, finally after many beatings and some really scary weird stuff, tells him to get out. He can't cope with that because although he hates women, he needs their approval. I wonder: did mommie love him best or not at all? He hates himself for desiring women, but he needs their love to feel confident. So he stalks his wife in the most pathetic and all-consuming way, sneaking into the house late at night and sleeping in the attic, bugging her phone, etc. Meanwhile he loves to play macho cop on the freeway. One day he pulls over a blond woman who reminds him of his wife and does a psycho-sexual sickie murder on her, calling her by his wife's name as he rapes and kills her.

Rule, whose weakness is a need to wear her support for the law enforcement community on her sleeve, feels a little compromised in this one. She is at pains to assure us that this psycho cop is one rare law enforcement anomaly, and that she sure hates to write this one since it makes all cops look bad, but she has to. She has to because she needs to be of service to her readership, and there is indeed a cautionary tale here we all might recognize. Simply put, never let push come to shove, especially if it's your supposedly loving spouse that's doing the pushing. Get out immediately because it will only get worse. Unfortunately, in this case the long-suffering wife only really gets the message to get away from the sickie when she finds out he is CHEATING on her. I mean, let's react to what's important! The beatings were bad, of course, and the total control wasn't good, but the final straw was THE OTHER WOMAN!

It could be said that if you desire and conceive a psychopath's children, you might, just might, be contributing to the continuance of psychopaths. The poor kids are always so innocent, and nobody, especially not moi, would suggest that we punish the sons for the sins of the fathers, having committed a few sins myself; but ladies, get a clue: if his macho ways turn you on so, maybe you should share some blame. I know it's boring, but try a nerd once in a while. Or at least try a little family planning. Rule keeps saying (here and in some of her other books) "but she loved him," or "she was in love." But any self-indulgence has its limit. If we can excuse her because she was in love, maybe we ought to excuse him because he also couldn't help himself. Personally, I...don't...think...so.

Incidentally, according to the point of view of evolutionary psychology, we create the opposite sex through our sexual choices, just as surely as the practices of agriculture have created the cows and the grains that have been sexually chosen for thousands of years.

Bottom line: this is not only one of Ann Rule's best, it is also one that lingers in the mind because of the vivid portrait she paints of a violent sexual control freak.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My Favorite Ann Rule Book...., July 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: You Belong to Me and Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files: Vol. 2) (Mass Market Paperback)

next to the Stranger Beside Me. A thrilling and bizarre ride through the demise of a truly sick highway patrol officer. The story of Tim Harris is so compelling precisely because he seems to be the last person you would expect to commit this type of crime.

My only rant is that there is precious little delving into exactly what caused the man to turn so bad.