Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Ann Rule has the capability of not only producing thrilling page turners BUT she gives her audience a make up of the criminal reasoning. In You Belong To Me Tim Harris appeared to be the all American hero. Yet one wonders WHAT drove (and drives??!) this man to his sick, fearful behavior. Shortly after reading the story I was pulled over by a local township police officer for an expired inspection sticker. I was FRIGHTENED ! Memories of what I read of TIm Harris fogged my mind. Makes you wonder. 5 stars to Ann.

I don't, as a habit, read a lot of true crime but when I do I usually look for something that Ann Rule has written. Her books have always been hard to put down, always good reads. 'You Belong to Me' is a really creepy story of a Florida Highway Patrolman who despises women in general yet seems completely obsessed with the two in his life--his wife and his mistress. His position of authority only makes this book that much scarier--to think that a cop would pull you over and then be able to do whatever he wanted to do and you would be completely helpless. But there were signs that he maybe was not on the up and up and even though some of his colleagues picked up on them, nothing was done. My heart goes out to the victim's family in this case. A riveting read yet absolutely disturbing.

The story of Tim Harris, Florida State Patrolman, is one of Ann Rule's most memorable characterizations. When he used a phoney traffic stop to meet his future wife as a young police officer, she was a young and naive teenager. For years he abused her and groomed her to be the perfect servile victim. Only when she discovered she had a rival for his attentions did she begin to rebel against his authority. Not only did Tim abuse his wife, he abused females on his beat, also. Ann Rule, who is very fond of law enforcement, would disagree with me, but I don't find it surprising that a control freak like Tim Harris would find law enforcement an appealing career, for after all it gave him the opportunity to pull over and intimidate female drivers and get paid for doing it. There was a very similar case in California, a respected state trooper who liked to pull over attractive young female drivers on a deserted highway off-ramp. There were complaints about the California officer also, but the good old boys network shelters these abusers until they finally go all the way and actually commit murder. This book is Volume 2 of "Ann Rule's Crime Files", and contains several other interesting short cases in addition to the book-length story. Very good true-crime writing.

Now this is my kind of book, a bunch of true stories in one book! Well, six stories to be exact. One really loooooong one and the the others quite a bit shorter. But they are more to the point and didn't seem to be missing any pertinent information. If you want to get a taste of Anne Rule and what she's "like" this is a good book to start.

'You Belong To Me ..." is book #2 of a long series of true crime stories where one story is headlined and several short stories are stuffed in towards the end. Overall these books do not have the depth nor the keen analysis work Ann Rule can produce, as she has done with some of her wonderful books ('Stranger Beside Me', 'If You Really Loved Me'). 'You Belong To Me...' is definitely a middle of pack offering.

In the book the headline crime story is about a no good husband and cop who slowly 'loses it'. Of course the end result is a brutal murder, no surprise here. I had a personal interest in the story having lived in the region of central Florida where the crime was commited. I fear others without such a personal connection might find all this to be very made-for-TV material. Yet certainly those women who feel they are married to overbearing, horrible men might find this material rather interesting (..in a positive way).

Bottom line: I suppose this is disposable Ann Rule material yet it did hold my interest. Passable.

As a new resident of Indian River county, I was shocked to learn that this crime occurred in its more recent history. The step-by-step police work saved me from any real trepidation about living in this area now. Only Ann Rule could have fully and truthfully documented the story with all its nuances.

This isn't exactly the best of Ann Rule, but the story about Tim Harris is interesting. Ther are a few other interesting stories in this book.