The Stranger Beside Me [Paperback]

Ann Rule (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 1 and up

"As dramatic and chilling as a bedroom window shattering at midnight."—New York Times

Ted Bundy was handsome, charming, a brilliant law student, and on the verge of a dazzling career. On January 24, 1989, he was executed for the murders of three young women, having confessed to taking the lives of at least thirty-five more.

This is the story of one of the most fascinating killers in American history—of his magnetic power, his bleak compulsion, his double life, his string of helpless victims. It is also the story of Ann Rule, a writer working on the biggest story of her life, tracking down a brutal mass murderer. Little did she realize that the "Ted" the police were seeking was the same Ted who worked with her at a Seattle crisis clinic, a man who had become her close friend and confidant. As she began to put the evidence together, a terrifying picture emerged of the man she thought she knew.

Twenty years after it was first published, The Stranger Beside Me remains a gripping, explosive true-crime classic.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 Florida's electric chair in 1989, the subject of Rule's 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 Bundy's life as he evolved into one of the century's most notorious serial killers. It's 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 Bundy's 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 public's never-ending fascination with serial killers. --Jodi Mailander Farrell --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

As dramatic and chilling as a bedroom window shattering at midnight. -- The New York Times --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 1 and up
  
• Paperback: 1 pages
• Publisher: Signet; 1st Signet Printing, July 1981 edition (July 1, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451137116
• ISBN-13: 978-0451137111
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (226 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,312,943 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

142 of 146 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly Terrifying, October 5, 2001

By 

Wendy Kaplan (Houston) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stranger Beside Me: The Twentieth Anniversary Edition (Hardcover)

I had heard of this book, of course; had wanted to read it for years, so when this 20th anniversary edition came out, I decided to give it a go. I had a pre-conceived notion: OK, this is going to be a really interesting biography of Ted Bundy, with the added attraction of having been written by a former dear friend. Fast, easy crime reading, I thought.

I was wrong. This story is so chilling, so frightening, it grips you in the gut. Ann Rule has simply stated the facts. No sensationalism, no gratuitous gore, no psychobabble. Just the facts. As they happend. And even though the reader might think of Ted Bundy as "old news," and even though he was executed in 1989, this book makes one check to see that the doors and windows are locked.

There are actually two stories here: one describes the gradual disintegration of a seemingly normal, affable, brilliant man into a sexual psychopath so evil, so methodical in his vicious killings, that one wonders if he was at all human. The other story is that of Ann Rule herself, a decent, hard-working, middle-aged mother of four who meets and befriends a nice young man working beside her in a crisis clinic. A man she regards as a younger brother; a man she views as a close and trusted friend. The slow but inexorable realization on Rule's part that this man is in fact an unspeakably violent serial killer is as painful to read as it was for her to experience.

Each victim is described in terms of such respect and such anguish that even a family member, I think, can feel that his or her daughter has been given a chance to shine, a chance to be more than a victim, more than a nameless number (8th girl killed, and so forth). The poignancy of these girls' very human preoccupations and lives serves to outline the contrasting horror in even more detail. That is why Rule does not have to defile the victims with intricate detail. The contrast between their young lives and their terrible deaths is enough in itself.

Rule's new Afterward, written in 2000, is fascinating. She has not "recovered and moved on"; there is no real "closure." She has come to accept that the incomprehensible contrast between Ted the Dear Friend and Ted the Monster will never leave her, and will never be fully explained, no matter how many facts she sifts, no matter how much progress has been made in understanding the sexual psychopath. It is her fate to have known Bundy in all his skins; it is our privilege to read her account of it.

57 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THIS KILLER BESIDE ME..., February 6, 2005

By 

Lawyeraau (Balmoral Castle) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: The Stranger Beside Me (Revised and Updated): 20th Anniversary (Mass Market Paperback)

This is an excellent true crime book. It has an unusual twist in that the author and the subject of the book, serial killer Ted Bundy, had a platonic relationship that arose from the time they were co-workers for a Seattle, Washington crisis center. Quite frankly, the author initially had no idea that Ted Bundy was anything other than what he appeared to be: a handsome, intelligent, charismatic, and articulate young man, who was, at the time, involved in local politics and later became a law student.

When he became the suspect in the disappearance and murders of a number of very young, pretty women, the author was in total disbelief. As the evidence mounted against her friend, the author, who is a former police officer, could not shut her eyes to the reality that Ted Bundy was actually a very disturbed individual who was guilty of all of which he was accused and probably guilty of other such crimes for which he was not accused for evidentiary reasons. Consequently, the author would suffer some angst for many years, as she struggled to reconcile the Ted Bundy that she thought she knew with the fiend who was compelled to commit so many vicious abductions, assaults, and murders. It is believed that at least thirty-five young women, and probably a good number more, died at the hands of Ted Bundy.

The author details the abductions, assaults, and murders of his victims from coast to coast, which crimes were ultimately to make Ted Bundy a nationwide household name, and an entity to be feared. The investigative efforts of law enforcement officers in the states of Washington, Utah, Colorado, and Florida are revealed, as are Ted Bundy's arrests and his trials. She also details his two escapes from custody in Colorado, the last of which would find him heading to the sunshine state of Florida.

Florida was an interesting choice of state for Ted Bundy, as it is a death penalty state in which convicted felons, who have been given the death penalty, are actually executed. Notwithstanding Florida's stance on capital crime, Ted Bundy went on to commit a slew of shocking assaults and murders in Florida for which he was ultimately arrested, tried, and convicted. Considering the fact that Ted Bundy could have chosen to relocate to a state other than Florida after his last escape from custody in Colorado, it almost appears as if he had a death wish by going to Florida and continuing to give in to his sick compulsion. Unfortunately for him, Florida was quite happy to make his wish come true, and on January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy was executed, and his reign of terror was finally over.

Those who like the true crime genre will enjoy this well-written and well-researched book. It is highly detailed and contains a great deal of information, some of it quite personal due to the author's relationship with Ted Bundy. She paints a very intriguing, intimate portrait of him, one that is three dimensional and complex. He was definitely a man whose benign and compelling external visage was at odds with his many internal demons, as he was a prolific serial killer. Externally, Ted Bundy was the sort of man towards whom women gravitated, and there was no dearth of Ted Bundy groupies once he made headlines.

In the updates at the end of the book, the author theorizes as to why Ted Bundy, a young man of so much promise, would end up the way that he did, and she provides some interesting and personal familial information from which the reader may draw his or her own conclusion. All in all, aficionados of the true crime genre will find much of interest in this book.

27 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stranger Than Fiction, June 9, 2000

By 

Melissa Hardie "mjh1963" (Potts Point, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Stranger Beside Me: Revised and Updated Edition (Paperback)

Without a doubt, the coincidence that found Ann Rule already acquainted with the prime suspect in a series of brutal murders is one that would be hard to believe if this were fiction. But it's not -- Rule, contracted to write the story of the elusive "Ted," discovers that her former colleague, Ted Bundy, curiously resembles the profile of the killer. Rule's later career as one of the most spectacularly successful true crime writers was significantly enhanced by the publication of this book. She writes with a surprising candor of the intimacy between herself and the Republican Party aspirant and law student who was eventually put to death after committing an unknown number of killings in an unknown number of states. Bundy's episodic rampages through the states of Utah, Washington and Florida are well known, and he is, in many ways, the most "famous" of modern serial killers. On the constitution of the serial killer as a modern identity, there's probably nothing better than Mark Selzer's book Serial Killers, a fascinating study of this modern pathology which traces the identity assumed by Bundy and other back to Jack the Ripper. The Ripper, as the first elusive, anonymous, random killer to gain notoriety in popular culture, offered an "identikit" profile for the serial killer which Bundy, as "Ted," fits perfectly.

Rule's book reads like a curious amalgam of true crime and romance fiction, and, in many ways, this is a love story of sorts. Rule's fascination with Bundy reminds us of the charismatic powers of the sociopathic personality, and its plaint, adaptable face in this competitive culture we find ourselves in. Some might find her portrait of Bundy disturbing: she remains, through most of the book, reluctant to acknowledge the severity and hideousness of his crimes. But she acknowledges them, finally, in her graphic retelling of courtroom testimony, and in her humble incomprehension of the pain that Bundy brought to the lives of many. If you're looking for a book about this iconic figure, it's hard to go past The Stranger Beside Me. One way or another, it's become a classic true crime narrative. Rule taps into the rule of contingency that dogs serial killings: everything takes place merely because of opportunity, coincidence, random fate. And everything seems to have a moral, though Rule is properly reticent about what the moral here might be. My only hesitation concerns the way in which Rule introduces the victims: in some ways, it's more like a roster call than the poignant series of vignettes she intends. There are facts here that have been better discussed elsewhere, perhaps, but because of the strange coincidence that drew Rule and Bundy together, it's a powerful book.