The Stranger Beside Me

In the early 1970s true crime writer Ann Rule discovered that the close friend she had been working with for several years was in fact the serial killer Ted Bundy. As a caring person she must have been completely shocked and horrified, but she would know at some level deep inside her that as a true crime writer she had been given a unique gift: the opportunity to write about a terrible crime from a very personal perspective. I was given the same “gift” when in 2014 I found an account of a murder that my grandma told me about… show more.

In the cottage industry of books, television series, and movies devoted to Ted Bundy, none is more compelling—or creepier—than Ann Rule’s hybrid of true-crime narrative and personal memoir. Rule has an angle so implausible that, as she often said, no Hollywood screenwriter would dare pitch the scenario: in 1971, while trying to make ends meet as a freelance writer for the pulp crime magazines, she worked at a suicide hotline alongside a polite and handsome young law student, little suspecting what lay behind his mask of sanity.  

Sure, you can watch the Netflix adaptation– but get the book and read it anyway, it’s worth it. While you think you might know serial killer Ted Bundy, Ann Rule really did know him, they were colleagues in Seattle who became friends. Her relationship with him and her job as a crime writer intersect, but it still takes a long time for her to come to terms with the fact that her friend is the psychopathic murderer of 36 women. Ann Rule was the 20th century’s Queen of true crime, and this book is a fascinating insight into a… show more.