The Stranger Beside Me- a review by Wendy C.
To Humanize a Monster, February 2, 2004, Amazon.com
"The Stranger Beside Me" by Ann Rule
I was scared out of my mind but I couldn't put it down. Here was the story of a madman, a monster, a truly sick individual whose greatest accomplishment in life was to viciously hunt down, murder and defile beautiful women. He mercilessly took their young lives from us- who knows what they could have been. Most of them were college coeds, some were already working with disabled children, and we lost them to the sick perversions of this notorious serial murderer.
As much as we'd like to concentrate on the victims of the crimes, though, and as much as we'd like to mourn as a society for these innocents, we are drawn in by Ann Rule into the fascinating world of the killer himself. He becomes the star of the story and the women he killed are incidental. Sure, Rule gives us tiny bits of information about the victims, but some are almost just barely mentioned, mere footnotes in the biography of a depraved man.
Ann Rule admits this as one of the sad results of what Bundy did. He stole their specialness, she says, by making them all blend together as mere "Bundy victims".
I have only begun to read True Crime and my first books were by FBI profiler John Douglas. In his books, Douglas details the inner workings of sociopaths like Bundy, assuring us they are not "crazy" in the sense of having "no choice" about their forays into evil. They do it because that is what they love to do. An artist loves to paint and men like Bundy live to kill. (Bundy, however, is dead now- thanks to 2,000 volts from "Old Sparky", Florida's electric chair. He was sentenced to die in 1978 but managed to live, thanks to countless appeals, until 1989.)
I read John Douglas's book "Journey Into Darkness" last year and I had no desire to pick up a book about Ted Bundy like I was some kind of Bundy groupie (of which there were several, disgustingly enough). But the angle of this book is that Ann Rule knew the man before he was ever a prime suspect in the grisly murders of several young women. Having no idea who she was working next to late at night, Ann was actually moved to believe Bundy would be "perfect" for one of her own daughters to date, were they older. Instead of being the perfect gentleman Rule thought he was, Bundy was a man with no conscience. He felt no remorse for what he did and indeed, he denied it until the end. For what were probably selfish reasons (he was a master manipulator), he confessed right before his death on January 24, 1989. (Eerily, I bought the book on January 24, 2004, exactly fifteen years after society was assured Bundy would never kill again.) But don't think Ann was a naïve, eaisly conned woman. She was actually a cop in the 1950s and she was no dummy. What we have here is a man who is able to become whoever he needs to be in order to lure women to his trap- in this case a VW bug where he handcuffed them after bashing their head with a crow bar.
What Rule fails to mention in her book, written in 1980 then updated twenty years later in 2000, is that Bundy kept his victims alive as long as possible to torture them. He was a sexual sadist and a coward whose last victim was only twelve years old and plucked from her middle school yard. I learned this from John Douglas. He has no sympathy for men like Bundy and perhaps Rule doesn't have sympathy for every last killer but Bundy was, after all, her friend and she perhaps felt it necessary to humanize him for the readers so we would understand.
"The Stranger Beside Me" by Ann Rule
I was scared out of my mind but I couldn't put it down. Here was the story of a madman, a monster, a truly sick individual whose greatest accomplishment in life was to viciously hunt down, murder and defile beautiful women. He mercilessly took their young lives from us- who knows what they could have been. Most of them were college coeds, some were already working with disabled children, and we lost them to the sick perversions of this notorious serial murderer.
As much as we'd like to concentrate on the victims of the crimes, though, and as much as we'd like to mourn as a society for these innocents, we are drawn in by Ann Rule into the fascinating world of the killer himself. He becomes the star of the story and the women he killed are incidental. Sure, Rule gives us tiny bits of information about the victims, but some are almost just barely mentioned, mere footnotes in the biography of a depraved man.
Ann Rule admits this as one of the sad results of what Bundy did. He stole their specialness, she says, by making them all blend together as mere "Bundy victims".
I have only begun to read True Crime and my first books were by FBI profiler John Douglas. In his books, Douglas details the inner workings of sociopaths like Bundy, assuring us they are not "crazy" in the sense of having "no choice" about their forays into evil. They do it because that is what they love to do. An artist loves to paint and men like Bundy live to kill. (Bundy, however, is dead now- thanks to 2,000 volts from "Old Sparky", Florida's electric chair. He was sentenced to die in 1978 but managed to live, thanks to countless appeals, until 1989.)
I read John Douglas's book "Journey Into Darkness" last year and I had no desire to pick up a book about Ted Bundy like I was some kind of Bundy groupie (of which there were several, disgustingly enough). But the angle of this book is that Ann Rule knew the man before he was ever a prime suspect in the grisly murders of several young women. Having no idea who she was working next to late at night, Ann was actually moved to believe Bundy would be "perfect" for one of her own daughters to date, were they older. Instead of being the perfect gentleman Rule thought he was, Bundy was a man with no conscience. He felt no remorse for what he did and indeed, he denied it until the end. For what were probably selfish reasons (he was a master manipulator), he confessed right before his death on January 24, 1989. (Eerily, I bought the book on January 24, 2004, exactly fifteen years after society was assured Bundy would never kill again.) But don't think Ann was a naïve, eaisly conned woman. She was actually a cop in the 1950s and she was no dummy. What we have here is a man who is able to become whoever he needs to be in order to lure women to his trap- in this case a VW bug where he handcuffed them after bashing their head with a crow bar.
What Rule fails to mention in her book, written in 1980 then updated twenty years later in 2000, is that Bundy kept his victims alive as long as possible to torture them. He was a sexual sadist and a coward whose last victim was only twelve years old and plucked from her middle school yard. I learned this from John Douglas. He has no sympathy for men like Bundy and perhaps Rule doesn't have sympathy for every last killer but Bundy was, after all, her friend and she perhaps felt it necessary to humanize him for the readers so we would understand.
posted by Spleengrrl @ 5:47 PM
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