First Exposure
She listened to police tales as a kid, she read true crime growing up, she studied police science in school, and along the way she became America’s premier true crime writer. Thanks to her unwavering curiosity about why people do what they do, Ann Rule has produced 20 books about the criminals in our midst, and over 1,400 articles. Some of her books have won awards and some have been turned into television movies, including the award-winning Small Sacrifices, starring Farah Fawcett, Dead by Sunset, and And Never Let Her Go, with Mark Harmon. Nineteen have been New York Times best-sellers.
Perhaps her most famous book is her first one. In The Stranger Beside Me, she wrote a complex tale about a man who had worked alongside her in a crisis hotline center. His name was Ted Bundy. Even as she strove to discover the identity of someone who was murdering young women in her area, she had already unknowingly befriended that very person. Within a few years, he was to become one of the country’s most notorious serial killers, yet in a strange way, this encounter later seemed an answer to a prayer.
In 1964, Rule had read Truman Capote’s groundbreaking nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, about how two drifters had slaughtered a family in a small town in Kansas. She had thought to herself, “Oh, if only I could get inside a killer’s mind like that and find out what’s going on, and then write a book, that’s all I’d ever ask.” She’s learned to be careful about what she asks for. Nevertheless, she now has the distinction of being the only true crime writer who knew a killer on a personal level before, during, and after his crimes, and who followed his trial and eventually his death.
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Where did it all begin?
Born in Lowell, Michigan, to a mother who taught special education and a father who coached sports, Rule had several close relatives who lived by the law: her grandfather and an uncle were sheriffs, her cousin was a prosecutor, and another uncle was a medical examiner, so she heard her share of stories.
“We lived in a small Michigan county where there weren’t many murders,” she recalls, “but I can remember when I was around nine or ten, my family was sitting around talking about a woman whose body had been found in a lake. It was probably a suicide, because her clothes were folded neatly in her car, but my aunts and uncles were discussing what could have happened and whether someone might have tried to make it look like a suicide when it was really a murder. As kids, we were treated with respect, and we were allowed to participate in these discussions. I always wondered why people did things.”
Her grandfather also took her into an empty courtroom one day to show her around. “I was in awe. The place seemed huge. Whatever happened in there seemed important.”
In addition to that, she met people in prison when she helped her grandmother prepare their meals. What she saw of them, both male and female, gave no clue as to why they were locked up. To her, they seemed normal. “They seemed so nice,” she says. “They weren’t big-time criminals. There was one woman upstairs that I was allowed to visit when I took her meals in, and she taught me how to crochet. She was a nice woman, but she’d bought her husband a Ford pickup and then caught him in it with another woman. So she shot him and killed him.”
Rather than keep her distance as most young people might have, Rule became more curious. “I was interested in the psychopathology behind criminal acts. I wanted to know why people did these things.”
In college, she majored in creative writing, but she also studied psychology and criminology. Then she got a job with the Seattle Police Department and managed to work there for over a year before a civil service examination ended her career. She passed everything else without a problem, but then it was time to check her eyesight. “I couldn’t even see the big E on the wall, so that was the end of that. Oh, that was a disappointment.”
Rule does not talk about her marriage and divorce. However, after the divorce, she became the sole support for four small children, and she had to find something fast. What she did next was to change her life.
Rule read magazines like True Detective, so having learned how to write she pitched a story. “At the time, these magazines would have a stringer in each area, and that person would get first dibs on any crime story that took place there. It happened that just when I wrote in, there was a vacancy in the northwest, so the editor tried me on one story. Then when he accepted it, he said, ‘We like your work, but we need you to take a male pseudonym, because our readers won’t believe that a woman would know anything about police investigations.”
‘Ted’
This was back in 1969 when law enforcement was a male domain, so Rule came up with an appropriate nom de plume, Andy Stack. “My maiden name was Ann Stackhouse, and people called my dad ‘Stack.’ My older son’s name is Andy Stack Rule, so I took it from both of them.”
It wasn’t long before she got other assignments, and soon she was writing two articles a week for such magazines as Master Detective, Inside Detective, Front Page Detective, and Official Detective. To bolster her BA degree from the University of Washington, she got a two-year degree in police science. Her editors acknowledged that she knew more than their male writers about forensic science and law enforcement, so they said if she wanted to, she could write under her own name. Yet she decided against it. “By that time, I realized how quickly most felons got out of prison, and I was divorced with four young children, so in the interest of our protection, I kept the male pseudonym. I worked for them [as Andy Stack] for fourteen years.”
Then she got the subject for her transition from articles to books.
It was 1974 in the Pacific Northwest when several attractive young women turned up missing. First they disappeared around Seattle and Olympia, Washington, and then one went missing in Oregon. On the same day in July, someone abducted two women from Lake Sammamish. With these latest victims, there were witnesses and a drawing was made of a man named ‘Ted’ who had driven a tan or gold Volkswagen Beetle.
A few months later, the remains of the two women were found and Rule was writing about the string of unsolved murders. “We were all so frightened and curious about who ‘Ted’ was,” she recalls. “I used to wonder, how can I get this person to talk to me? If I put an ad in the paper, would he respond?” To her subsequent astonishment, she already knew him. He was her co-worker at the Crisis Clinic, yet she didn’t realize that until he was gone.
Ted Bundy had moved on to Utah and four women were abducted there. When their remains were found, one had been bludgeoned so badly she was difficult to identify. A fifth woman managed to get out of his car and run away. She went to the police and later picked Bundy out of a line-up.
A half dozen or more women missing in Colorado and police speculated about a connection. An intense investigation was launched to determine if there were links to the missing girls in the other states, and that’s when Rule heard from Ted again. In September of 1975, he called to let her know he was a suspect, but to assure her that he had nothing to do with the crimes. He asked for her support, and when he was convicted of attempted kidnapping in Utah, he continued to write to her.
Awaiting trial for murder in Colorado, he escaped, got caught, and escaped again, landing in Tallahassee, Florida. On January 15, 1978, he fatally attacked Lisa Levy and Martha Bowman in their sorority house at Florida State University, and left three other coeds critically wounded. Although he’d been careful up to that point to leave little evidence, this time he made a mistake — he left a perfect row of teeth marks on Lisa Levy’s left buttock.
Then less than a month later, he grabbed 12-year-old Kimberly Leach and killed her in the woods. Soon arrested, he talked with Rule before his impending trial in 1979. She’d had some doubts early on, but by that time, she felt convinced of his guilt: “It sure was an odd coincidence that every place he was, women who all looked the same and who had the same victim profile were killed.”
Faced with a choice between attending his trial as a friend or reporter, she took the pragmatic route. “As a reporter, I could get into the courtroom. As a friend of the defendant, I might not. So I went in as a reporter.”
Even so, he often looked at her throughout the trial and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “I have no part in this. What are we doing here?”
The most difficult moment of the trial for her was the presentation of the bite mark evidence. The impression he’d left on Levy was clean enough to make a good match to a dental impression of Bundy’s teeth. In addition, he had bitten the girl twice with his lower teeth, actually giving the forensic odontologist two impressions to work with. It left little doubt about who had killed her.
“To be absolutely sure about his guilt,” Rule remembers, “I needed to see direct physical evidence, and there it was, no question. It made me sick to my stomach. I went down to the hall to the ladies’ room and threw up. Yet he still maintained this suave, friendly look. It was a bad day for me.”
After Bundy had been sentenced to death three times for the three brutal murders in Florida, he eventually confessed in 1989 to a number of murders in six states, dating back to the mid-seventies. Then he awaited the electric chair.
After his 1979 trial, Rule had to get on with her book. “I only had three months to do it,” she says, “because I only had money put aside to take care of us [her family] for three months. I worked ten to twelve hours a day, every day, but it was very cathartic to get that story out. I’d been saving it for so long and I hadn’t really looked squarely at it until then. I just started telling it.”
Initially she wrote it using a third-person perspective, but found that after over one hundred pages, it just didn’t work. “I had to go back and write it partially as first-person because I was part of the story.” When she did that, it worked.
Stranger Beside Me
To this day, the experience haunts her and she feels fortunate that there had never been a romantic attachment between her and Bundy. “I felt dumb, I felt fooled, and I thought that my perception, which I’d always counted on, was flawed. Ever since then, I’ve felt I can’t really know anybody.” But she wasn’t the only one. “We had very rigid screening at the Crisis Clinic where we had worked together, to be sure we were well adjusted and could help people who called in. Bundy fooled everybody.”
It’s still not easy for her to view this man who’d been like a younger brother as a heartless killer. “I cannot superimpose the monster image over the man I remember. Think about using a microscope where you gradually bring the two slides together. I can’t do that with him. I remember him as I thought he was, and then as the monster, but not the two images together.”
The Stranger Beside Me launched her career, and she began to sign contracts for books.
In an unusual move, Rule’s agent advised her to continue to write under her pseudonym for the next few books rather than under her real name. She had gotten a contract to write three books on serial killers, but the advance for those had been low. “When those came out, The Stranger Beside Me was doing very well, so my agent said that these books got such small advances I should not put my name on them. I stayed with ‘Andy Stack,’ but after a while I put them under my real name and they sold much better.”
The three books were The Lust Killer, The Want-Ad Killer and The I-5 Killer, and all featured men with a hidden vicious side.
Jerry Brudos, in The Lust Killer, had two strong emotions: hatred for his mother and a sexual attraction to women’s shoes and underwear. He’d steal shoes from neighbors’ homes, and by age 17, he was in court for attacking a girl. Eventually he honed his skill at stalking women and knocking them down to get their shoes. Then he stole women’s underclothing and began to dress up. He took pictures of himself, which he kept in his home.
Then he raped and strangled a door-to-door saleswoman, and she was the first of five murder victims in Oregon. He took photos of his hapless victims before and after he killed them.
More brutal was Harvey Louis Carignan, who avoided the hangman’s noose in 1949, only to kill again. Rule wrote about him in The Want-Ad Killer, released in 1983. He hated women, although he married twice, but both marriages fell apart. In 1973 in Washington State, he used a hammer to bludgeon to death Kathy Miller after she answered an ad for employees at his service station. He went to California, where more women turned up dead, and then moved to the Midwest.
Although he assaulted and raped a number of women, including two girls who were hitchhiking to Minneapolis, his next murder victim was someone with whom he was romantically involved. Right after she tried to end the relationship, she disappeared. When her body was found over a month later, it was determined that her killer had used a hammer to crush her skull.
Carignan liked his hammers. He used one end to rape women and the other to batter them to death. When several states coordinated their efforts, he was arrested. Among his possessions was a map with 180 locations circled in red. Some were associated with unsolved murders or assaults.
A more recent string of murders along the coast from California to Oregon inspired the third book in this trilogy. The 1-5 Killer found his female victims along Interstate 5, and he came to public attention in 1981 when one shooting victim survived. He also broke into homes at random to rape and kill.
When police turned up a lead on a sex offender named Randall Woodfield, they found evidence linking him to several victims. Despite the fact that he had been a top student and a good-looking athlete with professional football prospects, this 30-year-old man clearly had troubles. As young as he was, he’d raped over 50 women and estimates of his murders ranged from four to two dozen.
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In the early fifties, there were no databases through which law enforcement could make quick links with geographically mobile killers, but an LAPD homicide detective named Pierce Brooks was looking into that. He’d worked on a case of a serial killer who’d placed lonely-hearts ads to lure women, and he believed that this man might have done something similar in other places. So he went to the library and did a newspaper search, looking for similar killings. Then he went to his police chief and asked for a computer to help him more efficiently match cases. However, computers at that time were as big as a building so it wasn’t feasible. Yet he didn’t give up. In 1982, Brooks got the U. S. Department of Justice to host a conference at Sam Houston State University, and that’s when VI-CAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, was born.
Brooks read The Stranger Beside Me and he called Rule to invite her to serve on the task force. “So I went down there three or four times,” she says, “and worked with the men who had caught the Son of Sam, Correll Eugene Watts, and other infamous serial killers. My job was to help prepare the questionnaire that would go out to police departments to get minute details of crimes that appeared to be done in a serial pattern. I also testified before the Senate judiciary subcommittee and did a lot of PR work about the need for VI-CAP.”
It was decided that the FBI would run the program out of Quantico and in 1985, Brooks became its first director. Since then, VI-CAP has helped to link hundreds of cases and locate numerous killers.
Yet it’s not just violent or sociopathic men that inspire Rule’s tales. In fact, she finds herself more drawn to the twisted ways of the female psychopath.
In Bitter Harvest, Rule wrote about a brilliant female physician with two sides: a competent professional and a demanding, childish drug-abuser who would stop at nothing — including murder — to get what she wanted. In Small Sacrifices, Rule portrayed Diane Downs, an Oregon woman who shot her own children in 1983 so she could have the man she wanted. Rule is currently at work on another tale about a female psychopath, and she’s aware that little research has been done on this special breed.
“I always say that bad women are fewer than men,” she states, “but when you get one, they’re fascinating because they’re so rotten.”
She learned about Patricia Allanson, featured in Everything She Ever Wanted, from Allanson’s son-in-law, when he sent her a bundle of newspaper clippings. She found the story intriguing and eventually went to Georgia to talk to the people involved.
Called a modern-day Scarlett O’Hara, Allanson thought of herself as special. Her parents had always bailed her out and she’d never had to take responsibility for anything. Partly because of that, she felt that whoever married her ought to give her anything she wanted. She was high maintenance, and when she met Tom Allanson, she saw that he had the means to provide for her in style.
In 1974, they married, bought a 58-acre farm in Georgia and decided to raise Morgan horses. Yet Rule makes it clear that Patricia had quite another scheme at work.
When Walter Allanson, Tom’s father, disapproved of her and angrily tried to force Tom out of his life, Pat filed complaints of sexual harassment against him, claiming that he had exposed himself to her. Tom grew alarmed over this, along with rumors that he heard that his father was going to kill him, so he took out a restraining order. Yet his father was taking a defensive stand, believing that his own son was out to kill him. Intense fear and anger continued to grow on both sides.
Eventually the two men had a deadly confrontation and it seemed clear to Tom later that he and his father had been set up. He ended up shooting both of his parents and going to prison, while Pat got the farm. When the placed burned down, Pat got the money, and her machinations didn’t stop there.
An interesting angle on this story is the interview that investigators had with Tom after he’d finally been released from a 15-year stint in prison. He finally realized that Pat had been a liar, and called her a “headstrong, manipulative type person that would do anything to get what she wanted — and you would not know she was doing it.” He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it coming.
Rule admits to mixed feelings about these dreadful stories: she finds truly bad women interesting, but they also disturb her.
“For a woman to be like Pat,” she says, “it makes me angry and shocks me-and I would include Diane Downs, too — because most of us who are mothers would literally die without thinking to save our babies. We know how a woman is supposed to act and how a normal woman’s emotions are, and so when I find one who goes so much against what women instinctively feel, I’m shocked, I’m mad, and I have trouble with a tendency to editorialize as I write. I have to force myself to go back in these books and take my feelings out. Then in the very last chapter, that’s when I give my opinion. For me, these women are harder to write about than men, but they’re more interesting.”
Yet even as she describes the perpetrators of crimes, male or female, she never loses sight of the victims and their families. In one case, she found that other writers looking at the same story had failed to see the real person behind the victim. Letting the reader know the victim, Ann feels, is her own special contribution.
In 1997, a case emerged into public consciousness that soon shocked the nation. Anne Marie Fahey, a 30-year-old woman missing in Delaware since June of the previous year, had been linked to a wealthy and married lawyer with political connections. His name was Thomas Capano. He admitted that he’d had dinner with “Annie” shortly before she had disappeared, but denied any knowledge of her whereabouts beyond that. He thought she had gone “to the beach” — a remark that would come to have cruel irony.
Annie’s diary indicated that a man she’d been seeing whom she referred to as “Tomas” was manipulative, controlling, and jealous. She was currently involved with another man whom she loved, and she wanted to break off all connections with this Tomas. It soon became clear to everyone that she meant Capano. The waitress who had served them that summer evening Anne Marie vanished recalled that neither had looked very happy.
Still, with no body and no evidence of foul play, investigators were at a dead end. They learned about suspicious activities carried out by two of Capano’s brothers, but they could prove nothing until Gerry Capano was caught in illegal behavior. Under pressure, he confessed that Tom had asked him for help.
On June 28, 1996, Tom had arrived at Gerry’s home with a large and heavy fishing cooler and they had taken it out to the ocean on Gerry’s boat. In a spot off the New Jersey coast that they believed was sufficiently deep and isolated, they had dumped the cooler. Instead of sinking, it floated, so Gerry had shot a hole into it. He saw red liquid seep out, but the cooler still did not sink. They pulled it aboard and he walked away. He heard Tom struggle with something and then returned in time to see a foot disappear into the water. It was an image that would give him nightmares. As he learned about Annie’s disappearance, he began to realize what Tom had asked him to do.
Capano was arrested and while they still had no body, the cooler was found by a fisherman and turned in. Capano tried to defend himself by accusing another girlfriend of shooting Annie, but ultimately his arrogance did him in.
It was a difficult case with many angles and a lot of ambiguity, but on January 17, 1999, the jury convicted Capano of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to die.
Although Rule tends to stay away from stories where media attention is high and other writers crowd the field, this was her kind of case. She prefers those stories where the killer is someone with a lot going for him or her but where success, beauty, or wealth just isn’t enough for them. Her editor thought she should try it so she ended her book tour for Bitter Harvest, and set off for Wilmington and the Capano trial.
“That was the only case I ever did that was high profile,” she explains. “It was uncomfortable in a sense, because when I went there, the three writers who were already there were very resentful. The rest of the press was unfriendly, too. I’d never run into that before, but I decided, well, I didn’t come here to make lifelong friends, I came to get a story. I had my credentials worked out with the court clerk, but people came up and said, ‘We don’t think there’s going to be room for you.’ There was plenty of room, yet I’d sit down in one spot, and someone would say, ‘We don’t think you should sit there because that belongs to someone else.’”
Obviously conspicuous as a best-selling writer, she stuck it out, and in the end, she supplied much more of a story about who Annie had been than the other writers did.
“They were men, and they had an entirely different view of Anne Marie Fahey than I did. With them it was tsk, tsk, and wink, wink, and the implication that she was a bad girl who asked for it. I thought they didn’t understand the female psyche at all. One thing that’s important to me is to make the victim come alive. The killer usually is giving interviews and getting all this exposure, but the victim has no voice and unless an author tries to tell their side, they become almost cardboard characters.”
Even after that experience and the success of her book, which outpaced the others in sales, she still preferred the “sleeper” cases, the ones that most people haven’t heard or read about.
“I don’t want the reader to know the ending before they pick up the book.”