Anne Rule dies...
Ms. Rule’s articles had been appearing in the magazine True Detective for more than a decade when, in the mid-1970s, fate delivered her biggest subject to her doorstep. She was working on a book about a series of unsolved murders in the Seattle area when the police in Utah arrested the man they believed to be the killer, a former law student named Theodore Robert Bundy.
The name did more than ring a bell. In the early 1970s Bundy had been a close friend and colleague, answering the suicide hotline with her on the night shift at the Seattle crisis center where they both volunteered.
Initially, Ms. Rule refused to believe that Bundy was the killer. “For a long time I was holding out hope that he was innocent, that somehow this all was a terrible mistake,” she told The Houston Chronicle in 2003. “And it wasn’t just me, it was all the people who worked with him.”
After Bundy escaped from jail and went on a killing spree in Florida, Ms. Rule changed her mind, and the focus of her book. Published in 1980, it became an instant best seller, admired for its detailed accounts of police procedure, the work of criminal investigators and courtroom drama, not to mention the author’s jailhouse interviews with Bundy.
The book, updated several times, was made into a television movie, “Ann Rule Presents: The Stranger Beside Me,” broadcast on the USA Network in 2003. Barbara Hershey took the role of Ms. Rule, and Billy Campbell played Bundy, a man Ms. Rule described, in the 2009 edition of her book, as “a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human’s pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after.”
Ann Rae Stackhouse was born on Oct. 22, 1931, in Lowell, Mich. Her father, Chester R. Stackhouse, known as Stack, was a college football, basketball and track and field coach who took jobs all over the country, relocating the family again and again. Her mother, the former Sophie Hansen, taught special education.
As a child, Ann was surrounded by relatives in law enforcement: two sheriffs, a prosecuting attorney and a medical examiner.
