March 4, 2025 • 47 mins
This is the story of Ann Rule, an icon who’s published more than thirty true crime novels, and redefined the genre for an entire generation of Americans. She wrote multiple bestsellers, broke barriers for female crime writers, and unwittingly befriended one of the most notorious serial killers of all time.
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This series is hosted by Mary Kay McBrayer. Check out more of her work at www.marykaymcbrayer.com.
This episode was written by Mary Kay McBrayer
Developed by Scott Waxman, Emma DeMuth, and Jacob Bronstein
Associate Producer is Leo Culp
Produced by Antonio Enriquez
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Executive Produced by Scott Waxman and Emma DeMuth
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Order Ann Rule's 'The Stranger Beside Me' here for a deeper look into this case
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care and listening. Anne's heart was pounding as
(00:32):
she headed into the old Victorian mansion that housed the
offices for the Seattle Crisis Clinic. After weeks of training
on mock phone calls, now she would sit in on
actual calls. Anne's reasons for volunteering with the suicide hotline
were deeply personal. Her younger brother had taken his life
(00:54):
when he was only twenty one. He'd been a promising
young medical student with a bright future. She knew she
couldn't undo what happened to him, but maybe if she
could remember her training and say the right thing, she
could save someone else from ending their life the same way.
(01:16):
Anne climbed the stairs to the wood paneled office at
the top of the building. She was greeted by the
seasoned volunteer who would be training her for the night.
In the next room, a young man was already seated
in front of the imposing foam bank. This would be
her partner at the hotline. He was handsome and clean shaven,
(01:39):
with wavy brown hair cut just above the ears. The
trainer smiled and gestured towards the man. This is Ted Bundy.
He'll be working with you. Welcome to the greatest true
(02:13):
crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode
we're calling true crime writing's gold standard and Rule and
her friend Ted Bundy. It's the story of Anne Rule,
an icon who's published more than thirty true crime novels
(02:35):
and redefined the genre for an entire generation of Americans.
She wrote multiple best sellers, broke barriers for female crime writers,
and unwittingly befriended one of the most notorious serial killers
of all time. More after the break, we've all met
(03:15):
that guy who instantly creeped us out. Let me give
you a hypothetical situation to simulate the experience. Say you're
heading to a family holiday event. You pull up ten
or fifteen minutes before eating time, like etiquette dictates, I mean,
unless the hostess has asked you specifically to come early
(03:38):
to help set up, of course, and there's a white
utility van already parked outside. It's either taking up two spots,
locking the flow of traffic, or parked in front of
the mailbox. So even if you don't know who it is.
You already have your first red flag, well first two, really,
since no one should be driving a white utility van
(04:01):
except subcontractors or police undercover as florists. But you do
know who it is, and you know he's already been
here for a while because he always shows up early
to box someone into a religious conversation while hovering underfoot,
(04:23):
and while the hosts are trying to prepare. He didn't
bring anything to contribute, not even a bag of ice
or flowers for your mom. Your family found him at church.
He goes to a lot of churches. He says he
has the whole Bible memorized. He recites deep cuts of
(04:43):
scripture that seem unrelated to anything at hand, and he
interprets them aloud in front of you, an acquaintance in
intuitive leaps you can't track, and those interpretations seem to
stop just short of misogyny. At the meal, he's a
picky eater, asking if anything has touched pork. Stuff like that.
(05:05):
He scarfs down his food, and though the rest of
you are only halfway through, he asks if he can
have a private conversation with one of the men at
the table, and you won't see that relative again until
it's time to leave. You feel a little bit bad
about how hard you're judging him. Maybe he is just
(05:27):
very performative about his beliefs. Maybe he is just a
completely socially unaware pity invite. Maybe the reason he's never
spoken directly to you, despite knowing your family for decades
is because he's intimidated, not because he hates women as
a group. Maybe every single thing that sent your spidey
(05:50):
sense is tingling can be explained away as innocuous, but
it won't dispel the fact that this guy has bad vibes.
It only takes one person, one cousin or plus one
to acknowledge one off kilter behavior to vindicate your intuitions. Like,
(06:13):
for example, after the family prayer, which he added to
just as you all said amen, he starts muttering another
prayer in another language, loud enough for everyone to hear,
but quiet enough where no one can make out the words.
And then your stepsister's eyebrows furrow unconsciously, and then you
snap out of it. Van parking, bad manners, fundamentalism, creepy prayer,
(06:40):
picky eater. That's it. You're giving this guy a wide
berth and hiding behind your biggest uncle until Easter's over.
My point is, you know it when you meet a creep.
You know it without having evidence to support it. Call
it emotional, call it intuition, call it whatever you want.
(07:01):
You know that creepy feeling. It doesn't go away no
matter how much you try to rationalize it. But here's
the thing, and I cannot overstate this fact. Meeting a
creep is exactly the opposite of how women experience their
first interaction with Ted Bundy. He showed no warning signs.
(07:26):
He was a handsome, normal acting guy who was pretty
charming and easy to work with. That was his whole stick.
It's why he got away with it for so long.
And it was a long time after she initially met
him that Anne Rule realized Ted Bundy was a full
(07:46):
on sociopathic murderer. Some people are drawn to true crime.
(08:07):
They pick up a copy of In Cold Blood or
Helter Skelter and it sparks up an insatiable curiosity, a
need to know why people do the things they do.
For me, it's preventative and definitely anxiety related. I need
to know all the most terrible shit so I can
avoid it, or at least try to. But Anne Rule
(08:31):
wasn't drawn to true crime so much as she was
born to it. Anne came from a law enforcement family.
One uncle was a medical examiner, another was a sheriff
near the small Michigan town where Anne was born, one
cousin was a prosecuting attorney, and her maternal grandfather was
(08:53):
a sheriff. In fact, that grandfather lived in the same
building that housed the Stanton County Jail. As a kid,
Anne spent her summers there. She helped her grandmother prepare
meals for the prisoners and slid trays of food through
a narrow slot in the locked pantry door. She even
(09:16):
learned to crochet from the sweet woman in the cell upstairs.
The same sweet woman was about to go on trial
for shooting her husband. Most seven year olds might have
been less excited about spending their vacation within the cement
walls of a county jail, but Anne was fascinated by it.
(09:39):
She wanted to know how these people had ended up
in prison, in her words, what made them that way.
After high school, Anne earned her bachelor's degree in Creative
writing with a minor and abnormal psychology and even though
she had a clear talent for writing, what she really
wanted to do was police work. Just after college, she
(10:04):
joined the Seattle Police Department with aspirations of working in
the homicide unit, and then she failed her eye exam.
There went that dream. Dropping out of the police force
(10:26):
was devastating. In a later interview with KCTS nine, Anne
said she was so heartbroken by quitting that she would
go blocks out of her way to avoid driving past
the public safety building. Still, even though she didn't get
to be a detective, she was the youngest woman ever
(10:46):
accepted into the Seattle Police Department. After that, remaining with
the police force seemed too painful, she quit the department
(11:09):
entirely and initially went on to become a social worker.
It was only much later, when her husband left his
job to go back to school, that Ann started writing,
and that was mostly to make ends me. In nineteen
sixty eight, Anne started writing true crime articles for the
kind of pulpy magazine that usually sports a sexy, terrified
(11:32):
blonde with a lot of cleavage on the front cover.
This was not exactly Pulitzer winning stuff. She wrote articles
like I went to prison to sleep with my sister's husband,
and because I wanted babies, Joe screamed at me, you
want a stud not a husband. Of course, the editors
(11:53):
at True Detective Magazine didn't think the readers would buy
that a woman could possibly know anything about crime, so
for the first few years that she worked there, Anne
wrote under a slew of male pseudonyms. Incidentally, one of
these pseudonyms happened to be Chris Hanson. This was years
before dateline, but I guess people have always trusted a
(12:16):
man with a waspy name to expose criminals. She was
writing twenty thousand words a week with four kids at home,
and she didn't even get to do it under her
own name. That's dedication or dire necessity because the cost
of diapers is entirely too high. Either way, it's admirable
and frustrating. In her spare time, Anne was doing everything
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she could to shore up her credentials as an expert
on all things true crime. She was taking classes, attending seminars.
She learned everything from how to identify whether a fire
was arson to the ins and outs of criminal psychology.
But as it turned out, her big brain wouldn't come
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from the hundreds of hours of hard work that she
was putting into her career, not directly like most big breaks.
If she hadn't been working her ass off for years
to ensure a right place, right time scenario, it would
have seemed like a coincidence. In nineteen seventy one, Anne's
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life was getting messy. I don't mean that as a judgment.
I mean, who among us has never been a mess? But,
like Mindy Kaling said, if you're going to be a mess,
you might as well be a hot mess. Anne's career
was climbing, but her marriage was hovering on the precipice
of divorce. With four kids and not enough income to
(13:45):
support them, Anne wasn't sure if she could handle being
a single mother. Everybody reacts differently to being in a
spot like that. Some people want to bury their head
in the sand, Ostrich style. Some people want to throw
a Molotov cocktail into the mix, take ten tequila shots
and just see what happens. Some of us put our
(14:06):
nose to the grindstone and crank that shit out, because
what would you have me do? Fail? And maybe when
you come up for breath, you also reward yourself with
snacks and tequila it takes all kinds. Anne's solution was
probably the healthiest. This is some of the best advice
I've ever heard. When you feel helpless, do something to
(14:30):
help someone else. I'm not sure that Anne Rule ever
felt helpless, but her solution was helping others. She started
working at the suicide hotline. At the hotline, Anne met
a friend whom she could really trust, someone she could
tell her problems too without fear of judgment. And you
already know that this monster was Ted Bundy. Have you
(14:54):
ever had the intrusive thought of what if my work
husband was Ted Bundy? That really happened to her, y'all
At the time, Ted was a twenty five year old
psychology student at the University of Washington. He had been
assigned to the crisis clinic as part of his work
study program, and Anne was his partner there. Every Tuesday
(15:18):
and Sunday, they would work their assigned shifts in the
clinic's cozy attic offices. Ann's shift lasted from ten pm
to two am. Though there were plenty of calls, there
was also plenty of downtime, long hours that stretched away
through the night with nothing to do but talk. Anne
(15:40):
liked Ted She liked his clean look and gentlemanly effect.
She liked the way he walked her to her car
after shifts. And we all know and have been told
repeatedly by true crime novices that yes, he's handsome, Like yeah, nuby,
he was classically hot. That was how he'd have got
(16:03):
your ass. I mean, not that anyone deserves to get got,
of course, but this is fifty years later. There's no
excuse for not reflecting now. You can't just learn that
he was hot part of the story. Finish the sentence
he was hot, And that's when normal alarm bells don't
go off like they should. Your biology is betraying you.
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I know I'm preaching to the converted. Everyone listening here
knows you have to be especially wary of men who
are handsome because they abide by a different set of rules,
or like no rules at all. Remember when John Hamm
ordered off the diner's menu in thirty Rock and the
waitress just smiled at him. Yeah. What Anne really liked
(16:48):
about Ted was how easy he was to talk to.
She told him all about the problems she was having
with her husband, though they'd been planning to get a
divorce Anne's husband had just been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma,
and Anne didn't know how she could leave him when
he needed her most. Ted empathized with Anne's problems, and
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in return, she listened to his. He told her he'd
never known who his real father was, how he'd lost
the love of his life, and how in spite of
one disappointment after another, he'd overcome it all. Listeners, we
(17:33):
know that's not true. Ted was born to Eleanor Louise
Cowell in nineteen forty six. Eleanor, later known as Louise,
grew up in a deeply religious family. She was still
(17:54):
living with her parents when she found out she was
pregnant at the age of twenty two. Soon afterwards, Louise
left home to avoid the wrath of her tyrannical father.
She traveled to Burlington, Vermont, and gave birth an a home
for unwed mothers there. Eventually, her parents agreed to let
(18:14):
her and the baby that's Ted back into their home
as long as they could pretend that the baby had
been adopted by his grandparents and that Louise was his sister.
Ted had always suspected his true parentage, and in nineteen
sixty nine, after a series of career disappointments, he traveled
(18:35):
back east to confirm it. Some part of them had
always known the truth. Still seeing the word illegitimate stamped
in black and white on his birth paperwork at the
Burlington City Hall, sent Ted reeling. Ted had always idealized
his grandfather. Though other family members would later describe the
(18:57):
man as a sadistic bigot with a volatile temper, Ted
refused to see him as anything other than a loving father.
Now it turned out the old man had never been
his father at all, Ted felt unmoored, unsure of who
he really was. I'm not going to pretend that wouldn't
(19:18):
have been a difficult adjustment, especially at that point in time.
But family does take all forms. So Ted left back
to the West Coast to the person who could make
him feel as if he belonged. Her name was Diane Edwards.
(19:44):
Ted and Diane had dated for just over a year.
She came from a background of wealth and privilege and
was everything he aspired to be. Stylish, rich, respected. With
her on his arm, Ted knew that people would take
him seriously. They would finally see him as a part
(20:05):
of the upper class, as somewhat important, someone who belonged
at the highest echalons of society. Unfortunately for Ted, Diane
didn't share his vision for their future together. In fact,
she'd already intimated as much before he left for Vermont.
(20:25):
In June of nineteen sixty eight, Diane graduated from the
University of Washington. She'd accepted a job in San Francisco
and made no plans to bring Ted along with her.
When Ted returned from Vermont and surprised her in the Bay,
she made it crystal clear things were over between them
and Diane was done with him. Ted told Anne all
(20:56):
of this during their long nights together at the Crisis
Clinic hotline. And the thing is, most of it was true.
It was also true that he had seemingly overcome that adversity.
He'd gotten his life back on track. He was back
in school, an honor student with plans to go into
politics or law. He was even dating someone new. Ted
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was good now, He said, he was headed in the
right direction. And that's the thing about a good liar.
Most of what they say is true. It's just that
one lie buried deep in a barrel of fact. Ted
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had shared most of his and Diane's relationship with Anne,
but he was far from over it. Six years after
the breakup, he sought her out while on a business
trip to San Francisco. To Diane, Ted seemed like an
entire different person. He was swathe and confident, assured of
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his place at the top of the world. This was
the change she had been looking for. They started dating again,
but this time it was Ted who would be calling
the shots. That September, Ted and Diane got engaged. Then
in late December of nineteen seventy three, he pulled the
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rug out from under her. The whole thing had been
an elaborate ruse. He'd wanted to make Diane fall in
love with him so that he could reject her the
way that she rejected him, and that is psychotic. Ted
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had gotten what he wanted, but it wasn't enough. Days
after their breakup, the murders began. On January fourth of
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nineteen seventy four, eighteen year old Karen Sparks was assaulted
in the basement apartment she shared with three other students
at the University of Washington. Karen was beaten to within
an inch of her life and sexually assaulted with a
metal rod that punctured her bladder. It nearly killed her.
(23:34):
It's a miracle she survived. She made it out of
that horror and worked hard to overcome the physical damage
he had left her with. She got married, had a family,
and a career. All that year, the disappearances would come
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like clockwork. In April, there was Linda Anne Healy, who
was abducted from her apartment just a few blocks away
from where Karen Sparks had lived. Then in March, Dona
Gale Manson, a nineteen year old music student at Evergreen
State College, disappeared on her way to a jazz concert.
(24:21):
In April, Susan Elaine Rancourt, a student at Central Washington
State University, vanished after starting a load of laundry. In May,
Kathy Parks left her dorm room at Oregon State to
meet friends for coffee. She never made it. At this point,
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it truly seemed like the killer could strike anywhere. No
one was safe. The murders were occurring closer together, too.
There were two in June, less than two weeks apart.
One of the women who vanished was twenty two year
old Brenda Ball. This close to home for Anne Rule,
(25:02):
as Ball had been an acquaintance of her daughters. In
spite of the chaos going on in her personal life,
(25:24):
Anne had been keenly aware of the disappearances. That summer
in nineteen seventy four, Anne's divorce was being finalized, her
husband's cancer had stopped growing, and she was ready to
set out on her new life as a single mother.
The largest challenge would be making enough money to support
her family. There would be no more time for long
(25:45):
night shifts at the crisis clinic. Thankfully, Anne's career as
a writer had been going very well. She started reaching
out more frequently to detectives in the Seattle and King
County homicide units, and before long she was offered a
book deal to write about the developing cases. As Anne
looked into the abductions, she began to see the obvious
(26:08):
similarities between them. Almost all of the victims were attractive, wealthy,
young white women, with slim builds and long, dark hair
parted down the middle. Most had been taken from public places,
and in many cases, witnesses nearby had reported seeing a
handsome young man with his arm or leg in a cast.
(26:30):
One witness even remembers the man asking if she could
help him carry his briefcase to his car, a tan
Volkswagen Beetle. She said she would, but first she had
to grab something from inside her sorority house. She dashed inside,
but she took longer than she'd intended, and when she
came back out, the man had disappeared. Then, in the
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summer of nineteen seventy four, the murders seemed to come
to a grisly culmination. I probably don't have to tell
you that warm sunny days are few and far between
in Washington State, and Sunday, July fourteenth was one for
the books. That day, forty thousand people packed into the
(27:21):
grassy tree lined park along the shores of Lake Sammish
State Park. Among them were Denise Nasland and Janis Ott.
Janis had only been there a few minutes when a
handsome young man with his arminous sling approached her. A
group of sunbathers overheard him introduce himself as Ted. Later
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that same day, eighteen year old Denise was stopped by
a young man with his arminous ling. Neither woman was
ever seen alive again. After the abductions at Lake Sammymish,
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Washington State descended into a full frenzy. Headlines warned of
the mysterious Ted who was abducting people in broad daylight.
Witnesses provided a rough sketch of the suspect, and now
calls were pouring into the tip line. One of those
calls was from Anne Rule. Anne had been wrestling with
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the idea of calling in a tip about her friend
for months. Of course, Ted couldn't possibly be the killer.
The kind, thoughtful man she knew had been an upstanding
member of society. The last time she'd seen him, he'd
just graduated from college, he was practically engaged to his
(28:50):
longtime girlfriend, and headed for a successful career in law.
He'd been on the Crime Prevention Advisory Commission, for God's sakes,
it just didn't seem possible. But at the same time,
something nagged at her that picture did look an awful
lot like him, and he lived so close to the
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area where Linda, George, Anne, and Karen had been attacked.
Not only that, but for the second time that year,
the murders included someone she'd had a personal connection to.
Denise Naslynd, babysat for a close friend of hers. Anne's
own daughters were fast approaching the age of many of
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the victims. If there was even the slimmest chance that
Ted Bundy had something to do with these disappearances, then
she had to act. Anne called one of her friends
on the force and told him that she just wanted
to put her mind at ease. Witnesses were counted that
the killer was driving a tan VW Bug. Anne didn't
(29:54):
even think Ted had a car anymore, and she was
hoping the officer could find out. Twenty minutes later, the
officer called her back. Ted did have a car, a
bronze VW Bug. Thanks to Anne's tip, the picture from
Ted's driver's license went into the suspect pool. Unfortunately, at
(30:16):
that point there were twenty four hundred other suspects who
had been called in by people in the Seattle area,
Plus the trail was going cold anyway. After the two
kidnappings at Lake Sammish, the disappearances had abruptly stopped. Authorities
had no idea what exactly caused it. Had the killer
(30:37):
died or been arrested for some other crime, or was
he just waiting until the heat died down. Either way,
no new disappearances meant no new clues. The most they
could do was to sort through their now extensive list
of suspects and hope something came of it. For the
(30:57):
Seattle PD the chase was over, but for detectives in
the state of Utah and Colorado it was only just beginning.
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In the fall of nineteen seventy four, Ted Bundy was
falling apart. He'd moved to Utah to attend the University
of Utah Law school, but he couldn't keep up with
his classes. He was drinking more, and his relationship with
his new fiance had become cold and distant. As Ted's
life spun out of control, the cycle of murders and
(31:55):
abductions began again. A lot of people like to pay
Ted Bundy as some kind of criminal mastermind, but I
don't think he is. He lived in a time when
there were no cell phones or CCTV footage, when police
departments from different states had to send files via snail mail.
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Ted wasn't a genius. He was just lucky. In the
fall of nineteen seventy four, his luck would start to
run out. On November eighth, Ted Bundy attempted to abduct
Carol de Ranch when she was browsing a Walden's bookstore
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but unlike many of Ted's other victims, Carol got away,
and unlike Karen Sparks, Carol remembered every detail of the
attack that would spell the beginning of the end for
Ted Bundy. In the fall of nineteen seventy five, things
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were going well for Anne Rule. She grinded away for
years at True Detective magazine, and now all her hard
work was finally paying off. She received her first book contract.
After the dozens of articles she had written about the
Washington State killings, she would now be paid to write
a book about them, so something she had wanted for
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a long time, ever since she read Truman Capoti's In
Cold Blood. I mean that book is the ultimate true
crime book. It made her decide that she wanted to
write a book about what was inside the head of
a killer. She had no idea how close she already was.
That September, Anne received a call from Ted. She hadn't
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spoken to her old friend in years. She almost forgot
about the tip. She called in to the Seattle Police Department,
but as soon as she heard his voice, the memory
rushed back. Ted explained Seattle police were subpoenaing his law
school records. He had hoped that Anne, with her connections
(34:09):
in law enforcement, might be able to tell him why.
Anne still felt a tremendous guilt for calling him in.
As far as she knew, Ted was telling the truth.
He'd been pulled over during a routine traffic stop, and
now police were drumming up bogus charges around possession of
so called burglary tools. Anne agreed to make the call.
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The officer who answered the phone told Anne that this
was just a routine matter, that he was one of
twelve hundred people being investigated. Ted believed the lie, but
Anne had a bad feeling about it. The police needed
real evidence to get a subpoena. If they had that, well,
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maybe there had been something to her suspicions. After all,
as usual, Ted's lies to Anne were embedded in a
foundation of truth. He had been pulled over at a
routine traffic stop and arrested on possession of burglary tools.
What he hadn't told her was that those tools had
been the same ones used on ten women attacked in
(35:19):
Utah and Colorado, or that Carrol de Roach had already
pulled his photo from a stack of mugshots. The officers
had shown her the police weren't looking at Ted as
one suspect out of many. He was their main suspect.
Within a week, he would be charged with aggravated kidnapping
(35:40):
and attempted criminal assault. Over the next few weeks, Anne
and Ted began to rekindle their friendship through letters. He
insisted to her, as he did to every one, that
he was entirely innocent. She wanted to believe it, but
(36:02):
it was becoming harder. In spite of her doubts, Anne
provided emotional support and sent money for his prison commissary.
The problem was, while she couldn't completely believe in his innocence,
she couldn't believe in his guilt either. She just didn't
know what happened. Maybe he was covering up for some
(36:24):
other less atrocious crime, or maybe there was some other
explanation she didn't understand yet. But whatever Ted had done,
Anne still wanted to be there for him. In late November,
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Ted was freed on bail. He flew home to Seattle,
and shortly after his return, he and Anne met up
for lunch. The police warned against the encounter, but Anne
was insistent. She knew Ted, she trusted him, he would
never hurt her. Even though I know she survived this lunch,
(37:07):
my heart elevator drops every time I think about it.
They met up at a basement level French bistro in
the center of downtown Seattle. They sat and shared some hibbli.
Even though years had passed, nothing felt changed at all.
Ted seemed utterly unperturbed by the charges against him. He
(37:31):
was an innocent man. How could they convict him when
there was nothing to prove. Looking at him then, at
ease in the comfortable dining room, in his corduroys and
brown sweater, it was so easy to believe him. Anne
didn't tell him about her complicated feelings that afternoon, but
(37:52):
it wouldn't be long before she had another chance. A
few months later, they met up again for drinks at
a lie pub on the outskirts of the city. By
this time, Ted had become thoroughly adept at losing his
police tale, and he assured Anne that there was no
one watching them. They talked for hours, and as the
(38:13):
evening drew on, Anne finally found the courage to voice
her concern. She looked him in the eye and told
him that she wasn't convinced of his innocence. This woman
had nerves of steel. Ted just smiled. He told her
it was okay, that there were things he would like
to tell her, but he just couldn't. Anne would never
(38:51):
know what they were. That was the last time she
would ever see him as a free man. Anne and
Ted corresponded over the next ten years. At first, Anne
was sympathetic to Ted. A part of her really believed
that he might be an innocent man. But bit by
bit his actions chipped away at her doubts about his guilt.
(39:14):
There was his escape from the Pitkin County Courthouse in
Aspen after he was found guilty of kidnapping and assaulting
Carol de Roach. Ted Bundy jumped out a window and
went on the lamb for six days. But of course,
an innocent man would want to escape an unjust conviction.
Even after Ted's flight and Aspen, Anne continued to write
(39:37):
him with sympathy and lend him money. She even sent
him care packages. Then, in late December of nineteen seventy seven,
Ted escaped again. This time, he'd spent six weeks carefully
sawing through an electrical plate above his cell. He crawled
(39:57):
up into the ceiling and escaped through one one of
the guard's apartments that adjoined the jail. Hours before his escape,
he called Anne at the hotel where she was staying
in Hollywood. At the time, Anne's career was taking off.
She hadn't yet finished her book on Ted Bundy's case,
but a film production company had shown interest in one
(40:20):
of the magazine articles she'd written. Now she was in
Los Angeles to talk to producers about writing her first
film script. When Ted called her that night in nineteen
seventy seven, he asked for her address in Los Angeles.
After his escape, Anne couldn't help wondering what he might
(40:41):
have had in mind for her. Her faith in him
was beginning to crack, and by the time he resurfaced
in February, it crumbled entirely. At six fifteen a m.
(41:08):
On the morning of her first Hollywood premiere, Anne received
a call from a distraught Ted. The day before, he
was arrested in Pensacola, Florida, and now he wanted to
get it all out. He wanted to tell Anne the
things he hadn't been able to voice to her that
night in the tavern. Only now she was thousands of
(41:29):
miles away, and there were a whole lot of lawyers
and policemen standing between them. Whatever Ted had wanted to
tell her that night, Anne would never get to hear it,
and it really didn't matter any more. At this point.
The truth was too obvious to ignore. Now she saw
him for what he was, But people contained multitudes. As
(41:52):
impossible as it seems, she could know and accept and
understand that her friend was a monster, and that he
had also been a good friend to her. Anne and
Ted continued to correspond almost up until his execution. By
the end, he was a manic, bitter husk of his
(42:14):
former self. Anne moved on her book on Ted Bundy's killings.
The Stranger Beside Me was a sensation. Anne had once
felt that the only thing she wanted in the world
was a book contract. Now she almost had more work
than she could handle. By nineteen eighty four, Anne completed
(42:38):
her next three books, The Lust Killer, The Want ad Killer,
and The I five Killer. All three did well, but
none of them quite reached the bestseller status of The
Stranger Beside Me. Anne's career was stagnating. For a moment,
she must have felt like a one hit wonder. Then
(43:00):
she heard about the case of a woman named Diane Downes.
Downes was an Oregon woman who had been arrested for
shooting her three children in the spring of nineteen eighty three.
She did it because she was having an affair with
a married man who didn't want children. There was something
about the case that spoke to Anne that gave her,
(43:21):
as she put it, a prickle on the back of
my neck. Diane Downes was exactly the type of person
she looked for and a good story. Someone attractive, intelligent,
and charming, the last person you'd ever suspect of such
a heinous crime. Anne was fascinated by the case, and
when you're writing about something you're really interested in, you
(43:43):
do your best work. Small sacrifices. Anne's book about Diane
Downes was what took her from being a best selling
author to a household name. It received rave reviews, and
in nineteen eighty nine it was made into an EMU
nominated TV movie starring Farah Fawcett. In spite of all
(44:20):
her success, Anne still found it hard to move past
those dark years of the nineteen seventies. The moment of
Ted's execution neared. Anne got more than just a best
selling book from that friendship. She also took away lessons
about what makes a criminal. Criminals don't have to be
obvious creeps lurking in a parking lot. They can be charming,
(44:43):
good looking, even respected. After The Stranger Beside Me, those
were specifically the types of murderers that Anne looked for,
and we can still see the impact of her search
for those stories today, The Jinks, the Dropout, the Devil
in the White City. Anne Rule is the one who
(45:05):
introduced us to the stories about charming, respected sociopaths. Thank
(45:42):
you to Anne Rule for writing the book The Stranger
Beside Me, which helped to write this episode. Other sources
include the KCTS nine interview series with Anne Rule, and
several news articles. All of those sources are linked in
our show notes. If you want to learn more, join
me next week on The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever
Told For a story about a woman who was breaking
(46:04):
the glass ceiling in her own special way. In nineteen
seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore did something that only one
woman had ever attempted before. She tried to kill a
US president. The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is
(46:29):
a production of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay mcbraer and
I hosted this episode and this episode was written by
Zoe Luisa Lewis. Our show is produced by Emma Dumouth
and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Our theme music is by
Tyler Cash. Executive produced by Scott Waxman.
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care and listening. Anne's heart was pounding as
(00:32):
she headed into the old Victorian mansion that housed the
offices for the Seattle Crisis Clinic. After weeks of training
on mock phone calls, now she would sit in on
actual calls. Anne's reasons for volunteering with the suicide hotline
were deeply personal. Her younger brother had taken his life
(00:54):
when he was only twenty one. He'd been a promising
young medical student with a bright future. She knew she
couldn't undo what happened to him, but maybe if she
could remember her training and say the right thing, she
could save someone else from ending their life the same way.
(01:16):
Anne climbed the stairs to the wood paneled office at
the top of the building. She was greeted by the
seasoned volunteer who would be training her for the night.
In the next room, a young man was already seated
in front of the imposing foam bank. This would be
her partner at the hotline. He was handsome and clean shaven,
(01:39):
with wavy brown hair cut just above the ears. The
trainer smiled and gestured towards the man. This is Ted Bundy.
He'll be working with you. Welcome to the greatest true
(02:13):
crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode
we're calling true crime writing's gold standard and Rule and
her friend Ted Bundy. It's the story of Anne Rule,
an icon who's published more than thirty true crime novels
(02:35):
and redefined the genre for an entire generation of Americans.
She wrote multiple best sellers, broke barriers for female crime writers,
and unwittingly befriended one of the most notorious serial killers
of all time. More after the break, we've all met
(03:15):
that guy who instantly creeped us out. Let me give
you a hypothetical situation to simulate the experience. Say you're
heading to a family holiday event. You pull up ten
or fifteen minutes before eating time, like etiquette dictates, I mean,
unless the hostess has asked you specifically to come early
(03:38):
to help set up, of course, and there's a white
utility van already parked outside. It's either taking up two spots,
locking the flow of traffic, or parked in front of
the mailbox. So even if you don't know who it is.
You already have your first red flag, well first two, really,
since no one should be driving a white utility van
(04:01):
except subcontractors or police undercover as florists. But you do
know who it is, and you know he's already been
here for a while because he always shows up early
to box someone into a religious conversation while hovering underfoot,
(04:23):
and while the hosts are trying to prepare. He didn't
bring anything to contribute, not even a bag of ice
or flowers for your mom. Your family found him at church.
He goes to a lot of churches. He says he
has the whole Bible memorized. He recites deep cuts of
(04:43):
scripture that seem unrelated to anything at hand, and he
interprets them aloud in front of you, an acquaintance in
intuitive leaps you can't track, and those interpretations seem to
stop just short of misogyny. At the meal, he's a
picky eater, asking if anything has touched pork. Stuff like that.
(05:05):
He scarfs down his food, and though the rest of
you are only halfway through, he asks if he can
have a private conversation with one of the men at
the table, and you won't see that relative again until
it's time to leave. You feel a little bit bad
about how hard you're judging him. Maybe he is just
(05:27):
very performative about his beliefs. Maybe he is just a
completely socially unaware pity invite. Maybe the reason he's never
spoken directly to you, despite knowing your family for decades
is because he's intimidated, not because he hates women as
a group. Maybe every single thing that sent your spidey
(05:50):
sense is tingling can be explained away as innocuous, but
it won't dispel the fact that this guy has bad vibes.
It only takes one person, one cousin or plus one
to acknowledge one off kilter behavior to vindicate your intuitions. Like,
(06:13):
for example, after the family prayer, which he added to
just as you all said amen, he starts muttering another
prayer in another language, loud enough for everyone to hear,
but quiet enough where no one can make out the words.
And then your stepsister's eyebrows furrow unconsciously, and then you
snap out of it. Van parking, bad manners, fundamentalism, creepy prayer,
(06:40):
picky eater. That's it. You're giving this guy a wide
berth and hiding behind your biggest uncle until Easter's over.
My point is, you know it when you meet a creep.
You know it without having evidence to support it. Call
it emotional, call it intuition, call it whatever you want.
(07:01):
You know that creepy feeling. It doesn't go away no
matter how much you try to rationalize it. But here's
the thing, and I cannot overstate this fact. Meeting a
creep is exactly the opposite of how women experience their
first interaction with Ted Bundy. He showed no warning signs.
(07:26):
He was a handsome, normal acting guy who was pretty
charming and easy to work with. That was his whole stick.
It's why he got away with it for so long.
And it was a long time after she initially met
him that Anne Rule realized Ted Bundy was a full
(07:46):
on sociopathic murderer. Some people are drawn to true crime.
(08:07):
They pick up a copy of In Cold Blood or
Helter Skelter and it sparks up an insatiable curiosity, a
need to know why people do the things they do.
For me, it's preventative and definitely anxiety related. I need
to know all the most terrible shit so I can
avoid it, or at least try to. But Anne Rule
(08:31):
wasn't drawn to true crime so much as she was
born to it. Anne came from a law enforcement family.
One uncle was a medical examiner, another was a sheriff
near the small Michigan town where Anne was born, one
cousin was a prosecuting attorney, and her maternal grandfather was
(08:53):
a sheriff. In fact, that grandfather lived in the same
building that housed the Stanton County Jail. As a kid,
Anne spent her summers there. She helped her grandmother prepare
meals for the prisoners and slid trays of food through
a narrow slot in the locked pantry door. She even
(09:16):
learned to crochet from the sweet woman in the cell upstairs.
The same sweet woman was about to go on trial
for shooting her husband. Most seven year olds might have
been less excited about spending their vacation within the cement
walls of a county jail, but Anne was fascinated by it.
(09:39):
She wanted to know how these people had ended up
in prison, in her words, what made them that way.
After high school, Anne earned her bachelor's degree in Creative
writing with a minor and abnormal psychology and even though
she had a clear talent for writing, what she really
wanted to do was police work. Just after college, she
(10:04):
joined the Seattle Police Department with aspirations of working in
the homicide unit, and then she failed her eye exam.
There went that dream. Dropping out of the police force
(10:26):
was devastating. In a later interview with KCTS nine, Anne
said she was so heartbroken by quitting that she would
go blocks out of her way to avoid driving past
the public safety building. Still, even though she didn't get
to be a detective, she was the youngest woman ever
(10:46):
accepted into the Seattle Police Department. After that, remaining with
the police force seemed too painful, she quit the department
(11:09):
entirely and initially went on to become a social worker.
It was only much later, when her husband left his
job to go back to school, that Ann started writing,
and that was mostly to make ends me. In nineteen
sixty eight, Anne started writing true crime articles for the
kind of pulpy magazine that usually sports a sexy, terrified
(11:32):
blonde with a lot of cleavage on the front cover.
This was not exactly Pulitzer winning stuff. She wrote articles
like I went to prison to sleep with my sister's husband,
and because I wanted babies, Joe screamed at me, you
want a stud not a husband. Of course, the editors
(11:53):
at True Detective Magazine didn't think the readers would buy
that a woman could possibly know anything about crime, so
for the first few years that she worked there, Anne
wrote under a slew of male pseudonyms. Incidentally, one of
these pseudonyms happened to be Chris Hanson. This was years
before dateline, but I guess people have always trusted a
(12:16):
man with a waspy name to expose criminals. She was
writing twenty thousand words a week with four kids at home,
and she didn't even get to do it under her
own name. That's dedication or dire necessity because the cost
of diapers is entirely too high. Either way, it's admirable
and frustrating. In her spare time, Anne was doing everything
(12:40):
she could to shore up her credentials as an expert
on all things true crime. She was taking classes, attending seminars.
She learned everything from how to identify whether a fire
was arson to the ins and outs of criminal psychology.
But as it turned out, her big brain wouldn't come
(13:01):
from the hundreds of hours of hard work that she
was putting into her career, not directly like most big breaks.
If she hadn't been working her ass off for years
to ensure a right place, right time scenario, it would
have seemed like a coincidence. In nineteen seventy one, Anne's
(13:24):
life was getting messy. I don't mean that as a judgment.
I mean, who among us has never been a mess? But,
like Mindy Kaling said, if you're going to be a mess,
you might as well be a hot mess. Anne's career
was climbing, but her marriage was hovering on the precipice
of divorce. With four kids and not enough income to
(13:45):
support them, Anne wasn't sure if she could handle being
a single mother. Everybody reacts differently to being in a
spot like that. Some people want to bury their head
in the sand, Ostrich style. Some people want to throw
a Molotov cocktail into the mix, take ten tequila shots
and just see what happens. Some of us put our
(14:06):
nose to the grindstone and crank that shit out, because
what would you have me do? Fail? And maybe when
you come up for breath, you also reward yourself with
snacks and tequila it takes all kinds. Anne's solution was
probably the healthiest. This is some of the best advice
I've ever heard. When you feel helpless, do something to
(14:30):
help someone else. I'm not sure that Anne Rule ever
felt helpless, but her solution was helping others. She started
working at the suicide hotline. At the hotline, Anne met
a friend whom she could really trust, someone she could
tell her problems too without fear of judgment. And you
already know that this monster was Ted Bundy. Have you
(14:54):
ever had the intrusive thought of what if my work
husband was Ted Bundy? That really happened to her, y'all
At the time, Ted was a twenty five year old
psychology student at the University of Washington. He had been
assigned to the crisis clinic as part of his work
study program, and Anne was his partner there. Every Tuesday
(15:18):
and Sunday, they would work their assigned shifts in the
clinic's cozy attic offices. Ann's shift lasted from ten pm
to two am. Though there were plenty of calls, there
was also plenty of downtime, long hours that stretched away
through the night with nothing to do but talk. Anne
(15:40):
liked Ted She liked his clean look and gentlemanly effect.
She liked the way he walked her to her car
after shifts. And we all know and have been told
repeatedly by true crime novices that yes, he's handsome, Like yeah, nuby,
he was classically hot. That was how he'd have got
(16:03):
your ass. I mean, not that anyone deserves to get got,
of course, but this is fifty years later. There's no
excuse for not reflecting now. You can't just learn that
he was hot part of the story. Finish the sentence
he was hot, And that's when normal alarm bells don't
go off like they should. Your biology is betraying you.
(16:26):
I know I'm preaching to the converted. Everyone listening here
knows you have to be especially wary of men who
are handsome because they abide by a different set of rules,
or like no rules at all. Remember when John Hamm
ordered off the diner's menu in thirty Rock and the
waitress just smiled at him. Yeah. What Anne really liked
(16:48):
about Ted was how easy he was to talk to.
She told him all about the problems she was having
with her husband, though they'd been planning to get a
divorce Anne's husband had just been diagnosed with a malignant melanoma,
and Anne didn't know how she could leave him when
he needed her most. Ted empathized with Anne's problems, and
(17:11):
in return, she listened to his. He told her he'd
never known who his real father was, how he'd lost
the love of his life, and how in spite of
one disappointment after another, he'd overcome it all. Listeners, we
(17:33):
know that's not true. Ted was born to Eleanor Louise
Cowell in nineteen forty six. Eleanor, later known as Louise,
grew up in a deeply religious family. She was still
(17:54):
living with her parents when she found out she was
pregnant at the age of twenty two. Soon afterwards, Louise
left home to avoid the wrath of her tyrannical father.
She traveled to Burlington, Vermont, and gave birth an a home
for unwed mothers there. Eventually, her parents agreed to let
(18:14):
her and the baby that's Ted back into their home
as long as they could pretend that the baby had
been adopted by his grandparents and that Louise was his sister.
Ted had always suspected his true parentage, and in nineteen
sixty nine, after a series of career disappointments, he traveled
(18:35):
back east to confirm it. Some part of them had
always known the truth. Still seeing the word illegitimate stamped
in black and white on his birth paperwork at the
Burlington City Hall, sent Ted reeling. Ted had always idealized
his grandfather. Though other family members would later describe the
(18:57):
man as a sadistic bigot with a volatile temper, Ted
refused to see him as anything other than a loving father.
Now it turned out the old man had never been
his father at all, Ted felt unmoored, unsure of who
he really was. I'm not going to pretend that wouldn't
(19:18):
have been a difficult adjustment, especially at that point in time.
But family does take all forms. So Ted left back
to the West Coast to the person who could make
him feel as if he belonged. Her name was Diane Edwards.
(19:44):
Ted and Diane had dated for just over a year.
She came from a background of wealth and privilege and
was everything he aspired to be. Stylish, rich, respected. With
her on his arm, Ted knew that people would take
him seriously. They would finally see him as a part
(20:05):
of the upper class, as somewhat important, someone who belonged
at the highest echalons of society. Unfortunately for Ted, Diane
didn't share his vision for their future together. In fact,
she'd already intimated as much before he left for Vermont.
(20:25):
In June of nineteen sixty eight, Diane graduated from the
University of Washington. She'd accepted a job in San Francisco
and made no plans to bring Ted along with her.
When Ted returned from Vermont and surprised her in the Bay,
she made it crystal clear things were over between them
and Diane was done with him. Ted told Anne all
(20:56):
of this during their long nights together at the Crisis
Clinic hotline. And the thing is, most of it was true.
It was also true that he had seemingly overcome that adversity.
He'd gotten his life back on track. He was back
in school, an honor student with plans to go into
politics or law. He was even dating someone new. Ted
(21:22):
was good now, He said, he was headed in the
right direction. And that's the thing about a good liar.
Most of what they say is true. It's just that
one lie buried deep in a barrel of fact. Ted
(21:44):
had shared most of his and Diane's relationship with Anne,
but he was far from over it. Six years after
the breakup, he sought her out while on a business
trip to San Francisco. To Diane, Ted seemed like an
entire different person. He was swathe and confident, assured of
(22:04):
his place at the top of the world. This was
the change she had been looking for. They started dating again,
but this time it was Ted who would be calling
the shots. That September, Ted and Diane got engaged. Then
in late December of nineteen seventy three, he pulled the
(22:25):
rug out from under her. The whole thing had been
an elaborate ruse. He'd wanted to make Diane fall in
love with him so that he could reject her the
way that she rejected him, and that is psychotic. Ted
(22:45):
had gotten what he wanted, but it wasn't enough. Days
after their breakup, the murders began. On January fourth of
(23:14):
nineteen seventy four, eighteen year old Karen Sparks was assaulted
in the basement apartment she shared with three other students
at the University of Washington. Karen was beaten to within
an inch of her life and sexually assaulted with a
metal rod that punctured her bladder. It nearly killed her.
(23:34):
It's a miracle she survived. She made it out of
that horror and worked hard to overcome the physical damage
he had left her with. She got married, had a family,
and a career. All that year, the disappearances would come
(23:59):
like clockwork. In April, there was Linda Anne Healy, who
was abducted from her apartment just a few blocks away
from where Karen Sparks had lived. Then in March, Dona
Gale Manson, a nineteen year old music student at Evergreen
State College, disappeared on her way to a jazz concert.
(24:21):
In April, Susan Elaine Rancourt, a student at Central Washington
State University, vanished after starting a load of laundry. In May,
Kathy Parks left her dorm room at Oregon State to
meet friends for coffee. She never made it. At this point,
(24:41):
it truly seemed like the killer could strike anywhere. No
one was safe. The murders were occurring closer together, too.
There were two in June, less than two weeks apart.
One of the women who vanished was twenty two year
old Brenda Ball. This close to home for Anne Rule,
(25:02):
as Ball had been an acquaintance of her daughters. In
spite of the chaos going on in her personal life,
(25:24):
Anne had been keenly aware of the disappearances. That summer
in nineteen seventy four, Anne's divorce was being finalized, her
husband's cancer had stopped growing, and she was ready to
set out on her new life as a single mother.
The largest challenge would be making enough money to support
her family. There would be no more time for long
(25:45):
night shifts at the crisis clinic. Thankfully, Anne's career as
a writer had been going very well. She started reaching
out more frequently to detectives in the Seattle and King
County homicide units, and before long she was offered a
book deal to write about the developing cases. As Anne
looked into the abductions, she began to see the obvious
(26:08):
similarities between them. Almost all of the victims were attractive, wealthy,
young white women, with slim builds and long, dark hair
parted down the middle. Most had been taken from public places,
and in many cases, witnesses nearby had reported seeing a
handsome young man with his arm or leg in a cast.
(26:30):
One witness even remembers the man asking if she could
help him carry his briefcase to his car, a tan
Volkswagen Beetle. She said she would, but first she had
to grab something from inside her sorority house. She dashed inside,
but she took longer than she'd intended, and when she
came back out, the man had disappeared. Then, in the
(26:58):
summer of nineteen seventy four, the murders seemed to come
to a grisly culmination. I probably don't have to tell
you that warm sunny days are few and far between
in Washington State, and Sunday, July fourteenth was one for
the books. That day, forty thousand people packed into the
(27:21):
grassy tree lined park along the shores of Lake Sammish
State Park. Among them were Denise Nasland and Janis Ott.
Janis had only been there a few minutes when a
handsome young man with his arminous sling approached her. A
group of sunbathers overheard him introduce himself as Ted. Later
(27:44):
that same day, eighteen year old Denise was stopped by
a young man with his arminous ling. Neither woman was
ever seen alive again. After the abductions at Lake Sammymish,
(28:08):
Washington State descended into a full frenzy. Headlines warned of
the mysterious Ted who was abducting people in broad daylight.
Witnesses provided a rough sketch of the suspect, and now
calls were pouring into the tip line. One of those
calls was from Anne Rule. Anne had been wrestling with
(28:30):
the idea of calling in a tip about her friend
for months. Of course, Ted couldn't possibly be the killer.
The kind, thoughtful man she knew had been an upstanding
member of society. The last time she'd seen him, he'd
just graduated from college, he was practically engaged to his
(28:50):
longtime girlfriend, and headed for a successful career in law.
He'd been on the Crime Prevention Advisory Commission, for God's sakes,
it just didn't seem possible. But at the same time,
something nagged at her that picture did look an awful
lot like him, and he lived so close to the
(29:12):
area where Linda, George, Anne, and Karen had been attacked.
Not only that, but for the second time that year,
the murders included someone she'd had a personal connection to.
Denise Naslynd, babysat for a close friend of hers. Anne's
own daughters were fast approaching the age of many of
(29:32):
the victims. If there was even the slimmest chance that
Ted Bundy had something to do with these disappearances, then
she had to act. Anne called one of her friends
on the force and told him that she just wanted
to put her mind at ease. Witnesses were counted that
the killer was driving a tan VW Bug. Anne didn't
(29:54):
even think Ted had a car anymore, and she was
hoping the officer could find out. Twenty minutes later, the
officer called her back. Ted did have a car, a
bronze VW Bug. Thanks to Anne's tip, the picture from
Ted's driver's license went into the suspect pool. Unfortunately, at
(30:16):
that point there were twenty four hundred other suspects who
had been called in by people in the Seattle area,
Plus the trail was going cold anyway. After the two
kidnappings at Lake Sammish, the disappearances had abruptly stopped. Authorities
had no idea what exactly caused it. Had the killer
(30:37):
died or been arrested for some other crime, or was
he just waiting until the heat died down. Either way,
no new disappearances meant no new clues. The most they
could do was to sort through their now extensive list
of suspects and hope something came of it. For the
(30:57):
Seattle PD the chase was over, but for detectives in
the state of Utah and Colorado it was only just beginning.
(31:33):
In the fall of nineteen seventy four, Ted Bundy was
falling apart. He'd moved to Utah to attend the University
of Utah Law school, but he couldn't keep up with
his classes. He was drinking more, and his relationship with
his new fiance had become cold and distant. As Ted's
life spun out of control, the cycle of murders and
(31:55):
abductions began again. A lot of people like to pay
Ted Bundy as some kind of criminal mastermind, but I
don't think he is. He lived in a time when
there were no cell phones or CCTV footage, when police
departments from different states had to send files via snail mail.
(32:16):
Ted wasn't a genius. He was just lucky. In the
fall of nineteen seventy four, his luck would start to
run out. On November eighth, Ted Bundy attempted to abduct
Carol de Ranch when she was browsing a Walden's bookstore
(32:41):
but unlike many of Ted's other victims, Carol got away,
and unlike Karen Sparks, Carol remembered every detail of the
attack that would spell the beginning of the end for
Ted Bundy. In the fall of nineteen seventy five, things
(33:03):
were going well for Anne Rule. She grinded away for
years at True Detective magazine, and now all her hard
work was finally paying off. She received her first book contract.
After the dozens of articles she had written about the
Washington State killings, she would now be paid to write
a book about them, so something she had wanted for
(33:25):
a long time, ever since she read Truman Capoti's In
Cold Blood. I mean that book is the ultimate true
crime book. It made her decide that she wanted to
write a book about what was inside the head of
a killer. She had no idea how close she already was.
That September, Anne received a call from Ted. She hadn't
(33:49):
spoken to her old friend in years. She almost forgot
about the tip. She called in to the Seattle Police Department,
but as soon as she heard his voice, the memory
rushed back. Ted explained Seattle police were subpoenaing his law
school records. He had hoped that Anne, with her connections
(34:09):
in law enforcement, might be able to tell him why.
Anne still felt a tremendous guilt for calling him in.
As far as she knew, Ted was telling the truth.
He'd been pulled over during a routine traffic stop, and
now police were drumming up bogus charges around possession of
so called burglary tools. Anne agreed to make the call.
(34:34):
The officer who answered the phone told Anne that this
was just a routine matter, that he was one of
twelve hundred people being investigated. Ted believed the lie, but
Anne had a bad feeling about it. The police needed
real evidence to get a subpoena. If they had that, well,
(34:56):
maybe there had been something to her suspicions. After all,
as usual, Ted's lies to Anne were embedded in a
foundation of truth. He had been pulled over at a
routine traffic stop and arrested on possession of burglary tools.
What he hadn't told her was that those tools had
been the same ones used on ten women attacked in
(35:19):
Utah and Colorado, or that Carrol de Roach had already
pulled his photo from a stack of mugshots. The officers
had shown her the police weren't looking at Ted as
one suspect out of many. He was their main suspect.
Within a week, he would be charged with aggravated kidnapping
(35:40):
and attempted criminal assault. Over the next few weeks, Anne
and Ted began to rekindle their friendship through letters. He
insisted to her, as he did to every one, that
he was entirely innocent. She wanted to believe it, but
(36:02):
it was becoming harder. In spite of her doubts, Anne
provided emotional support and sent money for his prison commissary.
The problem was, while she couldn't completely believe in his innocence,
she couldn't believe in his guilt either. She just didn't
know what happened. Maybe he was covering up for some
(36:24):
other less atrocious crime, or maybe there was some other
explanation she didn't understand yet. But whatever Ted had done,
Anne still wanted to be there for him. In late November,
(36:46):
Ted was freed on bail. He flew home to Seattle,
and shortly after his return, he and Anne met up
for lunch. The police warned against the encounter, but Anne
was insistent. She knew Ted, she trusted him, he would
never hurt her. Even though I know she survived this lunch,
(37:07):
my heart elevator drops every time I think about it.
They met up at a basement level French bistro in
the center of downtown Seattle. They sat and shared some hibbli.
Even though years had passed, nothing felt changed at all.
Ted seemed utterly unperturbed by the charges against him. He
(37:31):
was an innocent man. How could they convict him when
there was nothing to prove. Looking at him then, at
ease in the comfortable dining room, in his corduroys and
brown sweater, it was so easy to believe him. Anne
didn't tell him about her complicated feelings that afternoon, but
(37:52):
it wouldn't be long before she had another chance. A
few months later, they met up again for drinks at
a lie pub on the outskirts of the city. By
this time, Ted had become thoroughly adept at losing his
police tale, and he assured Anne that there was no
one watching them. They talked for hours, and as the
(38:13):
evening drew on, Anne finally found the courage to voice
her concern. She looked him in the eye and told
him that she wasn't convinced of his innocence. This woman
had nerves of steel. Ted just smiled. He told her
it was okay, that there were things he would like
to tell her, but he just couldn't. Anne would never
(38:51):
know what they were. That was the last time she
would ever see him as a free man. Anne and
Ted corresponded over the next ten years. At first, Anne
was sympathetic to Ted. A part of her really believed
that he might be an innocent man. But bit by
bit his actions chipped away at her doubts about his guilt.
(39:14):
There was his escape from the Pitkin County Courthouse in
Aspen after he was found guilty of kidnapping and assaulting
Carol de Roach. Ted Bundy jumped out a window and
went on the lamb for six days. But of course,
an innocent man would want to escape an unjust conviction.
Even after Ted's flight and Aspen, Anne continued to write
(39:37):
him with sympathy and lend him money. She even sent
him care packages. Then, in late December of nineteen seventy seven,
Ted escaped again. This time, he'd spent six weeks carefully
sawing through an electrical plate above his cell. He crawled
(39:57):
up into the ceiling and escaped through one one of
the guard's apartments that adjoined the jail. Hours before his escape,
he called Anne at the hotel where she was staying
in Hollywood. At the time, Anne's career was taking off.
She hadn't yet finished her book on Ted Bundy's case,
but a film production company had shown interest in one
(40:20):
of the magazine articles she'd written. Now she was in
Los Angeles to talk to producers about writing her first
film script. When Ted called her that night in nineteen
seventy seven, he asked for her address in Los Angeles.
After his escape, Anne couldn't help wondering what he might
(40:41):
have had in mind for her. Her faith in him
was beginning to crack, and by the time he resurfaced
in February, it crumbled entirely. At six fifteen a m.
(41:08):
On the morning of her first Hollywood premiere, Anne received
a call from a distraught Ted. The day before, he
was arrested in Pensacola, Florida, and now he wanted to
get it all out. He wanted to tell Anne the
things he hadn't been able to voice to her that
night in the tavern. Only now she was thousands of
(41:29):
miles away, and there were a whole lot of lawyers
and policemen standing between them. Whatever Ted had wanted to
tell her that night, Anne would never get to hear it,
and it really didn't matter any more. At this point.
The truth was too obvious to ignore. Now she saw
him for what he was, But people contained multitudes. As
(41:52):
impossible as it seems, she could know and accept and
understand that her friend was a monster, and that he
had also been a good friend to her. Anne and
Ted continued to correspond almost up until his execution. By
the end, he was a manic, bitter husk of his
(42:14):
former self. Anne moved on her book on Ted Bundy's killings.
The Stranger Beside Me was a sensation. Anne had once
felt that the only thing she wanted in the world
was a book contract. Now she almost had more work
than she could handle. By nineteen eighty four, Anne completed
(42:38):
her next three books, The Lust Killer, The Want ad Killer,
and The I five Killer. All three did well, but
none of them quite reached the bestseller status of The
Stranger Beside Me. Anne's career was stagnating. For a moment,
she must have felt like a one hit wonder. Then
(43:00):
she heard about the case of a woman named Diane Downes.
Downes was an Oregon woman who had been arrested for
shooting her three children in the spring of nineteen eighty three.
She did it because she was having an affair with
a married man who didn't want children. There was something
about the case that spoke to Anne that gave her,
(43:21):
as she put it, a prickle on the back of
my neck. Diane Downes was exactly the type of person
she looked for and a good story. Someone attractive, intelligent,
and charming, the last person you'd ever suspect of such
a heinous crime. Anne was fascinated by the case, and
when you're writing about something you're really interested in, you
(43:43):
do your best work. Small sacrifices. Anne's book about Diane
Downes was what took her from being a best selling
author to a household name. It received rave reviews, and
in nineteen eighty nine it was made into an EMU
nominated TV movie starring Farah Fawcett. In spite of all
(44:20):
her success, Anne still found it hard to move past
those dark years of the nineteen seventies. The moment of
Ted's execution neared. Anne got more than just a best
selling book from that friendship. She also took away lessons
about what makes a criminal. Criminals don't have to be
obvious creeps lurking in a parking lot. They can be charming,
(44:43):
good looking, even respected. After The Stranger Beside Me, those
were specifically the types of murderers that Anne looked for,
and we can still see the impact of her search
for those stories today, The Jinks, the Dropout, the Devil
in the White City. Anne Rule is the one who
(45:05):
introduced us to the stories about charming, respected sociopaths. Thank
(45:42):
you to Anne Rule for writing the book The Stranger
Beside Me, which helped to write this episode. Other sources
include the KCTS nine interview series with Anne Rule, and
several news articles. All of those sources are linked in
our show notes. If you want to learn more, join
me next week on The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever
Told For a story about a woman who was breaking
(46:04):
the glass ceiling in her own special way. In nineteen
seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore did something that only one
woman had ever attempted before. She tried to kill a
US president. The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is
(46:29):
a production of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay mcbraer and
I hosted this episode and this episode was written by
Zoe Luisa Lewis. Our show is produced by Emma Dumouth
and edited by Antonio Enriquez. Our theme music is by
Tyler Cash. Executive produced by Scott Waxman.
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