The Stranger Beside Me: The Shocking Inside Story of Serial Killer Ted Bundy Paperback – November 6, 2018

I have only read two books by Ann Rule now, but I'm definitely a fan. I love her writing style and how she tells the good, the bad and the horrifying.I have long been fascinated by Ted Bundy. He was an extremely prolific murderer. But Ann made me see that, even more than that, he was a gifted, charismatic and honey billing of terrifying person. Because he seemed so normal. And looking back, there still weren't many real clues or warning signs for his friends or family. They never would have suspected anything. Even when it seems like it should have been completely obvious. He matched the description of the perpetrator. He had the same vehicle and the same name as the suspect. He lived or frequented the same area the crimes were committed. And they still could not fathom that it could be their Ted.

Real insight into Ted Bundy from a friend’s perspective. How hard it must have been to reconcile the man she knew with what he had done.

The book shows how strangers can live among us- seemingly normal, likable, functional but with a dark and dangerous side. It was difficult for me to understand how the author could continue to have a relationship with Bundy even when she knew about his horrific crimes.

The Stranger Beside Me by Ann RuleTruth is always stranger than anything anyone could dream up…Ann Rule makes her living writing about true crime. When women began to disappear in Washington State and Oregon, Ann was asked to write a novel about the disappearances, one that would make the public aware of the case, in a effort to smoke out the perpetrator.At the time, Ann took this as simply one more assignment; one more story that she could research, write, and above all get paid. Ann was a mother of four, recently divorced, and her writing skills financed her little family’s needs. The amount she would get for writing this novel was much needed. Little did she know how it would all turn out.By now almost everyone in the United States and in many other parts of the world knows the name Ted Bundy. He is known to have slain up to thirty-six young women in at least five states, and is suspected to have killed far more. The world knows him as a psychopath who never showed any remorse for what he had done. He was narcissistic, smart, an escape artist, an man who engaged in necrophilia and a man who played games with the law until the day he was executed over the number of women he killed and where the remains were located.But for Ann Rule all of this was a complication. Because Ann Rule knew Ted Bundy; and counted him as a friend. Then came the day when she began to realize that she didn’t know Ted Bundy at all.Ann worked a crisis hotline specializing in preventing suicides in 1971 when she met Ted Bundy for the first time. Ted was a student on a work-study program and Ann was a volunteer. They would work side by side for many, many nights. Ted was charming, well-educated, and showed a remarkable ability to keep suicidal people who called the hotline talking long enough for help to reach them. It is unknown how many lives he saved by working at the Seattle Crisis Center with Ann Rule. They became friends.Ann Rule could not know that the charming young man at the next desk was systematically killing and dumping the bodies of young women in both Washington and Oregon. The very picture of that type of person was so far removed from the man she knew it would have been impossible in her eyes.Later when Ted went to Utah to study law, Ann and Ted wrote letters back and forth. Meanwhile unknown to Ann, Ted was killing young women in Utah and Colorado. Ted’s arrest came as a total shock to her. She was sure it was all a mistake. Even after his first escape, she stood with him. And then Ted vanished into thin air.Escaping from jail in Colorado by cutting through the ceiling of his cell, Ted was hundreds of miles away by the time his escape was discovered. He eventually made his way to Florida, and then the demonic side of Ted broke all bounds. He tore through Flordia State Chi Omega sorority house, killing, maiming, and mutilating four students. He broke into a nearby apartment and maimed another young woman. Finally, he kidnapped, raped, and murdered twelve year old Kimberly Diane Leach, dumping the remains.This is a story of a madman. But it is also the story of a friendship strong enough to make the deeds of this serial killer unfathomable to someone who knew him better than almost anyone else. The story is blunt, bleak, and makes no effort to explain the crimes. It shows that Ted had another side that could and did form friendships.One cannot read this story and not feel the hurt Ann Rule went through as she began to realize her friend was in truth, only the stranger beside her at the crisis center.This book gets four out of five stars from me.Quoth the Raven…

The one thing that this book gives us is a real honest look at Ted Bundy, before he was caught, by someone who knew him well. Ann Rule isn't a psychologist but some of her reasoning in the added portion at the end of the book is probably pretty close to the truth. But, if her theory is true, that losing the rich beautiful girl set him off to constantly kill her look alikes then it doesn't make sense for him to have killed the little neighborhood child so much earlier. To me it has always seemed that Ted did not revere his mother for keeping him and raising him alone as so many have thought and written. This is the deepest secret he had and kept. I believe that he hated her for giving him an illegitimate birth followed by years of telling him she was not his mother, jerking him away from his grandparents that he thought were his parents then giving him a stepfather that he considered beneath him. Then, she had other children depriving Ted of his place as the beloved only child. If my theory is true then he probably did kill the little neighborhood child. I believe that he was well on his way to being the antisocial personality he became long before he ever met the rich beautiful girl who dumped him. There are a few things in the book - told by people later about his behaving oddly as a very small child. Maybe the product of hind site imagination. Maybe not. He did, of course, see this rich beautiful girl as his ticket out of his middle class life, his chance to be "somebody", he adored her for being the "perfect" girl he thought he deserved or he craved the life she represented and told himself it was love. For some reason he always had delusions of grandeur. Who knows who the father was and what mental problems he passed on to his son. Possibly his mother who adored him did plant into his mind the thought that he was special. She would have tried to make up to him for his illegitimate birth, his unstable childhood with her and her parents, the great lie she told him. He thought he was escaping his lower middle class life with the rich girl and when she dumped him I think it really did finish off the job already begun by his mother. He was able to transfer his hatred of his mother onto this girl and then onto all girls who resembled her. This is certainly an interesting book, a little too much detail about the trials but some people like that. A little too much self importance on the author's part but that is to be expected. I find the addition toward the end of the book of the idea that Ted's grandfather was some sort of monster who terrorized his family to be improbable. Ted manipulated everybody who interviewed him including intelligent, experienced psychiatrists. I think the report of this information about his grandfather at such a late date, when he was far into his sentence and on death row and not mentioned before when it might have swayed a jury, to be probably just more Ted Bundy crap. Possible, but not probable. Who knows. Nobody will ever figure out Ted Bundy. I wonder if anybody thought of looking at his brain to see if it was damaged in some way. Like they do football players who behave weirdly. But, this is an interesting book with several addendums as time went by. It's a must for those interested in Bundy.