The Stranger Beside Me By Ann Rule

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The Stranger Beside Me is a true crime book by Ann Rule. It takes an engrossing twist on the classic biographical true crime story in that Rule actually knew Ted Bundy, the serial killer that the book is about. She masterfully intertwines her personal relationship with her friend and the story of the murderer’s vicious crimes into a page-turner that incites sympathy towards one of the most notorious serial killers of all time. Ann Rule’s career is to write books like this one, and that was her job when she was volunteering at a Crisis Center in Seattle when she first met Ted Bundy. The two bonded over late nights answering phones to help people struggling with suicide and other internal conflicts. Due to her ‘in’ with law enforcement, …show more content…

She describes herself as one of the handful of women that Ted kept around for emotional support. Meg Anders and Carole Ann Boone were both crazily in love with Ted, which Ann claims she never was, but Bundy was able to keep them all under his spell. In Colorado, Ted escaped from jail twice, the first for only 6 days in June 1977, when he became a local celebrity in Aspen. Six months later, he escaped again, but this time he was much more ‘successful’ as he made it all the way to Tallahassee, Florida where he lived for two months as Chris Hagen and killed at least 3 young women. He was finally apprehended on February 13, 1978 and tried in the state of Florida where he was convicted for the death sentence three times over. Ann Rule was in Florida for the trial, where she finally admitted to herself that the man she thought she knew was the bloodiest serial killer in American history. Theodore Robert Bundy was executed on January 24, 1989, 9 years after his conviction. Nobody will know how many people Ted killed, some reports state upwards of 100. People can only surmise as to the reasons that Bundy killed innocent women for over 10 years; Ann Rule was one such person to look into his background and come up with a …show more content…

He was wrong. Even though his lawyers highly recommended it, Bundy refused a plea deal from the prosecution that would have given him life in prison in exchange for a guilty confession for three Florida murders. Subsequently, he stood trial for murder, where his mother, Louise Bundy, testified against the death sentence, which proved unsuccessful. Ted resented his mother. She gave birth to him out of wedlock at a young age. Louise’s parents took him in as their own to avoid the stigma surrounding unwed mothers at the time and raised then Theodore Robert Cowell as their own son with Louise as his older sister. Rule states that he found his birth certificate in 1969 and discovered the truth. He moved away from his mother, and that was the first year that he was suspected of murder. Antisocial personalities develop in early childhood, so his feigned parenthood did not cause his mental illness, but rather invigorated the symptoms. His mind relies on the pleasure principle, which desires instant gratification of needs. A characteristic of ASPD is that its sufferers do not have a superego to take into account societal norms that should influence behavior.

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