I generally steer clear of true crime fiction. The cases are so awful, and their dissection is so ghoulish, that I find it difficult to enjoy them. Crime fiction may be bloody, but at least we know those stories are the products of human minds, not human crimes. True crime, meanwhile, profits from real crimes with real victims, many of whom carry around the burdens of scars that cannot be forgotten. But this effort from Ms. Rule I could not resist. After all, this is a crime writer who knew Ted Bundy before he was Ted Bundy, serial killer, a woman in a unique position to speak to not only what the man was like, but how his mind worked. It is a fluke of history, but one from which we benefit as much as Ms. Rule herself.
They were nothing alike, of course. Ted Bundy was a young and charming student with the fullness of a life in the law ahead of him. Ms. Rule was a mother of two with a challenging marriage and a life at the crossroads. And yet, over their work at a Seattle-based suicide hotline, they befriended one another, beginning an acquaintanceship that, though intermittent, would last until Bundy's execution in 1989. In the intervening 20 years, Ms. Rule sees the nightmare unfold, a witness to Bundy's immense charm as he repeatedly extracts himself from situations that would have condemned a less persuasive man to ostracism. She exchanges letters with him, helps him bridge occasional shortfalls in cashflow,commiserates with him, all while, unbeknownst to her, his obsessive need to express his power over women leaves victims from Seattle to Florida.
Though Ms. Rule's first hand knowledge of the man fascinates, voyeuristically, and though she provides a clear chronology to the 15-year odyssey to find, charge, convict and execute Bundy, it's the extent to which she's able to shed some light on his pathology that is most illuminating. Her argument that Bundy was primed for his spree by the stigma of his birth to an unwed mother, by his psychopathic brain, and by the rejection of a woman at a key time in his formative development may be drawing a long bow, but she makes a convincing case.
It seems, at times, we're no farther ahead in our understanding of psychopathy now than we were when Ted Bundy killed all those sorority girls in Florida more than 30 years ago. It is connected to an inability to feel remorse, yes, but why? What malformation of the mind causes someone to do so much harm? Bundy was, Ms. Rule makes clear, an immensely talented person with a promising future which he threw away to get off and to prove that he was better than everyone else. That's not smart, or superior; that's weak. Superior people have no need to actively convince others of their superiority. It is demonstrably obvious that they are superior. Perhaps we'll never know, but Ms. Rule at least goes some way to informing our discussion of the matter. Excellent and chilling work. (4/5 Stars)
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