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callymd 's review for:
The Stranger Beside Me
by Ann Rule
it may be because i’m reading this book decades after it was written but the sympathetic often disbelieving tone of it kind of drove me nuts.
the book appeal is obviously to learn more about ted bundy from someone who intimately experienced him in their lives (platonically) to the point that she cannot fully admit to herself that he is a killer despite her male cop friends all pointing her to the evidence.
but it is hard to watch her continue to send him money for years during his incarceration only to vomit when finally seeing photos of the victims at his florida trial. and while she says she met with the victims’ families and she does write little detailed blurbs of each girl to humanize them, she spends so much time talking about how she can’t believe ted could be this monster and in one of the addendums of later editions is obsessed with trying to pathologize ted, ending with that he didn’t emotionally develop past a child and so he cannot understand he is not entitled to what he wants and doesn’t understand the world saying no, which i feel like is a bit too forgiving for a man who may have started killing women in his teens (people are unsure if he kidnapped and killed his young neighbor long before meeting the woman who broke his heart in college and supposedly set him on his murder type bender). nor does it feel right to make assumptions that he went to florida in a subconscious attempt to stop himself, knowing they had a death penalty.
the book appeal is obviously to learn more about ted bundy from someone who intimately experienced him in their lives (platonically) to the point that she cannot fully admit to herself that he is a killer despite her male cop friends all pointing her to the evidence.
but it is hard to watch her continue to send him money for years during his incarceration only to vomit when finally seeing photos of the victims at his florida trial. and while she says she met with the victims’ families and she does write little detailed blurbs of each girl to humanize them, she spends so much time talking about how she can’t believe ted could be this monster and in one of the addendums of later editions is obsessed with trying to pathologize ted, ending with that he didn’t emotionally develop past a child and so he cannot understand he is not entitled to what he wants and doesn’t understand the world saying no, which i feel like is a bit too forgiving for a man who may have started killing women in his teens (people are unsure if he kidnapped and killed his young neighbor long before meeting the woman who broke his heart in college and supposedly set him on his murder type bender). nor does it feel right to make assumptions that he went to florida in a subconscious attempt to stop himself, knowing they had a death penalty.