High entropy feelings about this book...

I say the following without really having ever dabbled in any other books in the genre, but I feel like this may be the canonical True Crime book. It's the perfect storm of:

• expert author with loads of prior experience writing about homicides & working with LEO

• crazy serial killer of celebrity

• that the author had a close relationship with prior/after the killings

Ann Rule is very uniquely positioned to write the best possible book about what happens, and she does a killer job (ba dum tss). Not a page is wasted, and it's a very gripping story. She balances recounts of what happened to the victims with reverence, a very digestible and coherent timeline of events, rarely relying on speculation and instead having primary source depositions or personal correspondence with Ted Bundy to confirm. It's brutal, it's fascinating, and the narrative emerges from the presentation of the facts with occasional speculation (well-placed giving the context of the author in the killings), but it doesn't waste any paragraphs on fluff.

My only gripe is with the author, rather than the text, and even then I'm more intrigued than critical. In the closing pages of the book, after recounting the 30+ brutal and perverse killing which Ted was convicted of several times over, after recounting how Ted had a proclivity for escaping custody and killing some more, and how he was something of a legal enthusiast who knowingly spoiled his own chances at a plea of insanity by writing to Ann Rule to tell her about how he was not insane, and knew that that defense would not hold up in his upcoming trials, proceeded to escape and kill some more – all this evidence and more,,,,

Musing on his death sentencing, Ann Rule says "Killing Ted will accomplish nothing. It will assure that he doesn't kill again." And I'm like ???? Rule sneaks in some opinions on the death penalty, but they're more so bound to her relationship with the man in question that to the philosophical efficacy of capital punishment. Which makes this line give me even more heebie jeebies tbh. It's adjacent to the fetishization of sexual serial killers, becoming attached to them, and empathizing past the point of humanization, but towards exoneration. I'm convinced that no one other than Bundy and his victims knows his malice better than the author of this book, whose pedigree boasts expertise in investigative homicide journalism. Having a take on the DP is fine, arguing in favor of rehabilitation is admirable, but shouldering the guilt of another man's crimes who admittedly bears no sense of shame or guilt, and then following that with the take of "Florida is a shithole country bc of the death penalty which will be applied to my friend Ted" is a shockingly awful take on it's face, but I think it must then speak to this woman's experience because she does not strike me at all as a dolt or as emotionally wishy-washy, or any other critique on her sensibilities that could drive her to sympathize with Bundy this much.

In the Epilogue, she writes "I strive to see Ted as anything by a monster. That was the only way I could write to him," 6 years after he was sentenced with the death penalty, but before his actual execution. This is after the initial publication of her book as well, and I'm kinda left thinking ???? "what the fuck lady, stop writing to him. He is a monster," again – weird tones of stockholm syndome/fetishization of these celebrity serial killers which I think is kinda commonplace amongst the audience of True Crime girly pops...

Nevertheless, these two outlying blips of questionable compassion do not detract from the quality of the book on the whole which is largely unblemished by the author's emotions. Emotions which again, she more than perhaps anyone else, would be more than entitled to mix in a lot more than she did.

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