Ann Rule

“Try to open up your mind a little, and move away from rigid opinions of what people should do and be - unless you have been there.”

“Lazy people tend not to take chances, but express themselves by tearing down other's work.”

“I had long since managed a degree of detachment when dealing with photographs from homicide cases. They no longer upset me as they once did, although I make it a point not to dwell on them. By the time I stood in Shirley Lewis’s office, I had seen thousands of body pictures. I had seen pictures of Kathy Devine and Brenda Baker in Thurston County, but that was months before it was known there was a “Ted.” Of course, there were no bodies to photograph in the other Washington cases, and I had had no access to Colorado or Utah pictures. Now, I was staring down at huge color photographs of the damage done to girls young enough to be my daughters—at pictures of damage alleged to be the handiwork of a man I thought I knew. That man who only minutes before had smiled the same old grin at me, and shrugged as if to say, “I have no part of this.” It hit me with a terrible sickening wave. I ran to the ladies’ room and threw up.”

“Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.”

“I'm publicizing the book that's done. I'm writing the book that's in the hopper, and I'm doing a little advance research on the book to come.”

“Some writers hate to go to trials, but I love trials.”

“All of my books now come from readers' ideas.”

“For a while, people couldn't understand why I'd find them so fascinating, but I'd rather go to a trial than to a Broadway play. Now that we have Court TV, they see what I mean.”

“I want to warn potential victims. Many of them are women, and many of them are battered women. It's a cause for me. When I look back, though, so many of the books I've written are about wives who just couldn't get away.”

“I always want to give the victim a voice.”

“I always say that bad women are fewer than men, but when you get one, they're fascinating because they're so rotten.”

“In all human endeavors that deal with what is unthinkable, too terrible to be dealt with squarely, we turn to what is familiar and regimented: funerals, wakes, and even wars. Now, in this trial, we had gone beyond our empathy with the pain of the victims and our niggling realization that the defendant was a fragmented personality. He knew the rules, he even knew a great deal about the law, but he did not seem to be cognizant of what was about to happen to him. He seemed to consider himself irrefragable. And what was about to happen to him was vital for the good of society. I could not refute that. It had to be, but it seemed hollow that none of us understood that his ego, our egos and the rituals of the courtroom itself, the jokes and the nervous laughter were veiling the gut reactions that we should all be facing. We were all on “this railroad train running …”

“And, like all the others, I have been manipulated to suit Ted’s needs. I don’t feel particularly embarrassed or resentful about that. I was one of many, all of us intelligent, compassionate people who had no real comprehension of what possessed him, what drove him obsessively.”

“The why of murder always fascinates me so much more than the how.”