Serial thrillers
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor
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| Author Ann Rule delves into murderous minds, including a former Kailua resident.
Richard Ambo • The Honolulu Advertiser Ann Rule book signings 12:30 p.m. tomorrow, Bestsellers downtown 1 p.m. Friday, Hickam Air Force Base PX Ann Rule's Web site: www.annrules.com |
Bundy would become the most famous mass murderer in U.S. history. Her book about him, "The Stranger Beside Me," would become the first of 21 true crime books Rule has written, 19 of which are New York Times best sellers still in print, and her latest covers the case of a woman who killed her husband, a Hawaiian Airlines pilot.
But fans may not have heard this story: For 22 years, Rule has been waiting to write the book about Seattle's infamous Green River Killer. The murders of young women — as many of as 49 of them — are believed to have taken place from 1982 to 1984, but no one was apprehended for many years.
When Gary Leon Ridgway was arrested for four of the murders in 2001 and his picture appeared in the newspaper, Rule's daughter, Leslie, also a writer, had this comment: "Mom, remember I used to tell you about the guy who would come to your book signings and just lean against the wall and look at you? That's the guy."
Ridgway actually lived less than a mile from Rule, south of Seattle.
After years of sitting in courtrooms, interviewing convicted murderers in prison, reading forensic reports and examining murder scenes, Rule is inured to such brushes with horror, yet she's still capable of experiencing a frisson of fear when a jail door slams behind her.
Her latest book, "Heart Full of Lies" (Free Press, hardback, $26), is subtitled "A True Story of Desire and Death" and concerns Liysa DeWitt Northon, a former Kailua resident who pleaded guilty to the murder of her husband, Hawaiian Airlines pilot Chris Northon. Though he died in Oregon, where the Northons had a second home, much of the action takes place here, where Liysa DeWitt had a career as a surf photographer.
Rule arrives in Honolulu today for a pair of book-signings tomorrow and Friday; we talked to her by phone before she got here.
Q. Do you ever think of Ted Bundy, who in a way put your feet on your career path?
A. Oh, boy, I think about him every day of my life. When I wrote the book in 1980 I naively thought, "Well, now that's done. I won't have to think about him anymore." But everyone is still so fascinated with Ted. ... I've accepted that I'll be in the (rest) home and people will still be asking about him. ... I already had the contract to write a book about an unknown killer six months before he became the prime suspect. If I'd tried to write the plot in a novel — a writer gets a contract to write a book about an unknown killer who turns out to be someone she knows — I could never have sold it; it would be too contrived.
Q. How hard is it to do what you do? Do you have to steel yourself to contact people and ask them to talk about intimate and tragic events in their lives?
A. It's easier than it would be if I were a reporter with a daily deadline. I have the time to get to know people. I usually begin by going to the trial. I move into the town for two or three months. I don't approach people during the trial, but we kind of get to know each other, so when I do approach them, time has passed, they know me a little. ... But I'm basically someone who doesn't want to go up and introduce myself. If I had to go talk to people when they were still feeling intense grief, I don't think I could do it. ... As for the killers themselves, I always hope they'll testify, because if they have, I don't feel compelled to go into the prison and talk to them. I don't like that feeling of doors slamming behind me.
Q. How do you choose the cases you write about?
A. My last eight cases have come to me from readers. (A Hawaiian Airlines pilot who was a friend of Chris Northon's was the one who alerted Rule to that case.) I'm looking for, first of all, cases where someone is the last person that anybody would ever see as a killer or a criminal, someone who has those things that the rest of us would want to have — physical beauty, popularity, intelligence, charisma, material things — and yet it's not enough. If I pick the right person, the books almost write themselves.
Q. Because of the uncertainties of the Northon case — Liysa Northon accepted a plea bargain and the trial was cut short, so there was little testimony to go on, and she refused to speak with you — was this book a bit different, more of a case study of a disturbed personality rather than a police procedural?
A. What I tried to do with this one was to show both of their backgrounds, and when you take all the elements of their lives, patterns begin to emerge. One of the things about Liysa was she was a prodigious writer of journals, screenplays, letters. She's a very good writer, and a lot of her writings were introduced into evidence and became public record, so in way it was easier to see her mind than, say, in the case of Deborah Green in "Bitter Harvest."
I went to prison to visit (Green) for eight hours, and they wouldn't let me take a tape recorder or notmebook. I literally had to run out to the parking lot when I got out and just kind of tip my head and let everything spill out.
