Excerpts from the Preface by Ann Rule, 29 January 1980:
This book began in 1974 as an entirely different work. It was to have been a crime reporter's chronicling of a series of inexplicable murders of beautiful young women. By its very nature, it was to have been detached, the result of extensive research. My life, certainly, would be no part of it. It has evolved instead into an intensely personal book, the story of a unique friendship that has somehow transcended the facts that my research produced. As the years passed, I learned that the stranger at the very vortex of an ever-spreading police probe was not a stranger at all; he was my friend.
...My contract to write this book was signed many months before Ted Bundy became the prime suspect in more than a dozen homicide cases. My book would not be about a faceless name in a newspaper, about one unknown out of the over one million people who live in the Seattle area; it would be about my friend, Ted Bundy.
...And so Ted Bundy was my friend, through all the good times and the bad times. I stuck by him for many years, hoping that none of the innuendo was true. There are few who will understand my decision. I'm sure that it will anger many. And, with it all, Ted Bundy's story must be told, and it must be told in its entirety if any good can evolve from the terrible years: 1974-1980.
...Ted has been described as the perfect son, the perfect student, the Boy Scout grown to adulthood, a genius, as handsome as a movie idol, a bright light in the future of the Republican Party, a sensitive psychiatric social worker, a budding lawyer, a trusted friend, a young man for whom the future could surely hold only success.
He is all of these things, and none of them.
Ted Bundy fits no pattern at all; you could not look at his record and say: "See, it was inevitable that he would turn out like this."
In fact, it was incomprehensible.
On 24 January 1989, Ted Bundy was executed for the murders of three young women; he also confessed to taking the lives of at least thirty-five more women from coast to coast. This is his story - the story of his magnetic power, his unholy compulsion, his demonic double life and his string of helpless victims. It was written by a woman who thought she knew Ted Bundy, until she began to put all the evidence together, and the whole terrifying picture emerged.
About the author: Ann Rule is a former Seattle policewoman and the author of over thirty-three bestselling books, including If You Really Loved Me (1991), Everything She Ever Wanted (1993), Dead By Sunset (1995), A Rose For Her Grave (1993), You Belong To Me (1994), A Fever In The Heart (1996), In The Name Of Love (1998), The End Of The Dream (1998), A Rage To Kill (1999), and Empty Promises (1999), as well as 1400 articles, mostly on criminal cases. She is regarded by many as the foremost true crime writer in America and the author responsible for the genre as it exists today. She has been a full-time writer since 1969. When she is not attending trials and researching new books, Ann Rule lives near Seattle, Washington. More information and updates can be found on her website. The Stranger Beside Me was first published in 1980.
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