I really can’t tell you how I felt with The Stranger Beside Me. I mean I really like Ann Rule’s style of writing but I didn’t like the book so much. It was way to long for my taste. However that being said, I liked specific parts of the book. One part on page 438, when the victims walk into the court room, I really like how Rule described it. “And the young women – victims, witnesses – were a steady parade through the courtroom doors, Melanie Nelson, Nancy Dowdy, Karen Chandler, Kathy Kleiner, Debbie Ciccarelli, Nancy Young, Cheryl Thomas. Dressed in bright cottons, they all had an innocence about them, a vulnerability.” Something about this just stood out to me.
I also get a sense that Rule may have had feelings for Ted? I mean she worked with him but she didn’t know Ted when he was killing all of these women, and she even joked with him that he really looked like the killer. Then, I feel like she became heart broken when he called her from the jail, like on page 502 when she says “I cannot forget his phone call in October 1975, the call where he calmly said, I’m in a little trouble- but it’s all going to work out. If anything goes wrong, you’ll read about it in the newspapers.” And I don’t necessarily mean like really heart broken but more as in shock that he was in trouble. But the fact that he said this really calmly really struck me. Like there must have been something in his head that made him be really calm about it. Overall I didn’t really enjoy the book as I thought I was going to but there were some parts that did stand out to me.