Ann Rule Quotes

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

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 …

He was a shadow man, fighting to survive in a world that was never made for him.

There is an odd synchronicity in the way parallel lives veer to touch one another, change direction, and then come close again and again until they connect and hold for whatever it was that fate intended to happen.

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.

I ended that letter, 'There is nothing in this life that is a complete tragedy - nothing - try to remember that.' Looking back, I wonder at my naiveté. Some things in life ARE complete tragedies. Ted Bundy's story may well be one of them.

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 watched from somewhere up above and saw the troopers lift the car off someone. Then I saw that it was me lying there. I wasn't afraid, and I didn't feel any pain - not until I woke up in the hospital three days later. Since then, I've known that the soul doesn't die, only the body, and I've never been afraid.

would be terrified that she would be found out. She could be so frightened, perhaps, that she might blurt out a confession. No one was leaning on her. To a burdened conscience, silence and solicitude can be more threatening than interrogation.

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

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.

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.

As I write these recollections of women who survived, I hope my readers are taking careful note of why they did.
They screamed.
They fought.
They slammed doors in a stranger's face.
They ran.
They doubted glib stories.
They spotted flaws in those stories.
They were lucky enough to have someone step up and protect them.

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

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

Some people hate the smell of hospitals. I hate the smell of jails and prisons, all the same: stale cigarette smoke, Pine-Sol, urine, sweat, and dust.

You cannot step over a mountain," she told me, "but if you step over pebble by pebble, you'll look back and the mountain will be behind you.

Choices are like dominoes, one tumbling against the next and then the next until events go out of human control.

I always want to give the victim a voice.

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.