The Stranger Beside Me Quotes

“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.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“Yet, in reality, Ted loved things more than he loved people. He could find life in an abandoned bicycle or an old car, and feel a kind of compassion for these inanimate objects, more compassion than he could ever feel for another human being.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“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.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“Any of us who have raised children know, as John F. Kennedy once said, that “to have children is to give hostages to fate.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“Dr. Benjamin Spock, who worked in a veterans’ hospital dealing with emotional illnesses during World War II, commented at the time that there was a pronounced cross-sex problem in dealing with psychopathic personalities. The male psychopaths had no difficulty in bewitching female staff members, while the male staff picked up on them rapidly. The female psychopaths could fool the male staff but not the women.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“Just be careful," a Seattle homicide detective warned. "Maybe we'd better know where to find your dental records in case we need to identify you."
I laughed, but the words were jarring; the black humor that would surround Ted Bundy evermore begun.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” but conscience is what gives us our humanity, the factor that separates us from animals. It allows us to love, to feel another’s pain, and to grow. Whatever the drawbacks are to being blessed with a conscience, the rewards are essential to living in a world with other human beings.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“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.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“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.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“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.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“The only clue I had was that my dog (who liked everyone) didn’t like Ted at all. Whenever he bent over my desk at the Crisis Clinic, she growled and the hackles on her neck stood up. The lesson is clear: Pay attention to your dog!”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“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 …”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“The most basic bit of advice given to women who have to walk alone at night is, ‘Look alert. Be aware of your surroundings and walk briskly. You will be safer if you know where you are going, and if anyone who observes you senses that.’ The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“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.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“The lesson is clear: Pay attention to your dog!”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“When we finally left the storms of the Midwest behind us, I turned to the man beside me, a Boeing engineer, and asked him if he had been afraid. “No. I’ve already been there.” It was a strange answer. He explained that he had been clinically dead as a youth, crushed beneath a car after he and several friends had hit a utility pole. “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.” I”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“Looking back, we see it is often casual choices which chart a path to tragedy.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“I asked him if there was any effective treatment for people like Bundy. “He paused for a moment and said, ‘Only a sledgehammer between the eyes.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“TED” HAD SURFACED, allowed himself to be seen in broad daylight, and approached at least a half dozen young women, beyond the missing pair. He’d given his name. His true name? Probably not, but for the media who pounced on the incredible disappearances it was something to headline. Ted. Ted. Ted. Indeed, the dogged pursuit of reporters seeking something new to write was going to interfere mightily with the police investigation. The frantic families of the missing girls from Lake Sammamish were besieged by some of the most coercive tactics any reporter can use. When families declined to be interviewed, there were some reporters who hinted that they might have to print unsavory rumors about Janice and Denise unless they could have interviews, or that, even worse, families’ failure to tell of their exquisite pain in detail might mean a lessening of publicity needed to find their daughters. It was ugly and cruel, but it worked. The grieving parents allowed themselves to be photographed and gave painful interviews.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“If, as many people believe today, Ted Bundy took lives, he also saved lives. I know he did, because I was there when he did it.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“On the surface, at least, it seemed that I had more problems than Ted did. He was one of those rare people who listen with full attention, who evince a genuine caring by their very stance. You could tell things to Ted that you might never tell anyone else.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story

“Detective Norman M. Chapman, Jr., was on call that night. Chapman is a man with a voice like warm maple syrup.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“Ted Bundy waving to the camera while the charges against him are being read. He told reporters, “I will be heard!”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“As soon as he stopped, I poked him with my umbrella and said ‘f— you!’ and got out real fast.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“MOST OF US have harbored a fantasy wherein we return to confront a lost first love, and, in that reunion, we have become better looking, thinner, richer, utterly desirable— so desirable that our lost love realizes instantly that he has made a terrible mistake.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“Strangely, while he was being continuously unfaithful himself, he expected—demanded—that she be totally loyal to him.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“Ted had even mugged a bit for the cameras, holding a model of his teeth against the picture of the dead girl’s bruised flesh. And he had realized just how damning this forensic dentistry evidence was to his case.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“Moreover he was able to place Bundy’s car, the VW Bug, bearing two separate sets of plates, in Colorado on the very days that the victims in that state had vanished, and within a few miles of the sites of the disappearances.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

“I didn’t know then that Carol DaRonch, Jean Graham, and Debby Kent’s girlfriend, Jolynne Beck, who had seen the man in the auditorium on November 8, had all picked Ted out of the Utah lineup on October 2. Ted had been one suspect, standing in a seven-man lineup, surrounded by detectives, all of them a little older, a little heavier than he was.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me