Something is compelling and almost addicting about learning the details of a case and trying to solve it. And sometimes it gives people the sense that they’re helping police solve the crime.
Before the web sleuths, true crime writers and readers did their research the old-fashioned way.
Ann Rule: True crime fiction gets personal
In the late 1970s and the early 1980s, the true crime fiction genre boomed.
Author Ann Rule hit the bestseller list when her first book The Stranger Beside Me was published in 1980. Previously she had only written articles. The book came out the same year as Ted Bundy was convicted of murder.
She met the serial killer in 1971 when they both volunteered for a suicide hotline. His first kill was confirmed in 1974, but it is believed there are earlier victims
Rule met with Bundy in jail. She interviewed everyone close to him during his years-long killing spree. She met with detectives that worked the cases. And she attended his trial.
The Stranger Beside Me became a definitive study of Bundy. And also presented profilers, of the time, with new details of the Bundy type of serial killer.
