The Stranger Beside Me
As a Bookshop affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
In 1971, Ann Rule was working the graveyard shift at a Seattle crisis hotline—helping strangers in their darkest moments. Across the desk sat a charming young man named Ted, her coworker and friend. Intelligent, sensitive, and easy to talk to, he was the last person she suspected of hiding a monstrous secret.
Three years later, young women began to vanish.
As Rule followed the terrifying spree of abductions and murders across the Pacific Northwest, she found herself unraveling a twisted truth: the killer the police were hunting—the one leaving a trail of shattered lives and unanswered questions—was the same Ted she had grown to trust.
What began as a story of coincidence turned into one of the most harrowing personal accounts in true crime history. Rule paints a portrait of Ted Bundy not as a headline, but as the charming, calculating predator hiding in plain sight—and the friend who turned out to be a stranger.
Gripping, intimate, and unforgettable, The Stranger Beside Me is a landmark of the genre—written by the woman who lived it.