Ann Rule was ‘self-deprecating and loyal to a fault’

Local best-selling true-crime author Ann Rule passed away on Sunday at age 83. Her fans and former colleagues say she took her signature genre to a new level and she did it with heart.

Rule passed away at a Burien hospital. Her daughter Leslie Rule said she had congestive heart failure.

Friend and high profile Attorney Anne Bremner visited Rule at the hospital on Saturday. She said her friend always acted like anything but a world-famous author.

“She was warm, funny, smart, self-deprecating and loyal to a fault,” Bremner said. “She loved her family, she loved her pets, and she loved her life.”

The author’s first of dozens of bestsellers was “The Stranger Beside Me.” It detailed serial killer Ted Bundy’s crimes and her own relationship with the killer.

It’s a story that sounds like fiction. The two of them worked together on a Seattle suicide hotline in the ’70s and became friends. This, while he was committing the most gruesome of murders. Rule was already writing stories about true crimes.

In 2013, Rule spoke to KIRO Radio about going inside the minds of sociopaths.

“I think most of us are what-you-see-is-what-you-get, but when you get a person without a conscience, they have no regrets, they feel no guilt, they see themselves as the center of the world,” Rule said in 2013.

She became a true expert after studying these kinds of people for months at a time, year after year. But she went on to explain that it’s the good people who kept her going.

“For every bad guy or bad gal I have to write about, there are at least three dozen heroes,” she said on the air. “There are the detectives who work so hard, the prosecutors, witnesses who come forward when it’s kind of dangerous for them to come forward.”

She, too, was one of those good people. She fought for the victims. She has testified twice before Senate Judiciary Sub-committees on victims’ rights and on the danger of serial killers. And in 2011, she helped a mom search for her daughter’s killer.

Karen Maeda Allman plans author events at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Bookstore and has met thousands of writers over the years. She says Rule stands out as one of the kindest and most generous. Allman echoes Bremner’s sentiment, that Rule’s approach to writing came from the heart.

“She was writing for people who might be in the kinds of situations that the women she wrote about were in,” Allman said. “People that were being abused or maybe friends or family members that thought that a particular guy that their mother or their sister or their friend was a little bit too good to be true.”

How many potential victims she may have helped through at least 20 million book sales? That much we will never know.