(no subject)

[truepenny]

Empty Promises and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

• "Empty Promises": Bellevue WA 1990: murder of Jami Hagel Sherer by her abusive stalker husband Steve
  
• "Bitter Lake": murder of woman and her toddler son by her stalker ex-boyfriend
  
• "Young Love": teenage boy threatens ex-girlfriend with bomb, but blows himself up
  
• "Love and Insurance": gay man murdered by his roommate (lover? close friend?) for a $500,000 insurance policy
  
• "The Gentler Sex": woman and her girlfriend murder her husband for the insurance money; another woman attempts to hire a hit man to murder her husband before he can divorce her (Murder Is Cheaper Than Divorce--she didn't care that he was divorcing her; she didn't want to have to divide her assets).
  
• "The Conjugal Visit": the terrible history of Carl Cletus Bowles
  
• "Killers on the Road": the equally terrible history of Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine, who in 1967 murdered three people and nearly murdered a fourth--all complete strangers--simply because they could
  
• "A Dangerous Mind": A man strangled his seven-year-old niece; investigators discovered a long history of his getting away with, or getting only very lightly punished for, sexually-motivated violence against children; his family (including the little girl's parents) continued to defend him. He committed suicide after his sentencing hearing.
  
• "To Kill and Kill Again": Gary Gene Grant murdered two teenage girls and two six-year-old boys (the girls were separate crimes, the boys were together) for no motivation that even he could understand.
  
• "The Stockholm Syndrome": Subject of a 1983 made-for-TV movie called The Awakening of Candra, Ann Rule's only novel, Possession, and (I think?) an episode of Forensic Files (I know I've seen the story re-enacted, so it was either Forensic Files or The New Detectives): Thomas Leslie Brown encountered a young couple fishing in the Oregon woods; having shot the young woman's husband and her dog, he spent three days dragging her through the mountains, raping her when he felt like it, and brainwashed her into believing that she had witnessed her husband's accidental death. It took her months to get reality sorted out again.

View all my reviews