truepenny | UBC: Rule, Without Pity

Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is mostly reprints from Ann Rule's Crime Files vols. 1-8, but it includes three new cases, and several of the reprints have updates.

The reprints are:

"Campbell's Revenge" (A Rose for Her Grave and Other True Cases)
"One Trick Pony" (You Belong to Me and Other True Crime Cases)
"The Last Letter" (You Belong to Me and Other True Crime Cases)
"I'll Love You Forever" (A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases)
"Murder & the Proper Housewife" (In the Name of Love and Other True Cases)
"The Most Dangerous Game" (In the Name of Love and Other True Cases)
"The Killer Who Never Forgot . . . or Forgave" (In the Name of Love and Other True Cases)
"The Lost Lady" (A Rage to Kill and Other True Cases)
"The Stockholm Syndrome" (Empty Promises and Other True Cases

The new cases are:

"The Tumbledown Shack": Chelan WA 1975: This one is creepily similar to "The Beach" (in Last Dance, Last Chance and Other True Cases), which also occurred in 1975, approximately 300 miles away. Two young women camping alone in an isolated location, surprised and murdered by a stranger. Tina Jacobsen and Gael Burton were stabbed to death in April in Moclips WA by William Batten; Beverly Johnson and Patty Weidner were stabbed to death in September in Chelan WA by someone who might or might not have been Jack Lee Stolle. Stolle clearly had guilty knowledge--he knew things that hadn't been released to the media--but his story was also wrong in places, and he would never either confess his own guilt or admit that he had been told about the crime by someone else. He died in prison without ever coming clean.

Johnson and Weidner were traveling with their dogs, Charlie and Silas (one reason they were confident in their own safety). Silas was also killed the same weekend (though his remains were too decomposed to determine cause of death); Charlie was still guarding Beverly Johnson's body when she was found.
"Dead and on Tape": Seattle WA 1973: Nick Kyreacos died in what appeared to be a shoot-out with a police officer (Rule used a pseudonym, but the power of Google tells me his name was David T. Smith). Unbeknownst to the officer, however, Kyreacos had a tape recorder concealed on his body, and what it recorded was not a shoot-out. The officer murdered Kyreacos, then shot himself twice (carefully) to make it look like Kyreacos had attacked him--in effect framing him for his own death. The trial did not uncover the officer's motives.
"Fatal Obsession": Bainbridge Island WA 1970?: Old National Bank VP kills his wife, their toddler son, their dachshund puppy, and himself, apparently in the grip of a psychotic break. As best anyone can tell, he believed at the time of his death that he had to sacrifice himself and his family in order to save the world. He killed himself by stabbing himself four times deeply in the chest--dramatically atypical of suicides--so that detectives were very nearly misled into looking for an outside assailant.

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