UBC: Rule, No Regrets

[truepenny]

No Regrets and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

• "The Sea Captain": Lopez Island WA 1980: murder of an 80 year old Puget Sound pilot by his wife of 20 years because he discovered that she'd been moving all of his pension and other income out of their joint checking account into one solely in her name--and because she didn't want to share any of his money with his two sons by a different woman.
  
• "It (Ain't) Hard Out There for the Pimps": Seattle WA: the brutal rape and near-fatal beating of an 18 year old woman (who may have been working informally as a prostitute, but it doesn't seem like her rapist even bothered to pretend he was going to pay her for sex) by a man who worked as a bouncer for a place called the Exotica Studio, which seems to have been somewhere between a peep show and a brothel; Rule's point--evinced by her title--is that it's not hard for the pimps. It's hard for the women who are trapped working for them.
  
• "The Runaway and the Soldier": Bellevue WA: 15 year old runaway Teresa Sterling murdered and raped (yes, in that order) by her 18 year old boyfriend, who abandoned her body in the woods. I felt like Rule left out a piece of this one; she says that Teresa hit a psychotic trigger with some particularly mean teasing, but she doesn't really explain what that trigger was or where it came from. "Old rages," she says, but that doesn't clarify much.
  
• "The Tragic Ending of a Bank Robber's Fantasy": Seattle WA: Sam Jesse thought he'd planned the perfect bank robbery, but apparently he'd never heard that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. He'd also apparently never heard that you should never point a gun at someone unless you're prepared to shoot them. In carrying out his "perfect" robbery, he first didn't notice the dye-pack in one of the stacks of bills the teller gave him (which was going to put a nasty spoke in his wheel anyway) and second accidentally shot the relief bank manager, who was 77. Sam was arrested before he even got out of the airport in Honolulu; extradited back to Washington, he committed suicide in his cell before he even went to trial.
  
• "A Very Bad Christmas": Portland OR: this pretty much takes the cake for Murder is Cheaper than Divorce. Richard Hamilton was married with two small children. He decided he was tired of being a married man, but he didn't want to have to pay child support. So he murdered his wife, his two year old son, and their seven year old daughter, and threw the bodies in the Columbia River; in the hopes of preventing identification, he decapitated his wife's body. He got away with his crime for approximately two days.
  
• "To Save Their Souls": Pasco WA: A young , devout Mormon mother, deserted by her husband and caught in the horrible Catch-22 where her job didn't pay enough that she could afford daycare for her two little boys while she worked--never mind paying enough for rent and groceries--went absolutely insane. She became convinced that she was evil and that the only way to be sure that her children would enter the Celestial Kingdom was for her to kill them. She dropped them off the Pasco-Kennewick Bridge into the Columbia River. Under M'Naughton--because she did know right from wrong at the time she murdered her children--her jury had no choice but to find her sane and therefore guilty. She was remanded to a mental hospital for more tests after her trial, and Rule was unable to find what happened to her after that.
  
• ". . . Or We'll Kill You": Fairfield CA: crisis-intervention counselor kidnapped, raped, and terrorized for nearly twelve hours by a pair of unbalanced sociopaths. She escaped them and survived because she kept her head and, ironically, used her training.

There is no case in this collection titled "No Regrets."



View all my reviews