UBC: Rule, But I Trusted You

[truepenny]

But I Trusted You and Other True Cases by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*"But I Trusted You" (Lake Goodwin, WA, 1997), the murder of Chuck Leonard by his estranged wife Teresa Gaethe-Leonard. As with some of her other case files ("In the Name of Love," for instance), Rule was trying too hard to make me like the victim, so that, although I certainly wouldn't take Teresa Gaethe-Leonard's side (nor trust her word about anything, including the wetness of water), I found myself doubting the reliability of my narrator. Evaluating Rule as a person, I actually like the fact that she got so invested in her stories and so passionate about championing the victims (Cheryl Cunningham, Ronda Reynolds, etc.), but it can be a flaw in her writing.

In prison, Gaethe-Leonard became part of the Prison Pet Partnership.

*Death in Paradise: The Haunting Voyage of the Spellbound" (somewhere off Rangiroa, 1978), the mysterious deaths of Loren & Jody Edwards. Was it accident-suicide? Accident-murder? Murder-murder? Two witnesses (one of whom had a skull fracture) whose stories didn't match, but the bodies had been buried at sea and there was just no evidence left to piece the story back together. The chilling suspicion is that someone got away with parricide, but . . .

*"Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth" (Bellevue, WA, 1978), woman murdered by her son, who was an LSD user, paranoid schizophrenic, and may or may not have been in a psychotic break when he killed her. (By M'Naughten he was sane: his efforts to hide his crime showed that he knew perfectly well it was a criminal act. But M'Naughten is actually a lousy yardstick of sanity. We just haven't come up with anything better.) He was still living with her because Washington laws at the time did not allow involuntary committal unless an individual was "patently and demonstrably a danger to himself or others," and this murderer wasn't, quite . . . until it was too late for his mother.

*"Monohan's Last Date" (Blewett Pass, WA, 1975), a kind of quintessentially '70s murder: swinger looking for a good time chooses the wrong people to try a threesome with.

*"Run as Fast as You Can" (Seward Park, Seattle, WA, 1978), murder of Penny DeLeo by 15-year-old Lee Wayne DuBois . . . basically because he could. Rule also suspected he murdered Joyce Gaunt six months earlier--she was found very near where Penny DeLeo's body was found.

*"The Deadly Voyeur" (Enumclaw, WA, 1974), guy randomly decided to abduct 2 teenagers at gunpoint & force them to have sex with each other while he watched. When they refused, he killed the boy and nearly killed the girl as she fled. He was caught on the scene. It was clear he'd planned his crime, but he chose his victims completely at random and had no motive except the desire to do evil.

*"Dark Forest: Deep Danger" (Carberry Creek, OR, 1974), the disappearance of a family of four, Richard and Belinda Cowden and their children David and Melissa, the discovery of their bodies in 1975 in a cave which a searcher swore he had investigated months earlier, and the possible connection with Dwain Lee Little, who at 15 had murdered and raped (in that order) a neighbor girl, Orla Fay Phipps, and had been paroled from prison (considered to be a rehabilitation success story) less than four months before the Cowdens disappeared. In 1980, he abducted, raped, and very nearly murdered a former co-worker, who identified him without hesitation. There has never been enough evidence to prove that he murdered the Cowdens, but it seems all too horrifyingly plausible.

As usual with Rule's collections, the quality here was uneven, and none of it as good as the best of her standalone books. But it is a dreadful procession of people who believed that they could do whatever they wanted to other people, simply because they wanted to.



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