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Monday, April 25, 2011

Two-Faced

I am reading a true crime novel about Ted Bundy. Not because I'm fascinated by the macabre, nor with serial killers except in the way I think most of us are -- in which they are so alarmingly un-human it twists our minds with unanswerable questions. 

Somehow, in that way of the internet, I found the story of Ann Rule, the author of this novel I'm now reading. Were her story fictional it couldn't be believed. She met Ted Bundy while volunteering on a crisis hotline, and they became friends. More unbelievably, she had previously been in law enforcement, and at the time she met Ted she was a freelance crime author and aspired to become a full-time writer. 

Still more incredibly, Ann would be involved closely with the investigations around the missing girls - Ted Bundy's victims - and she would be contracted to write about the killings in a book. All while she remained friends with Bundy. She herself would begin to suspect him and turn his name in to the investigation, though not convinced it could be him. Even when he became the prime suspect, her friendship with Ted continued, and she could not believe that this man, the one she knew, could possibly be the killer so many were seeking. 

A compelling and incomprehensible story. 

It is her story I am interested in. How difficult it is to reconcile what Ted showed her with the evidence shown her. Because I am trying to reconcile what is shown to me, and the evidence I discover. Roi is not Ted Bundy. He's not a psychopathic killer. 

But there are two of him. And it is beyond addiction. 


4 comments:

  1. You said, before, that you feel he is unknowingly two-faced. Does it matter?

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  2. It matters in that I don't think I have any idea who he really is. Only bits and pieces. I've never experienced something so unnerving/disturbing.

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  3. Yeah, I get that part. I just meant, does it make a difference in whether he knows what he is doing or not? Whether or not it is deliberate. Does that change your behavior?

    I'm sorry you are experiencing this right now...

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  4. Kelly - I don't know if it matters. It feels like it does. If he "doesn't know" that paints a very different picture from if he is deliberately manipulating, deceiving, and keeping a significant part of who he is hidden.

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