A Tangled Web Read online

  Also by LESLIE RULE

  NOVELS

  Whispers from the Grave

  Kill Me Again

  NONFICTION

  Coast to Coast Ghosts: True Stories of Hauntings Across America

  Ghosts Among Us: True Stories of Spirit Encounters

  When the Ghost Screams: True Stories of Victims Who Haunt

  Ghost in the Mirror: Real Cases of Spirit Encounters

  Where Angels Tread: Real Stories of Miracles and Angelic Intervention

  A TANGLED WEB

  A Cyberstalker, a Deadly Obsession, and the Twisted Path to Justice

  LESLIE RULE

  CITADEL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Questions for Readers to Explore

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CITADEL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2020 Leslie Rule

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  CITADEL PRESS and the Citadel logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  ISBN: 978-0-8065-3997-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944526

  Electronic edition:

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8065-3999-7 (e-book)

  ISBN-10: 0-8065-3999-2 (e-book)

  The best of friends stick with us through the darkest of times,

  and laugh with us when the sun comes out.

  I dedicate this book to my friend, Anne Bradley Jaeger,

  who laughed with me in the sunshine

  and walked beside me when the shadows grew long and cold.

  PREFACE

  I will never forget the first time I felt a killer’s eyes burning into me. Yes, the first time. It happened more than once, because it was my job to photograph murderers on trial, and they were not always pleased when I walked up to them and boldly aimed my camera. I was true crime author Ann Rule’s photographer and research assistant. I’m also her daughter.

  I was seventeen when my mom started bringing me to trials to take photos for the articles she published in the pulpy-paged detective magazines sold in supermarkets. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she saw over a thousand of her articles appear in True Detective and its sister publications—articles she typed on an old-style typewriter in the middle of the rec room with the TV blaring and four noisy kids playing around her. She wrote under male pen names because her editor told her, “No one will believe a woman knows anything about crime.” When I started working with her, I was studying photography at a vocational school where I spent half of my high school day, and my teachers tried to discourage me from pursuing a career in a male dominated field. Female professional photographers were rare at the time.

  There may not have been many women working as crime reporters and photographers, but, unfortunately, there were plenty of murderesses. While the majority of killers are male, cases of females who kill go back as far as history can reach. Cynthia Marler was the first murderess I met. She looked more like a movie star than the hit woman she was. The twenty-eight-year-old Hayward, California, mother of three stood 5′0″, weighed ninety-five pounds, and her thick waves of dark hair spilled past her shoulders.

  On August 10, 1980, Marler boarded a Seattle-bound plane under an assumed name and prepared to earn the $3,000 and the 1976 Chevy pickup truck she’d been promised for putting an end to an ugly divorce dispute.

  The petite killer disguised herself in a blonde wig and stalked Wanda Touchstone, following the thirty-four-year-old University of Washington student to a parking lot where she fatally shot her in the neck and head.

  Witnesses saw Marler fleeing the scene and later picked her out of a police lineup. Testifying in court, one witness remarked that she “was very, very small and had a hard stare.” I found myself the recipient of that hard stare soon after I approached her during a trial break in a stuffy Seattle courtroom and asked if I could photograph her. “Yes,” Marler replied, “but don’t take a picture of me when I’m smoking.” I took a few shots and was so nervous I forgot her stipulation. I snapped a photo just as she held a Camel cigarette near her face after exhaling a cloud of smoke. Marler reprimanded me, her voice chilled and unforgiving. “I told you not to take a picture of me smoking!” Her dark eyes bore into me, and I squirmed as I felt the uncomfortable prickle of a killer’s wrath.

  Ann wrote Cynthia Marler’s story twice, once for a magazine and then years later as a case included in her book, A Rose for Her Grave—Ann Rule’s Crime Files: Volume One. The photo I shot of the petite killer with cigarette in hand appeared in the book. She’s smiling brightly in the image, but an instant later, she was angry. I wish I had captured that on film!

  It might seem odd that my mother exposed her teenage daughter to killers, but she herself met a murderess when she was only nine years old. In fact, the woman taught her to crotchet! Viola was a prisoner in the “Mom and Pop jail” run by my mother’s grandparents in Stanton, Michigan. My great-grandfather, Chris Hansen, was the sheriff, and Anna, my great-grandmother, cooked for the residents. When little Ann spent her summers there, it was her job to carry trays of food to the female prisoners.

  In addition to the crochet lessons, Viola gave her advice, warning, “never trust those women who pluck their eyebrows into itty-bitty lines.”

  Young Ann wondered why such a nice lady was behind bars awaiting trial for murder. It was “justifiable homicide” the prisoner explained. Yes, she had shot and killed her husband, but she’d caught him in the arms of her best friend in the truck she’d bought for him with tips she made waitressing.

  The explanation didn’t satisfy Ann’s curiosity. How could someone take the life of another? The question intrigued her, and she’d one day explore it in the three dozen true crime books she authored. She was also fascinated by the methods her family used to solve crimes. Not only was her grandfather the Montcalm County sheriff, an uncle was the undersheriff, another uncle was the medical examiner, and her aunt worked in the juvenile court.

  How do they do it? little Ann wondered as she watched her grandfather and uncles solve crimes. How do they take a button and trace it back to the killer? Sometimes she was allowed to watch them work, and
sometimes she helped. She was about eleven when her grandfather and uncle recovered the remains of a John Doe. The man had apparently gone missing a long time before and had been reduced to a pile of bones by the time he was discovered. Ann helped spread the bones out on a table as they attempted to identify him.

  While forensic science has changed tremendously since my great-grandfather’s day, evil has not. It still comes in all shapes and sizes, and he saw his share of it when he hosted some of the Midwest’s most dangerous criminals at his jailhouse. He treated them all with respect, and that might be one of the reasons he was legendary for his uncanny ability to coax confessions from killers. He was also famous for the fact he’d never fired a gun in the line of duty in his twenty-four-year career, a distinction so unusual that the story was picked up by wire services in November 1939 and published in dozens of newspapers, along with the caveat, “he still is mighty quick on the draw and a tolerably good marksman.”

  One of Sheriff Hansen’s most widely publicized cases occurred on a cold January night in 1941. It was a little after 6 P.M. when seventy-three-year-old farmer Benjamin Perrien bent over a washbasin in his kitchen in his Clearlake, Michigan, home. He splashed water on his face, unaware of the gun pointed at him. Had he known of the rage building in his killer, he probably wouldn’t have turned his back on him. The blast from the 16-gauge shotgun ended Ben’s life.

  Sheriff Hansen and his deputies drove to the crime scene, forty miles west of their Stanton headquarters. They were greeted by thirteen-year-old Robert Eberhardt and the victim’s wife, Sylvia, sixty-three, who’d been milking the cow in the barn at the time of the attack. Partially deaf, she was unaware of the trouble until she found her husband crumpled on the kitchen floor.

  Young Robert, however, had seen everything. A sixth-grader at a rural schoolhouse, he was small for his age. He’d moved in with the Perriens two years earlier because his poverty-stricken family had too many children to feed. Robert did chores to earn his keep. Now, he said he’d witnessed the shooting and gave a detailed description of the intruders.

  The bullet had entered the back of Ben’s head, just as Robert had indicated, but Sheriff Hansen doubted the story—especially when it kept changing. His suspicions were confirmed when the Perriens’ dog retrieved evidence from a snowdrift, carrying it gingerly in his mouth as he trotted back to the house. The killer was none other than the small boy with the wild story. His four-footed friend had watched him throw the shotgun shell into the snowbank. Whether the pooch thought they were playing a game of fetch or somehow understood that Robert had harmed Ben, the evidence was undeniable.

  When the dog dropped the shell on the floor, Robert hastily hid it beneath his bed, but deputies soon found it, along with the boy’s gun. Confronted with the proof, he claimed intruders had placed the shotgun in his hands and forced him to kill Ben. Eventually Hansen persuaded him to reveal the truth and sign a confession. While Robert admitted to the murder, he was later quoted saying he felt only a little sorry about what he’d done. In the kid’s mind, it was justified. He told Sheriff Hansen that Ben had been “mean” to him, refusing to give him a vacation and had once thumped him on the head with a pail.

  The Perrien case was one of many shocking crimes that Hansen helped to solve. Inspired by her grandfather, Ann dreamed of becoming a police woman, a dream she achieved at age twenty-two when she was hired by the Seattle Police Department. Her beat was the city’s Pioneer Square area. In a skirt and high heels—part of the required uniform for female cops in the 1950s—she was not allowed to carry a gun. That was a privilege reserved for male officers. Still, she loved her job and was heartbroken when her career in law enforcement was cut short. She’d been on the force about eight months when the annual physical rolled around, and she flunked the eye exam. The sympathetic examiner allowed her to step up close to the chart, but she still couldn’t see the big E. Legally blind without her glasses, she’d be helpless if they were knocked off during a struggle. She was asked to surrender her badge. Devastated, she couldn’t bear to drive past Seattle PD and took detours for years.

  She got married at twenty-three and had four kids by the time she was thirty-two. My father was stricken with what would turn out to be a fatal skin cancer and couldn’t contribute much to support the family, so my mother became a freelance writer, publishing a dozen articles each month in detective magazines. Her old friends at the Seattle PD welcomed her back and gave her access to confidential files. To enrich her reporting, she went back to school to study police science, enrolling in classes such as Crime Scene Investigation and Arrest, Search and Seizure. (I took these same classes in 1978, not because I was planning on going into the field, but because I found them interesting and chose them as electives.)

  In 1971, Ann was not only a busy mother, she was a full-time writer and part-time student. I took it for granted then, but now I wonder how she found time to volunteer. She would later say it was something she felt she had to do. She was partly motivated by her guilt over the fact she’d been unable to rescue her only sibling. At age twenty-one, Don was overcome with a depression his family couldn’t help him shake. News of his fate appeared on the front page of the December 31, 1954, edition of the San Mateo Times, beneath the headline: “Wiz” Student Can’t Face Life, Dies Suicide. He was discovered in his carbon monoxide–filled car, parked with the engine running. In his last note, Don Rex Stackhouse apologized, said he loved his family, and asked for his body to be given to Stanford Medical School where he was an honor student.

  While Ann couldn’t help her brother, she hoped to help other suicidal people and saw an opportunity to do that at the Crisis Clinic, a nonprofit telephone hotline for troubled people. She signed up to volunteer and went through the training program. Teams worked in pairs, answering phones around the clock at the Crisis Clinic headquarters, a somewhat creepy and otherwise empty Victorian house on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

  Ann was given the Tuesday-night shift, and her hotline partner was a work-study law student, paid an hourly wage. He was twenty years her junior and reminded her of the brother she’d lost. She developed a sisterly affection toward the man who sat beside her and was so gentle with callers. Together they saved many lives. If one partner discovered they had a suicide in progress, they’d signal the other to alert authorities to trace the call, a process that could take over an hour in the 1970s.

  I remember my mom fixing sandwiches to bring to her Crisis Clinic partner because she worried Ted Bundy was too skinny. Yes, Ted Bundy! Today his name is almost synonymous with the term “serial killer,” but he wasn’t infamous back then. Ann considered him a good friend, and they had long conversations about their personal lives on slow nights when the phones didn’t light up.

  Eventually their time together on the hotlines ended, but they kept in touch and saw each other at the Crisis Clinic’s 1973 Christmas party. Soon after, Seattle was on high alert because of the sudden and inexplicable disappearances of several local teen girls and young women. Everyone was mystified because the victims weren’t the type to take risks and had vanished from populated areas, often in the light of day. Detectives suspected a cult was sacrificing maidens. Ann submitted a proposal about the disappearances to a publisher and got her first book contract. There was, however, a condition. If the case was not solved, the book would not be published.

  The case, of course, was solved, and the bizarre coincidence would have been too contrived to be believable in fiction. What are the chances a writer would contract to write a book about an unknown killer only to learn that the culprit was her friend? After he was arrested, charged, convicted and sent to death row to await execution for homicides in Florida, Ted confessed to some of the Washington murders. Ann’s editor balked, unsure if her book was worth publishing. “No one has ever heard of Ted Bundy,” he told her, but he saw the project through. The Stranger Beside Me was published in 1980.

  Several bestselling books later, she’d learned so much about killers she wa
s invited to serve on the FBI panel that developed the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP). Created in 1985, it was the first computer system to link unsolved violent crimes from police departments nationwide. Prior to that, serial killers and rapists could attack in various counties and states to avoid detection. For the first time, detectives became aware of crimes committed in other jurisdictions, detected patterns, and worked together to make swift arrests.

  While I’m proud of my mom’s accomplishments, I’m most proud that she remained a kind and down-to-earth person. She never let fame go to her head, preferred costume jewelry to diamond rings and loved to shop at Goodwill. I inherited my mom’s fondness for thrift shops and her fascination for dark mysteries. But true crime was her thing. I wanted to carve out my own niche and sought out mysteries of another sort.

  After writing dozens of articles for national magazines in the early 1990s, I published a number of bestselling books with paranormal themes. When my mom and I traveled together, I accompanied her to trials to photograph the cops and killers for her books, and afterward I investigated haunted places for my books. Sometimes she went with me. She, too, had a fascination for ghosts and possessed a strong sixth sense. I had no desire to move into her territory, though I did come close with one book. When the Ghost Screams—True Stories of Victims Who Haunt covered cases of haunted locations where the earthbound spirits of victims have been seen wandering.

  It must be a combination of DNA and osmosis that has finally compelled me to embrace my mother’s genre and write A Tangled Web. I was also influenced by hundreds of emails from my mom’s readers, some who’ve practically begged me to write a true crime book. Ann had authored two books each year for the last two decades of her career. She has been gone since the summer of 2015, and her readers desperately miss her books. I won’t pretend to have my mother’s expertise on crime or expect to replace her in her readers’ hearts, but she was a wonderful mentor to me, and I’ve tried to honor her with a carefully researched story that I hope will help me to carry on the family tradition of saving lives. Sheriff Hansen did it first as he protected his community from criminals, and Ann did it with her books that warned about the dangerous people who walk among us. Nothing made her happier than the letters from readers, thanking her for saving their lives. Because of her books, they recognized danger when they saw it headed their way.