You Belong to Me and Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files: Vol. 2)

Rating:
Summary: competent yet formulaic Ann Rule material..
Review: 'You Belong To Me ..." is book #2 of a long series of true crime stories where one story is headlined and several short stories are stuffed in towards the end. Overall these books do not have the depth nor the keen analysis work Ann Rule can produce, as she has done with some of her wonderful books ('Stranger Beside Me', 'If You Really Loved Me'). 'You Belong To Me...' is definitely a middle of pack offering.

In the book the headline crime story is about a no good husband and cop who slowly 'loses it'. Of course the end result is a brutal murder, no surprise here. I had a personal interest in the story having lived in the region of central Florida where the crime was commited. I fear others without such a personal connection might find all this to be very made-for-TV material. Yet certainly those women who feel they are married to overbearing, horrible men might find this material rather interesting (..in a positive way).

Bottom line: I suppose this is disposable Ann Rule material yet it did hold my interest. Passable.

Rating:
Summary: competent yet formulaic Ann Rule material..
Review: 'You Belong To Me ..." is book #2 of a long series of true crime stories where one story is headlined and several short stories are stuffed in towards the end. Overall these books do not have the depth nor the keen analysis work Ann Rule can produce, as she has done with some of her wonderful books ('Stranger Beside Me', 'If You Really Loved Me'). 'You Belong To Me...' is definitely a middle of pack offering.

In the book the headline crime story is about a no good husband and cop who slowly 'loses it'. Of course the end result is a brutal murder, no surprise here. I had a personal interest in the story having lived in the region of central Florida where the crime was commited. I fear others without such a personal connection might find all this to be very made-for-TV material. Yet certainly those women who feel they are married to overbearing, horrible men might find this material rather interesting (..in a positive way).

Bottom line: I suppose this is disposable Ann Rule material yet it did hold my interest. Passable.

Rating:
Summary: Ann rules!
Review: ANN HAS DONE IT AGAIN...I'M A TRUE ANN RULE FAN, AND HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING HER WORK FOR YEARS. THIS IS BY FAR ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF ALL TIMES.......

Rating:
Summary: Ann rules!
Review: Another great Ann Rule book. While not my favorite of her books, this out does many of the other true crime books I have read. I like that Ms Rule not only gives the facts, but really tells it in a story. If you have not read Small Sacrifices, I recommend that one, it is my favorite Ann Rule title for its sheer unbelievabity (also, Lifetime TV made it into a decent made-for-cable movie).

Rating:
Summary: It's Better to Have Loved and Told Him to Get Lost
Review: Ex-cop and true-crime writer Ann Rule has testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee and regularly presents seminars to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI Academy, as well as district attorneys and victim support groups. She has also served on the U.S. Justice Department task force that set up VI-CAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) to track and trap serial killers.

---AND she has designed a tee-shirt that reads "It's Better to Have Loved & Lost Than To Live With The Psycho The Rest Of Your Life." You can purchase one in the 'What On Earth' catalogue.

Just kidding about who designed the tee shirt, but Ann Rule should be buying these preprinted jobbies by the trunk-load and handing them out to the women she writes about. Her ill-fated, but young, beautiful, and innocent young women can't seem to leave those psychos alone.

Take the title story, "You Belong to Me." In this 192-page thriller, the wife gets the tee shirt, or at least its message in time and divorces her psycho policeman-husband. She lives in fear of him, is stalked by him, has her home invaded by him, has her phone tapped by him. Then he is finally arrested--not for stalking his ex-wife--but for the murder of a woman he had stopped for a traffic violation.

I'd guess the moral of this story is that stalkers should be taken more seriously by law enforcement, even (or especially) if they happen to be policemen.

The other five cases in this book are told in brief, punchy detail. I actually believe that the author tells a better story if she limits herself to twenty pages or so.

"Black Christmas"--A loner commie-hater kills the wrong family, believing they're Communist (wrong) Jews (wrong). The manner of death is particularly macabre. This is going to be the worst Christmas story you've ever read.

"One Trick Pony"--A beautiful cowgirl doesn't get her tee shirt in time, and is murdered by her alcoholic husband. He almost gets away with it, but continues to have bad luck with the women in his life. One of his girlfriends is shot in the stomach and her death is ruled a suicide even though "when the police got there they found Russ standing next to the dead woman, the gun in his hand."

"The Computer Error and the Killer"--The author included this case because she thinks that "it demonstrates how charming and benign the sadistic sociopath can be when he wants to appear that way." A monster slips through the cogs of the criminal justice system and kills again and again.

"The Vanishing"--A teenager who is about to go on vacation to Hawaii vanishes under strange circumstances. As the author states, "No one of us who searched for her could ever have guessed what [the teenager's] ending would be. Of all the possibilities, the truth was one that no one ever considered."

"The Last Letter"--Mistresses are suckers for unrequited romance. According to "The Last Letter," one of the unhappiest endings to a love story features a husband who actually divorces his wife and marries his long-time mistress.


Rating:
Summary: Ominous words
Review: The words in the title "You Belong to Me" are words a woman may want to hear from the man she loves, but when they come from a violent psychopath, watch out.

True crime is one of my favorite genres, and Ann Rule is one of its outstanding practitioners. I love the genre because nobody could make up this stuff. Truth, at least in human affairs, really is stranger than fiction. I seldom find "mysteries" or crime novels as interesting as a true tale, however incompletely expressed, because I usually sense the contrivances in the work of the novelist. But in the best true crime, there is always a sense of coming face to face with the sordid realities of human nature, regardless of how banal and stupid, and from such an experience there comes the sense of knowing a little more about humanity.

Here we have a Florida state trooper who likes to stop the girlies on the freeway and show them his shiny belt buckle and his well tailored uniform. Problem is he actually hates women and only gets off when he does them violence. His long-suffering wife finally, finally after many beatings and some really scary weird stuff, tells him to get out. He can't cope with that because although he hates women, he needs their approval. I wonder: did mommie love him best or not at all? He hates himself for desiring women, but he needs their love to feel confident. So he stalks his wife in the most pathetic and all-consuming way, sneaking into the house late at night and sleeping in the attic, bugging her phone, etc. Meanwhile he loves to play macho cop on the freeway. One day he pulls over a blond woman who reminds him of his wife and does a psycho-sexual sickie murder on her, calling her by his wife's name as he rapes and kills her.

Rule, whose weakness is a need to wear her support for the law enforcement community on her sleeve, feels a little compromised in this one. She is at pains to assure us that this psycho cop is one rare law enforcement anomaly, and that she sure hates to write this one since it makes all cops look bad, but she has to. She has to because she needs to be of service to her readership, and there is indeed a cautionary tale here we all might recognize. Simply put, never let push come to shove, especially if it's your supposedly loving spouse that's doing the pushing. Get out immediately because it will only get worse. Unfortunately, in this case the long-suffering wife only really gets the message to get away from the sickie when she finds out he is CHEATING on her. I mean, let's react to what's important! The beatings were bad, of course, and the total control wasn't good, but the final straw was THE OTHER WOMAN!

It could be said that if you desire and conceive a psychopath's children, you might, just might, be contributing to the continuance of psychopaths. The poor kids are always so innocent, and nobody, especially not moi, would suggest that we punish the sons for the sins of the fathers, having committed a few sins myself; but ladies, get a clue: if his macho ways turn you on so, maybe you should share some blame. I know it's boring, but try a nerd once in a while. Or at least try a little family planning. Rule keeps saying (here and in some of her other books) "but she loved him," or "she was in love." But any self-indulgence has its limit. If we can excuse her because she was in love, maybe we ought to excuse him because he also couldn't help himself. Personally, I...don't...think...so.

Incidentally, according to the point of view of evolutionary psychology, we create the opposite sex through our sexual choices, just as surely as the practices of agriculture have created the cows and the grains that have been sexually chosen for thousands of years.

Bottom line: this is not only one of Ann Rule's best, it is also one that lingers in the mind because of the vivid portrait she paints of a violent sexual control freak.

Rating:
Summary: Run. Run Away.
Review: While I try never to judge anyone too harshly, I'm afraid that this is one of those rare occassions where I simply must speak out in the hope that I may save just one person the terrible ordeal of reading this book.

Of course, I shouldn't presume that others won't like it. If you prefer dragging descriptions and uninspired factual regurgitation, then this book is for you. I know I didn't appreciate the plodding pace of this book, where each digression into the complicated breakfasts enjoyed by the victims was actually painful.

You really wonder how long it took to write this book because there doesn't seem to be much art in this work. While I applaude her diligence in trying to capture every detail, it proves to be too much. This story would do well in a multi-case book, or perhaps another author would do it justice. Run. Run Away.