"Everything She Ever Wanted" by Ann Rule

Everything She Ever Wanted

It's hard to believe that this is an account of murders, attempted murders and trials that actually happened. It's way too over the top for fiction. No reader would ever believe it.

At the centre of it all is the woman born Mary Linda Patricia Vann, but usually known as Pat Allanson.

It is very hard to know what to make of her.

On one hand, she seems to have lived in a fantasy. She not only lived with her parents into old age, but lived on them, at their expense. In fact, her demands drove them into poverty. She seemed to have seen herself as an incarnation of Scarlett O'Hara, and wanted a Southern mansion where she could breed Morgan horses - despite the fact that the cost of such a place was far beyond her means.

She saw herself as a delicate, gentle Southern belle, bravely overcoming her ill-health and frailty. When challenged, she would cry or faint. One of her daughters observed that, despite this fraility, she could easily lift heavy saddles on and off horses' backs - and, in fact her worst illness, an abcess which nearly killed her from blood-poisoning, was self-inflicted. Medical check-ups revealed that, otherwise, she was strong as one of her horses.

Did her fantasy vision of herself, and her wild rages when she didn't get 'everything she ever wanted' mean that she was mentally ill? It certainly seems outside the range of 'sane'.

And yet, she seems to have planned her actions carefully, and covered them up, in a way that doesn't suggest the disordered thinking of madness. She was so cunning that most of the crimes which it seems certain she committed, could not be pinned on her.

So, what did she do? Well, she married Tom Allanson, a blacksmith who had wealthy parents, even though he was estranged from them. Pat Allanson seems to have nurtured the ill-feeling between them.

Her parents-in-law were murdered in their basment, and their son was arrested for the crime. He was certainly present at the time of the killings - he'd gone there at his wife's suggestion, to try and heal the breach between them. He went at a time when he knew his difficult father was at work, and he could talk alone with his mother.

Before going to his parents' house, he dropped his frail, delicate wife at her doctor's for an appointment. So, who was the woman who phoned his father's office and informed him that his son was at his home? Even more mysterious, who cut the telephone wires to the Allanson house?

After Allanson was jailed for murdering his parents, his loving wife arranged control of most of his finances. The failing ranch her husband had bought her burned down and she got the insurance. His grandmother had had a stroke and his grandfather was elderly, so loving Pat moved into nurse them, won their trust, and gained their signature to papers which let her control their finances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arsenic_trioxide024.jpg

She tried to convince her jailed husband that he should join her in a suicide-pact. She was older than him, and frail and he was going to be in jail for so long. She couldn't bear to be without him - and the only way they could be together was in death.

Allanson steadfastly refused. If he'd agreed, and killed himself in prison as Pat Allanson wanted, maybe she would have killed herself to join him - or maybe she would have stayed alive and inherited from him. What do you think?

Allanson's grandfather, under Pat's care, was rushed to hospital and nearly died from a mysterious illness which later turned out to be arsenic poisoning.

Detectives were certain that he'd been poisoned by his loving grandaughter-in-law, Pat Allanson, but they could not prove it. They could not discover where she'd obtained the arsenic or how she'd fed it to the old couple - though some time later a house-sitter became gravely ill after eating hot-dogs and ice-cream from the old people's freezer. Evidence of poisoning, however, had been flushed away and the detectives were frustrated again.

But I could not possibly untangle this woman's criminal career in a short review. Suffice to say, that people who encountered her continued to suffer the symptoms of arsenic poisoning, until the possibility that she was innocent becomes very hard to believe. Among those who suffered long-term painful illness identical to that caused by arsenic poisoning was Pat Allanson's own adult daughter.

Throughout, Pat Allanson's own doting mother maintained that her daughter was innocent and harmless.

The cover may be lurid but don't let it put you off. This is a truly eye-popping account of just how mad those mortals be.

Review: The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule

I have a friend who I first bonded with over our shared interest in

The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule

psychopaths.
          My interest is, thank god, an academic one, a writer's curiosity about the extremes of human behaviour. My friend, poor woman, married a psychopath and has first hand experience of the dedicated selfishness that a human being can be capable of, the blind inability to appreciate that anyone except them has any right to an opinion, a life or free will.
          But when it comes to psycho-spotting, author and journalist Ann Rule can perhaps claim the prize.
          As a journalist, she often handled crime reports, spent a lot of time in police stations talking to detectives and made several friends on the force.

Ann Rule, from her Amazon page

          In her 40s, she volunteered to man phones on a suicide help-line, and shared her regular night-shift with a psychology student named Ted. She thought him a lovely young man and they became good friends, despite the age-gap of ten years. He was so caring towards the callers and at the end of her shift, he always walked her to her car, to make sure she was safe - whereas her detective friends, when she left their offices late at night, would say, "We'll watch from the window and if anyone mugs you, we'll phone 911."

     This little anecdote perhaps highlights something about psychopaths (and human nature.) Rule's detective friends were showing genuine concern and covering it with a joke. They probably knew there was little risk to her and, as ordinary human beings with many other concerns, they said goodbye and got on with their lives and jobs.
          'Ted', on the other hand, was acting a role, performing the character of 'lovely young man and caring friend.' It was convincing so long as it was never tested. One difference between someone telling the truth and a liar is that the truth-teller has 'an expectation of belief' because they know that they're telling the truth and therefore don't think they need bother to be meticulously convincing. They give a rough account, forget details - or assume that their genuine affection is apparent and needs no display.
          Liars know themselves to be lying and therefore go several extra miles in order to convince. Their stories are neatly in order, with lots of irrelevant detail to 'hide the lie among truths.' When it comes to relationships, their false affection is constantly voiced,  rehearsed and displayed. And takes many in.  Alas, research has shown that, though most of us think we can tell when someone is lying, we're actually very bad at it.

          Rule was no longer working with Ted, but was still in touch

Seattle, wikimedia

with him, when young women started disappearing from the Greater Seattle area. Rule was soon aware, from her friends in the Police, that they feared they were dealing with a serial killer. When suspicion fell on Ann Rule's friend, Ted, she thought it was obviously a routine enquiry or a mistake...
          But it wasn't. Ann's friend was Ted Bundy, and she found herself in the middle of the crime story that would define her career. For ever after she would be, the woman who worked beside Ted Bundy.

          Bundy abducted, terrified, raped and murdered many women, possibly more than a hundred. Like most serial killers, he probably started much earlier than the crimes he was charged with. Rule's research turned up the fact that, when Bundy was 15, a young girl, a child, was abducted from her home and murdered. The killer was never found. Bundy lived a few doors away, and knew the child. He never admitted to that killing - but he never admitted to anything unless there was an advantage for him.
          He was eventually arrested in Seattle, but insisted on representing himself, which gave him the right to make trips to the library to look at law books. While swearing complete innocence and mistaken arrest, he used a library trip to escape.

          He ran to Florida, but couldn't give up his hobby. Or was killing his addiction, his crutch? Within a week of arriving in Florida, he attacked several women in one night, killing three and leaving others badly injured.

Florida Capitol, wikimedia

          Bundy found Florida less careless and forgiving than the North-West. They sentenced him to death and placed him in a far  more secure prison. Another escape attempt was thwarted and after that he was kept in chains. Yes, he could have his trips to the law library - in chains.
          Now you would think that, to him, life was cheap. He had, after all, killed an unknown number of women for fun. Their lives and everything and everyone their lives had encompassed, had been as disposable, to him, as a condom. So what was a little matter of a death sentence, when life is so unimportant?
          But only other people's lives were unimportant to Bundy. He tried every possible delaying tactic, trick and appeal to preserve his own life. He also attempted to use the names of the women he'd murdered, and the sites where he'd dumped their bodies, as bargaining tools. Grant him another appeal, let him live a little longer, and he might give up a few more identities and a few more remains for burial.

          Bundy was an exemplary serial killer in that he demonstrates just how loathsome a nasty piece of work a human being can be - and yet he had a little fan club of female fools who were besotted with him. One even married him and had his child.
          If the psychology of serial killers is strange, the psychology of their groupies defeats me.

         If you share my interest in the minds of psychopaths, then Rule's book is of great interest. It sprawls a little, because she has updated it regularly over more than twenty years.
          Besides knowing the loathsome Bundy personally, and having access to him in jail, she has also interviewed many of the people he bereaved, which throws up some intriguing stories.
          The husband of one murdered woman was away on business on the day she was abducted. He told Rule that, in his distant hotel room, late on that day, he clearly heard his wife's voice say, "Help."
          Bundy's final killing spree took place in a university dormitory. He broke in, and lay in wait in darkened corridors. Rule interviewed a couple of survivors who survived because, as they told Rule, they became seized by what seemed, at the time, an inexplicable fear. One girl was in a bathroom and only had to step across the dark corridor to her bedroom, but found herself completely unable, for fear, to open the door. She had no idea why. She had no idea, consciously at least,  that Bundy was murdering her fellow students a little way down the corridor. This almost psychic awareness of danger reminds me of another book I've reviewed - Gavin de Becker's Gift of Fear.
         The Stranger Beside Me is often a grim read, but it's an informative one.