How meeting Ted Bundy set true-crime writer Ann Rule on her way

Few journalists are lucky enough to stumble into stories that grab the national consciousness for decades. And when they do, even fewer are lucky enough to know their subjects intimately before the news breaks.

Ann Rule, who died on July 26 at the age of 83, was one of these. Though she would become a prolific writer who reinvented the true-crime genre, Rule was just another anonymous writer in Seattle in 1971. A former police officer turned crime reporter on the wrong side of 40, with four children at home and a dissolving marriage, Rule volunteered at a suicide crisis hotline one night a week.

There she befriended a young man who would later be convicted of dozens of horrific murders: serial killer Ted Bundy.

"I liked him immediately," Rule wrote in , the 1980 book about Bundy that brought her fame and ultimately sold more than 2 million copies. "It would have been hard not to. He brought me a cup of coffee and waved his arm over the awesome banks of phone lines." Bundy's first words to Rule: "You think we can handle all this?"

"His physical attractiveness helped to make him a mythical character, an antihero who continues to intrigue readers, many of whom were not even born when he carried out his horrendous crimes," Rule wrote in . "As far as his appeal to women, I can remember thinking that if I were younger and single or if my daughters were older, this would be almost the perfect man." Yet, down the line, it became clear that Bundy fell far short of Mr Right.

In 1974, Rule was following the bloody path of a killer who preyed on young women. A witness reported hearing a suspect identify himself as "Ted" and police thought he drove a Volkswagen. Rule was concerned that her old friend matched a description authorities were circulating, and tipped off an officer she knew.