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{ But I trusted you. I did. }

[ But I Trusted You And Other True Cases: Ann Rule's Crime Files Vol. 14 | Ann Rule | Pocket | $7.99 ]

Is the blood beginning to run thin in Seattle author Ann Rule’s “Crime Files” series?

Or is “But I Trusted You”, the fourteenth and latest volume in the Queen Of True Crime’s bargain-priced paperback line, merely an unfortunate departure from Rule’s normally reliable reporting and storytelling? The title story, with its skimpy chronology of events, its limited insights into the couple whose marriage ended in murder, and its careless errors of fact and supposition, raises both questions.

As a Rule fan and follower I sincerely hope the latter is true—that “But I Trusted You” is a pothole on a road with many miles still left on it. Because, even though she’s now in her seventies and has written for four decades, it’s hard to imagine that this mighty and self-made force of Northwest nonfiction might be slowing down.

If that’s your concern as well, the good news is that this tale of a 1997 murder in Snohomish County, if anything, has all the earmarks of work that’s been done too fast. She published number thirteen in the series, the excellent “Mortal Danger,” in November 2008. Since then, she worked on “But I Trusted You”, which was released in late November 2009, but also her next full-length hardcover true-crime tome, “In The Still Of The Night“. (That book, set to be released June 8, is previewed at the end of “But I Trusted You”).

Rule, as many of you probably know, is a former Seattle cop turned writer for true-detective magazines, back in the 1960s and 1970s when those magazines were still around. After publishing her first few books under the pseudonym Andy Stack, she broke out in the late 1970s with “The Stranger Beside Me“, which not only tells the story of Ted Bundy’s serial killings, but the more personal story of their onetime friendship. She followed with another first-rate true-crime tale, “Small Sacrifices“, about Diane Downs, the Oregon woman who tried to kill her three small children when they got in the way of her relationship pursuits.

Since then she’s written several more true-crime books—most of them pretty good, in my opinion – and developed an ever-widening worldwide fan base. A number of her books have been adapted as TV movies and miniseries, and she has evolved into a distinctive brand—the undisputed champion chronicler of women in distress and women who cause distress.

Rule’s industriousness was such that she got her fans in the habit of seeing a new book every year or two. And it’s likely that in order to meet that expectation, she and her publishers developed the “Crime Files” series— each consisting of one novella-length story followed by five or six shorter tales of older Pacific Northwest crimes culled from her magazine days. The first in the series, “A Rose For Her Grave“,  came out in 1993.

Not only was the concept a stroke of marketing genius, but the execution was pretty good too. Of the fourteen, I’d say five are excellent, another four are well above average, three are serviceable or a little better … and only two books are ones I’d characterize as clunkers. Those are 1999’s “A Rage To Kill“, featuring the anemic seventy-five page tale of Silas Cool, the apparently deranged loner who hijacked a Seattle Metro bus a dozen years ago and forced it off a bridge, killing the driver; and “But I Trusted You.”

“A Rage To Kill” failed because it offered no real insight into who Silas Cool was, let alone what drove him to kill. “But I Trusted You”, while not quite that weak, suffers from the same lack of understanding about the killer — in this case, a woman named Teresa Gaethe-Leonard. It also is pretty scattershot in its attempt to draw a definitive picture of the victim, Chuck Leonard, Gaethe-Leonard’s estranged husband.

The story: Chuck Leonard, a Snohomish County school counselor and confirmed bachelor in his mid-forties, met Teresa Gaethe, some twenty years his junior, in New Orleans in the late 1980s. They married after a whirlwind romance and he brought her back home to his lakefront home near Everett. The marriage disintegrated almost as soon as it started, however, thanks in large part to her efforts to isolate him from his friends and family, and to alienate those who tried to remain close. Even the birth of a daughter a few years into the marriage failed to heal their differences. By 1995, they had separated and moved on to other lovers—Chuck to a fellow educator, and Teresa to a rich ex-boyfriend, now married in Hawaii, with whom she had reconnected.

Teresa wanted to resettle in Hawaii and be with her old flame, but she knew that Chuck would never allow her to take their daughter away. Things seemed to be at an impasse when, on February 20, 1997, somebody sneaked into Chuck’s house and fatally shot him three times while he slept. Suspicion, fueled by mounting evidence, pointed in Teresa’s direction. She was arrested and charged with his murder. But with the help of her lover in Hawaii she made her $500,000 bail—and disappeared shortly after.

Both Chuck Leonard and Teresa Gaethe-Leonard are painted with dabs of random personal anecdotes that can’t quite cover up several bare patches of chronological canvas. Years in the lives of both are brushed over with a sentence or two (It’s remarkable that Rule, with access to Chuck Leonard’s sister, can’t find out how many times he was married before Teresa, and can’t find out why a man so devoted to his youngest daughter apparently had no relationship with his older one). And several key stretches of time just before and just after the crime are dealt with in a more threadbare fashion than readers have come to expect from Rule, whose books are usually equally rich in story and character development.

As a result, both come off as simplistic, even stock characters from the fiction bookshelf—Chuck as a charismatic and cheerfully eccentric fun-lover, and Teresa as a secretive schemer who cared about nobody but herself. People are generally more complicated than that, which is why good true-crime writing has that “you can’t make this stuff up” quality to it.

What creates this problem is access, or rather the lack of it. In Rule’s best stories, she has access to the several of the people closest to the crime – usually the surviving spouse of a murder victim or the victim of a failed murder attempt by a spouse – who provide rich insight and motivation not only into their own actions, but the actions of the killer. Rule’s last two “Crime Files” books, “Mortal Danger” and “Smoke, Mirrors and Murder“, are two of the finest in this series for that very reason. And happily they tend to defeat any supposition that Rule’s fearsome work ethic might be conceding something to senior citizenship.

But that access just isn’t there in “But I Trusted You”. Rule’s narrative relies largely on interviews with siblings and friends who weren’t terribly close to the everyday lives of either the victim or the killer, or privy to their deepest thoughts. And without anyone to provide an understanding of who Chuck Leonard and Teresa Gaethe-Leonard were, the fascinating story of what she did to him—and what she did afterward to elude justice—are deprived of necessary narrative vitality. Instead those events are covered largely through Rule’s ever-present law enforcement sources, her observations at the trial, and the official record. Together they provide a cogent, though largely colorless, recounting of key events after the murder.

Worse, Rule has taken in recent years to covering up holes in her narratives by inserting herself into them—by way of an endless stream of theories and philosophies and suppositions based on her decades of observing criminal behavior and the justice system. More and more in this book and in others, there’s a lot of slippery observations like “one can’t help but wonder if” and “it’s likely that she must have” and “it’s not clear why she did this, but” and “probably what happened was”. At times, Rule appears to be recounting scenes or events between people she clearly hasn’t talked to (such one of Teresa Gaethe-Leonard’s attorneys, who Rule suspected was emotionally involved with her). That sort of supposition, if placed in a newspaper account, would be correctly red-flagged as suspect storytelling and as exposing the publication to potential legal liability. I’m not sure why true-crime books, even though they’re seen as a blend of entertainment and journalism, are apparently exempt from that standard.

It’s troubling, too, that Rule rarely sees fit to talk to the killers in her books, or to even try. While the recollections of others (and often the killer’s own letters and journals) can paint a roughly accurate picture of the killer’s character and motivations, it’s hardly a finished portrait. (Imagine, for instance, Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” being written without any talks with killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickok; or Joe McGinniss’ seminal “Fatal Vision” containing no insight into Doctor Jeffrey MacDonald other than that offered up by other people).

If Rule tried to interview Teresa Gaethe-Leonard in prison but was rebuffed, that’s one thing. If she just didn’t have the time because the book was being rushed to market, that’s another. But if she didn’t even try because she felt she knew all she needed to know about the killer, that’s quite another—and harder to comprehend (In my personal experience as a budding true-crime author, killers in prison are usually willing to talk. Sometimes that’s only because they’re bored silly and happy for the attention, but often it’s because they’ve had time to come to grips with what they’ve done and are ready and even eager to assert ownership over their wrongdoings. Even if they’re full of crap, they’re usually at least entertainingly so).

But, see, there you go: that’s the problem with supposition (In this case, I’m supposing because I don’t know, and I don’t know because Rule hasn’t responded to my attempts to contact her for this book review).

It’s also troubling that Rule shows little interest in what happens to the killers after their sentencing. In a recent visit to the Washington Corrections Center for Women near Gig Harbor, where Gaethe-Leonard is imprisoned, I learned some interesting nuggets about her from a fellow inmate that would have made for a couple of colorful pages at the end of “But I Trusted You”—if only Rule had bothered to seek them out for herself.)

One other problem with “But I Trusted You” is the carelessness with which it was edited, fact-checked, and proofread. Some examples:

• “But he was also a man who lived by his own rules, incurring envy in many men, jealousy in others”. It’s hard to believe this laughable passage on page 64 slipped past several sets of skilled eyes.
• On page 79, Rule, in a flight of extemporaneous fancy, lumps Teresa Gaethe-Leonard with “infamous female criminals” like Susan Smith, Diane Downs and Casey Anthony. That’s a potentially libelous statement, as Casey Anthony, who’s awaiting trial for the murder of her daughter, hasn’t been convicted of anything. I wonder if Rule convicted her because she believes her to be guilty—a belief buttressed by her decades of observing criminal behavior, and observing Casey Anthony only through the filter of the national true-crime media. Dangerous hubris, that, if true.
• Most embarrassingly, on page 172, she refers to the state women’s prison, at the time Gaethe-Leonard entered it, as the home of infamous felons Diane Downs, Mary Kay Letourneau and “Christine Marler”. First, Diane Downs, who committed her crime in Oregon, was never incarcerated at that prison. And second, Marler’s first name is Cynthia, not Christine—something Rule should know, since she wrote about Marler’s case in a previous book.

That’s all pretty disturbing, given that Rule has her own trusted readers and fact-checkers, and a New York publishing powerhouse should, presumably, provide the best editing services possible for a sales powerhouse of Rule’s stature. For “But I Trusted You”, it seems that many of the key people Rule works with every time out — the same names that crop up in the acknowledgment sections of each book in the “Crime Files” series—let her down this time.

I shouldn’t overlook the other six stories in “But I Trusted You”, given that they make up more than sixty percent of the book. All, in keeping with the “Crime Files” format, are “greatest-hits” pieces from Rule’s magazine-writing days.

• “Death In Paradise” is interesting given that it’s about a couple who vanished at sea while their children were aboard the vessel. But, given that the case is never solved, and that no credible theory that would explain the events is put forth, it’s ultimately frustrating.
• “Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth” is about the solved case of a son who kills his mother, but the story doesn’t fully satisfy because the killer is clearly mentally ill. What makes crime stories engrossing is the ability to understand the killer’s motives on some level, and the motivations in this story are beyond the capacity of a sane reader’s empathy.
• “Monohan’s Last Date”, the story of an underground swingers’ scene in the mid-1970s and a man whose vulnerabilities within it were ruthlessly and fatally exploited, is a crackerjack tale on its own that also serves as a sharp artifact of its time.
• “Run As Fast As You Can”, like “Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth”, is a good whodunit spoiled somewhat, again, by the inaccessible motives of the mentally ill killer.
• “The Deadly Voyeur” is gruesomely fascinating for the horror that took place in serene everyday surroundings—a lakeside park near Seattle—but again, the reader comes away feeling frustrated by how little insight is provided into the killer’s character or motives.
• “Dark Forest: Deep Danger”, the last story, is the best of the bunch. It’s got a unique case – an entire Oregon family who vanished during a camping outing – as well as a fascinating look into police procedure and forensic detection as the mystery stretched out over several years. And it offers satisfying insight into the killer once he’s suspected—and finally apprehended.

Am I being too hard on Ann Rule? Perhaps. But then again I’m judging her solely by a standard she herself has set. That’s why I say that she simply is better than this, better than she is represented in “But I Trusted You.”

Postscript: I hope to check back in on Ann Rule this summer, when “In The Still Of The Night” comes out. I’m especially interested in this story of the mysterious death of former Washington State Patrol trooper Ronda Reynolds because it’s inherently problematic—the initial Lewis County coroner’s ruling of suicide more than ten years earlier was overturned only in November 2009, well after Rule’s book was due to be handed in to her publisher. And nobody has been charged in Reynolds’ death, or even investigated as a person of interest, although Reynolds’ estranged husband has come under some media scrutiny.

The question here is: what kind of book will this be? It’s rare for a true-crime book to be published without a trial and a conviction. Readers simply demand satisfying endings, or so say those who are paid to interpret the demands of the true-crime market. And, unless Rule is prepared to take the ethically and legally risky step of naming a suspect before the justice system does, how can her book provide that satisfying ending?

And it’s for that reason, if no other, that I’ll be one of the millions of people buying the next Ann Rule book, regardless of the occasional intimation of her mortality. Because, after all, mortality is her business. And because there will never be a shortage of such business, it’s a damned good business for those of us in Rule’s line of work. May she be in the business for many more years.

Author: Jim Thomsen

Raised on Bainbridge Island, Jim Thomsen has been a Pacific Northwest newspaper reporter and editor for 22 years. Currently the night and weekend news editor at the Kitsap Sun in Bremerton, he's working to parlay his experience into longer-form journalism. His current project is a true-crime book that rounds up some of the most dramatic stories of crime, punishment and redemption to have passed through the state's Clemency and Pardons Board. He is also plugging away at a mystery novel, and will offer reviews of books in both genres here — as well as interviews with their authors. So, if you're planning to kill anybody and are willing to be interviewed about it before, during and after the trial, let him know and he'll get on the case. His blog about his journey to publication can be read at http://jimthomsen1.wordpress.com.

Jim Thomsen has written 2 articles for us.