A Rule To Follow -- For Local Psycho-Crime Writer, The Question Isn't Who Dunnit So Much As Why

With 8 million copies of her books in print, author Ann Rule's followers have grown to expect a deliciousness of details that explains why her true-life characters aren't what they seem.

Should a book be written about her, here's what it might include:

Ann Rule wears gardenia cologne from the drugstore, loves walking on the beach, reads Anne Tyler and the National Enquirer. She keeps her hair soft blond, her nails brightly painted and coffee on for visitors.

She picks romantic movies over violent ones, plays practical jokes on friends (who say she has a riotous sense of humor), dotes on her kids, her collie, her cats and refuses to kill spiders.

She was poor for a long time; she's been rich for a short time, and the long time has affected her more than the new wealth. She won't give up shopping at Value Village, a second-hand store, even after a fan recognized her there and blurted, "Aren't you Ann Rule? I thought you were doing so well!"

In essence, her friends and family peg her as your basic low-glitz suburban Seattle mom with a soft heart.

Now, as happens in her books, comes The Turn of Plot.

Miz Average she's not, because Ann Rule keeps getting more and more famous for a certain quirky expertise most moms never master.

In writing nonfiction, novel-like books about psychopathic killers, Rule has become ruler of a new literary genre: psycho-crime. Despite some critics' complaints that she's purely a gore-monger, it can be argued that Rule's real contribution is as an astute interpreter of the psychopaths - also called sociopaths - among us.

She's educated readers about people like her most famous sicko true friend, Ted Bundy, whose methods she explained in "The Stranger Beside Me." And Diane Downs, a seemingly average Oregon mom who attempted to murder her three children and deny it in "Small Sacrifices."

Now there's a new book, Rule's ninth: "Everything She Ever Wanted: A True Story of Obsessive Love, Murder & Betrayal." (Simon & Schuster; $23.)

It marks, she says, a continuing turn away from pure crime and toward psychological character studies.

Rule's main character this time is Pat Allanson, a Southern pseudo Scarlett O'Hara, who grew up very beautiful and very indulged. Using charm, persuasion and a dramatic flair for creating her own near-deathbed scenes, Allanson manages to turn everyone to her will.

There's her fool-for-love new husband, Tom, who's tormented because he can't make his fragile wife happy. There are her parents, the so-proper Colonel and Margureitte, who are bankrupted by their devotion to their demanding daughter.

Then there are Tom's relatives; they can't seem to stay alive after Pat Allanson enters their lives in 1974. She ostensibly has everything she wants: the suburban Atlanta estate Tom bought for her, the fancy show horses, the three beautiful children too devoted for their own good. Why are people dying - and who will be next?

After her experience writing the 2-million selling "Small Sacrifices" (which Rule's publisher initially found uninteresting because Diane Downs was "just a letter carrier who lives in a trailer"), Rule was on the lookout for another woman-centered story.

"I think the majority of my readers, maybe 75 percent, are females, and females seem particularly fascinated with other women who are just off the wall, who do things we find so reprehensible," Rule says, perching on a stool in her kitchen, her favorite place to chat, and ignoring her ever-busy answering machine.

But just being reprehensible won't earn a star turn in a Rule book. Rather, the author looks for the Pat Allansons of this world - charming, attractive women who seemingly have no reason to self-destruct, but do so anyway in a dramatic way.

"What drives me is not the gore," Rule says in her softly reassuring voice. "I put in just as little as I can. I want to know what happened to these people early on that may have caused them to turn out the way they did. I want to understand why they did it."

When Rule began writing true crime more than two decades ago, she was newly single with four kids to support; she also volunteered at the Seattle Crisis Clinic, spending nights seated beside another volunteer - Ted Bundy - before he was the Ted Bundy, mass murderer. To support her family, she put her University of Washington creative-writing degree to work, but with no great financial success. The first year she made money, it was but a thin $35.

"She was like any mom," recalls her son Mike. "Except that, as opposed to going off to work at Boeing, she would go up to her office, which was about 8 feet by 8 feet, and plug away on whatever the psycho of the month was."

Eventually the result grew to 1,400 articles for True Detective and other magazines that taught her how to write crime stories as page-turning mysteries, the technique she still uses.

That experience also positioned her to take the lead in birthing a book boom. When "The Stranger Beside Me" about Bundy first was released, the true-crime genre was essentially dead.

But "Stranger" and especially "Small Sacrifices" (which became a 1989 TV miniseries starring Farrah Fawcett) helped bring it to life with a roar.

And under Rule's guidance, with innovation. Until she came along, true crime was mostly macho writing done in a straight line - from the crime and the criminal to the police case and prosecution. Rule made it into a triangle by sensitively developing the victims as characters with feelings.

And until she came along, no one had fully developed crimes and their criminals as psychological case studies. She was a leader in this, too.

But now, Rule complains, there's an excess of true-crime books out there, and many aren't well done.

"I think the market has peaked. What's bothering me is that it's getting more gory. People ask, `Aren't you going to write about Dahmer?' No! I don't even want to read about Dahmer."

"There are a lot of people who feed off the tragedy of others, but she's not one of them," believes Edna Buchanan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami police reporter turned crime author.

Buchanan considers Rule "the person in her field. Not only is she good at what she does, but she's a good woman. What makes her stand out is her humanity. She's got kids, grandkids, she's been in love, and she's lost people she's loved. Ann has paid her dues to life, and it makes her a better writer than most of us."

Seattle historical novel author Donna Anders, Rule's friend of 15 years, has seen her "put aside good material if it will hurt somebody, even if it would make her book better.

"She has standards and a real sense of what's right and proper. She won't sensationalize. She's just a nice person."

Rule was quoted years ago as saying, "When I was 25 and had two babies, I never thought anything interesting would ever happen to me again."

So at each stage of her success, she marveled. There was the $10,000 up front for the Bundy book. There was the 1980 invitation to speak at Yale, with a $100 check tacked on. "I had to spend it for groceries, but I photocopied it first, then framed that and hung it on the wall."

Earlier this year she again hit the bestseller lists, this time for "If You Really Loved Me," about a millionaire Californian who convinced his teen-age daughter to kill his young wife - so he could marry the wife's even younger sister.

Now there's the tale of Pat Allanson, which earned Rule a $1.6 million advance. "Can you imagine that!' she says gleefully. "I didn't sell anything for the first five years . . . nothing but rejection slips."

Negotiations are now under way to turn it into a TV drama.

Still, it's not money that motivates Rule. It's the chance to educate people about the psychopaths among us - while crafting a darn good read, to boot.

"I love to sit down and write," she says, smiling. "There are very few things that please me as much as that."

"Ann is one of the few people I know who's managed to support herself and her children by writing," observes John Saul, the prolific Seattle author who pens thrillers. He considers Rule "a true pro" who's succeeded because she has "more talent, more energy and more drive than most people.

"Ann's professional life always comes first. Unlike most of us, who say, `I'll write tomorrow,' Ann says, `I'm busy. I'll see you in five months.' "

For years Rule lived and wrote in a house below the thundering Sea-Tac Airport flight path. Now success has bought her a modest-sized modern waterfront home she's decorated in teal and rose, along with modern art and a large crystal goose that, she confesses with some pride, was a steal at the Lakeside School rummage sale.

Days she spends in her home office, seated on a second-hand blue chair from Value Village, in front of one of two word processors, her desk overflowing with various court documents and newspaper clippings reporting outrageous and oddball crimes. Fans from around the country send her about one clipping a day.

Her favorites are those dealing with the most fascinating of criminals, conscienceless psychopaths who knows right from wrong - but don't care. Rule has become such an authority on the type that the FBI has sought her expertise.

Thus it would be easy to assume researching "Everything She Ever Wanted" would be a snap.

In fact, unraveling the reality behind Pat Allanson - and reasons her family blindly let her orchestrate their near-destruction - turned difficult, "a psychological detective search."

Family members and others offered mildly to wildly differing impressions of the imprisoned Allanson; she herself refused to talk. Nor did Allanson's medical records help. She'd never been diagnosed as a psychopath, but then most aren't.

Was Allanson, as some contended, a good person tragically imprisoned for crimes she didn't commit, or were others right to see her as truly frighteningly dangerous? Which of Allanson's ax-grinding relatives could Rule believe? Even she found it suspenseful.

Years ago Rule proudly wore badge 1157 as a Seattle police officer (until she flunked an eye test and had to quit); now she puts her cop's deductive skills to use.

She also got an incredible stroke of luck. Allanson had carelessly discarded hours of taped telephone conversations. When Rule replayed them she heard a woman who sounded caring, but who actually was calculating and cruel.

Psychopaths are "almost like aliens from another planet who come down and are so good at mirroring" the behavior and emotions of normal folks, Rule explains. In fact, they think nothing of lying and will harm even those closest to them with absolutely no guilt.

This was Pat Allanson. That led to another mystery. Most psychopathology results from early child abuse. But Pat Allanson was always indulged, never abused.

"When I finished my research, I thought, you're going to get the same personality if you give a kid nothing - or give a kid everything."

In the U.S., an estimated 3 percent of men and 1 percent of women are psychopaths, and most aren't criminals, Rule says. "They're your roommate, my camp counselor, various people we've probably dated, people you meet in your work."

Or in the news. Last April Rule found herself drawn to the Seattle murder trial of Randy Roth. "It was so bizarre. Not one but two wives (dead) and then one who almost didn't make it."

Not surprisingly Roth, whom a jury found guilty of murdering his fourth wife, has become her next book, "A Rose for Her Grave."

"I've written about so many cold people, but he's the most deadly cold man I've ever watched," she believes, promising her book will contain information about his methods and motivations that will be news even to trial followers.

Then after Roth, Rule will begin work on the first of eight true-crime books she's agreed to do under her new contracts - $4 million total - with Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books. (Some will be anthologies of previous works.) She hasn't chosen her next case; commonly she goes through 200 to 300 possibilities before deciding on the right one. And she may yet write a book about the Green River murders.

But eventually Ann Rule says she'd "love to be able to write gentle novels. And if they can still push my wheelchair up to the computer, I have some things to say just about human nature, period, and not necessarily the violent side of human nature."

--------------------------------- Rule reads `Everything' ---------------------------------

To hear Ann Rule reading from her new book, "Everything She Ever Wanted: A True Story of Obsessive Love, Murder & Betrayal", call the Seattle Times Info Line, 464-2000, from any touch tone phone. Then punch 6868. This is a free call from within the Greater Seattle area. Rule will also discuss the book on the Sally Jessy Raphael show Monday, Dec. 7, 3 p.m. on KIRO.