The term "serial killer" was first coined to describe Ted Bundy, who killed at least thirty-six college-age girls, mostly from 1974-1978. His odd killing spree has inspired several books and movies. Directed by Paul Shapiro, the film A Stranger Beside Me is based on the 1980 biographic novel by Ann Rule (played by Barbara Hershey), who first met Bundy (played by Bill Campbell) during 1971 when they worked together at the crisis center hotline in Seattle. The film begins with Bundy's arrest at Pensacola in 1978, and then flashes back to an evening when the two are working alongside each other. Bundy then appears to be handsome, intelligent, and personable but a college student not yet focused on a career. The scene then jumps to 1974, when she is a consultant to the Seattle Police Department, for which she once worked as a police officer, while writing murder mysteries written from a psychological viewpoint, and Bundy is working on the reelection campaign of Republican Governor Dan Evans (played by Michael St. John Smith). Soon, he moves to Utah to get a law degree. However, just before the move from Seattle, eight coeds are found missing or dead at a rate of one per month. While a law student, four more girls are found dead. While in Colorado, a girl manages to escape his attempt to kidnap her, whereupon she reports him to the police, and he is arrested. After making bail, he returns to Seattle, meets with Ann Rule, but he is extradited to Colorado to face trial for murder. Although he defends himself in the trial, he is found guilty and sentenced to 1-15 years, but only for kidnapping. While in prison, he fakes an illness, escapes, and drives to Florida, where one night he kills five more girls at a Florida State University sorority house in Tallahassee. The film then returns to the original scene, his arrest in Pensacola. During the trial, in which he defends himself, he has a fan club, including a girlfriend (played by Suki Kaiser). Under Florida law, a marriage is consummated when a judge is present while one member of a couple proposes and the other accepts, but he is nevertheless convicted and sentenced to death. While for nine years imprisoned at Raiford (the same place where Clarence Earl Gideon appealed his case to the Supreme Court because he was denied a public defender), Bundy receives visits from Ann Rule as well as from his newlywed wife, who still believes in his innocence. Thanks to scenes with the prison psychiatrist (played by Roger Haskett) and conversations with Rule, the reasons for his malady emerge. Reared by grandparents, his grandfather was extremely violent. Humiliation was his greatest dislike, and his turn-on was to be in control. At the age of fourteen (played by Trent Wittal), he lured an eight-year-old girl on his paper route to her death. At the age of twenty, he first learned that the woman identified as his big sister was actually his mother. At the age of twenty-seven, he proposed marriage to a girlfriend, she accepted, but he then dropped her and began to attack girls with similar looks and personality. Evidently, he could only become sexually aroused by tying them up, so he killed them to avoid being charged with rape. He was executed in 1989. Ann Rule, who perhaps knew him best, blames herself for not realizing early on that he was a serial killer who could have been stopped before so many young women were killed.  MH

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The Stranger Beside Me
by Ann Rule

Ann Rule was a writer working on the biggest story of her life, tracking down a brutal mass-murderer. Little did she know that Ted Bundy, her close friend, was the savage slayer she was hunting.