was her friend? After he was arrested, charged, convicted and sent to death row to await execution for homicides in Florida, Ted confessed to some of the Washington murders. Ann’s editor balked, unsure if her book was worth publishing. “No one has ever heard of Ted Bundy,” he told her, but he saw the project through. The Stranger Beside Me was published in 1980.
Several bestselling books later, she’d learned so much about killers she was invited to serve on the FBI panel that developed the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP). Created in 1985, it was the first computer system to link unsolved violent crimes from police departments nationwide. Prior to that, serial killers and rapists could attack in various counties and states to avoid detection. For the first time, detectives became aware of crimes committed in other jurisdictions, detected patterns, and worked together to make swift arrests.
While I’m proud of my mom’s accomplishments, I’m most proud that she remained a kind and down-to-earth person. She never let fame go to her head, preferred costume jewelry to diamond rings and loved to shop at Goodwill. I inherited my mom’s fondness for thrift shops and her fascination for dark mysteries. But true crime was her thing. I wanted to carve out my own niche and sought out mysteries of another sort.
After writing dozens of articles for national magazines in the early 1990s, I published a number of bestselling books with paranormal themes. When my mom and I traveled together, I accompanied her to trials to photograph the cops and killers for her books, and afterward I investigated haunted places for my books. Sometimes she went with me. She, too, had a fascination for ghosts and possessed a strong sixth sense. I had no desire to move into her territory, though I did come close with one book. When the Ghost Screams—True Stories of Victims Who Haunt covered cases of haunted locations where the earthbound spirits of victims have been seen wandering.
It must be a combination of DNA and osmosis that has finally compelled me to embrace my mother’s genre and write A Tangled Web. I was also influenced by hundreds of emails from my mom’s readers, some who’ve practically begged me to write a true crime book. Ann had authored two books each year for the last two decades of her career. She has been gone since the summer of 2015, and her readers desperately miss her books. I won’t pretend to have my mother’s expertise on crime or expect to replace her in her readers’ hearts, but she was a wonderful mentor to me, and I’ve tried to honor her with a carefully researched story that I hope will help me to carry on the family tradition of saving lives. Sheriff Hansen did it first as he protected his community from criminals, and Ann did it with her books that warned about the dangerous people who walk among us. Nothing made her happier than the letters from readers, thanking her for saving their lives. Because of her books, they recognized danger when they saw it headed their way.
With this story, I hope to warn readers about crimes my great-grandfather could not have imagined as he embarked upon his police career over a century ago. In his pre-computer world, cyber stalkers did not yet exist. Murderers have not changed since the 1920s when he began arresting them. They remain as cold-hearted as they were in the 1960s when my mother first began to write about them. Killers have not changed, but their methods have. They now have an arsenal of electronic devices they can use to dupe us, but we can outsmart them by learning their tricks.
INTRODUCTION
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
when first we practice to deceive.
—SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771–1832),
SCOTTISH NOVELIST, PLAYWRIGHT,
AND POET
A SPIDER, SOME BELIEVE, cannot be trapped in its own web. While rare, a careless spider can be caught in the net it constructed to capture prey. The fact it happens so seldom is a mystery that scientists have yet to solve. One theory suggests that the nimble creatures avoid becoming tangled in their webs by dancing lightly across the sticky strands with only the hairs on the tips of their legs making contact with their clever traps.
While A Tangled Web is not the story of an actual spider’s web, it does follow the wicked journey of a predator who showed no more compassion for victims than a spider shows for the hapless fly caught in its web. The