to carry a gun. That was a privilege reserved for male officers. Still, she loved her job and was heartbroken when her career in law enforcement was cut short. She’d been on the force about eight months when the annual physical rolled around, and she flunked the eye exam. The sympathetic examiner allowed her to step up close to the chart, but she still couldn’t see the big E. Legally blind without her glasses, she’d be helpless if they were knocked off during a struggle. She was asked to surrender her badge. Devastated, she couldn’t bear to drive past Seattle PD and took detours for years.
She got married at twenty-three and had four kids by the time she was thirty-two. My father was stricken with what would turn out to be a fatal skin cancer and couldn’t contribute much to support the family, so my mother became a freelance writer, publishing a dozen articles each month in detective magazines. Her old friends at the Seattle PD welcomed her back and gave her access to confidential files. To enrich her reporting, she went back to school to study police science, enrolling in classes such as Crime Scene Investigation and Arrest, Search and Seizure. (I took these same classes in 1978, not because I was planning on going into the field, but because I found them interesting and chose them as electives.)
In 1971, Ann was not only a busy mother, she was a full-time writer and part-time student. I took it for granted then, but now I wonder how she found time to volunteer. She would later say it was something she felt she had to do. She was partly motivated by her guilt over the fact she’d been unable to rescue her only sibling. At age twenty-one, Don was overcome with a depression his family couldn’t help him shake. News of his fate appeared on the front page of the December 31, 1954, edition of the San Mateo Times, beneath the headline: “Wiz” Student Can’t Face Life, Dies Suicide. He was discovered in his carbon monoxide–filled car, parked with the engine running. In his last note, Don Rex Stackhouse apologized, said he loved his family, and asked for his body to be given to Stanford Medical School where he was an honor student.
While Ann couldn’t help her brother, she hoped to help other suicidal people and saw an opportunity to do that at the Crisis Clinic, a nonprofit telephone hotline for troubled people. She signed up to volunteer and went through the training program. Teams worked in pairs, answering phones around the clock at the Crisis Clinic headquarters, a somewhat creepy and otherwise empty Victorian house on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.
Ann was given the Tuesday-night shift, and her hotline partner was a work-study law student, paid an hourly wage. He was twenty years her junior and reminded her of the brother she’d lost. She developed a sisterly affection toward the man who sat beside her and was so gentle with callers. Together they saved many lives. If one partner discovered they had a suicide in progress, they’d signal the other to alert authorities to trace the call, a process that could take over an hour in the 1970s.
I remember my mom fixing sandwiches to bring to her Crisis Clinic partner because she worried Ted Bundy was too skinny. Yes, Ted Bundy! Today his name is almost synonymous with the term “serial killer,” but he wasn’t infamous back then. Ann considered him a good friend, and they had long conversations about their personal lives on slow nights when the phones didn’t light up.
Eventually their time together on the hotlines ended, but they kept in touch and saw each other at the Crisis Clinic’s 1973 Christmas party. Soon after, Seattle was on high alert because of the sudden and inexplicable disappearances of several local teen girls and young women. Everyone was mystified because the victims weren’t the type to take risks and had vanished from populated areas, often in the light of day. Detectives suspected a cult was sacrificing maidens. Ann submitted a proposal about the disappearances to a publisher and got her first book contract. There was, however, a condition. If the case was not solved, the book would not be published.
The case, of course, was solved, and the bizarre coincidence would have been too contrived to be believable in fiction. What are the chances a writer would contract to write a book about an unknown killer only to learn that the culprit