Ann Rule

SEATTLE — True-crime writer Ann Rule signed a contract to write a book about an unknown Seattle serial killer six months before he was identified as her co-worker Ted Bundy, who shared the night shift at Seattle’s Crisis Clinic.

The woman credited by her publisher with reinventing the previously male-dominated true crime genre by focusing on the victims has died at age 83.

Rule wrote more than 30 books, including “The Stranger Beside Me,” which profiled Bundy.

Rule and Bundy met in 1971 and their relationship was mostly a grim coincidence, except he later confessed to eight murders in the state of Washington.

The FBI says Bundy started to kill attractive college students in Washington state around 1974 and was first arrested in 1975, but he later escaped and continued killing.

Bundy was executed in Florida’s electric chair in 1989 for the 1978 rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl. He had been found guilty of two other 1978 killings and suspected in 20 to 40 others. Authorities said he confessed to at least 23 of them in the hours before his execution.

Rule’s book on Bundy — her first and most famous — was published in 1980. She corresponded with him until his death.

Ann Rule, who went to work briefly at the Seattle Police Department when she was 21, began writing for magazines including “True Detective” in 1969.

Rule said she was fascinated by killers’ lives, going back to their childhood to find clues about why they did what they did. But her books focused on victims, and she became an advocate for victims’ rights.