True Crime Author Ann Rule Brings Celebrity and History to Bellevue Police Foundation Fundraiser

Ann Rule, the best selling true crime author with policing in her family history and more than two dozen books, recounted with humor how far police work has come since the 1950s to a breakfast crowd at the Bellevue Police Foundation fundraiser on Friday 

Rule, who spent a short time with the Seattle Police Department in her 20s, described how police women often were called to be social workers and babysitters at crime scenes, forensic scientists had fiber analysis and blood type matching as the latest technology, and how one criminologist speculated that someday suspects would be identified with one drop of blood -- about 15 years before DNA testing became commonplace.

"We all thought, 'Yeah, sure you can,'" she said.

"I don't know how people solved anything then," she joked.

She said that today, police women have risen to the ranks of chief -- including Bellevue's Linda Pillo -- and that cases that had been considered cold for four decades are now being solved because of today's science and technology.

"Things are just getting so much better," she said.

"I'm writing about cases that I wrote about as unsolved in the 1970s," cases that are now getting solved with DNA, she said.

Rule spoke after Bellevue police officers thanked donors for the latest tools purchased by the Bellevue Police Foundation, created in 2009 to raise money to buy equipment and pay for programs for the .  Since it was founded, the Bellevue Police Foundation has contributed more than $147,500 in equipment and training to the police department.

About two percent of the Bellevue Police Department budget is discretionary, so purchases of state-of-the-art equipment using the regular budget is often out of the question, foundation president Jim Melby said.

The foundation has purchased equipment such as crime analysis software ($24,637), police K-9s Diego and Roc ($17,376), a T-3 Electric Vehicle used for patrolling downtown Bellevue ($13,166), and other equipment.

Bellevue police Maj. Mike Johnson, also the emcee for the breakfast fundraiser, said that that the Bellevue Police Foundation equipped the department with iPads during start of , which he said has been a big help in many other types of investigations.

As well as collecting and transcribing interviews with witnesses and victims in the field, the police forensic artist's services can now be used remotely at any time of day by communicating with investigators and witnesses through the iPad, he said.

"They will work together to develop a sketch in the field," Johnson said. The sketch can be instantly sent out to other law enforcement.

"It's an amazing tool for that purpose alone," he said.

Rule, who said she wrote her first true cime stories under a male pen name because editors thought a woman wouldn't be taken seriously, wrote her first book "The Stranger Beside Me" about serial killer Ted Bundy.

Rule said still is working on two new books involving recent cases, including the hanging death of  -- ruled as suicide but disputed by her family, and a conclusion which Rule said she doubted -- which came right after the death of six-year-old Max, the son of her pharmaceuticals mogul boyfriend, Jonah Shacknai, at the Spreckels Mansion in Coronado, Calif. (Read more about that case in Coronado Patch.)

Rule is also working on a book about the Josh and Susan Powell case, Puyallup natives who moved to Utah whose family came to a tragic end. Susan Powell disappeared in December 2009 from their home in Utah, and her husband early this year.

Rule said had sworn not to write stories involving dead children because it was upsetting.

"When I started, the children were still alive," she said. "But I promised the grandparents, so I'm going forward with it."

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