Look. I need to talk about something that's been bugging me since mile marker 12 on the I-17 this morning.
Ann Rule - or Andy Stack, because she originally published this under a pseudonym, which is its own whole thing - spends a solid chunk of this book detailing how Randall Woodfield was this golden boy. Star athlete. Green Bay Packers draft pick. The kind of guy your titas would point at and say "why can't you date someone like that." And the book just... sits in that dissonance. Doesn't rush past it. Doesn't sensationalize it. Just lets you marinate in how wrong everyone was about this man while forty-four people ended up dead.
I was not ready for that on a Tuesday morning after twelve hours of trauma bay chaos.
The Investigative Slow Drip That Actually Works (Mostly)
Here's what Rule does better than almost any true crime writer I've encountered: she builds the police investigation like she was embedded with the task force. The I-5 corridor cases - spanning California up through Washington - get laid out methodically. You're following detectives as they start connecting seemingly random assaults and murders across state lines, and Rule doesn't skip the tedious parts. The witness interviews. The dead-end leads. The jurisdictional headaches of multi-state investigations in the early '80s before anyone had a shared database.
This is where the 10-hour runtime earns its keep. But it's also where some listeners are going to check out. There are stretches - particularly in the middle third - where the pacing drags. You're deep in procedural detail, waiting for the next break in the case, and it feels like Rule is being thorough to the point of testing your patience. I'm someone who reads patient charts for a living, so detailed documentation is literally my love language. But even I had moments where I thought "okay, I get it, move forward."
The court trial sections toward the end pick the energy back up. Rule's access to trial details - the forensic evidence, the testimony from survivors - is genuinely chilling. She handles victim accounts with a respect that a lot of modern true crime podcasters could learn from. That same careful handling of real people's worst moments is what drew me to T Is for Trespass — different format, but the same sense that the author understood the weight of what she was writing about.
Merlington Behind the Wheel (Mine, Not Hers)
Laural Merlington is a reliable narrator for this kind of material. She's got that steady, measured delivery that works for investigative true crime - you trust her voice the way you trust a colleague who's giving you report at shift change. Clear, organized, not trying to be dramatic for drama's sake.
But here's my issue. There are moments in this book - the victim accounts especially, the sections written from the killer's perspective as Rule reconstructed it - where I wanted more emotional weight in the delivery. Merlington stays controlled, almost clinical. And look, I appreciate clinical. I live clinical. But when you're describing what Woodfield did to these women, a little more vocal tension wouldn't have been out of place. It occasionally feels like she's narrating a documentary rather than inhabiting the horror of what actually happened.
She doesn't stumble on the Pacific Northwest geography or the legal terminology, which - as someone who has screamed "THAT'S NOT HOW DEFIBRILLATORS WORK" at her own windshield - I notice and appreciate. No audio glitches. Clean production. She's professional. I just wanted her to let me feel the weight a little more.
What Rule Gets Right About Monsters in Plain Sight
The thing that stuck with me - the thing I was still thinking about while making scrambled eggs for my kids - is how Rule handles the "how did nobody see this" question. Because I work in a trauma center. I have seen the aftermath of violence that neighbors describe as "he seemed so normal." Rule wrote this book in the early '80s, and she was already articulating something we still struggle with: that predators don't look like predators. Woodfield was charming. Athletic. Had women who genuinely loved him.
Rule doesn't let the reader off the hook with easy answers. She doesn't paint Woodfield as obviously monstrous from birth. A Head Full of Ghosts does something similarly uncomfortable — it refuses to hand you a clean explanation for the evil at its center, and I was just as unsettled finishing that one. She shows you the system that kept giving him chances - the early arrests that didn't stick, the parole board that released him, the women who didn't report because who would believe them about that guy? As someone who's done more sexual assault forensic exams than I care to count, that pattern hasn't changed in forty years. I yelled at my dashboard during this one. Not about medical inaccuracies. About everything else.
Who Needs This and Who Doesn't
If you're an Ann Rule completist, this is essential. If you want a true crime audiobook that prioritizes investigation over sensationalism, this delivers. If you need fast pacing and a narrator who performs rather than reports, you might want to bump the speed to 1.25x and know that the middle section requires patience.
Content warnings are serious here - sexual assault, graphic violence against women, abuse. This is not background listening. This is not bedtime listening. This is focused, eyes-on-the-road, processing-heavy material.
Charting My Final Note
Solid true crime from an author who respected both the investigation and the victims. Merlington is steady if slightly reserved. The pacing issues are real but not dealbreakers. Carlos asked why I was sitting in the driveway for ten extra minutes. I told him I was finishing a chapter. I was actually just sitting with it. Some books need that.
