Free The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule

strongest friendships of my life with those men.
    For my part, I never "burned" them, never took anything "off the record" and used it in a story. I waited until trials were ended, or until a defendant had pleaded guilty, careful that my reporting would in no way prejudice a prospective jury before trial.
    They trusted me, and I trusted them. Because they knew I was trying to learn everything I could in the field of homicide investigations, I was often invited to attend seminars given by experts in law enforcement and, once, a two-week homicide crime scene course given as part of the King County Police basic police school. I rode shifts with the Washington State Patrol, the K-9 units, Seattle Police and King County patrol units, Medic paramedics, and spent 250 hours with Marshal
    5, the Seattle Fire Department's arson team.
    I suppose it was an odd career for a woman, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Half the time I was an everyday mother; the other half I was learning about homicide investigative techniques and how to spot an arson fire. My grandfather and uncle had been sheriffs in Michigan, and my own years as a policewoman had only enhanced my belief that lawmen were "good guys." Nothing I saw as a crime reporter tarnished that image, even though in the early 1970s policemen were frequently referred to as pigs. Because in a sense I had become one of them again, I was privy to information on cases being actively worked-as I had been with the Devine homicide. I didn't discuss this information with anyone outside the police world, but I was aware of what was happening in 1974. The year had bareiy begun when there was a shocking attack on a young woman who lived in a basement room of a big old house at 4325 8th N.B., near the University of Washington. It happened sometime during the night of January
    4th, and it was bizarre enough that Detective Joyce Johnson mentioned it to me. Johnson, with twenty-two years on the force, dealt with crimes every day that would upset most laymen, but this assault had disturbed her mightily.

THE STRANGER BESIDE ME
    49
    Joni Lenz, eighteen, had gone to sleep as usual in her room, a room located in a basement accessible from the outside by a side door that was usually kept locked. When she didn't appear for breakfast the next morning, her housemates assumed she was sleeping in. By midafternoon, however, they went down to check on her. Joni didn't respond to their calls. As they approached her bed, they were horrified to see that her face and hair were covered with clotted blood. She was unconscious. Joni Lenz had been beaten with a metal rod wrenched from the bed frame, and when they pulled the covers away, they were stunned to see that the rod had been jammed viciously into her vagina, doing terrible damage to her internal organs.
    "She's still unconscious," Joyce Johnson told me a week later. "It breaks my heart to see her parents sitting by her bed, praying she'll come out of it. Even if she does, the doctors think she'll have permanent brain damage."
    Joni did beat the odds. She survived, but she had no memory of events from ten days before the attack until she awoke from her coma, and she was left with brain damage that will stay with her for the rest of her life.
    She had not been raped-except for the symbolic rape with the bed rod. Someone in the grip of a maniacal rage had found her asleep and vented that anger. Detectives could find no motive at all: the victim was a friendly, shy girl who had no enemies. She had to have been a chance victim, attacked simply because someone who knew she slept alone in her basement room, had perhaps seen her through a window, found the basement door unlocked.
    Joni Lenz was lucky; she lived. She was one of the very few who did.
    "Hi, this is Lynda with your Cascade Ski Report: Snoqualmie Pass is 29 degrees with snow and ice patches on the road; Stevens Pass is 17
    degrees and overcast with packed snow on the roadway . . ." Thousands of western Washington