The dark side of love is no fairy tale.... And while we may like to believe that crimes of the heart only victimize those who aren't careful, this collection of must-listen accounts will convince you otherwise. America's #1 true-crime writer, Ann Rule reveals how lovers become predators, how sex and lust can push ordinary people to desperate acts, and how investigators and forensics experts work to unravel the most entangled crimes of passion. Extracting behind-the-scenes details, Rule makes these volatile relationships utterly real, and masterfully re-creates the ill-fated chains of events in such cases as the ex-Marine and martial arts master who seduced vulnerable women and then destroyed their lives...the killer whose calling card was a single bloodred rose...the faithless wife who manipulated and murdered without conscience...the blind date that set the stage for a killer's brutality...and more. In every case, the victim -- young and innocent or older and experienced -- unknowingly trusted a stranger with the sociopathic skill to hide their dark motives, until it was too late to escape a web of deadly lies, fatal promises, and homicidal possession. Ann Rule (1931–2015) wrote thirty-five New York Times bestsellers, all of them still in print. Her first bestseller was The Stranger Beside Me , about her personal relationship with infamous serial killer Ted Bundy. A former Seattle police officer, she used her firsthand expertise in all her books. For more than three decades, she was a powerful advocate for victims of violent crime. Chapter One One of the reasons Sandy's -- as she was called -- murder disturbed me so much was because I knew her uncle. Her mother's brother, Jerry Yates, was a detective sergeant in the Crimes Against Persons Unit of the Seattle Police Department. His unit investigated homicides, robberies, sex crimes, and missing persons. Yates was in charge of the Missing Persons Division. He was an extremely kind man who worked hard to find loved ones other people had lost, and everyone who knew Yates was saddened that he would lose his own niece to an unknown killer. Although homicide investigators do their best to solve every case assigned to them, the men who had worked beside Jerry Yates for years vowed they wouldn't stop until they saw his niece's killer brought to justice. But it would prove to be a baffling case marked by bizarre circumstances. In the beginning, the vicious senseless murder of a 16-year-old girl seemed to be only a slight challenge to experienced detectives. But so many suspects who might have killed Sandy Bowman emerged, clouding the probe with false leads that led only to frustrating dead ends. Sandy Bowman was her maternal grandfather's favorite of all the offspring. Benjamin Yates was a hardworking Kansas native born around the turn of the century, and he had suffered many tragic losses in his life. His first wife, Ida Murphy Yates, died eight years after their marriage, leaving him with three children to raise. He was remarried to Neva Taylor Yates and they had eight more children. Sadly, their two baby sons, Earl and Donald, both died when they were only a year old, and another son, Ray, succumbed to leukemia at the age of 13. James, Jerry, Shirley, Dorothy, and Beverly grew to adulthood. Every family deals with grief in its own fashion, and perhaps because Benjamin and Neva had to bury three of their children, they covered up their pain, kept their sorrow to themselves, and seldom discussed their losses. Dorothy Yates married Roy Maki in 1947 three months before her sixteenth birthday. Dorothy, was a native of Kansas who married a young Washington State man. Beverly Yates was 16 when she married Hector Gillis Jr. Dorothy Maki was only 17 when her first son, William, was born, followed by Robert in just eleven months. Two baby boys in one calendar year meant that Dorothy had her hands full. Sandy came along four years later, and she was a sweet-faced baby girl with dark hair and huge eyes, someone her mother could dress up in frilly clothes. Sandra Darlene "Sandy" Maki was born on December 3, 1952, the adored baby sister of her brothers William and Robert Maki. The Yateses were a close family, and Dorothy's sisters, Beverly and Shirley, had children -- who, along with Jerry's, played with their cousins often. When the children were young, they lived near each other in the Ballard section of Seattle, the neighborhood populated mostly by Scandinavians -- Swedes, Danes, Norwegians, and Finns. Fishing ships docked in Ballard in between trips to Alaska and the Pacific Ocean, and both commercial and private boats had to move through the Ballard Locks to reach the open sea. Ballard was a low-crime area and so was most of the near north end of Seattle in the fifties and sixties. Ballard was on the western end of 45th Street, and the University of Washington was on the eastern. In between were the family neighborhoods with Craftsman-style houses and loc