The Stranger Beside Me is a 1980 autobiographical and biographical true crime book written by Ann Rule about serial killer Ted Bundy, whom she knew personally before and after his arrest for a series of murders.

Starting in early 1974, a series of brutal murders of young women in the Seattle area shocked the city and gained major attention.

Bundy was considered a possible suspect from the summer of 1974, when the unidentified killer was observed by several witnesses talking with two young women who later disappeared at Lake Sammamish State Park.

The killings in Seattle stopped, but young women in Utah, Colorado and Idaho began disappearing and being murdered under similar circumstances to the Seattle-area crimes.

He did not mention that in August 1975 he had been arrested and charged with the November 1974 kidnapping of a young woman who had been abducted by a man who posed as a police officer in Murray, Utah.

This incident here is narrated in third person, but not omnisciently, as the perpetrator is not identified as being Bundy, thus keeping the documentation of these events in-sync with the knowledge available to officers at the time Rule wrote.

The turning point came after forensic dentists testified that Bundy's teeth matched the deep bite mark on the body of one of the Florida State victims.