generous. After Rule's death in 2015, Victoria Beale wrote a piece for The New Yorker titled "Too Close to Ted Bundy" in which Beale accused Rule of making poor ethical choices in reporting the story and her involvement in Bundy's life after he went to jail, including sending money to Bundy while he was in jail. "Rule's role shifts from being inadvertently involved with a serial killer to an author considering how lucrative her access could be," Beale writes." Legal dispute After the release of Rule's 2003 book Heart Full of Lies, which chronicles the manslaughter conviction in the 2000 shooting death of Liysa Northon's husband Chris, Northon filed a defamation lawsuit against Rule and her publisher. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit in January 2011. While still in prison serving 12 years for the killing, Northon's fiancé Rick Swart, a freelance writer, wrote a front-page article for the Seattle Weekly newspaper that accused Rule of "sloppy storytelling" in Rule's Heart Full of Lies book. Swart did not disclose in the article that he was engaged to marry Northon, nor did his editors at the paper know of the relationship. In response to the article, Rule in 2013 filed a libel suit against the newspaper and the writer through attorney Anne Bremner, stating that Rule had been defamed by the article's criticism, causing damage to her reputation. In February 2014, a judge dismissed Rule's claims, finding that there were no false or defamatory statements about her in the article. The judge then awarded the defendants $10,000 each in damages plus attorney fees and costs. Rule appealed the judgment, and on June 22, 2015, the Washington state Court of Appeals vacated the earlier judgment against Rule and remanded the case to trial. After Rule's death in July 2015, as of January 2017, there had been no further developments in the case. Personal life and death Rule lived in Normandy Park, Washington and had four children, including author Leslie Rule. Rule's family also included five grandchildren and a foster son. She was married to Bill Rule, from whom she was divorced in 1972. In April 2015, King County prosecutors charged Rule's two sons with theft against their mother. Neither man was jailed. The charges against the sons were dropped on August 14, 2015, following Rule's death. Senior Deputy Prosecutor Amanda Froh wrote to the court, "Given the recent death