Pamela Schumacher
Pamela is the primary first-person narrator of the book. She is writing from the perspective of the present-day looking back in time to the 1978 murderous assault at a sorority house on the campus of Florida State University. At the time, Pamela was the president of that chapter of the sorority which included a group of female students living in a shared space they call simply The House.
One night, an unknown male breaks into The House and commits a series of vicious and sexually violent attacks. Some girls survive with serious injuries while a couple of the sisters are not so lucky. As one of the survivors, Pamela is able to provide an eyewitness account of the suspect, but it is of little investigative use because the sighting was short, shadowy, and stressful.
The bulk of the narrative is Pamela’s account of the subsequent trial of the suspected murderer who was accidentally captured by police a few hundred miles away to the west where he was literally less than ten miles away from Alabama border. Pamela’s account of the trial is from a perspective that knows far more about “the Defendant” than was known or reported at the time.
The Defendant
The suspect who is arrested for the murderous rampage at The House is a very thinly disguised version of real-life serial killer, Ted Bundy. In fact, it is almost incorrect to refer to the character known in the book only as “the Defendant” as a fictional character. The narrative presents a historically accurate portrait of many of the recorded facts of Bundy’s life.
The purpose and intent of this novelized version of Bundy’s story is to undermine the myth which has grown around that story. Pamela’s narrative specifically attacks elements of that mythic construction. She questions almost the entirety of the Bundy claim to infamous celebrity including his physical attractiveness, his charm, his intelligence, and even his celebrated role acting as counsel in his own defense.
Bundy’s trial is presented as an exercise in misogynistic patriarchal defense of the male. The judge presiding over Bundy’s case is taken to task for helping to create the myth of Bundy as the “bright young man” which is the foundation of his myth. This characterization by the judge of a man he is about to sentence to death row also serves as the ironic tweak which gives the novel its title.
Ruth Wachowsky
The other first-person narrative in the story is that told by Ruth Wachowsky. Ruth’s story takes place several years before the attack at The House in Florida and on the other side of the country. Bundy began his infamous crime spree in the Pacific Northwest as the unknown figure behind a series of mysterious disappearances of young women.
One day Ruth goes missing at a location that is one of the most infamous in the story of Ted Bundy. Like multiple real-life victims, Ruth is enjoying a day at crowded Lake Sammamish when she, too, disappears without a trace. Ruth has had a very hard life in her twenty-five years and the only person committed to finding out what happened to her is a friend who only recently came into her life, Tina Cannon.
A few years later, Tina will hear the news about the assault at the FSU sorority house. The first name of the defendant will be the same as that which had been associated with one of the prime suspects in the disappearances of women around Seattle. Tina puts two and two together regarding the possible answer to solving the mystery of Ruth and reaches out to Pamela.
