I must confess that while I know of Ann Rule by reputation, I’ve never read any of her true crime books straight through. I frankly prefer the documentary approach to history, not the novelized or highly personalized. When the Seattle Weekly recently published an article in which the author attacked her account of the murder of Chris Northon by his wife, Liysa, I expected a reasoned examination of the facts that at least took into account the clear premeditation of the act while supporting a different conclusion than Rule’s in “Heart Full of Lies.” I vaguely recall the October, 2000 killing in an Oregon campground; a man dead, his wife claiming to have shot him in self-defense, except that the circumstances were not just highly, but clearly, suspicious. But instead of reason, I read something far worse that what he accused Rule of: A 100 percent, unadulterated propaganda yarn spun by the perpetrator of the crime and her partisans—including the writer, more than he let on. The story was almost entirely a litany of unsupported allegations made by Liysa Northon and her “best friends,” treated as absolute fact by the writer. If Rule could be accused of not taking Liysa Northon’s own story seriously enough, we can hardly blame her. After repeating Northon’s allegations in the most lurid terms imaginable, the writer, Rick Swart, weaves the tale of Chris Northon’s last days on Earth in the following manner, as “remembered” by his wife:
“Then, on the night of October 8, 2000, a year after she'd first filed a restraining order, Liysa, Chris, and their youngest son went camping in the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Being in the woods always seemed to put Chris in a good mood, so Liysa calculated that if she would ever be able to convince him to go to rehab—both for alcohol and drug abuse; Liysa says Chris used pot, cocaine, Vicodin, and the sleeping pill Restoril to excess—now was the time. Liysa screwed up her nerve. "You go to treatment or else," she says she told Chris. It was a remark she would immediately regret. Enraged by his wife's ultimatum, Chris hit, choked, and nearly drowned Liysa in the freezing waters of the nearby Lostine River. When the couple's 3-year-old cried "Don't kill Mommy!" Chris momentarily backed off. But the abuse wasn't over. Later in the night, an even more inebriated Chris told Liysa that he wasn't going to lose his job nor his family because of her complaints to the police. He told her that if anything happened, he was going to cut up her and the kids so that no one would ever be able to find their bodies. It was at that point, says Liysa, after Chris threatened her and her boys with dismemberment, that she finally decided to leave him for good. In her words, she "wasn't going to let the morning come" when someone else would find her dead. After the sun went down, a terrified Liysa snuck to the couple's Ford Explorer, reached into her camera bag, and pulled out a .38 revolver, given to her by a concerned relative. Her hands still numb from the icy river, she fumbled the weapon while trying to load it, causing it to misfire. Afraid the discharge had alerted Chris, she hurried back to the campsite to grab her son. Running in darkness toward the child, she heard Chris moving around. It sounded, she says, as if he was coming after her. So she fired once, turned, and ran away holding her son. She didn't stop. She didn't check to see if the shot she had fired had hit Chris. "I just ran," she says… After firing at Chris, she drove two and a half hours to her brother's home in Walla Walla and told him about the blind shot she had just taken. While Liysa took a bath and went to the ER, her brother called a friend who worked for a local police department and had formerly served as a Wallowa County sheriff's deputy. Shortly after Liysa went to see the former deputy, he received a call from his old boss, the Wallowa County Sheriff. Chris was dead. The shot she had fired had hit him in the temple. The deputy had no choice but to arrest Liysa for her husband's murder.”
Putting aside the question of why Northon set-up this “camping trip” when she allegedly had a restraining order on her husband, and was “deathly” afraid of him, what isn’t mentioned here is the real reason why the sheriff had “no choice” but to arrest Northon for murder: Because that is what the crime scene rather strongly suggested. Chris Northon was not killed by a “blind shot.” His naked body was found zipped tight inside a sleeping bag, with a bullet hole in his temple shot at point-blank range—so close that the bullet went straight through his head, driving feathers from the sleeping bag into the ground. The bullet had traveled at a straight vertical trajectory—that is, straight down at a sleeping man. He had also been heavily sedated—so much so that forensic specialists stated that he would have died from that if he had not been shot first. He had “consumed” enough of the sleep aid Restoril—so potent it is a controlled substance only available by subscription—that forensic toxicologist Robert Middleberg stated that it was enough to potentially cause a coma, and death. And Liysa Northon certainly came “prepared” if that plan failed: After fleeing the campground, Northon dropped-off a bag with a friend; inside, police found stun guns and handcuffs.
What are we to make of this? It is obvious that if we can plainly see that Northon felt no compulsion about lying about the manner of her husband’s death—suggesting a compulsive, self-convinced liar who seems not to even to take into consideration that the forensic evidence would be at direct odds with her story—why should we not approach the rest of her story with guarded skepticism? “Evidence” suggesting drinking and a possible “struggle” near the lake was present, but the compressed timeline just might suggest that Northorn had first drugged her husband, shot him, and then set-up an elaborate scene to fool investigators. What she forgot was the convincing death scene part. Because Swart had plainly not done research that might draw another conclusion than the one he drew—or rather the tale Northon drew—and showed contempt for the reader by allowing a plain lie to pass as fact, I was prepared to be angered by the rest of his propaganda speech. In a foul mood, I wrote the following comment:
“Just because Liysa Northon is your typical white yuppie doesn't mean her story is any more credible than Rule’s; after all, she is the one who has the motive to lie. Frankly, the mythology of domestic violence is, like sexual crimes, has become an all too convenient accusation that everyone is supposed to believe just by its very utterance. When the "perpetrator" is dead, such as in this case, there is a certain convenience that he is not alive to engage in a he said-she said discussion. The brutal beast and passive victim of popular mythology is the exception, not the rule. Frankly, if Northon found an easy mark in a gullible Swart, that is how the story usually goes.”
I didn’t know the extent of Swart’s gullibility until later, but we’ll get to that later. I have written here a few times on the domestic violence question, which has been portrayed in an entirely one-sided manner; since the law and activists choose only to see one side, where the one is all guilty and the other all-innocent, they ensure that it continues to be a problem. However, you cannot speak sense to the true believers, and I heard from them:
“You don't seem to be awfully good at reading. Northon's story is vastly more credible, because it's supported by a great deal of documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony that Rule chose to ignore. Most importantly, Rule clearly misrepresented the truth when she claimed that it was impossible for her to interview Northon. Thus, I have no reason to put faith in anything Rule says.”
“One of them had significant evidence of whether there was domestic abuse or not, and it wasn't Rule. You went into the article already having decided what you were going to take out of it. That makes you a bigot - and you're an ill informed one as well.”
“Domestic violence is all too real and obviously you have no experience with it. it is not a myth. must feel very good to be sitting in the judgement seat. Get Real.”
“Very scary comment. "Mythology" of domestic violence? No, it's not the "exception," I know of more than one woman (and man for that matter) that has experienced violence in a relationship; and faced disbelievers like you."
I didn’t say I “disbelieved” that domestic violence occurred, but who’s paying attention when all one see’s is red? I responded to these individuals by pointing out that there is nothing that can be proven in this case that makes this justifiable homicide, and if you think murder is ‘”OK” in some cases, well, I’ll have to disrespectfully disagree. Furthermore, the few credible studies on the issues show that this is not the one-note act the activists continuously sell it as; these studies show that women instigate the circumstances that lead to domestic violence at least as often as men, and are the perpetrators as much as 35 percent of the time. Yet even when the female is the perpetrator (or both are), police generally only arrest the man, since that is the politically-correct thing to do. In an apartment I once lived in, I heard a scuffle going on in the room next door. I then heard a knock on my door; a scrawny black guy wearing nothing but his shorts ,covered with scratches from head to toe, was standing there. He wanted to use my telephone to call the police; it didn't surprise me--his girlfriend was a big woman within an even bigger attitude problem, the kind of person who always threatens if you with violence if you say something amiss. I had to admit the man looked like something out of a TV sitcom; I don’t doubt the police made the same observation, if they came at all. And, by the way, I’m not entirely ignorant personally of what it is like to be on the receiving end.
It also should be pointed out that the witnesses to the alleged domestic violence against Northon were few and far between; her young son by a previous marriage—who “obviously” didn’t tell the story he was told to by mommy--usually seemed to be “hiding” whenever the acts were allegedly committed. Neighbors claimed to have heard arguments—but it was always Liysa Northon they heard shouting. “Witnesses” claimed to have seen bruises on Northon, but it wasn’t suggested that these were induced from the supposed “ugly scenes” in public; it has been pointed out by others that Northon was also the “athletic” type, and women do more easily bruise than men do. The mark on her face when arrested could have been self-inflicted, given what we actually know to be true what actually happened on that fateful night. We also know that Chris Northon—an airline pilot—did not enter into this marriage willingly; when asked why she was forcing herself in marriage on a man who really didn’t want to, Northon allegedly laughed and said it was for the “free tickets to Hawaii.” According to Rule, Northon was self-obsessed, and thought little of her husband’s own career, expecting him to be obsessed with hers and her seemingly endless needs—“warts and all.” These "warts" included mood swings that this lifelong bachelor apparently found difficult to take or to understand. I don’t see any reason not to believe her.
In any case, Liysa Northon has already had plenty of opportunities to tell her side of the story. She even has a website that she has been allowed to maintain while in prison; she’s obviously has had nothing but time and taxpayer money to perfect her version of events. I’m not saying that domestic violence did not occur; but this is a woman who had already discarded two husbands, and while she apparently liked her Chris Northon’s “tool,” from the start of their marriage she found nothing positive to say about her husband, and seemed to have a special glee in telling everyone about his shortcomings. I can’t imagine what it was like to live with such a person.
The fact is that outside her partisans and domestic violence activists, there have been few takers of Northon’s story. A 122-page brief was submitted on her behalf before a district court in Oregon, claiming that Rule had “defamed” her. The court threw-out the case, stating that it wasn’t enough for the plaintiff to claim bias; the plaintiff had to prove that statements made in Rule’s book were false, and the plaintiff failed to do so. In fact, the court pointedly criticized the failure of Northon’s complaint to cite a single sentence that could be construed as “false.” Northon’s disingenuousness and avoidance of uncomfortable facts further irritated the court:
“Among many other things, plaintiffs wholly fail to address that Liysa Northon smuggled a letter out of the jail, asking her friend to get rid of her computer, and saying ‘Destroy it ASAP. My Gateway could hang me because e-mails are forever on hard drive. Get it away ASAP. Soon. Please. Before someone searches your place’ (Book, p. 279-80); that Liysa Northon instructed her father to destroy his own computer with e-mails she had sent him, promising to buy him another one (id. at 280); that a few weeks before her husband was killed, Liysa Northon had asked her best friend for poison, Valium or sleeping pills, and where any swift-running rivers were (id. at 308); that she wrote an e-mail which appeared to have been to her father stating that ‘I am going to have to end it one way or another soon. There have been some really ugly public scenes, and my friends at the pool look at my bruises and don’t know what to say. Drowning is the best in terms of detection -- but I want a gun for backup and then we’ll have to get a sure-fire disposal method. Both of us will have to throw the computers away because I just read they can trace e-mail on hard drives’ (id. at 318); that she requested a silencer in an e-mail, apparently to her father (id. at 319); and that her own attorneys concluded that the prosecution would have a field day demonstrating that Liysa Northon had been planning her husband’s death for a long time, probably more than a year (id. at 329). Plaintiffs also do not address the fact that while Liysa Northon swore to Governor Kitzhaber that “my children and I were under constant threat of death” (RuleDecl. 28 and Ex. 18 thereto, previously filed), she chose to go camping alone with her husband in one of the most remote areas of Oregon and in the most remote camping space available. They further do not address that she concedes that she shot and killed her husband after already being inside her vehicle, and returning, instead of escaping, to shoot her husband while he slept. It is this evidence, together with many other inconsistencies and many other facts described in the Book, which form the basis for the Book’s conclusions. Plaintiffs simply avoid addressing any of this evidence.”
Further:
“Plaintiffs assert that plaintiff Liysa Northon was not properly portrayed as a ‘battered woman.’ (Pls.’ Resp. at 2, 14.) As the Book describes, Liysa Northon’s own defense attorney determined, based on all the evidence, that she could not be portrayed at trial as a battered woman; she just did not possess characteristics described in the voluminous studies on the subject. (Birmingham Aff. at 11-18.) Moreover, evidence recovered from her computer indicates that plaintiff was at the very least exaggerating her claims of abuse if not fabricating them entirely. (Birmingham Aff. at 9, 16, 21-22, 26.) And Judge Price concluded that ‘Ms. Northon had concocted a plan to make the killing look like self defense by a battered woman.’” The court may also have asked why, in the face of all these claims, did not Northon seek a divorce. The simple answer, given Northon's seeming insatiable lust for material goods now, was that a divorce would prevent her from getting her hands on Chris Northon's life insurance pot.
The 9th Circuit Court would subsequently throw-out the case with a brief dismissal, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case at all.
But what about the “big” secret I alluded to before? The Seattle Weekly belatedly discovered that Swart is the latest fish about to be snared by Northon at the altar, and not just that: “What we found out about Swart was that he was as controversial as you might expect the guy in charge of a small-town newspaper to be. He'd once been sued for defamation by a U.S. Senate candidate for an unflattering editorial, a case that was dismissed and a ruling that was upheld on appeal by the Oregon Supreme Court. He'd also been pilloried for taking the side of loggers over environmentalists, and waging a one-man campaign to get a local high school to stop using a mascot that was offensive to Native Americans.” He'd made friends. He'd made enemies.” But—“he appeared to have a long history of telling the truth.” Or maybe not.
Ann Rule was more blunt about the situation on her website—including the double-dealing of Northon with her “current” beau:
“Well, I guess the Seattle Weekly did some latter-day fact checking and found out that Rick Swart, the author of the malicious and libelous article about me that appeared on July 20th, hadn’t told them everything. He is, indeed, engaged to Liysa. He apparently doesn’t know that Liysa was also planning to marry another man at the same time she was seeing him (on visitor’s day). The other man, whose privacy will be protected, has scores of letters from Liysa planning their wedding. He contacted me because she was beginning to scare him. Chris’s best friend and I are going to meet with him soon. I also heard from Rick’s wife of twenty years who was understandably heartbroken that her marriage suddenly blew all to pieces because of Liysa. As far as I can tell, all of Rick’s information came from Liysa. And he apparently believes her. I have boxes and boxes and boxes of documentation about what really happened. You who have read the book will remember that Liysa set up the camping trip, and she made intricate preparations before they left for the river. She said she left the campsite once because she was “afraid” of Chris, and then came back. Why would she come back if she was so terrified? And poor Chris could not have made a move toward attacking her; he was unconscious, and zipped up to his chin in an Eskimo sleeping bag. He never knew what hit him when she fired a bullet DOWN into his forehead. There are dozens of facts in the book that explain what really happened, too many to mention here. If you haven’t read Heart Full of Lies, I hope you will. I feel most sorry for Chris’s parents who have suffered again and again from Liysa’s manipulations, lawsuits, and horrible things she says about them. And that was all after she killed their only son. I feel sorry for Chris’s son who will never know his dad–although Chris’s fellow pilots have been wonderful as substitute dads, along with Don King, who is raising the boy and Liysa’s older son.”
For myself, I’m willing to take the slings and arrows of Northon’s partisans and the fanatical activists who see everything in black and white. The truth does matter to me.
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