Ann Rule's Sloppy Storytelling

Editor's Note, July 28:For a list of corrections to this story, along with copies of the documents used in writing it, click here and scroll down to where it says "UPDATE." 

Charlie Powell

Liysa Northon, 49, in the yard at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Oregon.

Related Content

• What Rick Swart Failed to Tell Us About This Week's Cover Story (UPDATE)
  July 28, 2011
• True-Crime Writer Ann Rule Plans Book on Josh Powell Murders
  February 23, 2012
• Comment of the Day: True-Crime Writer Ann (Does Not) Rule
  February 24, 2012
• Hackers Are Gathering in Seattle This Weekend and It's For Your Own Good
  December 3, 2010
• "Occupy" Facebook Supporters: Seattle (20,000 ) Loses to Sesame Street (35,000 ), But Beats Bellevue (1)
  October 20, 2011

More About

• Ann Rule
• Birmingham
• Rick Swart
• Domestic Violence
• Crime and Law

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Weekly Newsletter: Our weekly feature stories, movie reviews, calendar picks and more - minus the newsprint and sent directly to your inbox.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

Editor's Note, July 22: The story below, written by Rick Swart, is about true-crime author Ann Rule, and the facts he claims she didn't get right in her book Heart Full of Lies, an account of the 2000 shooting death of Oregon pilot Chris Northon. In Swart's telling, Northon's wife Liysa, who is currently serving a 12-year sentence for the murder, was failed by her original lawyer, an overzealous district attorney, and Rule, who claimed that Liysa was not the battered wife she'd portrayed herself to be, but rather a sociopath who'd concocted tales of abuse as a justification for shooting her husband.

What Swart failed to reveal to us is that he's now engaged to Liysa. Here's how we found out.

On July 21, at 2:36 PM, Rule wrote a note to her fans about the article. She described it as "deliberately mean" and "full of inaccuracies." She also wrote this: "There is a back story concerning the article's author that I cannot reveal at the moment-it will knock your socks off when my lawyer allows me to tell you about it."

Seeing as how I had edited Swart's piece, I wasn't surprised by Rule's response. But I did want to know what Swart thought Rule's big reveal might be. So at 3:52 PM that same afternoon, I e-mailed him and asked if there was anything he hadn't told us about the story.

It wasn't until 1:21 AM on July 22 that Swart returned my e-mail and told me what he thought Rule might be hinting at: "What she'll probably say is I'm in love with Liysa Northon (which is true)."

By 7 AM this morning, after I'd read Swart's e-mail, Rule's readers had already found out about Swart's love affair. They pointed to a new post on Liysa's web site, where a just-posted picture showed the inmate and Swart in an embrace with the caption "This is my fiance' (sic) Rick Swart."

Here's where we need to backtrack for a second. Swart is a former third-generation publisher and editor of a small town newspaper in Oregon. He grew up in the business. He had 25 years of experience as a journalist. But he was still unknown to us when he first pitched Liysa's story.

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.

When Swart turned in his first revised draft it was 12,000 words long. He and I had hours of phone conversations and exchanged many e-mails in order to get the beast down to a manageable size. All along, he swore to the veracity of the facts his article contained--facts that were backed up by primary documents and interviews--and his true reason for writing Liysa's story: he was just a curious journalist who'd found a great yarn.

Had we known, as we now know, that Swart and Liysa were engaged that disclosure would have been made explicit in the story. This morning I contacted Swart by phone to ask him why he didn't tell me about the enormous conflict of interest. This is how he explained his decision to withhold that information from us:

"It's a freelance piece first of all. I'm selling you a product. So it's not like you're my boss and you need to know my personal life. My background is in community newspapers where we write about people we know, people we have relationships with, all the time. We don't have the luxury of big staffs. So we're not as able to have those arms-lengths relationships I guess...I'm willing to have all this fall squarely on my shoulder."

It should go without saying that this is not a satisfactory response. If you're writing about your fiancee, or anyone with whom you have a relationship, you tell the reader. Community newspaper, national newspaper, alt-weekly. It doesn't matter.

As for the salient facts of the story, Swart says those haven't changed: "The story is true. I turned over every rock. I was as diligent as I could be to make sure it was factual, true, and even fair. I've been doing this for 25 years. And it's not the first time I've had to write about someone I known or people I care about. I don't get as hung up about that as a lot of people do. I understand why they do, but I don't necessarily agree with that philosophy. It's my personal life and I'd like to think I'm able to separate that from my craft."