A question for all you true crime readers:

[murielm99]

I am in the middle of reading Anne Rule's "But I Trusted You," Volume 14 of her Crime Files. I have finished the first case, about Teresa Gaethe-Leonard.

In the concluding pages, Rule comments that the convicted person (I am trying to avoid spoilers) joined infamous felons in Purdy, at the Washington Corrections Center for Women. Those felons included Diane Downs, Mary Kay Letourneau and Christine Marler.

The first two are indeed infamous. But who is Christine Marler? I have Googled her and found nothing.

Is she famous in the Northwest? Rule seems to draw many of her stories from that area, since she lives there. I hope someone here knows.

[XanaDUer]

1. Not sure who she is

but thanks for the heads up about the newest Rule book. If I find out who she is (I have been an inveterate TC reader now for about 30 years, and I've never heard of her), I will post it here.

Did you go onto Rule's page and see if there in something on there about her?

XD

[XanaDUer]

2. Nope, nothing

We could email Ann Rule and ask her.

[frogmarch]

3. Ann Rule's fan site

http://www.annrules.com

There's a guestbook at the site. Maybe you could ask there who Christine Marler is.

There's also an email address for Ann Rule: [e-mail]

I too googled inmate Christine Marler and had no luck. :shrug:

[mitchum]

4. Here ya go...

she was a criminal profiled in this previous Rule collection, but the name was changed from Cynthia to Christine (Why?)
A Rose For Her Grave by Ann Rule


"The third story in this book is about Wanda Touchstone. She had been recently divorced from her wealthy husband Lew and moved to Seattle to start a new life. She was gunned down in a parking lot in the University District in Seattle in 1980. Her killer was Cynthia Marler who was hired as a hitman. But the person(s) who hired her have never been brought to justice"

[TedP]

5. Cynthia Marler

I can tell you some things about her. You can get most of this information from the archives at the King County Courthouse in Seattle. She was apparently a drug addict who was hired by someone in the Bay Area (she was from there, I think) to kill Lew Touchstone's estranged wife. It is a very sad story because clearly, the people who hired her didn't care if she got caught. Obviously, she wasn't very competent as a "hitman." They just wanted to pay someone as little as possible to kill that woman, and as an addict, she was willing to do it. I believe they offered her $10,000. Apparently, based on what I read recently, they also offered 4 acres of land. But the point is that they probably knew there was a good chance she'd get caught.

Now the really tough question is why Touchstone would hire such a poor "hitman." She was caught within several hours and later confessed to the crime and identified who hired her. I heard from a knowledgeable source that Touchstone was probably a protected witness against organized crime. So apparently, he assumed he could get away with murder on the cheap, and he did. The court records were sealed during the trial and weren't made public again for a few years. I can't help but feel sorry for Marler to some extent, because she was used and discarded by the people that hired her. Someone else should go to jail for that, too.

The really creepy thing about the story is that Touchstone tried to go to his wife's funeral. Her family wouldn't let him in.

But apparently his wife wasn't totally innocent, either. There was evidence she was greedy and tried to take a lot of his money when their marriage fell apart. She was something like 30 years younger than him.

I think this story shows why we need to change our approach to drug addiction. We need to recognize it's a medical problem instead of thinking of it as something that can be eliminated by punishment. There must be many crimes committed in our society by addicts who are just trying to get money for their drug habit. If we did what some European countries do and treat it as a medical problem, addicts could get "maintenance" doses of the things they're addicted to. Many of those people in Europe actually hold down regular jobs in spite of their addictions.