An Oregon judge has dashed a convicted killer's hopes of an image makeover, ruling that she cannot sue true-crime author Ann Rule for portraying her as a "cold-blooded murderer" and “evil sociopath.”

Liysa Northon claimed in a $1 million suit filed in 2004 that Rule defamed her in “Heart Full of Lies,” a book about the slaying of her husband. She is serving 12 years in prison for manslaughter after pleading guilty to shooting Chris Northon in the head under "extreme emotional disturbance."

The book, Northon said in her complaint, damaged her reputation because she has always insisted "that she was the victim of domestic violence at the hands of Chris Northon and that she acted to protect herself and her children."

But U.S. District Judge Michael O. Mosman earlier this month granted an anti-SLAPP motion to strike in which Rule argued, among other things, that the plaintiff could not show malice and had no reputation left to damage.

"I don't have in front of me the showing of actual malice or even anything pointing that way sufficiently to meet plaintiffs' burden" under Oregon's anti-SLAPP law, Mosman said, according to the transcript of a Feb. 5 hearing.

The law required Northon to present "substantial evidence" that she would prevail on the merits of her case. Having failed to do that, she may now have to pay an award of attorney's fees to Rule.

“She wanted to relitigate whether she was a battered woman who killed in self-defense,” says Rule attorney Duane A. Bosworth (Davis Wright Tremaine, Portland). “But that legal ship had already sailed.”

Northon's lawyers did not present evidence of battered woman syndrome at her criminal trial. But she argued in a court brief that even after her conviction, “[S]he still had her good reputation ... because people viewed her as a battered woman and were sympathetic.”

“[O]nce Ann Rule’s book was published and Liysa was portrayed as a cold- blooded murderer for money and a sociopath with additional mental disorders, her reputation was forever marred and most of her professional and personal contacts have turned away from her,” she said.

But Mosman agreed with the defense that the allegedly false statements could not have caused Northon any more harm than what she had done to herself by pleading guilty to an intentional killing.

In a defense brief, Rule said e-mails taken from Northon's computer show “she planned her husband’s death in advance of the camping trip” and “was at the very least exaggerating her claims of abuse if not fabricating them entirely.”

Northon wrote a friend from jail asking her to destroy the computer. “My Gateway could hang me because e-mails are forever on hard drive,” she said.

Mosman also dismissed the claims of Northon's father and brother, who alleged Rule falsely depicted them as accessories to murder.

By Matthew Heller
2/21/07