By Gary Fletcher

Observer Staff Writer

ENTERPRISE A book just released about the October 2000 murder of an Hawaiian Airlines pilot by his wife at the Shady Campground on the Lostine River has received an "early good response," author Ann Rule said.

"Heart Full of Lies" reveals background, detail and developments that will be new even to those who attended the July 2001 trial in Enterprise and watched Court TV coverage.

For instance, police later learned that a friend who testified on behalf of the defendant, Liysa King-Northon, did not reveal on the stand that Liysa had left a backpack containing stun guns and handcuffs with her after the murder. The friend also admitted that Liysa had asked her how to get poison and sleeping pills, according to Rule.

Before reporting the incident, King-Northon drove four hours, through several towns and across the state line to reach the friend’s house in Dayton, Wash., where her oldest son was staying.

"So many people don’t even know what happened,” said Jeanne Northon, mother of the victim, Christopher Northon, King-Northon’s husband. She and Christopher’s father, Richard Northon, live at Wallowa Lake.

"Ann Rule did a lot of investigating. We’re so pleased that she took it upon herself and got the truth out," Jeanne Northon said.

"It was painful for us to read some of the details of what Liysa did to Chris, but the book was well done. The parts about Chris sound just like him. The title is excellent. It’s all about Liysa’s lies."

The book’s ending is a foregone conclusion. Liysa King-Northon pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter under extreme emotional distress, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

However, interest is maintained throughout the book by the tension between the two sides of the story, and the use of flashbacks to bring background to the development of the investigation.

Rule appeared Tuesday on the CBS Early Morning Show to kick off her nationwide tour of her latest of 22 books.

The tour starts in New York and will work across the country to Hawaii, where Liysa and Christopher Northon were thought to have lived an enviable lifestyle in paradise.

Rule’s book describes Christopher, a young man growing up on a ranch in Bend and becoming a pilot.

His bride-to-be was a high school cheerleader. Her father was president of Walla Walla Community College, and her mother, at 15, had been the youngest queen ever of Chief Joseph Days.

Liysa DeWitt, who later became a successful freelance photographer, seemed to have been a Walla Walla Sweet popular like the tasty onions of her hometown. Rule, however, paints her as more of a Wa-Hi Blue Devil her high school’s mascot.

Rule plans to appear in Portland Nov. 2 and wrap up the tour in time to be back at her home on the shores of the Puget Sound by Thanksgiving. The 376-page hardcover book includes 32 photos and costs $26.

Rule thinks it will be spring before she returns to Wallowa County for a book signing at local book stores like the Joseph Book Shop, operated by Tom Hutchison, one of the people acknowledged in "Heart Full of Lies."

"What impressed me about this book is the astonishing dichotomy between the two representations of the same event," Hutchison said.

"I did what I had to do to save myself and my child," Liysa, then age 39, and a petite 5-foot-5 said at her trial, about shooting in self-defense her 44-year-old, 6-foot-2 husband. She said she was abused by him during their four-year marriage.

Others who described him as being of high character, had not seen the other side of the Jekyll/Hyde personality that Liysa described.

In the book, Rule describes a manic-depressive part of the wife’s makeup, and reveals why her attorney, reputed to be among the best trial lawyers in the nation was reluctant to use a battered-wife-syndrome defense.

Portland attorney Pat Birmingham told the jury that he would help them figure out the "jigsaw puzzle."

However, Rule in her book makes the pieces fit and in some places provides a different perspective than that provided from New York on Court TV.

Initially, Rule did not want to do the story.

"I was approached by so many people about this case, but I told them I was so busy on other books, I didn’t have time," said the author of 19 New York Times bestsellers.

"I support women victims," Rule said. "I had written four books about women killed by their husbands.

"Then I got a letter from a man questioning why only women are portrayed as domestic violence victims. ‘It can happen to men too,’ he wrote.

"One of Chris’s pilot friends, Joe Rhys-Wilson, called me saying that not only is Chris dead, but his reputation is ruined in the area where his parents are now living," Rule said.

"At first I heard such conflicting stories, it fascinated me," Rule said. She was hooked, and began investigating.

"This took longer to research than most of my books," she said.

"Whomever I write about, it’s almost as though I come to know them better than some of their acquaintances do. It’s like a homicide cop. It’s his duty to find out anything that might explain (this) crime that defied all reason."

"I called some men from earlier in her life, and I saw a pattern of her wanting a man so bad; then when she got him, she didn’t want him anymore."

Christopher was a bachelor until age 40 when he married Liysa.

"He’d had a lot of girlfriends. I did not find one female friend that could imagine him hurting anyone, much less a woman," Rule said.

However, Liysa’s brother, Tor DeWitt, a Walla Walla chiropractic physician, contends that Christopher was abusive to both Liysa and a previous girlfriend named in the book.

Rule tried to reconstruct the couple’s lives. She concluded that "they were like two trains going in opposite directions on the same track, headed for disaster," she said.

"My training is to look for physical evidence," Rule said. In this case it

didn’t match up with the story the defendant provided.

"Liysa said that he was drunk and tried to drown her. The autopsy result showed that he’d had enough sleeping pills to drop a horse."

In the end, Liysa’s prolific writing did her in. In what Rule calls a "Perry Mason" moment, two days into the trial, anonymous tips provided last-minute evidence, including Liysa’s e-mails. One to her father read, "Drowning is the best in terms of detection, but I want a gun for back up. …"

Her father first gave her a stun gun that had been her brother’s, then the father gave her a pistol that he’d had since 1989, Tor DeWitt said.

Chris Northon was found in a mummy bag zipped up over his face, dead from a single bullet through the temple from a short-barreled .38-caliber revolver.

"If she was so deathly afraid of him, why would she want to go camping in such an isolated spot with no help around?" Rule said.

"When I put together the totality of everything she said and the times it just didn’t add up," Rule said.

"A psychopathic personality that would go into unprovoked rages" is how Liysa’s father, Wayland DeWitt, described Christopher.

"Ann Rule has done an incredibly disappointing disservice to battered women and children everywhere by her statement that Liysa was not a battered wife and that she made up all these stories for several years so that she could collect his insurance money," DeWitt said.

"When I saw the first page (dedicated to ‘Chris’s little boy…’) I knew this book was written for the Northons. Everything they told her to say, she wrote," DeWitt said.