A Rage to Kill

by Ann Rule

  On June 5, DePalmo and Homan talked to Melvin’s cousin and asked him how he had happened to be asking for Marcia. He told them that he had been to her apartment house about midnight on Saturday night, but that no one would buzz the door to let him in. Then he’d called her repeatedly, but the phone was always busy. He had gone so far as to call the operator—who had told him that Marcia’s phone was off the hook. He had worried about it sporadically, until he finally went back on June 3 and learned from the manager in the apartment house that Marcia had been murdered.

  Asked if he were in the habit of seeing Marcia often, Ditty said he wasn’t. “I guess I hadn’t seen her for about two months. I just suddenly thought of her and dropped by at midnight.”

  Now they either had one man who had been back twice on one night to try to get into Marcia Perkins’s apartment, or two different men who had called on her between midnight and six A.M. on the Friday night/Saturday morning she had probably been murdered. Marcia was alive between four and six; the manager had listened in to the intercom and heard her voice. Ralph Ditty, Melvin Jones’s cousin, seemed sincere and volunteered to take a lie detector test if the detectives wanted him to do so. They did, and made an appointment with him for just that.

  They also had an estranged husband who seemed remarkably understanding about his legal wife’s boyfriends, but he seemed to be in genuine mourning and he was very open with the detectives. But most of all, he had a solid alibi for the early morning hours of May 29. He had been home taking care of their children. He told them what he had been able to put together about Marcia’s last “steady” boyfriend, whose name was Chuck Lyons.* He said that Lyons didn’t drink at all. He was a teetotaler whose main interest—beyond Marcia—was in cars. In fact, Lyons owned four, one a black Lincoln. Marcia had been fond of Lyons, according to her husband, but she had vacillated about her future with the car buff. “She thought he had no plans and no purpose in life,” her husband said, “and they didn’t have much in common. Marcia worked hard but she liked to party.” He described Lyons as being too much of a straight arrow for Marcia, even though he was very attracted to her.

  But still, questions arose. If Chuck Lyons thought so much of Marcia, why hadn’t he come around to see her? Why hadn’t he gone to her funeral? That didn’t make sense. The woman had been dead for a week, and no one knew if Lyons even knew it.

  None of the people the Seattle detectives talked to knew where Chuck Lyons lived, although the detectives were told that one of his relatives was supposed to own a barber shop on Rainier Avenue South. Homan and DePalmo went there and found the shop closed. Marcia’s husband was at a loss to help the investigators until he remembered a letter that Marcia had written to him. “You know,” he said, “she talked about Lyons in that letter, and she said that she and Lyons would like to have a baby boy and name him ‘Beaufort Charles Lyons, Jr.’ ”

  While the name “Chuck Lyons” had sparked no information on the police computers, the name “Beaufort Charles Lyons” did. Homan and DePalmo found a man by that name who owned a classic 1962 black Lincoln, among other cars, and worked at a Seattle marina. The detective partners walked along the bobbing docks of the marina until they found Chuck Lyons’s boss.

  “Chuck was off over the three-day weekend, starting the 29th,” the man said. “But he came back to work on June 1st, and he’s been here regular ever since.” Lyons was not, however, working the present shift, so they asked that he call police headquarters when he appeared.

  When “Chuck” Lyons showed up for work, he called DePalmo immediately, his voice edgy, having gotten a message from the Homicide Unit. He clearly had no idea why they were calling him. When Benny DePalmo told him that Marcia was dead, he gasped, “Oh no!” and seemed to be stunned. He asked how she had died and, when he was told that she had been murdered, he said he would be in to talk to detectives right away.

  This was the fourth male who had been closely linked to Marcia Perkins—her ex-husband, Melvin, Melvin’s cousin—and now, Chuck Lyons. All of them sounded seriously upset and shocked. Chuck was as good as his word and walked into the fifth floor Homicide Unit within half an hour. To the trained eye of the detectives, he seemed to be barely fighting back tears.

  “I haven’t seen Marcia since about 9 P.M. on the Wednesday before Memorial Day,” he said softly. “I didn’t even try to call her over the weekend because she said she’d probably be going to Montana to see her sister. Then when I tried to call on Tuesday and Wednesday [June first and second], the phone just kept ringing on and on. I figured she was still in Montana or on the way back.”

  “You didn’t read about it in the paper?” Homan asked him.

  “Nope. Haven’t read the paper, or even caught the TV news, I guess. All this time, she’s been dead—I didn’t go to her funeral. I didn’t even know she was dead,” he said brokenly.

  They talked to Chuck Lyons about people in Marcia Perkins’s life. He said he knew Melvin Jones, but only as an acquaintance. He remembered, however, that Melvin had already picked up his stereo set by Wednesday night, May 26. He wouldn’t have been coming by to get it on the Friday before Memorial Day, since he didn’t have any other belongings at Marcia’s.

  Some homicide cases have too few suspects, and this one was floundering because there were so many suspects. Still another one surfaced when an attorney friend told Duane Homan that Marcia Perkins had been the object of another man’s obsession. Marcia worked at the University of Washington Hospital, and there had been a patient there who was convinced that he was having an affair with her. He talked on and on about Marcia. The patient, who was a prisoner at the Monroe Reformatory, was in the hospital because he’d been stabbed in the back in a prison fight. He was partially paralyzed.

  “He’s a little weird,” the lawyer said, “and this affair was all in his head, but I thought you ought to know.”

  It wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities that a man, slightly deranged, should have been in love with his beautiful nurse. Stalkers have hounded women literally to their deaths because of imagined romantic connections. Had the prisoner somehow found where Marcia lived and gone to her apartment, begged to be let in, and then turned violent when she offered him no more than a cup of coffee? It sounded plausible until Homan and DePalmo found that the prisoner had been back in the reformatory by the Memorial Day weekend, and every minute there was accounted for.

  Marcia’s sister, who had flown to Seattle for her funeral, had the most vital information. She told the detectives about her relationship with Melvin Jones. He had once been her boyfriend, and the three of them—herself, Melvin, and Marcia—had indeed lived together. “He used to call Marcia ‘Sister Dear,’ and I know he’d been coming around to see her,” she said. “When I talked to her by phone from Montana on Wednesday night [May 26] she said, ‘That damn Melvin is here again.’ I told her just not to let him in, and we continued to talk.”

  Marcia had apparently been having trouble with Melvin Jones. She told her sister that he’d come by her apartment four days earlier at three in the morning. “She said he was really drunk and he was pressing the call buttons to her apartment. She didn’t let him in because he sounded so drunk.”

  “What does Melvin drink?” Benny DePalmo asked.

  “Bacardi rum and Miller beer. He does weird things when he’s drunk.”

  “Was he involved with Marcia?”

  She shook her head. “No. No. He never had a physical relationship with Marcia. He always considered her his ‘sister.’ ”

  Sister was the word they were looking for. Melvin Jones was emerging as the investigators’ best suspect. The man who had buzzed Marcia’s apartment the morning she was killed had referred to her as “Little Sister.” And the liquor found at the crime scene was a bottle of Bacardi rum and a can of Miller High Life beer. The detectives knew now that Melvin had tried before to gain entrance to Marcia’s apartment during the wee hours of the morning when he was drunk. It seemed now that she had probably giv
en in to his pleas—and with tragic consequences—on May 29. The only thing they really needed now was some direct physical evidence that would tie Jones to the murder scene.

  If only the apartment manager had opened his door that morning to get a look at the man who stumbled toward Marcia’s door. But he hadn’t—and it looked as though the only eyewitness was dead.

  Benny DePalmo learned one more thing about the unknown killer when he talked with officials at the telephone company. Marcia’s phone had been busy when friends called during the first hours after her murder. That would have happened if it were simply off the hook. But he had witnesses who said it had rung normally later that morning and no one answered. Phone technicians said that could only have occurred if the cord was yanked from the phone itself or from the wall. Obviously, someone either had waited for hours beside Marcia’s dead body and yanked the wire as he left, or returned later to do it. DePalmo suspected that someone had returned to her apartment to clean it up several hours after the murder.

  But now Melvin Jones suddenly became elusive. He could not be found for further questioning. Days later, when the investigators finally located him, he was even more confident and self-assured than he had been when he talked to them the first time. He explained that he had spent the evening of May 28 (Friday) at a party at the University of Washington with a friend and the friend’s girlfriend, a pretty American Indian girl named Jeanie Easley. He had drunk a great deal of rum, he said, and returned home long after midnight.

  “Ralph woke me up,” he said. “He wanted to know Marcia’s telephone number.” Melvin said he would be happy to take a polygraph test to verify his movements at the time Marcia was murdered. Ralph Ditty took the polygraph test first, on June 14. He passed, although he appeared nervous on questions having to do with any possible guilt on the part of Melvin Jones. Detectives thought perhaps Melvin had told Ralph that Marcia was dead and Ralph had gone to her apartment on Saturday night and again the following Wednesday to assure himself that Marcia’s murder was not an alcoholic dream on Melvin’s part.

  Jones himself had so little response to the lie detector leads that they might as well have been hooked up to a hollow log. All the polygrapher got were horizontal lines across the tracing paper. Melvin apologized. Without thinking, he had taken a drug to ease the pain of his bad back. That explained it. The drug he’d taken would effectively blunt responses enough to render polygraph readings useless.

  Melvin denied that he’d ever had sex with Marcia or that he’d killed her. He did admit going to her apartment before six o’clock on the morning of May 29 after leaving Jeanie Easley’s apartment, but he said Marcia wouldn’t let him in, so he’d gone home. With every questioning session, his answers changed slightly, but he was adamant that he would never hurt a hair on Marcia Perkins’s head.

  The friend who had gone to the dorm party with Melvin and his date, Jeanie, verified that Melvin had spent the entire evening with them at the party, and that Jones had left them sometime very, very early in the morning of May 29. Melvin had been so intoxicated that he’d passed out in Jeanie’s apartment. “Jeanie and I had to prod Melvin to get him to wake up and ready to leave her place,” he said.

  By this time Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo had worked eighteen-hour days on the homicide investigation for two weeks, and all they had been able to do was eliminate one suspect after another. Most of the also-rans had started out looking promising. They had a gut feeling about Melvin Jones, but they had not one shred of physical evidence placing him at the scene of Marcia Perkins’s death. It was not from lack of trying, or skill: the detective partners had an enviable reputation as meticulous crime scene investigators, but someone had been clever enough to erase the very things they needed for an arrest.

  Six days later, Seattle homicide detectives were called out on another sexually motivated murder. The name of the victim would shock even them.

  At 4:33 P.M. on Tuesday, June 22, a worried woman had knocked on the door of her daughter’s apartment on Bellevue Avenue East. She hadn’t heard from her since the weekend, which was unusual. Her twenty-one-year-old daughter was employed at the Seattle Indian Center as an Emergency Assistance adviser but, when her mother had called her there earlier, she learned that her daughter hadn’t come to work that morning, nor had she called to say she was sick. The young woman was a very dependable employee who never failed to report in before.

  Her daughter’s name was Jeanie Easley.

  When no one responded to her knocks, Jeanie’s mother looked toward the front windows. She saw that the drapes on Jeanie’s apartment were still drawn. Jeanie only kept her drapes closed at night. She pounded again on the door, but no one answered. Always careful about invading her daughter’s privacy, her concern now overrode any hesitancy to intrude. She tried the door and found to her surprise that it wasn’t locked. She walked into the foyer.

  A horrendous sight greeted her, something no mother should ever have to see. Jeanie lay spread-eagled in the living room which was littered by the debris and the dirt from crushed and broken plants and pots. It looked as if a tremendous struggle had taken place. A mammoth split-leaf philodendron barely covered the girl’s near-naked body. Without any real hope, her mother felt for a pulse and found none; the skin on Jeanie’s wrist was cold to her touch. Her mother knew she had been dead for a long time. She walked leadenly to the phone.

  Detective Sergeant Jerry Yates and Detectives Baughman and Marberg sped at once to the scene, a scene that would prove to be sadly familiar to them.

  The lovely Indian girl was nude except for a pink bathrobe and a torn bra pushed up around her neck. Her apartment was in utter chaos: clothing had been dumped on the floor, food was mixed in with the garments, drawers stood open, and Indian jewelry and crafts were scattered around in piles. It was as if someone had torn through the apartment looking for treasure, heedless of the disorder he created as he raged. Even as the detectives surveyed the damage, a radio still played loudly and jarringly. The scene was very like that in Marcia Perkins’s apartment twenty days earlier.

  Jeanie Easley had had a lovely face and figure; now her skin was marred by bruises and scratches and there were vicious marks around her neck where her robe’s belt had been tightened. Despite the disarray in Jeanie’s apartment, it was apparent that the place had been kept spotlessly clean. There was no dust, kitchen appliances gleamed and all the white walls were sparkling—except for the east wall where the detectives saw two discernible hand prints. A palm print to a homicide detective is like a glint of gold to a Forty-Niner; Tim Taylor, a forensic technician from the Latent Prints Section, took careful precautions to preserve the two hand marks that seemed so out of place on the clean wall.

  Jeanie Easley had either been about to eat or to serve someone else when she was killed; two cooked hamburger patties rested in their congealed grease on a plate on the kitchen counter.

  While Billy Baughman sketched the apartment,George Marberg took dozens of photographs. Then Jeanie Easley’s hands were encased in plastic to protect any evidence that might still cling beneath her fingernails, and her body was removed by King County deputy medical examiners to await autopsy.

  They saved the dirt from the uprooted plants, too; there was a good chance some of it still clung to the killer’s clothes or shoes.

  The similarities between the murder of Jeanie Easley and that of Marcia Perkins fairly shouted for attention: both victims were young, attractive women, both had worn robes that were pulled up around their shoulders, both had been strangled and beaten, and both women had been left staged in the classic rape position of widespread legs. Each of the women had been left close to the front door of her apartment, and both of the apartments had been ransacked and the victims’ wallets stolen.

  Also telling was the indication that Marcia Perkins and Jeanie Easley had been preparing food or coffee for a guest: two cups with instant coffee for Marcia, and the two hamburger patties for Jeanie. They had lived in close proximity to on
e another, their drapes had been drawn, and in each case the radio had been left on at high volume.

  Melvin Jones had known both young women. It was more than a grotesque coincidence that Jeanie, the second murder victim, had been Melvin’s alibi for the night Marcia was killed. It was Jeanie’s apartment where Melvin was seen last—inebriated and drowsy—after the party at the University of Washington on the final night of Marcia’s life.

  The viciousness of the attack on Jeanie Easley was noted during the autopsy on her body. She was slender, five feet, six inches, and weighed 125 pounds, but someone far stronger than she had beaten her so severely that a dental bridge was lodged far down in her throat. Like Marcia, Jeanie had been raped and sodomized.

  Jeanie Easley’s death was a great loss to her family and friends. They described her as a tireless worker for good, a young woman obsessed with bettering the life of her people. Beyond her work in the Emergency Assistance Program at the Indian Center, she had made weekly trips to the Monroe Reformatory to try to help Indian prisoners prepare themselves for the world outside when they were paroled. Her apartment reflected her pride in her heritage and her desire to overcome the oppression that Indians sometimes encountered. Posters, calendars and pictures of Indian leaders decorated her walls; one reading “The Earth and Myself Are of One Mind” depicted an heroic ancestor.

  Jeanie had had a green thumb, too, and her apartment had been full of plants. It was ironic that her killer should have chosen to drape her body with the plant of which she’d been proudest. It was a new acquisition, according to her mother, who had given her the split-leaf philodendron a week before—on June 15.

  Her mother told detectives that she had seen Jeanie last on Sunday, June 20, when she had driven her daughter home after a visit, a regular weekend routine. Her boyfriend, Linc Kitsap*, told Detectives Ted Fonis and Dick Sanford (who had taken over primary responsibility for the Easley case) that he last saw Jeanie on Monday night at five o’clock when he’d driven her home from work. As he dropped her off, he’d noticed a tall man who looked to be about twenty-five to thirty waiting near the front of her building. Jeanie had not spoken to the man, or even acted as if she knew him. She had just gone quickly into her apartment.