A Rage to Kill

by Ann Rule

  Kitsap said Jeanie had no enemies. The whole concept seemed alien when he thought of Jeanie; everybody loved her. She was a very careful woman, he said, and she’d always kept her doors locked. “She wouldn’t let anyone in unless she checked to see who it was first,” he said quietly.

  “You have a key to her apartment?” Sanford asked.

  The young man shook his head. “Her mother’s the only one who has a duplicate key.”

  Everyone from Jeanie’s boyfriend to her landlord attested to her meticulous housekeeping. “She was the type who picked up an ashtray as soon as you finished a cigarette and took it to the kitchen and washed it,” Kitsap recalled. The detectives asked him what the apartment had looked like the last time he had been inside—on Sunday morning.

  “Were the walls clean?”

  “Always.”

  “You didn’t see any hand prints on the walls?”

  He looked surprised. Hand prints? He was sure he would have recalled if there had been any hand prints on the wall then. “Jeanie wouldn’t have allowed it,” he said. “There was nothing on that wall but a mirror, two posters, a macrame hanging—no stains of any kind.”

  As they had in the Perkins case, the Seattle police investigators began a canvass of neighbors. A man in the apartment directly above Jeanie’s quarters told Sanford that something roused him from his sleep very early in the morning of June 22. Between 1:20 to 1:30 A.M., two short screams for help had burst through his dreams. “I thought they’d come from the street, but when I looked out my window, I didn’t see anyone out there. I listened, but everything was quiet, and I finally went back to bed.”

  The couple who shared an adjoining wall with Jeanie’s apartment had heard nothing at all during the night of June 21–22.

  Two young men came forward and told the police that they had spent several hours visiting with Jeanie on Monday night, June 21. It was the first day of summer, and the longest day of the year and, in Seattle, that meant it was light until well past ten. Lots of people in the Broadway and University districts were out that Monday night, visiting.

  Detective Dick Reed interviewed the men who volunteered the information about being with Jeanie on Monday night. They told Reed that they had dropped in around 7:30 and had stayed until 10:30 or 11. Jeanie was busy around her apartment, talking to them while she cleaned. She told them she planned to leave on her vacation in a few days, and wanted to leave her place clean so it would be nice to come back to. She had also confided in them about a man she was “afraid” of. He wasn’t a complete stranger, she said, but she didn’t know his name.

  “She said, ‘I told him not to come back again,’ ” the men told Reed, but she hadn’t gone into any more detail than that. No one had knocked on her door while they were there and Jeanie had no phone, so there were no calls.

  A coworker at the Indian Center came up with a suspect’s name and a possible motive. He said that Jeanie had been instrumental in catching and convicting an obscene phone caller who had plagued the Center in January and February of 1976. He explained, “Jeanie kept the guy on the line for half an hour and he was trapped. She testified in court against him.”

  The investigators checked and found that the man had been convicted of making obscene calls on the basis of Jeanie’s testimony, but he was reported to have left the Seattle area.

  All of the detectives involved in the two murder investigations met to discuss the many commonalities in the two cases, and the fact that Melvin Jones’s name kept surfacing in each. Both Jeanie and Marcia had had very full social lives and many admirers, but at length, the investigators had eliminated every possible suspect except the husky ex-convict.

  Jeanie Easley’s friend, the man who had brought Melvin along to the dorm party on May 28, was interviewed again. Although he worked with Melvin at an upholstery company, he said they had met originally at the Monroe Reformatory. They asked him about Melvin’s mood during the first part of June, and the man recalled that Melvin had been at work regularly the week after Marcia Perkins died. “He mentioned once that he had to take a polygraph because he had some friend who died,” the man said. “But it didn’t seem like he was upset about it or anything.”

  “Melvin ever talk about wanting to date Jeanie, or about going to see her after you all went to the party together?” Sanford asked.

  “No, not that I can remember. He never said anything about her after that night.”

  While the circumstantial evidence was pointing more and more at Melvin Jones, technicians and criminalists at the Washington State Crime Lab were evaluating evidence. There was nothing from Marcia Perkins’s apartment. The scene had just been too clean. But the investigators were excited when Tim Taylor called with the news that he had “made” Melvin Jones’s palm prints.

  “Those are his prints on the wall of Jeanie Easley’s apartment.”

  It was enough probable cause for an arrest.

  Ten minutes later, Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo pulled up in front of the home where Melvin Jones lived with relatives. He was outside working on his car, and he squinted at them as he wiped grease from his hands. He agreed to accompany the detectives to headquarters, but he did not seem unduly alarmed. When informed of his rights and told they wanted to discuss the case with him, Jones asked, “Which case?”

  “Marcia Perkins. What about that party you went to on the 28th?” De Palmo asked.

  Jones seemed to relax even more, as he told them about going to the party with Jeanie Easley and her friend, and then going back to Jeanie’s place, “You know, the one—the girl—that got did in,” he added. For the first time, Melvin looked away from DePalmo and Homan.

  “How did you find out about that?” Homan asked.

  “One of my cousins read about it in the paper and told me.”

  Melvin Jones suddenly realized that he had become a suspect in both murders, and he sat in his chair a little less easily. When Benny DePalmo reminded him that he’d often referred to Marcia Perkins as “Sister” and “Little Sister,” he acknowledged that was true, but he became very nervous when he was told that the building manager and other witnesses had heard the last visitor to see her alive use those words over the intercom. He continued to deny that he had any involvement with Marcia’s death, even though he seemed at the point of tears.

  “We made your print on Jeanie Easley’s wall,” DePalmo said quietly.

  And now, the hulking man suddenly broke into real sobs, but he insisted he had no guilty knowledge in either case. “I already told you I was in her apartment once,” he said. “I already told you I went to Jeanie’s place that once.”

  “Where were you on June 21st?” Homan asked.

  Jones said that he’d gone to Moses Lake with his girlfriend on a fishing trip over the weekend of June 19 and 20. “We must have got back about a quarter after four on Monday afternoon. I dropped off some of my relatives, and then I went to my friends’ house to give them some fish. They weren’t home—so I went to some other friend’s house.”

  Melvin had the time period carefully accounted for. He said he’d stayed at his friend’s for about two hours. Then he’d picked up his girlfriend and driven her to the house where she babysat.

  “I had some sherry,” he continued, “and arrived home about one to one-fifteen A.M. I went to bed. I haven’t seen Jeanie since the night of May 28th and 29th.”

  Melvin’s relatives had already told the detectives that he got home at 2 A.M. on June 21.

  “We know you got home about an hour later than that,” Homan said. “And Jeanie’s boyfriend picked out your mug shot from a lay-down. He says you’re the man he saw hanging around Jeanie’s apartment about five on that Monday afternoon.”

  It was odd to see a man big enough to scrimmage with the Seattle Seahawks and walk away without a scratch reduced to tears, but something was scaring Melvin Jones. He didn’t have an answer to Homan’s comments; he only cried harder.

  Homan and DePalmo backed off and allowed their s
uspect time to calm down. When Melvin stopped sobbing, they asked him to go over his recall of the vital Sunday and Monday again. But his responses were exactly the same. He could not have been the one who killed Jeanie Easley; he was fishing or with his friends and family the whole time.

  Benny DePalmo asked him if he remembered Jeanie Easley’s apartment well enough to draw a sketch of it that would show how she had arranged her furniture. It appeared that the questions would stop for a while, and Melvin was almost relieved to pick up a pencil and the pad of paper. He proved to be quite adept at drawing, and he slid his rendition of the apartment toward the detectives.

  They saw that he had placed every piece of furniture, every appliance properly. That surprised them since both Melvin and Jeanie’s friend said that he was “passing out” drunk when he was in Jeanie’s apartment on May 28.

  But Melvin made one fatal error in his floor plan.

  He had drawn in the split-leaf philodendron in its pot and a second large plant. Neither of those plants had been in Jeanie’s apartment until June 15. If Melvin had never had gone back to see Jeanie in her apartment after May 28, how could he know about those two new plants her mother had given her only a week before she died?

  When Homan told Melvin that the two plants had been recent gifts to Jeanie, he stonewalled, insisting that they had been there before. Only they hadn’t been; Jeanie’s mother was positive of that.

  Melvin Jones was placed under arrest for suspicion of both homicides and booked into the King County Jail.

  On June 24, detectives armed with a search warrant removed plaid pants, a green T-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes from Melvin Jones’s bedroom. They noted that there were multicolored fibers still clinging to the treads of the shoes.

  Chesterine Cwiklik is a criminalist whose speciality is hairs and fibers. With a spinarette to draw those fibers into the thinnest possible thread and scanning electron microscopes, there is little that Chesterine cannot determine about their origin. In the crime lab, she compared known samples of fibers from the murder scenes to those found on Melvin’s shoes. She was able to match fibers from the living room and kitchen carpets in Jeanie Easley’s apartment microscopically to the filaments that Melvin had carried away on his shoes. Chesterine also found that fibers in the weave of his plaid pants were identical to those retrieved from Jeanie’s living room rug.

  Every criminal takes something of the crime scene away with him—no matter how minute, just as every criminal leaves something of himself at the crime scene—no matter how minute. It is the oldest axiom of crime scene investigation, but not one that most killers think about. Melvin Jones had taken a plethora of infinitesimal bits of his victim’s home away from her murder scene without knowing it.

  Even the soil from Jeanie’s beloved plants had lodged in his shoes. Dirt may look like only dirt, but the components there, too, can be matched to one source.

  Melvin Jones was in a panic, but he continued to insist that he was innocent. Now, he switched to another story of where he had been the night Jeanie Easley died. Taking the lesser of two felonies, he recalled that he had been out stealing tires on June 21–22.

  He took another lie-detector test, and polygraphist Norman Matzke reported that he had given deceptive responses on several questions. The pens had moved in wide arcs on the questions, “Did you kill Jeanie Easley?” “Did you have intercourse with her?” and “Was she alive the last time you saw her?”

  Matzke reported, “His responses went right off the page. He blew ink all over the walls.”

  Although the similarities between the murder scenes of Marcia Perkins and Jeanie Easley were numerous, there was a basic difference, and that was essential. There was direct physical evidence in the latter case, but in Marcia’s murder, there was only circumstantial evidence. In Jeanie’s murder, the homicide detectives were able to take two palm print matches, a half dozen minute rug fibers, and a bit of potting soil to the King County Prosecutor’s office. In a court of law, the differences were magnified a thousand-fold. The jury could see the defendant’s connection to Jeanie’s apartment, even if they had to see it through a magnifying glass. With Marcia, they had to weigh a preponderance of circumstantial evidence.

  During Melvin Jones’s month-long trial, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Roy Howson gave the jury a crash course in understanding hair and fiber evidence and on the makeup of potting soil. He outlined the multiple connections between Marcia Perkins and Melvin Jones, and the similarities between the two women’s murders. Juxtaposed that way, the commonalities in the M.O. used in the murders was like something from a serial killer’s game plan. But no one could tell how the jurors were thinking. They listened to all the evidence and all the arguments intently. On October 26, almost exactly five months after Marcia Perkins’s murder, four since Jeanie Easley’s, they retired to ponder their verdicts.

  The principals in the case didn’t have to wait long. After five hours, the jurors signaled that they had agreed on a verdict. When they returned to the courtroom, the foreman announced that they had found Melvin E. Jones guilty of first degree murder in the death of Jeanie Easley. But they had found him not guilty in the death of Marcia Perkins.

  Later, jurors said that they could not come back with a guilty verdict in Marcia’s case because of the lack of physical evidence in her apartment. Although the Seattle detective team was disappointed in the second verdict, they weren’t surprised; they knew all too well the weight a tiny bit of direct physical evidence can carry.

  Melvin Jones hadn’t yet reached his twenty-sixth birthday, but he already had one prison sentence and a parole violation behind him. Now, his hopes to play professional football were gone. He was sentenced to life in prison for Jeanie Easley’s murder. He is currently incarcerated in the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. His maximum sentence is still life, but his early release date is June 5, 2000.

  Marcia Perkins’s patients missed her for a long time, and those who knew Jeanie Easley know that her death took away a woman who would have been a strong positive force in the Indian Nation. Neither of them knew the danger that waited outside their apartment door long after midnight on a fragrant spring night.