Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Her two husbands had agreed that if either of them heard from Manzy, they would notify the other. About ten days later, Rockwell had called Mearns to see if he’d heard anything, but he hadn’t. Rockwell said he hadn’t either.

  Although Mearns had been concerned about his daughter Dolores, he wasn’t really worried. “Manzy left me the same way when she ran off with Raoul,” Mearns said. “She just took off without so much as a note. I didn’t hear from her for nine months—not until she wanted to arrange for the visits with our younger girls.”

  It was now five months since anyone had seen Manzy Rockwell. Maybe she had had enough of Raoul’s womanizing, and had chosen to leave him just as she had walked away from her first husband.

  But maybe not.

  The Crimes Against Persons detectives fanned out to talk with those who had known the Rockwells. They found several people who had heard Raoul Guy complain that his wife had stolen more than $5,000 from the antiques gallery’s cash registers.

  Detective Carol Hahn interviewed Karen Yanick, who lived next door to the now-missing couple. She said that she last saw Manzy on March 31.

  “She was coming home from work, and everything seemed to be normal with her. I know I saw Dolores the day before, and she was so excited about registering for spring quarter—she’d gotten into the classes she wanted. Neither of them acted as though they planned to leave Seattle.”

  And yet, on April 3, Raoul had come to the Yanick home and said that Manzy had left him. “He was doing his income tax,” Karen Yanick told Carol Hahn, “and he couldn’t make his books tally. He said he had asked Manzy to help him and she just said, ‘See my lawyer!’ and wouldn’t explain what she meant. I guess she gave him the name of her lawyer, and he said he went to find him—and couldn’t. Then, when he got home, Manzy and Dolores were gone.”

  The very next day, Rockwell had gone to the Yanicks’ again. This time, he said that there was somewhere between $3,000 and $4,500 missing from the books. And $800 in cash missing.

  “I thought this was kind of odd,” Karen Yanick said, “because Manzy told me that they were really in debt—that’s why she went back to work at the bank, to try to catch up on their bills.

  “We invited Rocky over to dinner several times over the next week or so, and he was so sad and worried. We even took turns staying with him at the antiques shop during business hours in the evening so he wouldn’t be so lonesome. And then he just stopped opening the shop very often.”

  Karen said that Manzy Rockwell had worked days at the bank downtown and evenings in the shop—unless the “society women” showed up, and then Manzy would go upstairs because she couldn’t stand to watch her husband flirt with them. “That made her so unhappy.”

  Dolores, too, had tried to help the Rockwells’ financial situation by paying her own way in college. She signed on as a Kelly Girl temp in February, and then went to work full-time for the Pacific Northwest Company, managing to work and still go to her classes at the university.

  Karen Yanick paused. There was more to tell, things that might sound crazy. She and her husband had begun to wonder about some of Raoul’s behaviors.

  “Maybe we just had overactive imaginations,” she said. “But we noticed that one of the windows under their building was open, and it never was before. It was right next to the septic tank. And later on, maybe as late as June, there was a really terrible, foul odor coming from their house. It was so bad that we asked Rocky about it. He said it was only some crab that had spoiled, and he threw it into his garbage can.”

  Detective Noreen Skagen checked out the women’s clothing left behind in the Rockwell residence. Karen Yanick helped her sort through Manzanita’s and Dolores’s things. There were numerous dresses, suits, coats, blouses, skirts, shoes, and purses. Noreen (who would one day become an assistant Seattle Police chief and then the U.S. Attorney in the Seattle District) wondered what might be missing. Karen Yanick said the only item of clothing that she could see wasn’t there was a rust tweed dress that Manzy often wore.

  Manzanita was a skilled seamstress, and Skagen and Yanick found a wool skirt that was half sewn, along with an almost-finished coat she had been making for Dolores. There was a pair of green high-heeled pumps that Karen recognized.

  “Those are Dolores’s,” she said. “I remember how proud she was of them when she bought them last spring.”

  With an ominous sense of foreboding, the two women went through a barrel in a corner of the back bedroom. There they found full bottles of hair spray, barely touched containers of face cream, expensive perfumes, lipsticks. Dolores’s newly purchased schoolbooks for her university courses were there, too, along with her purse. Her identification was inside; there was cash in her wallet, and all the ordinary things that most women kept in their purses.

  “Why would she leave her purse?” Karen Yanick asked, and then gasped, suddenly suspecting why.

  As the Seattle Police investigators spread out further with interviews of friends and clients of Raoul Guy Rockwell, they heard similar stories from all of them—except that they were never quite the same in the details.

  Raoul had apparently tailored his anecdotes to suit whomever he spoke to.

  He had told another couple who had socialized with Manzanita and him that she had left her packed bags behind, instructing him to have a moving company pick them up. When the husband, Robert Lane, dropped by at the end of May, Rockwell had sharply refused to let him go upstairs, giving him vague excuses why he couldn’t do that.

  It was rapidly becoming obvious that Raoul Guy Rockwell had had a slightly different story for almost everyone about where his wife and stepdaughter were. The amount of money that Manzanita was supposed to have stolen varied with each telling. Sometimes he said her attorney’s office was in the south end of King County—in Kent—and sometimes he gave a Bothell address in the north sector.

  He was fairly consistent, though, about describing his missing ex-wife as a thief, a woman out of control, unfaithful, determined to desert him, and leaving him in a snarl of financial entanglements.

  One customer, a man named George Sparr, told Gail Leonard that he had known Rockwell for three years. He confided that he had been horribly embarrassed sometime at the end of March to be present when Manzy and Rocky had a fight. “They were extremely insulting to one another,” Sparr said, “and I edged my way to the door and slipped out, feeling that this was a private matter and not something I should be witness to.”

  “Did you see Manzanita after that?” Leonard asked.

  “No. I went back sometime around April 16th, and Rocky told me Manzy and Dolores were gone. Apparently, while he was up in Bothell trying to find Manzy’s attorney, he said, she was busy burning all of his irreplaceable papers in their fireplace. He told me that she had stolen thousands of dollars from him, messed up his income tax, and yet she left all of her jewelry behind—even her engagement and wedding rings. He showed me a note she supposedly left, instructing him to put all of her things in storage.

  “But that’s the odd thing,” Sparr continued. “A couple of days later, I noticed some of Manzy’s jewelry in a display case in the shop with a For Sale tag on them. I bought a pair of rare cherry amber earrings for only $5, and I took a friend to the shop later and she bought a necklace that was also underpriced.”

  Sparr had asked for the key to the Rockwells’ upstairs apartment so he could use the bathroom, and then asked “Is Manzanita upstairs?”

  “What did he say?” Leonard pressed.

  “He looked as if he’d seen a ghost, and he said, ‘What the hell do you mean by a remark like that?’ He was totally spooked, and he called me four times the next day, leaving messages for me to call—that it was urgent. When I did call him back, he asked me again why I had asked if Manzy was upstairs.”

  Rockwell had been alternately accusing and confiding with Sparr. He told Sparr that Manzanita was following him, and had trailed him to the apartment of a woman friend.

  More
and more odd things happened, Sparr said. Some weeks after Manzanita and Dolores left, Sparr had noticed that the heavy cement cover of the home’s septic tank had been shifted. “When I went there later, though, it was sealed tightly.”

  Some of the witnesses Gail Leonard and Herb Swindler talked to came close to categorizing Raoul Guy Rockwell as a Bluebeard, while others found him charming—if a little eccentric—a man caught in a marriage with a neurotically jealous woman. One couple even confided that Rockwell had told them that Manzy was seeing another man and that he was disturbed because none of their friends had told him about it.

  “How could we tell him?” the wife said. “We didn’t know anything about that. We never saw Manzy with anyone but Raoul. She adored him.”

  But Raoul Guy continued to describe his absent wife as a crazy woman, one who had made his life a living hell and then left him in disastrous financial straits.

  One very reliable source disputed that Manzanita Rockwell had been reduced to a “basket case.” In 1960, Dr. Sheldon Biback was a very popular and respected obstetrician-gynecologist with offices in the University District. Manzanita Rockwell was one of his patients.

  When Noreen Skagen talked to Dr. Biback, he recalled an office visit he’d had with Manzanita on March 30. She had come to him in a state of extreme agitation, so anxious that she asked him to prescribe a sedative. That was not how Biback had viewed her in their past appointments, and he sensed that she was dealing with a reality that would make most women upset. She told Biback that she had suspected her husband of being unfaithful for some time, and she had followed him to another woman’s house. There, she had confirmed her worst suspicions.

  “I can’t live this way,” she confessed to her doctor, “and I told Raoul that I knew about his affair, and I wasn’t willing to accept that and pretend it wasn’t happening. I’m going to have a showdown with him to force some kind of a decision. I love him and I’m going to fight for him because I believe our marriage can be saved.”

  Dr. Biback told Noreen Skagen that he had found Manzanita Rockwell a “rational and reasonable woman.” Even though she had been very distracted by her situation, calling herself “a basket case,” she hadn’t seemed at all crazy, or even vindictive. She was simply a woman who was ready to face a very real problem and try to do what she needed to to win back her husband’s affection.

  Biback hadn’t heard from her again. But then, apparently no one had, except for Karen’s brief sighting of Manzy as she came home from work the next day.

  Manzanita had been Biback’s patient for some time and he pulled her chart when Detective Skagen asked for her description.

  “Manzanita was five feet five inches tall,” he read, “and weighed 122 pounds. She had auburn hair and a fair, freckled complexion.”

  Dolores had been required to have a physical when she applied to the University of Washington, and Dr. Gilbert Eade had her chart in his office. She was five feet five and a half and weighed only 112 pounds.

  Who the other woman in Raoul Rockwell’s life was was anyone’s guess. It could have been Evelyn or Blake, or perhaps one of several other women. Apparently Rockwell had been adept at carrying on many liaisons at the same time without any of his paramours knowing about the others.

  By the time Detectives Noreen Skagen and Carol Hahn, and the Rockwells’ neighbor Karen Yanick, had finished their inventory of Manzanita’s and Dolores’s abandoned belongings, they had listed 640 items! Everything from clothing to makeup to treasured personal belongings filled three boxes, three trunks, and three barrels. These were delivered to the property room of the Seattle Police Department on the second floor of the Public Safety Building to await any further developments on the women’s disappearance or, less likely, instructions from Manzanita and her daughter.

  The missing women had obviously left with only the clothes on their backs.

  Without their purses.

  Without their makeup.

  As summer faded into autumn, 1960, Raoul Guy Rockwell was still missing. His home and gallery sat empty, a looming gray building that no longer attracted eager collectors but looked more dreary with every day that passed. Rockwell’s vibrant and charismatic personality had made it popular; now Seattle detectives sensed that it held some terrible secrets.

  It was probably fitting that the most popular movie at the time was in its first run at Seattle’s Paramount Theater. Psycho starred Janet Leigh (albeit briefly, as her character soon perished in the infamous bloody shower scene) and Tony Perkins as the Bates Motel manager. The mansion behind that motel hid Perkins’s character’s secrets.

  It was also a looming gray building. And Leigh’s character also disappeared completely.

  Herb Swindler and Gail Leonard were not optimistic about the safety of the women who had vanished so completely from Raoul Guy Rockwell’s life, and indeed from life itself. No one had heard from them. They had left no paper trail at all, hadn’t tried to cash checks, contact banks, written letters to their daughters/sisters. They hadn’t even taken their identification with them.

  But where were they? The investigators in the Crimes Against Persons Unit sent out requests to other law enforcement agencies in the Northwest requesting information about any women who might have been in accidents or checked into hospitals—perhaps suffering from amnesia—or, in the worst possible scenario, been found dead and were currently listed as Jane Does.

  Nineteen sixty, of course, was long before the high-speed communication of thirty to forty years later. There was no central clearing agency in the state of Washington or, for that matter, in the United States. Computer-generated fingerprint matching lay far in the future, as did DNA and other sophisticated blood and body fluid correlations to identify victims or link them to their killers. There were no computers in police departments, no Internet, no cell phones.

  Even so, Homicide detectives were successful in closing the vast majority of their investigations and seeing convictions in trials the old-fashioned way: with hard work, canvassing, and brainstorming.

  But this case was a challenge. It wasn’t going to be easy to find Manzanita and Dolores. Or Raoul Guy Rockwell himself.

  On September 1, 1960, the probers received information from a sheriff’s office far from Seattle, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains. Wenatchee, Washington, was the seat of Chelan County, some 150 miles east of Seattle, a small city known for its apple blossom festival each May and the verdant fruit-growing orchards that spread out endlessly in the region.

  Dick Nichols was the Chelan County sheriff in 1960, a genial man whose staff usually dealt with drunken fights in taverns and migrant camps, illegal marijuana patches, and the occasional homicide. The Columbia River roared close to Wenatchee, its banks crowded with towering poplar trees that protected the orchards from windstorms.

  Nichols phoned the Seattle Homicide Unit lieutenant on duty to ask if the Seattle cops were aware that the severed legs of a female had been recovered from the Columbia River in nearby Grant County in May and June.

  “Why don’t you contact Deputy W. E. Dunstan in the sheriff’s office in Moses Lake?” Nichols suggested. “They’ve got one of the legs, and the other is here in our county. Dr. Robert Bonafaci, our coroner, is a pathologist and he has it.”

  The floating legs were a gruesome find. They could have come from a woman anywhere in Washington, or even from the Canadian border cities just beyond Okanogan County, which lay north of Chelan County. The Columbia was a wide river, full of dangerous rapids, carrying all kinds of debris as it coursed south.

  Detectives Gary Honz and “Buzz” Cook drove to Wenatchee to pick up the severed legs and transport them to Seattle so that longtime King County coroner Dr. Gale Wilson could examine them. Along with the legs, they received photographs and slides that Dr. Bonafaci had taken, and four X-ray films.

  While Honz and Cook were in Wenatchee, Detectives Bill Panton and Vern Thomas found some fascinating news at Cook’s U-Drive, the car rental company Raoul
Guy Rockwell patronized. A records search there showed that he had rented a GMC panel truck on April 6, four days after anyone had seen Manzanita and Dolores. He drove it away just before two that afternoon, and returned the vehicle on April 7 at 9 A.M. The odometer indicated that he had driven 319 miles. The round-trip distance to Wenatchee is exactly 306 miles.

  On September 3, 1960, Dr. Wilson submitted his report on the two legs found in the Columbia River. In his opinion, they had come from the same person: a Caucasian female who had been approximately forty years old and about five feet five inches tall. She had probably weighed close to 130 pounds. Her feet had very high arches, and the second toe on the first leg was longer than the big toe, which had an obvious bunion on the outside surface; the little toe had a wide gap between it and the fourth toe, and turned under.

  One of the legs had been found in a wooden box. That limb had been sawed off at midthigh and then broken. The second leg had been cut and broken closer to the knee.

  There was a nylon stocking in the box, a Micro-Mesh, seamless type, sandy beige color, size 9 ½. That wasn’t much in the way of physical evidence but it was something. Perhaps they could find its mate or other hose of the same make and size.

  The Grant County Sheriff’s Office said that the first leg had been located by a family picnicking on the shores of the Columbia on May 30. A professor of anthropology at Washington State University in Pullman concurred that it belonged to a female of middle age, white, and possibly about five feet seven and a half. She had type O blood.

  The second leg had surfaced in the Columbia on June 22, two miles away—in Quincy, Washington—and been spotted by a man living in a trailer court there.

  The measurements of the disembodied legs seemed to fit the description given for Manzanita Rockwell. Manzanita had told one of her friends that her blood was type O, although that wasn’t noted in Dr. Biback’s chart.