by Ann Rule
He was deluged with tips from mystics who believed they knew what had happened to Marcia Moore. In a case with no clues, the investigative team tried to remain open-minded and consider every possible source of information carefully, no matter how far-fetched it might be.
The phone bills run up in the probe were astronomical. Lieutenant Bemis and his team called every telephone number they could locate in the missing woman’s duplex, without finding anyone who had heard from Marcia. Marcia Moore’s family on the East Coast never heard from her. No one in Ojai, California—where she had scores of friends—heard from her.
There was one strange incident that might have had bearing on her disappearance. On either January 15 or 16, the twelve-year-old daughter of one of Marcia’s closest friends answered the phone and a woman with a Boston accent like Marcia’s asked, “Is your Mummy there?”
The child said she was not and there was no number where she could be reached, and the caller said she would call back later. She never did.
“If she were in trouble, that would be the time she would call me,” the friend offered. “She has called me to her side several times in the past when she needed me.”
The search for Marcia Moore grew eerier and eerier. Some psychics maintained that the ghosts of the dead were able to use phone lines to get messages through, even years after they passed over. Was it possible that Marcia Moore would try to contact someone from the other side? Bemis and his fellow investigators found themselves considering the most bizarre possibilities when regular detective work netted them nothing at all.
Marcia and Happy Boccaci were to have attended the International Cooperation Council’s Rainbow Rose Festival in Pasadena, California, on the weekend of January 27 and 28 as featured speakers. This was America’s largest gathering of psychics and it was a function that Marcia would never have missed if there was any way she could be there.
One of the festival organizers had a theory on Marcia’s disappearance. “I guess this sounds kind of far out, but a lot of psychics here think she dematerialized. In the Indian philosophy, you can raise your consciousness, keep developing yourself like Jesus Christ and some of the gurus, and reach a point where you just zap out.”
Bizarre? Of course. But then the whole of Marcia Moore’s life had bordered on the bizarre, and there were no rational explanations about where Marcia had gone.
Marcia had also written a speech that she planned to present at the World Symposium on Humanity in Los Angeles in April. Happy Boccaci went in her place. He wrote to Elise, “I just got back from L.A. where I delivered Marcia’s brilliant speech, entitled, ‘Where is the reincarnation movement heading today?’ And I got a lot more people praying. I don’t have much to say except I am terribly depressed and ever so lonely. I do cry a lot. Again, thank you for your note and do keep praying…Light and love, (not so) Happy.”
The husband of a missing woman is always suspect. So was Dr. Walter “Happy” Boccaci. Marcia’s family considered him the prime suspect in her disappearance, although he stood to gain nothing financially in case of her death. He would actually be poorer because her trust fund wouldn’t go to him—but to her three children.
Boccaci seemed remarkably sanguine about the suspicions of the Moore family. “I realize that if my daughter were suddenly to marry somebody on the East Coast that I had never met—and six months later she disappeared, I would say, ‘Damn it. It’s the husband who did it. He’s the culprit!’ That’s just a natural thing to believe.”
Her family used Marcia’s trust fund to hire private detectives. They came to the Northwest, and had no better results than the Snohomish County investigators. Although they looked hard at Dr. Happy Boccaci, and reportedly tried to trick him into believing he would get an inheritance if Marcia’s body was found, he told them what he had told everyone: “I wish I knew where her body was, her soul, whatever. But I don’t.”
Because Marcia Moore was herself a psychic, I consulted two psychics whom I knew to be amazingly accurate in their assessments and predictions. What would happen when the cards were thrown down a year after her disappearance and questions were asked about Marcia? Would there be two diverse opinions—or would they agree?
Barbara Easton, a well-known Northwest psychic who reads ordinary playing cards, did several spreads on Marcia Moore. She knew only a little about the case. She was asking the question, “What were the circumstances around Marcia Moore’s disappearance?”
The answers came swiftly. “Just before she vanished,” Barbara said, “she received a long-distance phone call from a woman concerning a contract in which a lot of money was involved. There is a man involved, too—a man concerned about a real estate contract on which a great deal of money hinged.”
According to the cards, Marcia Moore’s marriage had been in trouble, and she was in the process of making a decision to get rid of emotional ties that had never worked. She had been very disappointed and frustrated. Moreover, she had recently heard from a man out of her past and received an invitation which had made her happy.
“The cards tell us that she wanted a divorce—even if no one was aware of it,” Easton said, shaking her head.
Easton spread the cards four times, and each time the ace of spades (the death card) appeared side by side with the nine of hearts (the wish card).
“I think she’s dead,” Easton sighed. “Someone wished her dead, but the cards indicate that she was also blessed with very good women friends who were lucky for her, women she had turned to in the past for help.”
Easton also picked up repeatedly on “hospital” and “court (or trial)” as she did further spreads of cards. Could Marcia Moore be in a hospital some place where no one knew who she was? Could there eventually be a trial for her murder?
The blonde psychic explained that, although death showed repeatedly in Marcia’s cards, these could also be interpreted as the death of the personality as it has been known. “She could have been so enlightened by the drug that her known personality died—leaving her body. There’s possibly a five percent chance that she’s hospitalized or sitting on a mountain top some place—meditating,” Easton said. “It’s called going to the void.”
The elements of Marcia Moore’s disappearance, then, that Easton elicited from the cards again and again were:
Marital problems, disappointments, frustration.
A renewed relationship with an old love.
A real estate transaction involving a lot of money.
Concern over another woman.
Phenomenal success ahead for Marcia in her work.
A hospital.
Death. Violent death.
A court trial.
“I think the decision was made for Marcia Moore to die,” Easton summed up flatly.
Another popular psychic based in the Northwest, Shirley Teabo, read Tarot cards. Like Easton, she had a high success rate.
Shirley Teabo was not told about Barbara Easton’s reading on Marcia Moore, nor did she know more than the bare facts about the woman’s disappearance.
Could a second psychic home in on whatever astral projections Marcia Moore’s entity was sending? Would Teabo’s interpretations be entirely different from Easton’s?
Teabo was able to pinpoint the date of Moore’s disappearance (without knowing when it was) as between December 20 and January 20, 1979. “At that time, there was a passage away from difficulties—a journey over water,” she said. “A journey over water far enough to leave the state of Washington. I see her on a ferry boat and I see the rays of a lighthouse crossing over her. She has—or had—a woman friend who was very good for her, someone from the past.”
Teabo picked up a “retreat, a meditative state, a convalescent state after much anxiety.”
“For some reason, I pick up the San Juan Islands. She has ties there, but I pick up a sunny day and she is happy. It may be something that has happened in her past.”
The next card was not so cheerful; it was a coffin, a sarcophagus—a sign
that someone is buried. “Sheets and things are wrapped around her,” Teabo said. “Her ‘fear’ card revolves around a real estate transaction—something involving a great deal of money.”
The psychic spread cards asking about what had happened in Marcia Moore’s home on the last day she was seen. These cards showed the end of a cycle, a finishing-up. “She was preparing for a change, and she was well able to protect herself.”
Oddly, Teabo, too, saw trouble with another woman—a woman of a violent nature who could have caused Moore real problems. “One woman is her friend—the other was a danger to her.”
According to Teabo’s reading, Marcia Moore had been about to advance tremendously in the world of her art. The books she was working on would have been highly successful. “But I see an illness…a hospitalization. She may be in an institution.”
According to Shirley Teabo, Marcia Moore had been subjected to great stress. “Quarrels over money, over land, and someone was trying to make away with something that belonged to her.”
Marcia’s brother Robin had theorized that, if she had been kidnapped, it would have been because of the “unorthodox spiritualism” she was involved in. Teabo turned up cards that indicated that this might very well be true. Twice in succession, the anti-religion and cult cards turned up side by side. “She was at a crossroads and the path she chose was faulty, dangerous.”
Marcia’s marriage had not been serene, according to the Tarot cards; the couple had each felt bondage and restriction, frustration in the marriage.
As Barbara Easton had, Shirley Teabo saw violence on the last day of Marcia Moore’s known existence. She picked it up again and again. “Oddly, I don’t think she’s dead…but I don’t see her alive, either. It’s as if her mind isn’t hers any longer. If she is dead, she’s earthbound.”
A summary of Teabo’s reading has many points of similarity with Easton’s.
Trouble in the home.
A real estate transaction involving a lot of money.
Great success ahead in Moore’s career.
Concerns about another woman who was dangerous to her.
Hospitalization.
Violence.
A “death” state.
If Marcia Moore was alive, the cards of both psychics suggested that she was incapacitated to the degree that she couldn’t let anyone know where she was. If she was dead, her body had been secreted so carefully that it might never be found.
While Lieutenant Darrol Bemis and Detective Doris Twitchell worked the case from the scientific viewpoint of trained police officers, Dr. Walter Boccaci tried to reach his wife through less orthodox methods. After fasting all day and doing yoga, he injected himself with ketamine at midnight.
“The sole purpose of this is to reach my wife. We were telepathic. We were soul mates. Ketamine is the only way I can get out of my body. And I have been reaching her. I see her so clearly. She’s sitting in a lotus position, lovely and beautiful. But she doesn’t talk to me. I know why. She’s amnesic. That’s the only possibility, don’t you see. The only way that makes sense.”
Dr. Boccaci published one last issue of “The Hypersentience Bulletin,” the newsletter he and Marcia had mailed to their followers. He wrote a “Final Note” to Marcia: “When you walk along the beach and listen to the sound of the waves, listen also to the roar of my voice, reverberating, ‘Marcia, I love you. I’ll always love you…’”
Despite his protestations that his life was over now that his wife was gone, Boccaci remained a suspect in her disappearance—or death…or transformation, whatever had happened. He told Erik Lacitis, a Seattle Times columnist, about his troubles. “The tragedy of this whole thing is what’s happened to me. I am just hanging on by the skin of my teeth. I am destitute. I’m surviving by selling furniture and other personal possessions.
“I just spent a whole year of my life devoting all my energy to trying to find my wife…I tried everything. There’s nothing more I can do to find my wife. Now, I’m trying to pick up the pieces of my life. I am forty-two, and I have another forty-two years ahead of me. And I can’t get a job. I have been blackballed.”
Although Boccaci said he had never lost a patient because of anesthesia or even had one with an adverse reaction, he felt he had been unable to find work in his profession because of all the publicity about Marcia’s disappearance, and, perhaps, their ketamine research.
Boccaci left Washington State and took a residency at a Detroit hospital where his story was not so familiar. At length, he did find a job as an anesthesiologist at a tiny hospital on the Washington coast. Happy Boccaci wrote to Marcia’s friends that he was finally doing well, jogging five miles a day, and feeling much better.
Marcia Moore’s family members were divided in their opinions of what had become of her. Her daughter recalled how often Marcia had spoken of her dread of growing old. “It bothered her a lot. What do I think really happened?” she asked. “I would have to say that she committed suicide in some way.”
But committing suicide without leaving a body behind is not easy to do. If Marcia Moore had leapt from a ferry boat on its way to the San Juan Islands, her body might have sunk—but, more likely, it would have eventually washed up on some spit of land.
It would be two years after Marcia Moore vanished before those who loved her and those who sought her would have at least a partial answer to a seemingly incomprehensible mystery.
A property owner was clearing blackberry vines from a lot he owned near the city of Bothell on the first day of spring 1981. He reached down and almost touched a partial skull that lay hidden there. There was another bone, too. The site was less than fifteen miles from the town house where Marcia and Happy had lived. The skull had well-maintained teeth, and that would help in identifying the remains.
When the Snohomish County investigators asked a forensic dentistry expert to compare Marcia Moore’s dental records with the teeth in the skull, they knew, at long last, where she was.
A meticulous search of the area produced nothing more, however. No clothes. No jewelry. No hiking boots.
Could Marcia Moore have walked so far on the freezing night she vanished? Possibly. But she would have had to skirt a busy freeway and pass any number of areas where people lived, shopped, and worked, and no one had ever reported seeing her. Could she have been murdered, and taken to this lonely lot? Possibly. Although the detectives didn’t release the information, there was profound damage to the frontal portion of her skull.
One of Marcia’s close women friends made a pilgrimage to the spot where her last earthly remains had lain. She wrote to a mutual friend who also mourned for their dear friend, and it was both a comforting and a disturbing letter.
“I went over and saw the exact spot where the skull was located,” she wrote. “And it was a beautiful place, on top of a bed of soft, dry leaves, encircled by some very large trees. And growing all around the circle were trilliums beginning to come up. Of course not in bloom yet. My first thought was, ‘Marcia would have loved this place!’ It was almost like a gigantic fairy ring, those big trees in a circle. A little boy showed me the place; he is the son of the man who found the skull. The little boy said there was a hole right in the front of the skull, and I said, ‘That sounds like a bullet hole,’ and he agreed.”
But he was only a little boy, and the investigators were never convinced that Marcia Moore had been shot in the head; her skull was so fragile and it had lain out in the elements for more than two years.
To this day, no one really knows what happened on that Sunday night in January 1979—no one but her killer, if, indeed, she was murdered. Marcia had always longed for a glimpse into another, brighter, world. Once there, she sent no messages back to the friends who waited for some sign.
No one has heard from Dr. Happy Boccaci for a long time.
Update, December 2003
Twenty-five years ago, Marcia Moore’s and Dr. Walter “Happy” Boccacio’s experimentation with the drug ketamine seemed harmle
ss enough—if a bit eccentric.
Today, ketamine (ketamine hydrochloride) is a drug that is being abused by an increasing number of young people who use it as “club drug.” It is often handed out at “raves” and parties, sometimes with tragic results.
Street names for ketamine include: “Special K,” “Vitamin K,” “Kit Kat,” Green,” “Blind Squid,” “Purple,” and “Special La Coke.” It is a rapid-acting dissociative anesthetic used medically on both animals and humans (for pediatric burn cases). Ketamine usually comes in liquid form and the most potent way to use it is by injection. The human response to ketamine occurs so quickly that there is a risk of losing motor control even before the injection is completed. Users respond in different ways—from rapture to boredom. Its hallucinogenic effects impair perception, and it’s quite common for those using ketamine to relate out-of-body or near-death experiences.
The drug prevents all pain, so it is possible for the user to be injured and completely unaware of it. The effects of a ketamine “high” usually last for four to six hours, but may last from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Hearts seem to beat normally after the user is injected with ketamine, but their breathing can be suppressed.
Marcia Moore’s daily dose of 50 mg was in the low range—which would rapidly have produced psychedelic effects. However, if her use increased, she would have gone into the convulsions, vomiting, and oxygen starvation of the brain and muscles that follows large doses.
As dangerous as ketamine is, it has become the emerging top choice as a club drug in New York, Miami, and San Diego. With the new information about a drug that is legal only for medical use, it is clear now that Marcia Moore and her husband were playing with fire. With her long history of daily use of a drug now known to be very, very hazardous, she was undoubtedly psychologically and physically addicted.
Unable to feel or acknowledge pain, Marcia might well have left her home on a freezing night and been unaware of the cold as she wandered miles away. But the hole in her skull has never been explained. In all likelihood, someone did shoot her or strike her with a blunt weapon, whether it was a wicked stranger who picked her up on the road or someone who knew her well.
