A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

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.
    Had she lived, Marcia would have been