A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

her lung capacity wasn’t what it was when she was nineteen.
    Typical of her personality, Jane raised the bar, setting harder tasks for herself, willing her body to remain as trim and tautly muscled as a ballerina’s. As if she hadn’t already proved herself enough in 1979, she set off to bicycle alone from Nova Scotia to New York. Along a dark stretch of road, she collided with a truck and was carted off, bleeding and bruised, to a hospital. After a stay of several days, she insisted on finishing the trip.
    If Jane Costantino had been a cat, she would have had five lives yet to go. But she was, after all, only a human, only a woman alone in a world fraught with dangers far more menacing than lightning or an unlit country road.

    Jane Costantino’s carefully charted 1980 trip was the most rigorous adventure she had ever attempted. She and her brother bicycled from Denver to New York City. They had a wonderful time, their time together turned out to be everything she had hoped, and the summer season was far from over. She had pedaled her way to one coast, and intended to make it to the West Coast, too.
    She flew back to Colorado and began another bicycle trip west, but this time she was all by herself. She liked her own company and she always met interesting and friendly people so she never really felt alone. There was no question at all that she could manage the second trip physically.
    Jane’s plan called for her to go to the shores of the Pacific Ocean first. She would dip her bicycle wheels in the ocean at Cape Alava off the Ozette Indian Reservation. This was on the farther-most northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. After that, with her trip symbolically over, she would bicycle leisurely back to Seattle to meet with friends on Thursday, July 24.
    As she knew she would, Jane made it to the Pacific Ocean all right. Tanned and healthy, she attended an archaeology lecture at the Ozette digs. She was a woman that people always remembered and several would recall seeing the lovely, blonde woman headed toward the beach. Although it didn’t seem that ominous at the time, they also remembered seeing a man walking on the trail behind her, also headed toward the ocean. He was big, burly, and had black hair.
    It was early afternoon then. The sun was shining. In the forty-second year of its existence, the Olympic National Park had been a safe haven. It was a place for communing with nature, for renewing one’s soul after a long winter, and that was all Jane Costantino had on her mind. She was a short walk away from her goal; she was about to swish her bike’s tires through the salt water in the shallows of the Pacific Ocean. And then she would head toward Seattle. Seattle was well over a hundred miles and a couple of ferry boat rides away, but it wasn’t much of a challenge after she’d just traversed the entire country.
    Jane Costantino didn’t know that another woman in the park had been approached by a hulking man in a black cowboy hat and a purple shirt, nor that the woman had been alarmed by the way the stranger acted.
    Jane didn’t know that this man was just behind her on the trail, stealthily keeping out of range of her sight and hearing as the rugged trail fell away behind her. Even if she had known, she might not have been frightened. She was full of stories about eccentrics she’d met on her travels. She would be the first to say that most of them were harmless enough. Maybe just a little crazy or lost or lonely.

    The afternoon sun grew warmer, but it wasn’t oppressive because the wind from the ocean was cool and fragrant with the special salty sea smell that cannot be duplicated. Wild roses and berries vines gradually gave way to sea grass. Beyond, there was nothing but wave after wave as the Pacific Ocean rolled on into infinity.

    It was 3 P.M. on that Wednesday in 1979: July 23. A group of hikers trudged toward the ocean; when they rounded a turn in the trail they came upon a woman who appeared to have fainted. She lay beside the beach trail two-tenths of a mile from the ocean. Moving closer and calling, their voices became hushed and then silent as they saw that her blouse was soaked in wet blood. Try as they might to find a pulse or to catch even a faint rising and falling of her breasts, they were unsuccessful.
    Here, on a perfect day in a perfect paradise of a park, a woman was dead—and not by accident, but by violence. Her body was fully clothed, and there was no