A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

sign at all that she had been sexually assaulted.

    Notified by a phone call from one of the hikers, three separate law enforcement agencies responded: Clallam County Sheriff’s deputies, tribal police from the Ozette Indian Reservation, and rangers from the U.S. Park Service. The Ozettes, the Park Service, and the Clallam County Sheriff’s office had worked together for nearly half a century to keep the park safe. Although the Clallam County Sheriff’s office was sixty miles away in Port Angeles, the sheriff’s detectives were on the scene within minutes. They had waited on a windy narrow finger of land named Ediz Hook, until a Coast Guard helicopter winched them up and shuttled them to the beach trail where the dead woman lay.
    Park Rangers Gordon Boyd and Steve Underwood and Deputy Michael Lenihan saw that the victim had not died accidentally or of natural causes. She had multiple stab wounds in the chest, so many that she had probably died almost instantly. Either she had been part of an intensely violent argument with someone she knew, or she had been stalked by a maniac along the lonely trail.
    Gingerly, they fished her wallet out of her backpack. It was pathetically easy to identify the tanned woman. There were numerous pieces of I.D. in the pack—listing addresses in Denver and Long Island. She was Jane Costantino, thirty-two. The description on her driver’s license and the photograph fit. She had come here from far away, but for what reason? Had she come alone or with a lover or husband?
    The investigators organized a grid search of the vast national park, and they fanned out through the area, talking to other hikers and campers. Even though the murder had been discovered within a very short time of its occurrence, a national park is not an ideal crime scene to work. The killer might well have slipped away unseen, and already be headed back toward a city where he could lose himself. It had to have been a man—surely, no woman would have been able to overpower a victim who had been as ruggedly healthy and perfectly muscled as the woman who lay before them.
    When the officers at the scene finished searching the sandy banks and the brushy areas off the trail, they released Jane Costantino’s body to the coroner.
    Roads into the vast park were sealed off by deputies and rangers. Every car leaving the park was stopped and searched. Women hiking alone quickly joined up with other groups. It was still a long time until dark on a July day in the far Northwest, but every shadow cast in the forested area seemed threatening now.
    The officers and rangers feared they were looking for a killer who might well strike again. Every male camper was suspect, even if he had a wife, a bunch of kids and dogs, and a picnic basket with him.
    The probers were exceptionally fortunate in finding a witness who had an interesting—and chilling—story to tell them. She was slender and pretty, but shaken when she learned that a woman had been stabbed to death on the trail.
    “This weird guy started following me,” she began with a tremble in her voice. “I tried to avoid him, but he caught up with me on the trail to the beach. He told me that he was a photographer for
Playboy,
and he offered me fifty dollars to pose for him in the nude. He sure didn’t look like any photographer for
Playboy,
and I didn’t see a camera, either. I told him to just go away.”
    The woman looked down, biting her lip to keep from crying. She told them that she was feeling both frightened and guilty. “Just after that, another woman came along the trail. I’m afraid it might have been the woman who died. It
must
have been her—and he just stared at her, and then he turned around, and started following her.”
    “What did he look like?” the Clallam County officers asked.
    “Big. He was really big—probably over six feet, and kind of blubbery around the middle. Not real clean. He was wearing a purple shirt, and a cowboy hat, a dark hat. He gave me the creeps.”
    The young woman told them she had hurried away, grateful to be free of the stranger. She hadn’t thought that anything was wrong because she had heard nothing. Certainly, there had been no screams, no cries for help at all.
    “If I’d stayed, maybe I could have helped her,” she said somberly. “Maybe the two of us could have stopped him.”
    “No. Maybe both of you would have been killed,” a deputy said quietly. “You couldn’t have known what he was going to