A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

do.”
    The witness said that the man on the trail had appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties.
    “You ever see him before?”
    She shook her head. “Never—not until he came up to me on the trail.”
    The deputies talked to other hikers, who gathered in quiet clusters in a clearing. Several of them remembered seeing a man who matched the first witness’s description. Two hikers had met him on the trail, but he had been in a great hurry, plunging past them. “He had dark red stains on his purple shirt,” a man said. “It looked as if he’d been picking berries, and wiped his hands on his shirt, at least at first. I realize now that wasn’t what it was.”
    Park Rangers Gordon Boyd and Steve Underwood and Deputy Michael Lenihan headed down a trail that wound toward the beach. They came upon a husky man wearing a black cowboy hat, and a purple shirt. The shirt was soaking wet, and it clung to his beefy chest. But it didn’t have any stains on it at all. It was obvious to the investigators that the man had just washed it in the ocean.
    They ordered the man to lean against a rock while they searched him. Lenihan pulled a hunting knife out of his belt and several lengths of rope from his pockets. The big man refused to answer any of their questions. He would only give his name: Dale C. Harrison, thirty-seven, from Othello, Washington. Othello is a farming community in eastern Washington, a ferry ride, a mountain pass and hundreds of miles away from Cape Alava. He refused to say why he was in the park.
    They arrested Dale Harrison on suspicion of murder, handcuffed him and placed him in the back of a ranger’s car. Because Jane Costantino had been stabbed to death in a national park, her murder was a federal crime.
    The FBI would continue the investigation. FBI Special Agent Paul Mack fed the name Dale C. Harrison into the computers to see if he was wanted. Surprisingly, he was not currently on any wanted lists, but he did have a record. His rap sheet showed a number of arrests for sex-related crimes dating back almost two decades. He had been convicted in 1962 of sexual molestation against two young girls. He had used a knife in that incident. He had served two years on yet another molestation charge and had been paroled from prison in 1965.
    Yet Dale Harrison had apparently lived a “normal” life, too. In the fifteen years since he had been released from prison, he had married and fathered two children. He worked as a forklift operator and as laborer, and had a good employment record. Apparently, his predatory sexual fantasies had only been banked—until they erupted on a sunny day in July.
    And Harrison had to have been a man consumed by lust and rage. The initial report from the Medical Examiner said that Jane Costantino had been stabbed six times in the chest with “hard, vicious thrusts.” The knife had pierced so deeply that the Medical Examiner believed Jane’s killer had to be a man of more than usual strength.
    Dale Harrison fit that description. They believed he was the person who had shattered the forty-two years of serenity in the park. Forty-two years and never a murder.
    The investigators doubted that Jane had known her killer. She was, almost certainly, a chance victim. Harrison had approached the other woman first. He hadn’t known her and he hadn’t known Jane either. When the first woman he accosted told him to “get lost,” he had turned around and seen Jane Costantino coming down the trail. When the agents and deputies checked on Jane’s background, they learned about her quest to ride a bike coast to coast. She had come so close to completing her journey. Just another fifth of a mile and she and her bike would have reached the ocean.
    Instead, Jane had the tragic misfortune to cross paths with the man who pretended to be a
Playboy
photographer. She wouldn’t have believed that ruse for a minute. But a woman who had worked for years as a cocktail waitress would have become very adept at turning away men without offending them. Jane Costantino could think on her feet. She wasn’t a woman to panic and run. She would have tried to reason with an attacker—if he gave her a chance to do so. Why then had Jane Costantino been killed? Her clothing hadn’t been disarranged at all, so a sexual attack hadn’t even been begun. Had Jane said something to the man who approached her that had enraged him? It was possible that she had inadvertently made a remark that triggered