A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

terrible violence.
    It looked more likely that Dale Harrison had been looking for a woman to kill. He had done it swiftly and violently. And silently. There was a great deal of both circumstantial and physical evidence that linked Harrison to the inexplicable murder of a stranger. His hunting knife matched exactly the wound measurements taken at Jane Costantino’s autopsy.
    Tests of his wet purple shirt showed that the ocean had failed to wash away traces of human blood. The shirt fibers still held enough blood to test, and the blood matched Jane’s genotype.
    A man whose appearance was as striking as Dale Harrison’s was not easily forgotten. Several people who had been in the park picked him from both a mugshot laydown, and from a line-up, positive that he was the same man they had seen on the beach trail. The first woman he accosted had no doubt at all that Harrison was the man who followed Jane Costantino as she hurried toward the ocean.
    Dale Harrison was arraigned and held in lieu of $100,000 bail. When agents questioned him, he was adamant that he knew nothing at all about the murder of Jane Costantino. But then, faced with the hard evidence against him, he changed his story.
He
wasn’t the person who had killed her, he said confidentially. But he admitted that he had been a witness to her stabbing.
    The suspect said that he had looked on helplessly as another man, a stranger to him, had grabbed his knife and plunged it into the woman with the bicycle.
    The special agents glanced at each other. If ever they had heard a weak explanation, this was it. Here was a husky forklift operator, a man who should have been a formidable opponent. Why hadn’t
he
jumped to Jane’s defense? And even if he had been afraid to help her, how could he have turned his back on her as she lay bleeding to death? He could have at least gone for help.
    They asked him what had happened to the “mysterious stranger.” It was Harrison himself who was found with a knife, the bloodied shirt, and the rope.
    Dale Harrison insisted that he had run away because he was terrified of being falsely accused of murder. Yes, he admitted, he had a record for sex crimes, and that was what scared him.
    “Who would have believed me—once they knew about my record?”
    Who indeed? The investigators stared back at him. His story made no sense at all. They wondered if he was going for a split personality defense.
It wasn’t me; it was this guy who invades my body . . .

    While Dale Harrison awaited trial for murder, he continued to insist that he was innocent. The investigators and special agents continued to check into his background, sure that they still didn’t know the entire story. They believed that Harrison had gone into the national park with a cruel mission in mind; he seemed to have no other reason for being there.
    At length, they made contact with a man who said he was one of Harrison’s closest friends. Boyd Blaunt* nodded uncomfortably as they explained what they were looking for. Had Harrison ever talked about his former crimes? Had he ever spoken of something that might explain his vicious attack on a woman he had never seen before?
    Boyd Blaunt said that he had. “He’s had some kind of fantasy—or obsession maybe you’d call it—for about a year and a half.”
    There was another side to Dale Harrison, the hardworking, devoted family man—information that hardly surprised the FBI agents who had tried to categorize their suspect. Blaunt said that Dale had fashioned a very intricate and deadly fantasy. Once he first told Blaunt about it, Dale had brought it up many times—at least a dozen times, detailing every aspect of it to his friend.
    “I didn’t take him seriously at first,” Blaunt said. Harrison’s plan was just too kinky and far out for anyone to really mean it. He had been turned on by the idea of finding a girl all alone in an isolated forest. Away from everybody else, he figured she would be helpless, and Harrison would have a rope handy to tie her up. Then, at his leisure, he would make a sex slave of her. His discipline and bondage fantasy included beating the captive woman with a belt.
    The knife was part of it too, according to Blaunt. Dale Harrison said he would use a knife to force his victim to submit to “acts of degradation and rape.”
    Boyd Blaunt said that Harrison had even gone so far as to urge him to join in the plan to find and attack a woman. “But I always refused. It was only after that