A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

girl died that I realized how serious he was.”
    Blaunt’s information on Harrison’s compulsion was an exact blueprint of what had occurred on July 23. At least up to a point. But Jane Costantino had not been raped. Even alone in the forest, she wouldn’t have been helpless; she would have fought back when she realized that he was determined to tie her up. That must have shocked Dale Harrison, the investigators thought.
    Instead of being passive and frightened, Jane would have argued and struggled with her captor. Panicked, full of rage and frustration, all of his planned fantasy in disarray, Dale Harrison had stabbed her with the knife that was supposed to be used only as a threatening tool. If she had submitted to the fantasy, would she have lived? No one will ever know.
    There are no hard and fast rules on how to react to a rapist. Some will be scared off if a woman fights back and some will be enraged. Some will listen to quiet reasoning or to hard luck stories. More are turned off by women who vomit or claim to have AIDS, but there are no guarantees. Jane Costantino fell into a fatal synchronicity of time and place. She had the terrible luck to be on the same path that Dale Harrison was when he was acting out his fantasy.
    Harrison went on trial in U.S. District Court in November 1980 for the stabbing death of Jane Costantino and a jury found him guilty. His defense team attempted to bring in a motion that would mitigate his sentence because he was mentally ill. According to defense attorney Dan Dubitsky, psychologists had indicated that “. . . something is there, but they can’t put their fingers on it.”
    Assistant U.S. Attorney James Flush was adamant that Judge Donald Voorhees should not consider Harrison’s allegedly “exemplary life between 1965 and 1980 as an indication that he might be safe to be free. Either he has been very careful in committing crimes since 1965 or this is something that can occur [again] after a long period of time.”
    On December 5, Judge Donald Voorhees denied the defense motion for a psychiatric study that might have allowed Harrison a chance for early parole, and sentenced him to life in prison.
    Judge Voorhees spoke very firmly as he meted out Harrison’s life sentence, “In the light of his past history and this heinous crime . . . I am sentencing him to life imprisonment.”
    Jane Costantino’s friends and relatives gathered at her funeral services for a last good-bye. An uncle from Long Island talked about her family’s continuing concern over the chances Jane had taken. “Naturally we worried about her, but you can’t dwell on those things. But we never thought of murder. Maybe being hurt in an accident, but not murder.”
    Nor, quite probably, did Jane herself. She lived her short life to the fullest. And like Amelia Earhart, she took soaring chances and reaped many wonderful rewards before her life ended early; just as she had known it would.

Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town
    Death is unexpected for most murder victims, a small blessing, indeed. But at least they lived their lives without the sure knowledge that an angry executioner was waiting just around a corner. For one lovely young woman, her early death was as inevitable as the waning of the moon. She
knew,
but neither she nor any of her friends could stop it. She even knew who her killer would be, but that didn’t help her either.
    It’s impossible to say just when the seeds of violence that threatened to destroy her were sown. The rage in her killer may have been a direct result of the war in Vietnam. Or it may have been a small kernel of hostility that had grown in him since he was a child.
    Their story began as a love story, but it ended full of murderous hate and jealousy.

E loise Amelia “Amy” Packard* was only sixteen when she met the man she would one day marry. The fine bone structure of her face and her ebony hair had come from her Indian heritage, and her perfect complexion from her Irish relatives. The tall redheaded young man from Oklahoma couldn’t take his eyes off her when they met for the first time in 1962.
    Amy worked as a mother’s helper for a family in Olympia—the capital city of Washington State—and they loved her like their own. But she wanted to be with Eric Shaw* and they knew that it wouldn’t be long before they were going to be looking for someone else to help with their children. They advised Amy to wait until she was eighteen, and she did, although it