A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

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    No one saw the little face watching from a nearby window or realized the child there had disappeared. A moment later, an operator heard a small voice asking for the police. “My daddy shot my mommy,” she said. Gently, the operator questioned the little girl, learned her name and her address, and nodded to another operator to go ahead and call the Des Moines police. When she turned back to the child on the line, there was only a dial tone. Someone in the Driftwood Apartments had already called for an aid car. The fire department automatically alerted the Des Moines police that there had been a shooting.
    Robert Fox happened to be patrolling only seconds away from the Driftwood Apartments, and he spotted the white Ford with what appeared to be two adults and two children inside pulling out. He turned on his blue lights, and the car slowed and stopped.
    It was a potentially explosive situation for a policeman. He knew there had been a shooting, but no more than that. There were children inside the car, and he dared not fire himself. Fox activated the outside mike and shouted, “Come out with your hands in front of you!”
    The driver’s door didn’t open, and Fox realized that the man in the car was shouting something back. Fox could not make out what he was saying. Then the woman in the passenger seat called from her window, “He can’t get out of the car—he’s a paraplegic!”
    A split second later, she reached down to the seat and tossed something out onto the pavement. It was a revolver. As it hit the street, the cylinder popped out and Fox was close enough to see that it still held three live rounds of ammunition.
    His first concern was still the youngsters, and he held his hand out to them and said, “Come on, kids.”
    They ran to him, and the little girl then made what was probably the most poignant res gestae (spontaneous) statement Fox had ever heard, “My daddy shot my mommy in the head. I tried to make him stop—but he wouldn’t. My daddy killed my mommy. My mommy told me that if daddy ever shot her, we were supposed to go live with my aunt. Will you make sure we get to live with my aunt?”
    She was such a little kid, Fox thought—not more than six or seven. She should never have had to witness what she had obviously just seen. He sheltered the kids in his arms and led them to the back seat of a patrol car. The little boy didn’t seem to understand what was happening, but Fox feared the girl would never forget it.
    Although it had been only a few minutes since the shooting, the scene on the Kent–Des Moines Road was alive with squad cars, both from the city of Des Moines and from the King County Police. Detective Sergeant Marty Pratt (soon to be the Chief of Police) joined them a few minutes before nine. He helped the woman companion of the gunman into his car. She, too, was a paraplegic. The .38 was locked in the trunk of a county car while the investigators made sure that the shooter didn’t have more weapons.
    In the seventies, Des Moines was a city of just over 4,000 people and had not had a homicide in many years. Like many small departments in the county, the local police operated on a reciprocal program with King County Police. They now requested help from that department’s homicide unit. Detective Sergeant Len Randall and Detective Rolf Grunden joined the Des Moines police and King County patrolmen in trying to sort out just what had happened.
    The victim had been rushed to the emergency room of Highline Hospital in nearby Burien, and Randall and Des Moines Sergeant Ken Schnorr saw that the crime scene was secured and left deputies guarding all that was left of it—a huge pool of coagulating blood, a stained blanket, and numerous bullet casings. Then the two sergeants drove to Burien Hospital to see about the condition of the victim.
    They knew her name because neighbors had identified her as twenty-eight-year-old Amy Shaw. But that was all they knew about her world, her life or why the red-haired man had shot her.
    And they would not learn the truth from Amy; although the paramedics had used heroic procedures on the break-neck run to the hospital and the ER doctors had worked frantically over her, Amy was pronounced dead at 9:40 A.M. There was no way she could have lived no matter how much medical treatment she received. Eight .38 caliber bullets had crashed into her body. All of her wounds were to the left side of her body, as if she had turned, prepared to run, after