A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

she saw the gun in the shooter’s hand.
    Bullets had pierced Amy’s left lower jaw, breast, lung, ear, and thigh. Ironically, the bullet that penetrated her shoulder had gone on to sever her spinal cord at the same level where Eric’s had been cut six years before in Vietnam. She might have survived those bullets, but not the one that entered her skull and coursed through her brain. Doctors and cops alike shook their heads. Amy Shaw’s killer had had to
reload
his gun to cause so much carnage.

    Eric Shaw and his second wife, Mariel, were transported to the Des Moines police station to be interviewed separately. Detectives used the wheelchair in their car to move Mariel, and improvised with an office chair with wheels and padded arms, maneuvering it carefully as they brought Shaw himself in.
    Mariel Shaw was understandably distressed, but she fought to control her emotions as she tried to reconstruct what had happened.
    “We’d gone over to pick up Eric’s children,” she said softly. “And then Eric and Amy were having an argument—I think about their clothes.”
    Eric had turned to her and asked her to hand him a sack of clothes they had brought with them. She reached down and picked up the bag from the floor. Only then, as he took it from her hand, had she seen the glint of the gun beneath the bag.
    The pale woman in front of them looked anguished as she remembered the shooting. She said Amy Shaw had still been walking toward the car when the shots began. Her husband had fired all the bullets and then reloaded. “I tried to stop him but he’s too strong,” she said.
    She had had no idea how deep her new husband’s hatred for his ex-wife ran, no idea that he had brought a loaded gun with him. She was willing to give a verbal statement to the Des Moines detectives, but she was reluctant to sign a written statement until she had talked to an attorney.

    In sharp contrast to his bride, Eric Shaw did not appear shaken by the tragedy. When Detective Rolf Grunden approached him with a swab that would show if he had gunpowder residue on his hands, Shaw quickly held up his left hand. “You might as well only take this one,” he drawled. “That’s the only one that did it.”
    Detective Jerry Burger faced the man who had just shot his ex-wife eight times. He asked Shaw if he was comfortable.
    “As comfortable as I can get,” Shaw answered, pointing to his crippled legs with a massively muscled arm.
    “You’ve served time in the military?” Burger asked, trying to find some possible explanation for the carnage he’d just witnessed.
    “Yeah . . . I was all over Nam. That’s where I got greased,” he answered, touching his shoulder and lazily tracing the path of the bullet which had paralyzed him. “Can I have a glass of water?”
    When Burger returned with it, he was shocked to hear Shaw whistling cheerfully. Eric Shaw declined to make any statements at all without the presence of his attorney. When he was informed of his rights under Miranda for the third time, he waved his hand, “I know about all that good stuff—I took business law at Bellevue Community College.”
    As unbelievable as it seemed, Eric Shaw appeared very pleased with himself that the woman he’d once been married to, the mother of his children, was dead. His children were now, for all intents and purposes, orphans, but that wasn’t bothering him. Nor was he concerned about Mariel, who sat weeping in another interview room.
    The investigators didn’t know yet just how much of the shooting—if any—the children had witnessed, and they were reluctant to question them so soon after their mother’s death. A policewoman came into the station to comfort them until they could be removed to a receiving home to wait for their aunt to arrive.
    Eric Shaw had claimed that the police could never touch him because they had no facilities to care for him, but he was wrong. He was booked into the King County jail, and the investigation continued. Des Moines had only eight policemen at the time, and they would all be busy for days trying to sort out what had happened and interviewing the dozens of witnesses who had seen Amy Shaw fall in a blaze of gunfire. There was no paucity of evidence and witnesses’ statements in the Amy Shaw case.
    Many of Amy’s neighbors in the Driftwood Apartments gave statements. They had seen Amy Shaw, clad in a brown blouse and white shorts, as she walked out to the white Ford. They had seen the gun in the