A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

clothes horse, although her taste ran to the slightly bizarre. On this day, she wore a pair of tight pink slacks, a figure-revealing green sweater, and high-heeled pumps. Her hair was teased into a huge bouffant with youthful pigtails, and her makeup had been expertly applied—base, eyeshadow
and liner, false eyelashes, and her full lips were deep red.
    It might have been any trial where an attractive female sat in the defendant’s chair, only there was a vast difference. Jackie wasn’t a woman at all. She was a twenty-four-year-old transvestite prostitute. It would have been hard for a casual observer to tell; the defendant mimicked women so well that he would have fooled anyone.
    Jackie’s attorney had made a motion asking that his client be allowed to wear women’s clothing and a wig during the testimony and that he be referred to as “Ms.” After pondering this request, Judge Horowitz granted the motion.
    While some of the circumstances of this trial had a humorous side, there was sadness too. The victim had died, the prosecution said, because the defendant had fooled him with “her” disguise, and because he had confronted her. There was nothing funny about the end of their story.

T he two principals in this violent drama that would come to a fatal conclusion on a stormy February night in 1976 could not have been more different. The chance that they would one day meet was as remote as a head-on collision on a lonely road.

    Jonathan Lewis “Jackie” Emerson* was born on October 16, 1951, in Yakima, Washington, right at the peak of the apple harvest. The central Washington city has exactly the right climate for apples, peaches, pears, cherries and plums, and the hills of Yakima County are dotted with fruit trees as far as the eye can see. Both of Jonathan’s parents were hard workers, which was fortunate because he joined a family that already had six children.
    Jonathan never really had time to know two of his sisters; one died within three days of her birth of pneumonia and another—Rose—succumbed to spinal meningitis when she was three years old. His older sisters thought their baby brother looked like Rose, and they started dressing him up in girls’ clothes, trying, perhaps, in their innocent way, to bring back the sister they had lost. He was so young that he wouldn’t remember that, but his mother told him about it.
    The dress-up games may well have been for a different reason. For as long as Jonathan could remember, he had been far more comfortable playing with dolls than he ever was with a toy truck or a BB gun. He didn’t have much male influence around the house; his father worked all the time, and even when he was home, Jonathan remembered that “he was so busy he didn’t know what was going on around him.”
    Once his father found him playing with dolls, and Jonathan froze, waiting for an explosion. At some level, he knew that his father would disapprove. “But all he did was tell me to put them away. And the next time he caught me, he didn’t say a word.”
    When Jonathan received masculine toys like footballs and guns, he gave them to his brother. He had absolutely no interest in playing sports, or in watching sporting events on television. He had a fight with his brother once, who had tried to force him into a football game.
    His mother seemed to find no fault with the way Jonathan was; she kept him very close to her and was somewhat overprotective. She had lost her two little girls and she wasn’t taking any chances with Jonathan. She called him “Jackie,” and he felt that she always thought of him as a daughter rather than a son.
    The first memory “Jackie” Emerson had of his sisters dressing him in female clothing was one Halloween night when he was six. The frilly dress and wig was supposed to be only a costume, but he loved it. He felt right in those clothes.
    Mrs. Emerson worked at a hospital in Yakima and wasn’t home much more than her husband was. They both had to work overtime to support their family. Jackie seemed content enough and she never had any problems with him. Unlike his lost sisters, he was healthy and easy to raise. His mother’s extended family and the neighbors accepted him easily as a different sort of child. He played with his cousins who treated him as they would a girl, and the older folks in the neighborhood always referred to him as “a pretty boy.”
    As Jackie neared puberty, he saw his father even less; his parents’ marriage was