A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

strained and his father began dating other women. “I’m glad he was gone,” he would remember. “I’m glad he didn’t interfere with my life, and make me be something that I couldn’t be.”
    But someone else
did
interfere with Jackie Emerson. When he was twelve, one of his father’s male friends sexually abused him. In pain and shock, he cried to himself—but he never told his father. Perhaps he kept the secret because he had felt some sexual release. “He kept leading me on, and I wanted to . . .
    “After this, doors started opening. I realized what I was; this is what I wanted. That man brought me out. The only guilty feelings I had were that I had to
hide
my feelings.”
    Jackie would never be much bothered by guilt; he took what he wanted. When he was thirteen, he was arrested for shoplifting. He was not prosecuted. A few months later, he was arrested for assault. He was puzzled by that; he had “only been throwing rocks at a bum near the railroad tracks.” He was not prosecuted. When he was about fourteen, he was arrested for auto theft. His father wouldn’t let him have the family car for a prom at school, so he “took someone else’s.” Jackie was sent to the Youth Center for a week or two, and then to an outpatient program.
    Sometime during his adolescence, Jackie Emerson came to see himself as a woman. He identified with his grandmother more than any person in his life. She had been the closest person to him, and she was always there while his parents worked. During psychological testing, he actually drew himself as a female, as this was his inner picture of himself.
    His mother, who had thought it was “cute” to have a passively sweet little boy, was horrified to find that her sixteen-year-old son was still dressing in women’s clothes. Since she had encouraged his wearing little girls’ dresses when he was eight or nine, it seems odd that she was so surprised to find he had never stopped.
    “Jackie could never accept himself as a male,” his aunt once said. “He was high-strung, and he’s still argumentative sometimes because he feels people won’t accept him. He’s insecure too,” she added.
    Jackie Emerson never managed to graduate from high school; he was always running away from home. Some of his relatives were sure he was working as a homosexual prostitute, although his mother would never accept that. Eventually, he started working on his GED (General Equivalency Diploma) and told his friends and family that he was going to save up for surgery so he could become a real woman. Until then, he said, he planned to study to be a beautician.
    Jackie Emerson was slender and doe-eyed, far more feminine than masculine. His mother finally threw her hands up and conceded that Jackie was more her daughter than her son. A formal picture of the family taken in the early seventies included Jackie in full female regalia.
    Even so, Jackie’s sexual identification warred with his strict Baptist upbringing. “I was scared that I would go to hell if I got my sex changed in an operation,” he recalled once. But he read the Bible until he found a passage that he felt was meant for him. “God does not expect flesh in heaven,” he explained. “He expects your soul.”
    Had Jackie Emerson lived within the strict parameters of the Bible quotations he found, tragedy might have been averted. But Jackie had a heedless, wild streak, and a kind of ruthless pride that would get him into trouble time and again.
    Jackie’s rap sheet as an adult began in 1970, and he had arrests all up and down the West Coast: “Offering and Agreeing,” “Resisting Arrest,” “Gross Indecency,” “Hitchhiking,” “Prostitution,” “Obstruction of Public Thoroughfare,” “Larceny Shoplifting,” “Grand Larceny,” “Resisting, Offering and Agreeing.” Some of his arrests were for parking tickets and for having no driver’s license, but most were connected to prostitution and stealing. Usually, he walked away clean or had to pay a small fine. Jackie Emerson had long since learned that he could do just about anything he wanted and get away with it. He rarely told the truth about anything, and soon began to believe his own self-serving version of events.
    On February 23, 1974, Jackie Emerson approached a man who was visiting Seattle in his motor home. Jackie looked very pretty that night and it’s unlikely that the “John” had any idea that he had made a date with a man. Jackie suggested that the