A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

for robbery.
    If Jackie had bewilderment over his gender, his confusion was nothing compared to that of the doctors and social workers he encountered; they never could decide whether to call him “he” or “she,” and his voluminous file was filled with studies that called him both.
    “Diagnostically,” one psychiatrist wrote, “she is best categorized under the heading 302.3 [in the
Diagnostic Statistical Manual
—the psychiatrist’s bible],
Transvestitism.
She also has some hysterical features in her makeup, tends to rationalize her behavior, to be quite gullible and somewhat given to fantasy. There is a fairly substantial antisocial element in her makeup. She tends to overly emphasize her need for surgery as a prelude to undertaking self-support . . . Her current employability is very much to be questioned, on the basis of her emotional stability, her history of prostitution, and her transvestite situation. Some counseling would seem appropriate for her to assist her in a more realistic appraisal of the opportunities open to her and how to make the best use of her resources.”
    This psychiatrist had chosen to identify Jackie Emerson as “she,” and clearly he/she did have a sexual identity problem. But so had—and
have
—myriad others who had not turned to crime for support or to pay for a hoped-for operation.
    Jackie Emerson was five feet, ten inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds. He had a fury in him, waiting to be unleashed if anyone questioned his persona or threatened him. The pretty face with the big eyes and the soft skin were a remarkable mask, a mask that made him more dangerous because he was not what he seemed to be at all.

    February 13, 1976—Friday the 13th—turned out to be an incredibly unlucky day for Brad Bass. He certainly had no reason to be worried about his physical safety when he stopped into an all-night restaurant for a bite to eat and a cup of coffee. He was big enough and strong enough to take care of himself.
    Larry’s Take 5 at 601 Pike Street was deep in the heart of the downtown section of Seattle. It was up and running twenty-two hours a day, with a cocktail lounge and a restaurant. It was also in the middle of the “stroll” in Seattle; Pike Street was prostitution territory, although those who sold sex for a price were sorely besieged by the Seattle Police Department’s vice squad. Pimps turned their women out along Pike Street and sat back in their zebra-upholstered Cadillacs to wait for their money. The hapless girls got arrested often and, when their faces became too familiar to the vice detectives, they were moved around the circuit to Portland or San Francisco and replaced with new faces. They were as expendable as women could be, trapped by circumstances and the lack of enough money to escape.
    The pimps seemed to go on forever; it took the testimony of two prostitutes to nail a pimp, and the women were afraid of a beating with a hot coathanger—or worse. It wasn’t easy to find two women brave enough to turn on the men who controlled them.
    Most of the prostitutes who worked the Pike Street stroll were no threat to their customers beyond the possibility of a sexually transmitted disease, and the seventies was an era when AIDS and even the herpes virus were unknown to the public. However, some of the prostitutes who approached men were not what they seemed to be, but it would have taken a physician to know it.
    Larry’s Take 5 drew business from straight customers, cruising women of the night, and, inevitably, from the vice squad. The restaurant’s policy was to serve everyone who was behaving himself, and things were relatively calm on Thursday night, February 12. Ike Stone was the chef. The grills and ovens were in the front of the restaurant and had an excellent view of the place through the opening where orders were picked up. He could see both the booths and the front door. Ike had seen the flotsam and jetsam of life come and go through the doors of the Take 5 for a year, and nothing surprised him much anymore. On Thursday night/Friday morning he was working the graveyard shift.
    Sometime around two-thirty A..M. on that Friday the 13th, an attractive and slender black woman walked up to the counter and, in a husky voice, ordered a grilled tuna fish and cheese sandwich and french fries to go. She wore a green pantsuit and her hair was teased in a bouffant style. Stone watched idly over the serving counter as the woman walked to the booths directly