A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

was the faint odor of a death too long undiscovered in the apartment. Marcia Perkins lay just inside the entrance, her legs spread wide in the classic position of a rape victim. She wore only a short blue terry cloth robe and a bra, and both had been pushed up to her shoulders. Rigor mortis, the rigidity that comes soon after death, had come and departed, a natural process that took several days. They noted that there also was considerable skin slippage on the victim’s body because decomposition had begun.
    Marcia had suffered a beating, although she had obviously put up a terrific fight against her attacker. Dark purple abrasions marred her face, throat and left knee. There were definite indications that she’d died of strangulation—manual strangulation—at the hands of a powerful killer. Her eyes showed the burst blood vessels (petechiae) that are characteristic of death from strangulation.
    A pair of blue bikini panties lay crumpled in a nearby doorway, and oddly, a pair of women’s shoes with both straps broken—as if the wearer had been lifted forcibly out of them—rested close to the panties.
    The motive for Marcia Perkins’s murder was apparent; she had clearly been the victim of a violent sexual attack. It would take an autopsy and laboratory tests to say whether rape had been committed.
    There were signs in the apartment that seemed to say that Marcia had known her killer and had admitted him willingly to her home. Two cups with a teaspoon of instant coffee powder in them sat on the kitchen counter, and there was a pan of water on the stove, although the burner beneath was turned off. A partial bottle of rum sat on the counter. Since the kitchen was otherwise immaculate, it appeared that Marcia had been in the process of serving refreshments when someone had come up behind her, seized her boldly, and literally yanked her out of her shoes as the attack began.
    Her killer had to have been a man possessed of tremendous strength. And cunning. The three homicide detectives noted that someone had made a concentrated effort to wipe away all traces of himself from the premises. There were no fingerprints on any of the smooth surfaces which ordinarily would be expected to reveal latent prints. Everything had been laboriously wiped clean. The killer had even swept up long strands of the victim’s black hair into a dustpan, although he hadn’t thrown them away. Maybe he’d realized there was nothing incriminating about the hair of a person who lived in this apartment. He had yanked the phone cord from the wall, although the phone was already off the hook.
    All the drapes were tightly shut, closing the apartment off from the world outside, and the radio still played—loud enough to cover sounds in the apartment, but not loud enough to draw complaints from other tenants. It looked as if the killer had wanted to move around his victim’s home unseen and unheard.
    A woman’s purse—probably Marcia’s—had been dumped on the floor. There was no wallet or money inside. For some obscure reason, the bedding from the victim’s bed was tangled on the living room floor. A steam iron and an empty Miller’s beer can were caught inside the bedding.
    Benny DePalmo checked the only bathroom, and found the sink spotless, with bottles of perfume undisturbed on its ledge. But he
did
find a man’s ring on the counter behind the sink. That seemed strange; if the killer had gone to such efforts to wipe his presence away, why would he leave such a distinctive ring behind?
    With so many questions, one thing was clear: Marcia Perkins had to have been been killed by someone she knew and trusted. The apartment house had an excellent security system. Marcia would have had to buzz open a downstairs lock to let anyone come up to her floor. Then, she had to let a visitor into the locked apartment itself. She was in her robe, and she had been preparing to serve coffee when she was attacked. A complete stranger wouldn’t have been so obsessive in wiping away his fingerprints. The killer must have had reason to believe he would be questioned and printed, and so he had tried to make certain he couldn’t be placed in her apartment near the time of her death.
    But the investigators didn’t know enough about Marcia Perkins at this point to speculate who that might have been. Her estranged husband was outside with the apartment manager, and he seemed to be genuinely grieving. Who else was there in Marcia’s life whom she trusted