A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

enough to let into her apartment?

    Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo attended the postmortem examination of Marcia Perkins. Their original supposition that she had died by manual strangulation had been correct: the cricoid cartilage was fractured and there were hemorrhages in the strap muscles on either side of her neck. There were no ligature marks that would have been left by a rope or noose, but there were bruises where fingers and thumbs had exerted intense pressure.
    In addition, there were many, many scratches and lacerations on Marcia’s body; she had fought her killer like a tiger. But she had lost. She
had
been brutally raped and sodomized, and there were tears and contusions in her genital organs. Purple teeth marks encircled her right nipple. Her killer had been a man of great strength and, certainly, possessed with terrible anger.
    The medical examiner pointed to the right portion of the victim’s forehead and explained, “This wound was administered with a blunt instrument. This was a stunning wound, but there is no fracture.”
    The two detectives headed out to interview Marcia’s neighbors. Whoever had killed her had a running start. Even the time of death was not a certainty at this point, although it had been at least three days earlier. Along with Detectives Bill Baughman and George Marberg, they began a canvass of the apartment house where Marcia Perkins had lived and its twin adjacent building.
    Some people seem to remember every strange noise or out-of-place person in their neighborhoods; others apparently go through life wearing earplugs and blinders. The quartet of investigators hoped to find the former.
    The building next to Marcia’s was occupied by patients or families of patients receiving cancer treatment at the nearby Fred Hutchinson Cancer Clinic. Because that was why they were in Seattle, many of the occupants were away from their apartments most of the daytime hours, and the detectives would have to check back several times to make contact with them. Also, a lot of people had taken advantage of the three-day holiday weekend and left town for Memorial Day.
    But there
were
some illuminating statements coming from the victim’s neighbors. The manager of Marcia’s building remembered now that someone had buzzed his intercom between four and six o’clock on Saturday morning, May 29. “It woke me up,” he said. “I answered and I talked to a man who sounded drunk. He asked for Marcia and I told him he’d made a mistake and to buzz the correct apartment.”
    The manager had been annoyed enough to stay on the intercom to listen in on the ensuing conversation, and he heard the man talking to Marcia. He was pleading very insistently to come in. “He was saying, ‘Please, little sister, let me in.’ ”
    “Did she buzz him up?” Bill Baughman asked.
    “Not at first—but she finally agreed to unlock the door when the guy kept begging.”
    He had apparently stumbled up to her apartment. That is, the manager had heard some faltering steps clumping up the stairway, but he hadn’t looked out to see who the man was.
    The manager’s apartment was just across the hall from Marcia’s quarters, and he could have peeked out the door, but he wasn’t that curious; he was sleepy and went back to bed. However, he told Marberg and Baughman that the occupants of the building next door would have been in a better spot to hear what went on in Marcia’s apartment. “Their windows face the same breezeway as Marcia’s. It’s almost like being in the same room in the summer when the windows are open . . .”
    And that proved to be true. One of the residents in the next-door building told the detectives she had heard a woman’s voice in a “loud argument” about 6 A.M. “There were doors slamming and banging, all right,” she recalled. “It went on for about three minutes.” But she hadn’t gone to the window and looked over into Marcia’s apartment. This was a live-and-let-live neighborhood where people didn’t poke their noses into their neighbors’ business.
    Still, one of the women who lived in Marcia’s apartment house had also been been awakened on the morning of the 29th by someone at the intercom just outside the front door. It was practically under her bedroom window. She told the detectives that the man had first said he was the police. “But then he laughed, and I heard him say that he was Marcia’s brother. I could hear him talking first to the manager and then to