A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

parking lot, facing the road, as if she planned only to stop for a few minutes.

    The man who lived in the apartment directly over Sharon Mason’s unit thought he recognized her footsteps on the stairs at 4:55. He heard her door open and close. But he had turned on his television to hear the five o’clock news while he was fixing dinner in his kitchen, and that blocked out any noises outside his walls.
    But Sharon Mason’s comings and goings were so predictable. He had
never
heard loud sounds from her apartment. Now, when he did hear something, he listened and remembered. He heard “three quick thumps,” followed almost immediately by three muted cries of a woman uttering “Oooh . . .ooh . . .oh.”
    He stood in his kitchen, his hands poised over the sink, listening. Puzzled. The sounds weren’t loud enough to be termed screams, or even alarming enough for him to be sure anything was wrong.
    But his curiosity was piqued and he went to his window to peer down at the parking lot. There was a car below, and, feeling a little foolish, he jotted down the license number.
    Sharon Mason’s upstairs neighbor felt vaguely disturbed the rest of the evening. At one point, he even went downstairs and rang her doorbell, thinking he would ask her if everything was O.K. But no one answered the bell. He wondered if his imagination was playing tricks on him. He’d been reading
Helter Skelter
about the Manson murders, and he figured that was responsible for his being uncharacteristically suspicious.
    Not another sound came from Sharon’s apartment all evening, but that wasn’t unusual. Sharon never had her television on too loud, she never had a party that he could recall or even entertained friends whose voices might carry.
    Another man was puzzled when he tried to contact Sharon Mason that evening. He was the maintenance man who took care of the apartment complex. He’d gotten a priority assignment to change the locks on Number 9. But when he knocked on the front door late Monday, she didn’t answer. Assuming that she had a late conference at her school, he had left. But he’d phoned several times during the evening and never got an answer.
    After the last call, he shook his head slightly and hung up. He knew from the manager that the tenant in Number 9 was extremely upset and he had promised to have the locks changed by nightfall. But he couldn’t change them unless the tenant was present. He figured she had stayed someplace else for the night, so he decided to call her the next day.
    In truth, Sharon Mason’s apartment was not unoccupied, but no one inside could—or would—answer the doorbell, knocks, or telephone rings.
    On Tuesday morning, the first graders in Sharon’s schoolroom were restless. Their teacher was late, and she was never late. One of them went to tell the teacher in the room next door.
    In nine years, Sharon Mason had never failed to call in if she was ill or could not be at work. Indeed, she usually called the night before to give school authorities the chance to find a substitute teacher. Her principal and her fellow teachers were alarmed. A woman whose punctuality and dependability were legendary would not fail to appear for work unless there was something wrong.
    At 9 A.M. a worried co-worker called the Tumwater Police Department to request that an officer check on Sharon to be sure she was O.K. Sergeant G. E. Miller reached her apartment house twenty-two minutes later. He knocked loudly on the front door of Number 9, and like the others who had tried to rouse someone, was met only with silence. While he waited, he glanced idly down into the parking lot and saw “a tannish-mustard Oldsmobile” parked in the stall allotted to Number 9. He noted nothing unusual about it, except that it was covered with mud.
    Sharon’s fellow teachers told Tumwater police officers that it was quite possible that she had driven to Aberdeen the night before. Although she hadn’t mentioned that she might do that, they knew that she was very worried about her stolen key. But a call to her parents in Aberdeen elicited the information that they hadn’t seen Sharon since she drove away Sunday afternoon.
    Understandably her parents were frightened. They assured the officers that Sharon would have called them if she stayed anyplace but her apartment. “This isn’t like her,” they told the police and they asked them to go into her apartment.
    With the manager leading the way with his pass key, Tumwater Police