A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

for one’s self.” Although victims can no longer say who hurt them, or how they died, the postmortem examination of the body can speak volumes about the truth of what happened.
    Sharon had been struck forcefully on the head, and then she had been strangled manually. Human hands had left finger-shaped bruises on her throat. In a delicate victim, death by strangulation occurs quickly, sometimes within moments.
    Sharon Mason had been a virgin, but while she was unconscious, her attacker had removed her slacks and her underwear and had “raped” her with a foreign object. There was no physical evidence of normal intercourse, although acid phosphatase tests on her girdle produced the bright reddish-purple reaction that indicates the presence of semen.
    She had been alive, but unconscious, when the carotidartery on the left side of her neck was severed, causing massive bleeding.
    There were other, postmortem (after death) wounds on her right thigh. But these long cuts had not bled.
    Nachoneckny informed the Thurston County detectives that someone—undoubtedly the killer—had moved Sharon’s body some hours after death. Livor mortis, or lividity, is the purplish staining that appears on the lowest regions of a body when the heart stops pumping blood. When the body is moved before lividity is complete, a secondary pinkish coloration appears along the nether regions of the new position. This, the medical examiner said, had occurred in Sharon’s case.
    The investigators already knew that Sharon’s killer had done a great deal of “staging” in her apartment, as if he relished the reaction of the detectives who would try to figure out who he was. They suspected he had stayed in her apartment for a long time after she died. For one thing, the witness who saw Sharon’s car out front at five had watched it sporadically all Monday evening until ten—when it was gone. But then it was back the next morning, in its allocated parking spot.
    The killer had carefully created the scene in the bedroom. The lower half of Sharon’s bedspread was stained red, and so was the carpet beside it. The killer had deliberately driven a bloody steak knife into the carpet between his victim’s legs, a phallic symbol that was an especially grim sight next to the birthday cards that spilled from her coat pocket.
    More shocking and baffling, however, were the words scrawled across the mirror above the chest of drawers in Sharon’s bedroom. The killer had written his message in two shades of her lipstick: DIDNT [
sic
] KEEP THE DEAL. P.S. ONE MORE . . .”
    (It was a communication method used by one of the most infamous serial killers in America. In the nineteen-forties, William Heirens, 17, left a lipstick message on the bedroom wall near the body of Frances Brown, a middle-aged nurse. It read, “Catch Me Before I Kill More . . .”)
    What did Sharon Mason’s killer mean? What kind of a “deal” could a woman like Sharon Mason have made with a man capable of such violence? It seemed totally implausible—but there it was written in scarlet on her mirror.
    The rest of the elegant apartment was clean. The bathroom had not one speck of blood in it; even when the trap in the sink was removed, there was nothing to indicate the killer had washed up there; the plush bath mat was in place, as was the crystal container of fancy soaps on the sink, and the box of bath powder on the back of the toilet.
    Technicians dusted every surface of the apartment for latent prints, sketched the rooms to scale, and photographed every room. Now, the real work would start. The investigative team from the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office fanned out to begin questioning the first of over three hundred people who would be questioned before Sharon Mason’s murder was solved.
    Paul Barclift talked to the shocked and disbelieving staff at the Roosevelt Elementary School. Sharon Mason had been one of the most admired teachers there, calm and loving with her first-graders, and always ready to help out with school projects. While she had no close friends at school, no one described her as stand-offish or unfriendly; she was simply “a very private person.”
    Sharon had talked often about her parents. “She was superclose to them,” one teacher recalled. But as far as her teacher friends knew, Sharon didn’t date, and didn’t even have a close woman friend.
    Sharon’s parents told the detectives that they felt they knew her better than anyone in the world, and