A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

they knew of no strong attachments she might have had to anyone outside the family. If there had been someone, or if she was frightened about anything, they were positive she would have told them.
    Yes, she was afraid of the dark. Yes, everyone agreed that she had been unusually cautious. Was it possible that she had a kind of black presentiment of doom that some potential murder victims seem to feel? Or was Sharon’s unusual vigilance due to the fear of a
real
person or situation that she had told no one about? Certainly, she had reason to be afraid during the last twelve hours of her life because she
knew
that someone had chosen her car to break into—that someone had stolen the key to her apartment.
    Was it within the realm of possibility that Sharon had had a secret lover? If she had, it would have been a love unconsummated because the autopsy findings had verified that she was a virgin. Was it an affair only of the heart, or an affair that had never begun? Perhaps Sharon’s lack of interest in making friends or in participating in activities beyond her parents and homemaking stemmed from a passion that was as secret as it was powerful. Had she promised to marry someone—and then reneged? Had she promised not to reveal a love for a married man—and then done so?
    What was the “deal” she didn’t keep? Or was it simply a red herring?
    Even a woman who kept secrets from the world had to tell
someone.
If Sharon had had a lover, surely she would have entertained him at her apartment, or left at night to meet him. No one had ever seen her with a male companion in the apartment complex, in a restaurant, or at a movie. She was always alone when she registered at the motel where she stayed during power blackouts. And the motel maids said they had never found any sign at all that she had had company there.
    The more they found out about the circumspect life that Sharon Mason had lived, the more the sheriff’s detectives felt the lipstick-scribbled words had no connection to her at all.
    But the P.S. alarmed the investigators. What did the killer mean by “P.S. ONE MORE . . .? Did another woman have to die before they caught him?
    The killer they sought was either very clever or very lucky. All the physical evidence retrieved from Sharon’s apartment was sent to the Western Division of the Washington State Crime Lab in Seattle to be compared with known samples. The steak knife used in the murder could be matched exactly to others found in Sharon Mason’s kitchen drawer. There were no prints in the apartment but Sharon’s. The hair sample clinging to her coat was not her own—but there were no hair samples found to compare it with. The blood in the apartment was all Sharon’s. The killer apparently hadn’t cut himself during the violent attack.
    Paul Barclift wondered how an attack of such ferocity could have taken place without Sharon’s upstairs neighbor’s hearing it. Barclift sent K. C. Jones to interview the upstairs neighbor who had heard the unusual sounds the night she was murdered while he himself waited in Sharon’s apartment.
    “I shouted and banged on the floor,” Barclift said, “but K.C. didn’t even hear me upstairs. With the neighbor’s television on and his kitchen fan going, there was no way he could have heard Sharon as she was fighting for her life—nothing beyond those three soft cries.”
    There was the mystery of Sharon’s Oldsmobile. The neighbor saw it at five and at ten, as clean and shining as she always kept it. The next morning, it was covered with mud and vegetation. Sergeant Dick Nelson collected samples of the dirt and weeds from the undercarriage of the car and took them to the geologists at the Washington State Highway Department’s Materials Lab in the hope that they would be able to pinpoint the area where the car might have been. Unfortunately, both the weeds and the mud were common to many spots in Thurston County.
    It was a long shot, a routine procedure in a frustrating homicide investigation. Another far-out possibility was that there might be something in Sharon Mason’s phone records that could help them find her killer. The investigators asked Pacific Northwest Bell for a copy of long distance calls made to and from Sharon’s apartment. The phone company representatives said they would forward a report as soon as the records could be compiled.

    The area around the apartment house had been searched once, and it was searched again. The investigators