A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

developing the controls or the empathy for others that mark an adult personality. He wants what he wants when he wants it. No one else matters.
    He is often glib, charming, attractive, and convincing. He is not hindered by conscience. He lies with the guileless smile of a child, the clear eyes of an innocent. If you are lucky, an encounter with a psychopath leaves you only disillusioned and doubting your own judgment.
    Two Washington State girls were not lucky. Their encounters with a psychopath ended their lives. Undoubtedly, many more girls would have died if not for the painstaking detective work of Seattle Police and King County, Washington, Police investigators.

O n Friday, November 28, 1969, the bridge tender of the First Avenue South Bridge in Seattle reported for work somewhat grudgingly, his thoughts still on the leisurely Thanksgiving holiday just past. There was little traffic; most people had Friday off too, and even the nearby Boeing Company was closed for the holiday. Idly, he scanned the polluted waters of the Duwamish River that roiled sluggishly beneath the bridge.
    Decades earlier, the Duwamish was as clear as glass, pristine as it was in the days when the Indians for which it is named lived on its banks. But it was being destroyed by industrial wastes. As the bridge tender watched the dirty water, his attention was drawn to a large object that bobbed in the waves. He had seen some peculiar things in the river, but now he felt a prickling of apprehension. The object was either a department store mannequin or a human body. As he squinted to see more clearly, he realized that it
was
a body. And it looked as though it had been in the Duwamish for some time.
    And that was odd. There were so many people who worked near the bridge, who drove over it. The body could not have been there long; someone surely would have spotted it.
    The bridge tender ran for the bridge shack and phoned the Seattle Police Harbor Unit. The police boat reached the river beneath the bridge at 8:20 A.M. As the officers aboard drew closer to the drifting form, they saw that it was indeed a body—the nude body of a female.
    Immersion in water speeds decomposition of a body and the task before the officers was not a pleasant one. Carefully, they hoisted the form onto the police boat. They could see that she had probably been in the river for many weeks, but her age or what she had looked like in life were impossible to determine.
    An assistant medical examiner waited on shore with an ambulance and the body was transferred at once to the King County Medical Examiner’s office to await the autopsy that might give some clue as to the woman’s fate. The dead woman appeared to have suffered some facial wounds, but that could have happened long after she was dead, damage done by floating trees or something sharp along the river banks. A rule of thumb for any superior detective is that unexplained deaths are treated first as a homicide, second as a suicide, third as accidental, and only when all other possibilities have been excluded, as the result of natural causes.
    Seattle Police Homicide detectives Dick Reed and Roy Moran had drawn weekend duty and they observed as Dr. Gale Wilson performed the autopsy on the anonymous woman. Wilson had held his post as medical examiner for more than thirty years, and was one of the foremost forensic pathologists in the country. If the body held any clues, he would find them.
    The woman was five feet, five inches tall, and weighed 130 pounds, but her weight could have varied up to ten percent from life weight because of bloating from gases and waterlogging. Only her hair looked alive, it was a rich auburn-brown, long and thick. Her eyes were brown. Dr. Wilson estimated her age at somewhere between twenty-eight and thirty-five, but he warned Reed and Moran that that was only a guess; it was extremely difficult to establish age on a body so decomposed.
    One of the best clues to body identification are dental records, but the dead woman’s teeth would be of little help. Four teeth were missing and she had no fillings in her remaining teeth. Her fingernails were well cared for; they were long and filed neatly, and were still coated with platinum-colored polish. She had small hands and feet. She wore a Timex watch, which had stopped at 3:10. But whether it was A.M. or P.M. , they had no way of knowing.
    There was a silver friendship band on her ring finger, left hand, and, in her hair, a white metal