A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

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    She had eaten kidney beans and ham within hours of her death.
    None of this information seemed likely to identify the Jane Doe victim. Like her age, the cause of her death could not be determined as precisely as it would if she had been found sooner. She had suffered cerebral contusions before she died. Someone had struck her on the forehead and around the bony orbits of her eyes causing injury to the brain itself.
    There seemed to be evidence of some hemorrhaging in the strap muscles of her neck indicating she may have been strangled, too, but tissue damage made it impossible for Dr. Wilson to be sure. But one thing
was
certain; she had been alive when she entered the river, although she was undoubtedly unconscious. River silt was evident in her larynx and trachea.
    Who was she?
    The best chance of identifying her might be through her fingerprints. Because her fingertips were so decomposed, it was relatively easy to slip the loose skin off and send the outer layer with ridges and whorls still apparent to the FBI for possible matching.
    Not really hoping to find much, Detective Dick Reed and his sergeant, Ivan Beeson, went back to the banks of the Duwamish near where the body had floated. They scoured the river banks searching for some item of clothing, I.D.—anything that might be linked to the drowned woman. They found nothing.
    Dick Reed pored over all the Seattle Missing Persons reports, looking for a woman answering the description of the body found in the Duwamish. Descriptions of the “Jane Doe” appeared in
The Seattle Times
and
Post-Intelligencer,
asking for citizens to come forward with information. As always, there was a flurry of calls. Some of them even looked promising.
    Two area women had told friends that they were going to Vancouver, British Columbia, some weeks before, and they seemed to have disappeared completely. The women had criminal drug abuse records in both Washington and British Columbia so their fingerprint classifications were on file.
    The FBI Lab in Washington, D.C. was trying to raise the prints from the woman in the river, but it would be days before FBI technicians could complete the difficult process. It might even prove impossible.
    Several people had viewed the corpse and a few had made a tentative identification. It was well nigh impossible though to be sure with only a visual observation.
    A man familiar to police because he hung around Seattle’s skid row told detectives about meeting a “lonely woman” at a waterfront charity shelter. “Sometimes she called herself Margie,” he said. “Sometimes it was Betty—and sometimes she said her name was Sue. I expect none of those were her real name. She had a little drinking problem. Not real bad, you understand. But I haven’t seen her around for a month.”
    The man first identified a morgue photo of the unidentified body as his friend. But then he remembered that “Margie-Betty-Sue” had had a rather distinctive tattoo in a “sort of private part of her person.” The murder victim had no tattoos at all.
    People seeking lost daughters, wives and friends filed through the county morgue, but there was always something that didn’t quite match. The body was too tall, or the eyes were the wrong color. She was not the “lost sister” from Bothell. She wasn’t the runaway daughter from a posh neighborhood on Mercer Island. Nor was she either of the two women who’d traveled to Vancouver. On December 5, the FBI was able to make prints from the dead woman’s fingertips, but they did not match those on the rap sheets of the two missing women.
    More devastating to the search, the FBI had no record in their voluminous file of the “Jane Doe’s” prints. Apparently, she had never been printed so one of the better methods of identifying nameless bodies was lost to the investigation.
    Nevertheless, the Seattle investigators made up bulletins for every law enforcement agency in the U.S. and Canada with the woman’s description and her fingerprint classification. If there was someone out there who missed her the detectives would hear about it in time. Though nothing came in that shed any light on the case, they would not give up.
    The lack of response was frustrating. Until the Jane Doe body could be linked somehow with the world she lived in, the people she knew, the predictable patterns of her daily existence, finding her killer would be impossible.

    In January of 1970, the pitiful corpse was buried as a