A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

which she favored when she walked. And to the best of her parents’ knowledge, Georgia had never had her fingerprints taken.
    But yes, Georgia
had
worn a Timex watch with a silver band. (The Timex found on the unidentified body had a gold band.) And, yes, she had worn a silver ring of some sort on the third finger of her left hand.

    *   *   *

    Georgia Murphy’s parents fought to retain their composure as they recalled the last few days they had spent with their daughter. She had been accepted by the Army as a recruit in October of 1969, and she had been excited about going into the service. Because she knew lots of people in Seattle, Georgia left a little early to go to the city to report for duty. “She left on about October 28 to say good-bye to her friends there,” Mrs. Murphy said. “She was going to stay with her uncle.”
    Her mother said she received word from the Army that Georgia should report for duty on November 5. She had relayed this message to Georgia’s uncle, and just assumed he had told Georgia.
    Oddly, Georgia’s uncle had shown up in Cle Elum on November 11. He said that he and his family had left Seattle for good and were moving on. He returned all of Georgia’s clothes—except one outfit her mother remembered: her blue jeans, a blue blouse, blue nylon jacket, and her tennis shoes.
    “He told us that she didn’t need the rest of her clothes because she would be getting Army issue stuff.”
    Mrs. Murphy told the Seattle detectives that she’d found her brother’s behavior peculiar and a bit scattered. First, he was going to stay in Cle Elum. He even found a job as a clerk at the local police department through a government funded program, but he stayed only one night and then moved on.
    He didn’t seem to have a plan. He came back to Cle Elum again on November 21, and asked Mrs. Murphy if she had heard from Georgia. When told no, he replied, “She probably went to Canada.” On another visit, he’d advised her parents to “forget her.”
    The rest of Georgia’s family was not about to do that, but they tried to convince themselves that she
had
reported to the Army and was in basic training somewhere. But she hadn’t written or called and that just wasn’t like her.
    Suspicious of the uncle’s behavior, Detectives Fonis and Cameron talked to a number of people who knew him. He was younger than Georgia’s parents, and he was described as a pleasant enough man until he imbibed too much, and then he could be a “mean drunk.”
    What the two detectives needed most was something to link Georgia Murphy to the nameless dead woman. So they checked military records to see if Georgia had had her prints taken when she applied to join the service. But her fingerprints hadn’t been taken. That would have happened when she reported for duty, but she had never shown up. There was no entry in the Army records that showed Georgia Murphy as being on active duty.
    Most of all, the disparity in eye color between the body in the river and Georgia puzzled the investigators. How could bright blue eyes change to muddy brown? They wondered if it was possible that the pollutants in the Duwamish River had somehow changed the appearance of the dead woman’s eyes—so much so that they appeared brown? The detectives contacted plants along the river to find what chemicals were dumped into the Duwamish. The answers were startling if only from an ecological standpoint, and they could have great bearing on their investigation. Employees grudgingly admitted to getting rid of waste in the river: “Caustics, oil, oil sludge, sodium hydroxide, and hydrogen sulfide.”
    The investigators called forensic pathologists all over the West Coast. Their queries were without precedent. Some thought that human eye color would never change; others thought it was quite possible.
    The blood in the dead woman’s body had putrefied at the time of autopsy but even so a sample had been frozen. Although DNA testing was a long time away, there were fairly sophisticated techniques available to test blood in the sixties and seventies, and criminalists were able to type it. The blood samples proved to be the same type as Georgia Murphy’s, although the experts could not narrow it down to enzymes and RH factors.
    The Timex watch was no help at all. The number etched on the back was a model number—not a serial number.
    Detectives Fonis and Cameron tried another fingerprint check through the FBI. If Georgia Murphy had