A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

simply run away, perhaps she had had her prints taken somewhere over the past eighteen months.
    No luck.
    “We have to find something with Georgia Murphy’s prints on it,” Cameron said. “Let’s go back to Cle Elum.”
    Again the duo crossed the mountains. They gathered papers and a cosmetic bag that had belonged to the missing girl. They also took hair curlers which still had strands of Georgia’s hair twisted in the rollers.
    Criminalists using the Ninhydrin process with iodine fumes and heat can bring up fingerprints left on paper decades earlier. Some distinctive prints
were
raised from Georgia’s personal papers and her books. On January 7, 1972, the FBI confirmed that the prints taken from the woman in the Duwamish and those on Georgia Murphy’s belongings were the same. There was no question now that Georgia Murphy was dead.
    The polluted river and inaccurate measurements of height and weight recorded in the missing reports circulated after Georgia’s disappearance had contributed to the tragic delay in identifying the lost girl from Cle Elum. Years had passed since a much beloved daughter had been buried as Jane Doe in a pauper’s grave.
    Now, detectives were forced to confirm what Georgia Murphy’s parents had feared all along. On February 17, the Murphys came to the Seattle Homicide office and were briefed on the detectives’ work on the case. Georgia was no longer missing. But the truth behind her violent death was still unknown.
    Georgia’s uncle became a prime suspect. The last place she had been seen alive was near his mobile home. According to witnesses, Georgia had had a date with a young sailor, his sister, and her boyfriend on November 4—the night she disappeared. Her date had told mutual friends that he let Georgia out of his car in front of the trailer park in the early morning hours on the 5th. The uncle had told everyone that she never came home at all.
    Information came back to Seattle police headquarters in late March of 1972 that the uncle was in Dallas, Texas. Ted Fonis and Don Cameron requested an address check by Dallas Police. When the man was located in the Texas city, they sent a case summary to the Dallas department and asked that a polygraph examination be administered to Georgia’s uncle. Frankly, they believed he had murdered his niece; his skittishness and the way he traveled from place to place certainly made him look like a guilty man.
    With a list of questions prepared by the Seattle investigators, Dallas Police Chief Frank Dyson instructed his lie detector expert to test Georgia’s uncle. On April 13, 1972, he was hooked up to all the leads on the polygraph: blood pressure, heart rate, galvanic skin response, respirations. They expected him to “blow ink all over the walls.”
    But he didn’t. He passed the test. He passed so cleanly, in fact, that he was eliminated from suspicion. This was frustrating but not unusual in police probes. Some of the “best” suspects turn out to be clean, and some of the most innocent-looking are guilty.
    It meant starting over. Now, the Washington investigators focused their attention on the young sailor Georgia had dated on the night of November 4, 1969. Apparently they had gone out several times. His name was Bernie Pierce, and he was just a kid, too, not more than twenty or twenty-one. The detectives learned that Pierce had left the Navy, and was reported to be living with a sister in Flathead County, Montana.
    Don Cameron called Flathead County Sheriff Curtis Snyder in his Whitefish office. Snyder assigned Detective Britt Davis to talk with Pierce’s Montana relatives. Davis had no luck finding Bernie himself, but he quickly located the man who had accompanied Georgia Murphy, Bernie Pierce, and Pierce’s sister on the double date in Seattle on the night of November 4.
    “We went to the Double Decker Restaurant,” the man recalled. “Georgia and Bernie were fighting as usual. About marriage. Georgia wanted to get married—and Bernie wanted to stay single.”
    “Were they drinking?” Britt Davis asked.
    The young man shrugged. “Georgia wasn’t. Bernie might have been. He usually drank heavily when he was on leave. Sometimes he was mean.”
    The quarreling pair had left the Double Decker sometime after midnight, and Bernie Pierce had told the witness later that he’d taken her home. His friend said that Pierce had seemed genuinely surprised to hear that Georgia was missing.
    The next question was,
Where was