A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

Bernie Pierce now?
    His friend told Detective Davis he wasn’t sure, but thought he might be in the Seattle area. Bernie’s sister was no longer in Montana, and was rumored to be back in Seattle. The informant also suggested that detectives check out a man he knew only as “Sid” who worked in an auto-wrecking yard in Seattle. “I heard he raped a thirty-eight-year-old woman,” Pierce’s friend said, “and I know Georgia went out with him two or three times while she was in Seattle.”
    It appeared that eighteen-year-old Georgia Murphy had dated or spent time with any number of dangerous men; her fate seemed almost preordained by the company she kept. As her family had said, Georgia trusted too many people. But she’d been only a teenager, enjoying the excitement in Seattle after growing up in a small town. Obviously, she hadn’t been as wise to the world as they had hoped.

    By June 1972, Georgia had been dead for more than two and a half years, her body returned to the place where she was loved—but her killer was neither known nor arrested. If Bernie Pierce was in the Seattle area, Detectives Ted Fonis and Don Cameron could find no trace of him. They had checked all the reputed haunts of the elusive ex-sailor, all the pertinent city and county records. They had even checked with the welfare department records. But Bernie Pierce wasn’t listed anywhere. Chances were that he had long since left Seattle.
    The man described as “Sid, the auto-wrecker” had evidently been a red herring; no one else had heard of him.
    It looked as though the person who had bludgeoned Georgia Murphy and had thrown her away in the cloudy waters of the Duwamish was going to get away with it. Good homicide detectives hate a “loser” case more than anything so they work harder on them in their scant free time than they ever do on slam-dunk cases.
    However, Don Cameron, Ted Fonis and Dick Reed agreed that they had gone as far as they could go without having some new information on Georgia Murphy’s last days.

    Kent, Washington, is a small town in the southeast section of King County, a town once situated in the most fertile valley of the county. But by the seventies the valley floor was being paved over for an ever expanding Boeing plant and new shopping malls and businesses. Kent is a half hour’s drive at most from the Duwamish River where Georgia Murphy floated.
    In Kent, on the evening of August 11, 1972, a young woman named Marjorie Knope was looking forward to the next day with great expectations. It would be her twenty-fourth birthday. Marjorie was temporarily unemployed and lived with her parents in a small frame house. She was finally getting over an event that would devastate most young women. The man she was engaged to had been suffocated and crushed beneath an avalanche at Snoqualmie Pass eighteen months before. After she lost him, nobody else quite measured up. Her old high school boy friend had wanted to renew their romance, but she couldn’t do it. A lot of men had asked the slender blond woman out, and sometimes she went—but with little interest or enthusiasm. Finally, only a few days before her birthday, she met a man named Jim. She couldn’t explain why, but she
knew
he was going to be special.
    Marjorie stayed home deliberately on the Friday night of August 11, hoping that Jim would call. If he did, she planned to invite him to her birthday party.
    She watched television with her parents, keeping one ear tuned to the phone. When “Love—American Style,” ended at ten, the elder Knopes said they were tired and headed for their bedroom. Marjorie said she wanted to watch television a while longer, so her folks shut their bedroom door to muffle the sound of the TV.
    Her father slept soundly; he had to be up at six A.M. Her mother fell asleep too, but woke sometime later at the sound of a neighbor’s dog who was barking furiously. She saw a bright slice of light under the bedroom door and wondered why Marjorie was still up. Probably she was just excited about her birthday, or maybe she was disappointed because the call she expected had never come.
    Mrs. Knope dozed off again, but it would be a restless night for her. Once more she awoke, too drowsy to know exactly what time it was. She heard voices in the living room, and assumed the television was still on. But then she heard someone walking across the kitchen floor with a heavy footfall. The shoes sounded as if they had rubber heels, and she thought