A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

sheriff.”
    The first deputies to arrive saw that the young woman who lay in the grotesque position was indeed dead. She lay half on her side, and they could see that her knees were severely gashed, although there was very little blood. These were probably postmortem wounds.
    While the deputies cordoned off the entire field with yellow crime scene tape, King County Detective Sergeant George Helland and Detectives Keith May, John Miller and their supervisors surveyed the bizarre scene before them. It was almost surreal in its brutality. It was obvious that someone had driven a car back and forth across the dead girl’s body, breaking bones and perhaps literally crushing the life out of her. Tire burns, tracks, and axle grease marked her pale flesh. The girl’s knees were cut to the bone where some part of the vehicle’s undercarriage had sliced across them.
    There were some clothes lying near the dead girl’s left foot. As they read over the missing report that was only a few hours’ old, they had little doubt that the victim was the missing Marjorie Knope. There was a shortie nightgown, there—just as her parents had described, and there was also a quilted ski jacket.
    How Marjorie had come to be on the football field dead—and miles from her home—would be harder to determine.
    The detectives photographed the entire scene, taking hundreds of shots from every conceivable angle. Fresh tire tracks were evident in the dirt edging the field and in the grass itself. There were deep indentations in the manicured turf where a car’s wheels had spun. The killer had clearly made at least two passes over the body.
    The investigators moved carefully in a circle around the body, staring hard at the grass and dirt there. And then, they found what every homicide detective hopes for but rarely finds. There were two small items half-hidden in the grass. They spied a single Kwik-Set key attached to a ring fashioned to look like a tiny princess phone, and a brass button. The button was distinctive, almost military in appearance, with a design of two dragons etched on its surface. Had they belonged to Marjorie Knope? Or was it possible that the killer had dropped them?
    Carefully, they slipped the key ring, the button, and the dead woman’s clothes in separate bags, sealed them and labeled them with the date, time and their initials.
    It is the King County department’s habit to triangulate a body site with measurements keyed to fixed points—so that they can reestablish the location absolutely at a later time if they need to. Even photographs are not as precise as triangulation.
    Hours later, when the scene had been thoroughly checked out, the victim’s body was released to deputies from the Medical Examiner’s Office. As they gently turned her body over, the investigators saw she still clutched some kind of scarlet material in her right hand. With rigor mortis fully established, it was difficult to pry the cloth from her hand. She had died holding onto a pair of red panties. Perhaps Marjorie Knope had been trying to find her clothes when she was hit.
    “It looks almost as if she were kneeling or crawling when she was run over,” George Helland mused. “Maybe she didn’t even see what was going to happen. I hope not.”
    They had been working for hours in the hot August sun, but they were far from finished. There were two areas they had to explore at once. Residents who lived near the field had to be contacted to see if they had heard anything during the night. A sadder task was the questioning of Marjorie Knope’s family to see if they could give any reason for her bizarre and brutal murder.
    Deputies spread out along the streets that abutted the junior high school property. Most of the residents had heard nothing unusual, but they did provide some information that could very well prove valuable. A man, who had been up with his sick child, recalled hearing a car with a noisy engine and a worn-out muffler on the field about two the previous morning. “I heard car doors slamming,” he said.
    “Anything else?” Deputy Glenn Christian asked.
    “The car’s engine sounded like a small motor,” he said. “It definitely wasn’t a muscle car or anything like that.”
    A woman nearby told the investigators that she had been extremely conscious of time the night before. “I was waiting up for my teenagers because they had missed their curfew,” she said.
    The woman said she had seen a small, dark-colored car drive