A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

into the school yard at 1:20 A.M. Since her husband worked for the school district, she had watched the vehicle carefully, wondering if it was someone planning to break into the building. After it disappeared from her line of sight, she had still been able to see reflected headlights from somewhere behind the school.
    “Then,” she told Detective Keith May, “I heard a car start up again—precisely at 2:10 A.M. Seconds later, it reappeared at the north end of the school in the parking lot. It accelerated out of the lot and went south at a rapid pace. At this time, I could see it was like a car my son used to own—a 1961 Ford Falcon. Clean. Dark-colored. Big round tail lights, and, I think, a hole in the muffler. The car disappeared, but it was heading toward Kent on S. E. 240th.”
    The witness was a detective’s dream, good on time and detail.
    Marjorie Knope’s stunned parents were at a loss to explain why she would have left their house the night before. They were having great difficulty absorbing the fact that she had been safe in her own home, only a dozen feet away from them, and now she was dead. Murdered.
    Mrs. Knope went over her memory of hearing a visitor during the night, the slamming of the back door, and the sound of a car leaving. Although she had been half asleep when she heard the sounds, she was sure she would have wakened at once had Marge called for help.
    The detectives checked the Knopes’ yard. In front of the house, they noted that the freshly plowed dirt next to the driveway was disturbed as if a struggle had taken place there. There was also a mark that looked as if someone had dropped to one knee in the dirt. At a cursory look, the tire tracks in the driveway were similar to those at the play field—new tread on the front wheels and worn snow tires with a zig-zag pattern on the back.
    Why,
the detectives asked, would anyone have wanted to hurt Marjorie? Had she been afraid of anyone in her life? Was she in a relationship marked by quarrels?
    “No,” her parents said. “No, not at all.” They said she had been mourning her lost fiancé for a year and a half, and had not dated anyone seriously since his death.
    It was therefore difficult to form a motive, but the investigators reached for the most unlikely dynamics. Perhaps one of Marjorie’s suitors had come to her parent’s house in the wee hours of the morning and forced her to leave with him.
    “He would have
had
to force her,” her father said adamantly. “She would never have gone along willingly. She was little, but she was strong. And she had been working out.”
    It appeared possible that Marjorie Knope
had
allowed someone to enter her parents’ home briefly, after throwing on a ski jacket over her nightie. She might even have walked him (or them) to his car. At that point, the unknown visitor had apparently grabbed her with such force that she was literally lifted out of her shoes. This theory was bolstered when the detectives found her wire-framed glasses in the dirt of the driveway. She wore her glasses all the time, even to have her picture taken.
    What struck her parents as strange was that anyone who didn’t know them pretty well could have even found their place. “Unless you have directions, it’s almost impossible to find our house,” her father said.

    *   *   *

    The King County detectives knew
what
had happened to Marjorie Knope on her twenty-fourth birthday, but they still had no idea who might have killed her—or
why.
    Detective Keith May was embarking on his first homicide probe and he was joined by a veteran investigator, Detective Ted Forrester. The two detectives and Sergeant Helland checked Marjorie’s background meticulously, and talked to several of her girlfriends.
    Her friends verified that she had no steady boyfriend. They said she dated quite a lot, but only casually. She and her friends frequented two taverns where dancing and beer-by-the-pitcher were featured. One was the Ad Lib and the other was called The Blarney Stone. They were the kind of taverns where young women could go in a group and know they were among friends. Nobody would bother them. They fed the juke box and listened to “American Pie” and Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman.”
    Her friends told the detectives that Marjorie had met a man at the Ad Lib on Thursday night. “Marge was in a very good mood,” a good friend told the detectives. “This person was named Jim. He had long hair—medium-brown, a beard,