A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

and a mustache. He was about five foot ten, and weighed around 160 pounds. They left together, along with another couple we know.
    “Marge really liked him and she told me later that he’d promised to call Friday—the night she disappeared—about a Saturday date. The last time I talked to her that day, he hadn’t called.”
    Marjorie’s girlfriend told Ted Forrester that she had had some trouble shaking a boyfriend she wasn’t interested in. “His name is Scott Benti*. She told me he took her up to the mountains one day and put the make on her. She wasn’t interested at all and he got mad. She said he wouldn’t speak to her all the way home. And I heard that he told another one of our friends that he ‘was going to have Marge—one way or another.’ ”
    “Do you know what he meant by that?” Keith May asked.
    “I don’t know for sure, but it kind of scared Marjorie when she heard that.”
    George Helland talked to another girl who had been Marjorie Knope’s best friend since they were both in the seventh grade. She nodded when he mentioned Scott Benti. “Yes, she was kind of afraid of Scott. She told me he said ‘I’ll get you in bed one way or another,’ and that the look on his face when he said it scared her. That was the reason she was turned off about him.”
    Marjorie’s best friend verified that she expected to have a date with Jim for her birthday party on Saturday night. “He was supposed to call her Friday, and then pick her up on Saturday afternoon and bring her to my house. She was very pleased and was looking forward to her date with Jim. As far as I know, Marge was home Friday night—waiting for his call.”
    This woman knew Jim’s last name—it was Marrek. But that was all she knew about him.

    It was a long weekend for the investigators who were trying to solve the murder of Marjorie Knope. On Monday morning, August 14, they attended her autopsy. The slender blonde woman had succumbed to the grievous damage caused by a car’s being driven back and forth across her body. She had multiple rib fractures, and one sharp bone had punctured her right lung, causing a fatal hemopneumothorax. She had literally drowned in her own blood. Her nose, jaw, and thigh bones had been fractured, her knees cut to the bone, and the internal organ damage was extensive—so extensive that it was impossible to tell if she had been subjected to a sexual attack before her death. Her reproductive organs had been crushed too. However, no semen was found.
    A woman who weighed 105 pounds would have been no threat even to a small man. This was overkill, and the detectives witnessing her autopsy realized that they were looking either for a man who hated Marjorie personally—or who was a danger to
all
women. They could sense the rage behind his attack, and they left the Medical Examiner’s office determined to catch him before he hurt another woman.
    It was easy enough to find Scott Benti. He was at home in Kent, and he appeared to the detectives from King County to be in genuine mourning for Marjorie. Moreover, he had an alibi for the late night of August 11—12. He had spent from 7:30 P.M. until well after two A.M. with a half-dozen friends at the carnival rides at Seattle Center. His friends agreed that he had been with them. His car? It was a tiny foreign model that didn’t resemble a Ford Falcon in any respect.
    Ted Forrester located Jim Marrek at his home in Kent on Tuesday, August 14. Yes, he had met Marjorie at the Ad Lib, left with her to get something to eat, and even taken down her phone number. “I promised to call her on Friday after work,” he said, “but I never intended to. I have a steady girlfriend in the north end of Seattle. I knew she was coming to Kent for the weekend.”
    Forrester nodded without expression, but he thought how sad it was that the dead girl had spent the last night of her life waiting for a call from this man who had already dismissed her.
    Nevertheless, Forrester and May checked out the man’s alibi for late Friday night. It was good. He had been with several friends. He may not have very gallant—but he was not a murderer.

    Already, two likely looking suspects—one a handsome stranger, and the other acquaintance who had threatened to rape the victim—had vanished in a handful of solid alibis. The King County investigators could not find any secrets in Marjorie Knope’s life, nothing at all that would make her a likely target for a killer. She had been a