A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

sweet and friendly young woman who hoped for a second chance at happiness. Was it possible that a complete stranger had seen her sitting in her parents’ living room in her frilly pajamas? Surely, he would have made noise as he forced his way in to get to her. No, that didn’t fly at all; the Knope house was too far off the beaten track.

    Ted Forrester and Keith May had learned only that Marjorie had been a friendly, quiet girl who was liked by everyone. She had been temporarily out of a job but was cheerfully looking for a new one. Her social life had consisted of going to the funky taverns in the Kent area—taverns that catered to people in their twenties who liked hard rock and cheap beer. Marjorie herself didn’t even like beer. She seldom drank more than Coke.
    The long summer of 1972 ground on, and the news stories about the small blonde woman killed in Kent went quickly to the back pages and then disappeared completely. There was bigger news as far as the world was concerned: the Olympics in Munich were the scene of a terrible massacre, and there were seven indictments in the Watergate break-in. King County detectives kept up their intensive probe, determined to find the savage killer who had somehow talked his way into the Knopes’ home and taken their daughter away.
    They stopped scores of cars—dark-toned Fords—and scrutinized their tires, comparing them to the moulages they had made of the tracks in the junior high field and in the victim’s driveway. They combed wrecking yards for a Ford with similar tires and a bad muffler and/or an oil leak. Hundreds of people were interviewed, friends of Marge’s and friends of friends of friends.
    The detectives fielded the kook calls that invariably come in after a sensational murder. An anonymous caller phoned the Knopes weeks after their daughter died and breathed, “Listen carefully: Elton Joe Stark* killed your daughter.”
    The King County investigators found Elton Stark and quickly saw why he was not the most popular guy in his circle of acquaintances. He was a hothead who annoyed people. But he had barely known Marjorie, and he hadn’t even been in town the night she was murdered.
    Once more, Keith May, Ted Forrester and George Helland went back over Marjorie’s past, and every event—no matter how minuscule—that had changed the dynamics of her family. They still had the key on the princess phone key chain and the button, the two items they had found next to her body. All they had to do was tie them to someone.
    They learned that the Knopes were good-hearted, friendly people who had often opened their home to someone in need of help. Most stayed for a short time, but one young man stayed so long that he was almost like a son to them. In the autumn of 1965, when Marjorie was still in high school, they had taken in one of her classmates, a kid who had no place to live. The boy had lived with them for about a year.
    His name was Bernard Henry Pierce.
    Ted Forrester set out to find Pierce. He followed an increasingly cold trail of apartments where Pierce had lived in the past. At each address, Forrester tried the Kwik-set key. None of the doors swung open. That didn’t mean a whole lot; many people get new locks when they move into an apartment. And Pierce was a long shot, anyway, someone who hadn’t lived with the Knopes for six or seven years.
    Ted Forrester had no idea at this point that a man named Bernie Pierce continued to be a suspect in the murder of Georgia Murphy. That was a Seattle Police case, and since he wasn’t a really hot suspect in
that
case, there was no reason that the King County detective would have heard about his connection to another vicious murder of a young woman.
    And then Forrester received confidential information from a young woman who had known Bernie Pierce in 1970. Suddenly, the whole complexion of the investigation changed dramatically. The woman’s statement about Pierce took him out of the casual contact category. Trembling with remembered terror, the girl told Ted Forrester that she had once lived in the same apartment complex as Pierce.
    “We thought he was a really great guy,” she began. “My roommate and I considered him as close as a brother. He was really nice to us, helped with heavy stuff and fixed things, you know. But this one time, my roommate was gone for the weekend, and—”
    “Go on,” Forrester encouraged.
    “Well, Bernie came to visit and I could tell he’d been drinking. He was