A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

very talkative. He just stayed and stayed—for over two hours. I finally just suggested that he’d better go—”
    She recalled that, to her shock, Bernie Pierce had asked her to have sex with him, and he did so in crude terms. When the informant told him to go or she would have to find someone who would
make
him leave, she had seen a whole different side of his personality. “He grabbed me by the throat until I couldn’t get my breath. I was struggling and fighting him. I know I managed to kick him in the crotch—and then everything got black.”
    She told Forrester that when she came to, she was lying on the floor and Bernie Pierce was leaning over her. “He was crying and he said, ‘I almost killed you. I blacked out.’ ” He had then confessed that he had done something like that “once before.”
    Terrified, the witness said that she had tried to keep her wits about her. She didn’t want him to tell her what he’d done to someone else, fearful that he might get violent again. She pleaded with him to get some psychiatric care—“for his own sake.” Somehow she had managed to ease him out of her apartment without any further confrontation.
    “I guess I should have reported him,” she told Ted Forrester. “But I was too afraid he’d get mad and come back.”
    “Did you ever see him again?”
    “He didn’t come back for six months,” she said. “And then I wouldn’t let him in.”

    Checking further into Pierce’s background, Forrester learned that Bernie Pierce
had
raped a sixteen-year-old girl whose family had befriended him, and he had been arrested for that. He was currently on probation. It was beginning to look as if befriending Bernie Pierce was a decidedly unhealthy thing to do.
    Forrester located Pierce’s probation officer and obtained a current address for him. On September 18, 1972, five weeks after Marjorie Knope’s murder, and almost three years from the time Georgia Murphy had disappeared, he located Bernie Pierce at an address on Des Moines Way South. Forrester realized that the apartment was approximately halfway between the spots where Georgia Murphy’s and Marjorie Knope’s bodies had been found. He left a note asking Pierce to come into headquarters—which he did the next day.
    Ted Forrester had asked the Seattle detectives working the Georgia Murphy case—Ted Fonis and Don Cameron—to attend his interview with Bernie Pierce. If he was responsible for the murders of
two
trusting young women, he had to be questioned carefully.
    Bernie Pierce was a softly handsome man who affected an “Elvis” look. He had wavy bangs and sideburns halfway to his chin. He was stocky and powerfully muscled in his arms and shoulders. He didn’t seem particularly nervous to be questioned about Marjorie, although he gave as little information about himself as possible. He said that he’d lived with the Knope family from September of 1965 until June of 1966. Marjorie?
    “I looked upon her as my sister.”
    “When was the last time you saw her?” Forrester asked.
    “It might have been June or early July,” he answered. “I went out to the house to visit her father.”
    At this point, Fonis and Cameron didn’t ask Pierce about Georgia Murphy; he was a reluctant and seclusive subject at best, and the detectives did not want to put him on edge until they were ready. Fonis and Cameron waited.
    Asked about the night Marjorie disappeared from her home, only to be found dead at the junior high school, Bernie Pierce said that he had had a fight with his new wife on that Friday—August 11. Sometime after nine, he had left and gone on a drinking binge from tavern to tavern in the southeast part of King County. A lot of the evening was fuzzy, but he recalled talking to a woman he knew at the Four Corners Tavern. He said he had no memory at all of driving home.
    “What were you driving?” Forrester asked.
    “It was my purple Ford—1963. I don’t have it anymore. I sold it to a wrecking yard for junk.”
    The car was right,
but none of the detectives showed their elation. Pierce was allowed to leave.
    Ted Forrester found the junked Ford, and it was already partially stripped. No motor. No wheels. The muffler was gutted; it would have been very noisy. He found a blonde hair caught in the car’s undercarriage, and he photographed it. He took samples of grease and oil from the undercarriage and then he took pictures of the hulk from every angle, concentrating especially on the snow