A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

tires in the back seat. They had a distinctive zig-zag pattern.
    It was beginning to appear that Pierce’s brotherly feelings for Marjorie Knope were as dangerous as those he had felt for the woman he’d come close to strangling two years before. Before the investigators moved in to arrest him, they needed some tangible physical evidence. The long blonde hair on the junked Ford’s undercarriage was good—but even the crime lab couldn’t prove absolutely that it had come from Marjorie; the most they could hope for was that it would prove to be microscopically alike in class and characteristics.

    Keith May talked to the new Mrs. Pierce at their apartment. He showed her the Kwik-set key. Her face was a study of pain and dull acceptance.
    “I had one like that,” she said. “But I haven’t seen it for several weeks. The last place I saw it was in the glove compartment of the purple Ford that Bernie sold to the wrecking yard.”
    She explained that the key fit the front door of a home she’d once lived in. When May showed her the brass button, she studied it quietly. Then she moved slowly to a closet and pulled out a woman’s coat. She reached into the coat pocket and pulled out a button identical to the one May held.
    “I lost that button when it fell off my coat onto the back seat floor of the Ford. I forgot to pick it up when I got out.”
    Bernie Pierce’s wife recalled the bleak night of August 11 well. Bernie had come home very late, and very drunk. The next morning she’d noticed a great deal of cut grass stuck under the rear bumper of the Ford. When she asked her husband about it, she said he hadn’t been very concerned. He had simply brushed the clumps of grass off.
    “Anything unusual about that Saturday?” Keith May asked.
    She shook her head. Bernie had spent the day with her. He had even taken her for a ferry ride. “He seemed perfectly normal—just like his old self.”
    Forrester and May went to the Four Corners Tavern, and they learned the identity of the woman Bernie Pierce had talked to the night Marjorie Knope died. She remembered him well; he was hard to forget. She had danced with him, but then he had made an unwelcome pass. She’d walked off the dance floor when he became too familiar. When she told him firmly that she wasn’t interested in having sex with him, his response was boorish enough that she remembered it. “He asked me if I knew any other woman in the Kent Valley who might be ‘available’!”
    On October 10, Bernie Pierce submitted to a lie detector test given by Dewey Gillespie, a highly skilled polygrapher. Gillespie seldom had to complete a lie-detector test; his pre-test explanations were designed to psychologically alarm the test subject. Gillespie’s technique worked on Bernie Pierce, and only halfway through the test, he indicated that he was ready to make a statement about Marjorie Knope. Gillespie stepped to the door of the room, and beckoned to Keith May and Ted Forrester.

    Bernie Pierce gave several statements to May and Forrester, hedging and stalling before he finally told the whole incredible story. He insisted that he had “blacked out” in the last tavern he visited, and that he had only come to his senses when he was on his way to the Knope house. He had knocked on the kitchen door, and he could see Marge sitting alone watching TV. He had simply walked into the kitchen through the unlocked door, just as he had done scores of times when he lived there. Marge had been wearing a nightie and a robe, and looked up at him with some alarm. First, he said, he told her he was drunk and apologized for that. She was nervous as she sat on the edge of the couch. She told him that her folks were just in the next room.
    He had stood up then and prepared to leave, but he told the two detectives that he had suddenly gotten the idea that he should rape Marjorie. “First, though, I had to figure out some way to get Marge outside because any scuffle would bring her father out of bed with his big .44 . . .”
    He said he had seized upon a ruse to get the trusting girl outside. He’d pulled out the choke on his car to flood it, and then asked Marge to come outside and help him start it. She’d slipped on the ski jacket and obligingly walked out to the driveway.
    But, as Marjorie neared the driver’s side door, Bernie Pierce had suddenly grabbed her by the throat and held on. The young woman had tried vainly to pull his hands away, but she became unconscious and