A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

sank on one knee to the driveway dirt. Then he had picked her up and put her in the trunk before she came to, and sped away from the home that had once been his own.
    Bernie Pierce continued his sickening confession. He said that Marjorie was conscious when they got to the play field. When he opened the trunk, she had tried to crawl out. She was bewildered and asked him why he’d choked her.
    “I told her, ‘I want to have sex with you.’ ”
    Marjorie had asked him where they were, disoriented by shock and being unconscious. She didn’t recognize the junior high playing field in the dark of night. Apparently realizing she was trapped, Marjorie reportedly begged the man who had been like a brother to her to promise not to hurt her.
    “I told her I wouldn’t hurt her.”
    Pierce said he had removed his own clothing first, and then Marjorie’s. In an ironically “gallant” gesture, he said he had spread “Marge’s coat on the ground so she wouldn’t have to lie on the damp grass.”
    Asked to describe his victim’s attitude, he recalled that it was one of submission. She was trying not to do anything to anger him. She had kept asking him “Why?” again and again, and she’d reminded him of his wife and his family. She had pleaded with him to “see a doctor.”
    Although he would not admit to it in so many words, it was apparent to the investigators that Bernie Pierce had been unable to reach a climax. It may have been because he was very drunk, or Marjorie’s pleading may have distracted him.
    She apparently still believed that he could be reasoned with.
    Pierce recalled that Marjorie had complained that she was cold. She tried to put her coat on. “I took it away from her and told her to get in the car because it was warmer there.”
    He directed her into the back seat of the car, and again tried unsuccessfully to rape her. At last, he moved away from her and started to put on his clothes.
    Marjorie Knope must have thought she might have a chance to get away. But, tragically, after she got out of the car she stopped to find her clothes. Had she not been so modest, she might have been able to slip away in the dark and hide from him.
    “Marge had moved somewhere behind the car,” Pierce continued. “It sounded like she was crying.”
    Sobbing, she had crawled along the ground trying to find her clothes. She was on her hands and knees when he made his decision.
    “I don’t recall feeling any emotion at all,” he told Ted Forrester and Keith May. “I just wanted to leave, so I started the car and backed up. It must have seemed necessary at the time to back up—because I did—and I backed right over Marge. I felt it but I don’t think I realized what I hit because I just put it into first gear and drove over her again frontwards and off the field . . .”
    He had noticed dirt and grass under his bumper the next day and cleaned it off. Later in the week, he said the Ford’s engine had thrown a rod and he’d sold the whole car to the wrecking yard for fifteen dollars. He hadn’t “learned” of Marge’s death until more than two weeks later when a relative told him about it. “The news shocked me. At that time, I was not aware that I had caused her death.”

    Not impressed with his selective memory, Forrester and May arrested Pierce and placed him in the King County Jail. On October 16, 1972, he was formally charged with first degree murder. Pierce pleaded not guilty. But, on November 20, he changed his plea and told Superior Court Judge James Dore that he was guilty of second degree murder.

    The case of Bernie Pierce was far from over. Finally, Don Cameron and Ted Fonis of the Seattle Police Department could question him about Georgia Murphy. Their case was much more difficult; they had no physical evidence to link him to Georgia’s murder. Even with a confession, defendants have been acquitted unless there was some strong physical evidence to back up that confession.
    Bernie Pierce was cagy. He would admit only to having been with Georgia Murphy on the night she was alleged to have died. He wanted to “think about the rest of it.”
    When he thought about it, Pierce was not anxious to talk to Cameron and Fonis again. The Seattle Police detectives wanted Georgia Murphy’s parents to have the scant comfort of knowing what had happened to their eighteen-year-old daughter. Pierce said he would take another lie detector test only if he was assured he would not be prosecuted on the Murphy