A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

that her life had been as beset by heartbreak as it had been blessed by wealth and genetic gifts.
    Seeing her then as she posed in leotards and tights, a study in grace and beauty, no one could ever have imagined the tragedy that lay ahead of her.

I n 1928, Marcia Moore was born into a family of high achievers. She was the cherished daughter of Robert Lowell Moore, a thirty-two-year-old Bostonian with a scrupulously blue-blooded background. Undeterred by the financial climate of the Great Depression, Marcia’s father founded the Sheraton Hotel chain in the 1930s and his business knowledge made the luxurious hotels flourish. The Sheraton Corporation stayed in the family until it was sold to ITT in 1968 for an estimated $20 million.
    Marcia’s parents were involved in the New England Theosophical Society, which she always called laughingly, “kind of blue-blooded spiritualists.” Later, they built a “meditation mount” in Ojai, California, where they often joined friends who were interested in the same spiritual pursuits.
    One of Marcia’s brothers became a successful attorney in Greenwich, Connecticut. The other was Robin Moore, whose books
The Green Berets
and
The French Connection
stayed at the top of the best-seller lists for months and then were made into blockbuster movies.
    Marcia herself was a talented writer, but her field of expertise was far more ethereal than her brother’s. She saw beauty in nature, secrets of life beyond the veil of reality, and she trusted more than the average human, using her special sense to guide her. She was considered a true psychic by those who believed that the mind was capable of perceiving far more than the concrete things that can be rationally explained.
    Marcia Moore’s life story and her expertise in the mystic arts of yoga became familiar to a million readers when Jess Stearn wrote a book about her in 1965:
Youth, Yoga, and Reincarnation.
Stearn, who also published
Edgar Cayce, The Sleeping Prophet
and
The Girl with the Blue Eyes,
spent three months with Marcia Moore and her third husband at their Boston home, and he, too, became a devotee of the yoga philosophy.
    Marcia appeared in the picture section of the book, wearing leotards and demonstrating the complicated yoga positions or “asanas,” her body so perfect that there wasn’t a hint of cellulite or the slightest bulge of fat. She was almost forty, but she was completely flexible, her muscles elastic and trained. Indeed, she appeared to be a girl in her teens. That was important to her; she had a fear of growing old.
    Oddly, although Marcia was a brilliant woman with an exceptionally strong mind, she had never been successful at choosing men. By the time she was fifty, she had four husbands. The first three were men who had disappointed and hurt her. Though she charted her life through her knowledge of astrology, letting the stars guide her, they often failed to guide her well when it came to romance.
    There were dark sides to the men she chose. “Marcia was drawn to brutal men,” a friend said sadly. “She was so lovely and so good—she deserved better.”
    Marcia Moore referred to her first three marriages as “unfortunate,” and didn’t say much more. “She felt her first husband treated her like a writing machine,” her friend recalled. “She was basically kept behind the typewriter—being a little ‘word merchant,’ as she called it.”
    When Stearn wrote about her in the mid-sixties, Marcia Moore was in the midst of her third marriage—to a man who was twelve years younger than she. He was also an astrologer, but their marriage was to be no advertisement for selection by the stars. Marcia probably knew that when she spoke with Jess Stearn. He quotes her in the book as saying that her destiny and her husband’s might not always lie together. She told him that she only knew that it was meant for them to be together at that point in their lives.
    After the excesses of the sixties, America was ready for a lifestyle that was pure and healthy. Marcia Moore was right at the forefront of all the new fads. She espoused vegetarianism as well as yoga. Except for her relationships with men, it all worked for her wonderfully well. She had everything, seemingly, that anyone might need to be happy—beauty, intellect and vibrant health. Indeed, Marcia had such control over her body and mind that she could actually control her heartbeat, her breathing and her blood pressure. She taught these