A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

sentence.” Indeed it was; unless a patient is actually on the operating table when the main artery of the body tears or bursts, death by exsanguination almost always follows. But Happy Boccaci had survived, although he was in sorry shape. He showed Elise pictures of himself on crutches. His legs seemed to be limp and paralyzed.
    However, by the time he’d come to her for an astrological reading, he looked to be in perfect health. The only sign that he’d been in an accident, he said, was that he could no longer drum or roll his fingers on a hard surface. He had lost control of those nerves.
    If Elise had begun to wonder if Dr. Boccaci was full of tall stories, she soon had proof that he
was
on the staff of a highly respected hospital. “I have a genetic bone disease,” she said. “One morning, I woke up with stress fracture of my knee. Happy had me come to his hospital and I was given the royal treatment. I didn’t have to pay for anything. I really felt that Happy took a real, altruistic interest in my health.”
    Elise was in her thirties and attractive; Dr. Happy Boccaci was about forty and newly single. Soon he began to visit her on a social basis, although she tried to keep their relationship platonic. It wasn’t that he wasn’t attractive because he
was.
But there was something that put her off.
    “He began buying my two-year-old daughter gifts,” she said. “This was making me uncomfortable and I tried to make some distance. I remember my daughter crawling on his lap once and asking, ‘Are you nice or are you mean?’ He told her he was a nice Italian man.”
    The question of Dr. Boccaci’s interest in Elise Devereaux soon became moot. Marcia Moore came back to Seattle to speak for a second time in the summer of 1977. Happy Boccaci was in the audience and was totally taken with the fragile heiress. He learned that Elise was a friend of Marcia’s and began a campaign to get an introduction to Marcia.
    Something made Elise hold back. She knew that Marcia was involved with a young man, whom Marcia sensed to be a reincarnation of Lord Byron. She had always been fascinated by Lord Byron, and felt they had had a connection in another life. Although the man she was seeing was much younger than she was, she was drawn to him. He had a lot of medical problems, and Marcia was taking care of him. He was her “Lord Byron.”
    Even so, Elise knew that Marcia was often lonely, and so was Happy. There was no real reason they shouldn’t meet, although Marcia was about a dozen years older than Happy. “He kept badgering me to introduce them,” Elise recalled. “I was reluctant. He actually called me on the phone and had a temper tantrum. I must have felt intimidated because I invited him to a private reception. The rest is history. Marcia and Happy were drawn to each other immediately.”
    Anyone could see that they made a striking couple—the big bear of a man with thick dark hair, beard and mustache, and heavy features, and the petite woman with the features of a porcelain doll. Dr. Happy Boccaci swept Marcia Moore into his arms and she felt, finally, as if she had come home.
    Walter “Happy” Bocacci at forty was the deputy chief of the anesthesiology department at Seattle’s Public Health Hospital. He had held that highly responsible position for ten years. Until his second divorce from his wife, his interests had been in the scientific world where everything was explainable. It would seem that he would be an unlikely mate for the ethereal Marcia Moore, but he had already plunged into the world of astrological projection by the time he met Marcia.
    They both felt a karmic link. Who could argue that the meeting of Bocacci and Marcia Moore did not seem preordained? It
did
seem as if they were meant to be together.
    Happy always told the story of their meeting in a way that did not include Elise Devereaux. He explained that he had been browsing in the Quest Bookstore in Seattle, a shop specializing in works on the psychic world, in late May 1977, when he picked up a volume titled
Astrology, the Divine Science.
“I was mesmerized by the picture of a woman on the dust jacket.”
    It was Marcia Moore.
    As he confided to Marcia later, “It flashed through my mind. Wow! Would she make a perfect wife! I actually felt some electrical impulse coming off the page and penetrating me—such as we visualize with magnetism.”
    And so when Marcia came to Seattle to lecture, Dr. Happy Boccaci was there, sitting in