A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

the front row, taping her remarks so that he wouldn’t lose the sound of her voice or her insights into this new world that enthralled him. He knew that he would see her again, that he was already half in love with her.
    After Elise’s private reception, Happy invited Marcia to walk with him. They strolled through the fragrant summer night and talked until the sun came up.
    Marcia had to leave Seattle for lectures in Vancouver, British Columbia, but Happy Boccaci pressed his suit with letters he had a friend hand-carry to Marcia in the Canadian city. He invited her to visit him in Seattle, saying, “Marcia, I know my destiny is either with you or through you.”
    She agreed with him. She had missed him terribly, and they spent a week together and, as Marcia wrote later, took “two incredible mind trips together.” Marcia Moore had been traveling for five years, never spending more than three months in one place before moving on.
    Certainly, a lot of men had come on to her, had desired her, but this was the first man in a long, long time who had seemed right for her. With him, she’d felt that she had “come home” at last.

    Marcia and Happy were married on November 25, 1977. Two days later, she wrote to Elise Devereaux, “Little did you know what forces you set in motion when you invited me to stop off in Seattle this last July! Anyway, here I am married to Walter, and very much enjoying life in our clean, fresh, and shining new home near Lynnwood. We would both love to see you! Do come by whenever you can. Also, we are having an open house on Friday night, December 23. So much news to catch you up on . . . You won’t believe what we are doing!”
    One would never expect to find a woman like Marcia Moore living in a duplex apartment in Alderwood Manor, Washington. She had always seemed to belong in Los Angeles or Shanghai, or, even India, studying the masters of the occult.
    But Marcia’s own particular karma had intervened. The man she had fallen in love with lived in Washington and, when she joined her life with his, she, too, would settle in the principally rural area of Snohomish County. Fir forests, lumber mills and farms instead of incense, tapestries, and mystery.

    One of the subjects Marcia and Happy discussed at length was the capability of drugs to alter the mind. Marcia was still trying to find a way through the looking glass of life. She mentioned a relatively little known drug, ketamine, to Happy and he surprised her with his familiarity with it. She shouldn’t have been so surprised; as an anesthesiologist, he had used it on children and in animal experiments.
    Normally, ketamine was used in such strong doses that it would produce unconsciousness, but Marcia felt ketamine had properties that could unveil age-old secrets of the psyche if it were taken in much smaller quantities.
    Happy wondered if she might be right. She was exquisite, brilliant, and she seemed to have, almost within her grasp, the answers he sought.
    Marcia Moore became more and more convinced that ketamine was the answer to what she was seeking, and Dr. Boccaci soon was almost as enthusiastic about the mind-expanding properties of the drug as she was. Boccaci was convinced that ketamine would one day be recognized as one of the brightest tools in psychotherapy. He called it “ketamine psychotherapy.” He left behind the job at the hospital that was paying him $47,000 a year, to prove his theories.
    Walter and Marcia received government approval to research ketamine. They called their research “the samadhi therapy.” They set up a foundation and lived off the $1,400 a month that Marcia received from the family trust fund. They began to call ketamine hydrochloride “the goddess Ketamine.”
    Marcia charted their experiments, and wrote of her reactions to her first 50-milligram injection of ketamine.
    “. . . I became aware of a tingling warmth and a sense of relaxed well-being . . . In this and subsequent ketamine voyages, my impression was one of making the circuit of a vast, multi-dimensional wheel.
Walter!
I repeated the name and the syllables shone forth like a glowing crown of light . . . ‘Walter, flower, power.’ I kept on chanting the words, watching the equivalent images blossom forth.”
    Both Happy and Marcia were injected with the drug daily for about six months, but Boccaci soon found that he wasn’t getting the insights that Marcia was. He said later that he felt he didn’t have her mind, her