Practice to Deceive

had made the calls, investigators had no feasible way to sift through the thousands of military personnel around Moffett Field.
    Fortunately, several tips that came into the police offices named a possible suspect even before the sun set on the day her body was discovered.
    Neighbors on Ruskin Drive and adjoining streets told homicide detectives that Mary Ellen had had some issues with a teenage neighbor boy who lived with his parents in a house located directly behind the Stackhouses’ home. More accurately, he lived in the garage outside his family home. The rumor was that Gilbert Thompson, sixteen, wasn’t allowed to sleep in the house because he was “strange sexually” and his parents didn’t want him sleeping so close to his female relatives because he was molesting them.
    Thompson had a German shepherd that was allowed to run free, and the dog had dug up the Stackhouses’ front lawn and garden that Mary Ellen tended so carefully. She had scolded Gilbert, saying he should keep his dog fenced in. He had been very angry. Indeed, just before Jimmie left for the Tennessee training facility, he had given their own bulldog to a farm home because it too was destroying their freshly planted grass.
    If only the Stackhouses’ dog had still been in the basement, Mary Ellen would have had some warning.
    Shortly thereafter, Gilbert’s dog disappeared and he was convinced that Mary Ellen had called the dogcatcher to take his pet away. Whether she had done that is moot; she would never be able to say. There were other neighbors who were concerned about the dog and also might have reported it to animal control.
    In the days before Mary Ellen’s murder, witnesses told the investigators that Thompson had blamed her and shouted at her “in unpleasant terms” about his dog’s disappearance.
    No one said “person of interest” in 1963; police just came right out and said “suspect,” and early on Gilbert Thompson was definitely a prime suspect in Mary Ellen’s homicide.
    Ironically, Gilbert’s parents—who had lived in the neighborhood for only six months and had six children of their own—had been among the first to offer to care for Mary Ellen’s children until Jimmie Stackhouse’s flight from Tennessee landed.
    Within hours after they had responded to the scene of Mary Ellen’s murder that Tuesday, detectives went to the Thompson home. But there was no one there except for Gilbert’s mother. She said her husband was a roofer, and Gilbert was, too, although he was employed by another company. They were both at work.
    Mrs. Thompson was as upset and grieving as all the other neighbors the investigators had talked to. She offered again to take the Stackhouse children into her home until relatives arrived to care for them.
    On Wednesday evening, Captain William McKenzie and Detective Sergeant John Mattern went back to the Thompsons’ and asked to speak to Gilbert. By 9 P.M. , it seemed clear to them that the sixteen-year-old had some guilty knowledge or involvement in the Stackhouse case. He and his father agreed quite willingly to go to headquarters to talk further, and if it was indicated, for the teenager to take a polygraph exam.
    When the detectives spoke to Gilbert’s father privately, they learned that the elder man had dealt with his son’s oddly perverse sexual obsessions for a very long time. Eight years before—in 1955—the family had lived in Bakersfield. At the time his son was only eight, but Gilbert had been caught forcing a girl to strip as he pointed a knife at her.
    Four years later, there was an incident in Missouri where the then twelve-year-old Gilbert was arrested for attacking a woman on the street, again with a knife. He was also accused of stealing from a teacher that year. Later, in Monterey, California, he was arrested for choking one woman and wrestling another to the ground.
    “He used a knife in both of those attacks,” his father finished grimly.
    School authorities in Bakersfield had handled the first incident when he was eight. He seemed far too young to be dealt with by the police. There was no record of the events that had allegedly happened in Missouri four years later, and the San Jose detectives suspected that his juvenile record—if he even had one—had been shredded in Missouri.
    Between some of the attacks against women, Gilbert Thompson had lied about his age and enlisted in the army. He wasn’t very big, only about five feet, six inches tall and 140 pounds,