Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

had to leave Seattle, and he didn’t want to go to her aunt’s Christmas dinner. When Emily begged him to let her stay, he became enraged and started tearing her clothes off.
    “He ripped off the new white nightie my grandmother bought me for Christmas. And then he tore up my scarf and a shirt.
    “My grandmother heard us fighting and she opened the door and told Terry to leave me alone. He yelled at her to get out and slammed the door in her face.”
    A minute later, eighty-three-year-old William Borden had opened the door.
    “He saw Terry holding me down on the bed, and he came in and tried to make him stop. After that, there was blood everywhere.”

    Ivan Beeson and Dick Reed arrived in Port Orchard to take custody of Terry Ruckelhaus and to take Emily Borden back to Seattle. She wanted to go back, but she begged them not to make her see Terry or put her in the same car with him. They assured her she wouldn’t have to. Beeson drove the suspect back to Seattle around the land route that goes through Tacoma, while Reed accompanied Emily on the ferry.
    Somewhat calmer now, Emily gave Dick Reed a complete statement about what had happened in the Bordens’ home. When William Borden told Ruckelhaus to leave his granddaughter alone, the younger man whirled and shouted, “You’re not going to stop me from taking my wife!”
    “I didn’t think my grandfather was stabbed,” she said tearfully, “but he kind of looked down, and then I saw all the blood. Then he was on the floor and Grandma was lying on her back.”
    Emily said she couldn’t do anything to help them. Terry had gone to the kitchen with a knife in his hand. His glasses were on the floor and she’d picked them up and washed the blood off the lenses. She didn’t know why she’d done that. It was all so horrible, as if it couldn’t really be happening.
    “Terry told me to get the car keys. I saw my grandmother in the kitchen trying to get something to clean up my grandfather. She kept saying, ‘My husband is dead. Emily, don’t leave! I have to get help. Please call the police.’ I wanted to help her, but Terry yelled, ‘Mrs. B., no!’ And he jerked the phone out of the wall.”
    Then he told Emily that they had to leave. Shocked and terrified, she went with him.
    Emily said she felt guilty because her resistance to leaving with him had set the scene for her grandfather’s knifing.
    “I told him that he just couldn’t keep dragging me all over the country. It was the first time I ever really stuck up for myself. My grandparents tried to save me, and they threatened to call the police. But after he stabbed my grandfather, I knew I had to go with Terry to get him away from there—so my grandmother could call for help.”
    Emily had called Amber, her dog, and they got in the car.
    “Terry was shaking so hard that he had a hard time starting the car. He kept saying, ‘Look what you made me do! Look what you made me do.’ ”
    They started driving toward downtown, and Terry saw signs directing them to the ferry terminal.
    “He was crazy—he kept babbling and telling me that now we both had to die, but we would meet again ‘in the sea.’ And then everything would be all right. It would all be different then. I was sure he was going to kill me, too. But there wasn’t any way to get away from him once we were out of the house. He was right behind me, and he wasn’t going to let me go.”
    Emily said she had asked Terry to get rid of his knife, but he had only tucked it into the waistband of his pants. She begged him not to use it.
    “He was covered with blood,” she said with a shudder. “It was all down the front of him and his hands were red. My shoes were red, too, and I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to clean them off. I tried to wipe the blood off when we waited in line for the ferry, but there was too much—so I slipped them off and put on another pair.”
    As their car inched forward in the ferry line, Terry Ruckelhaus had rambled on about how they could get married now and have children. But soon, he would switch to his theory that they would both have to die—to meet again in the sea someday.
    Emily said she couldn’t believe that no one noticed Terry, covered as he was with her grandparents’ blood, but people seemed intent on their own errands on this incredibly gruesome Christmas Day. Terry had reached across her to take a bottle of Wild Turkey whiskey out of the glove compartment. He took a deep swallow, and