Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

she said she’d encouraged him to drink it, hoping that if he got drunk enough, he wouldn’t be able to hurt her or anyone else after they landed.
    “I was just hoping we would land,” Emily told Dick Reed. “With his wild talk about our being together in the sea, I was afraid he might force me to jump off the ferry with him.”
    Emily said she hadn’t been able to let herself think about what had happened to her grandparents; she tried to hope that her grandfather had only been unconscious when they left. It didn’t seem possible that anyone could be dead so quickly.
    It was twenty minutes to ten that night when Detective Dick Reed and Emily Borden debarked from the Seattle-bound ferry and drove the three blocks to the Public Safety Building and the Homicide Unit. There was no place for the exhausted girl to stay. She couldn’t go back to the bloody house on Myrtle Street, and her relatives were all at the hospital where Florence Borden was undergoing lifesaving surgery; the doctors who operated on her discovered that she had avoided the same death suffered by her husband by a mere fraction of an inch.
    The detectives found a safe hotel room for Emily.
    Their own day was far from over. It seemed to them that Christmas Day had gone on for a week. There was voluminous physical evidence to log in to the Evidence Room, and reports to type up. Beeson and Reed checked with the hospital at 12:40 A.M. and found that Florence Borden was still in surgery, still in critical condition.
    The two Homicide investigators booked Terry Ruckelhaus into jail. The next day, he would be formally charged with one count of first-degree murder and one count of assault in the first degree. The second charge might become another murder charge at any time as Florence Borden was holding onto life by a thread.
    His bail was set at $100,000. The booking sheet listed Ruckelhaus as twenty-nine years old, five feet eight inches tall, 165 pounds, with brown hair and mustache, blue eyes. His occupation was listed as “chemist” and he carried a Hawaiian driver’s license.
    Ruckelhaus seemed removed from the Bordens’ brutal stabbings, but he still claimed to be very worried about his “wife,” Emily. It clearly hadn’t dawned on him yet that he had committed such savage acts that Emily was lost to him forever.
    Early on the morning of December 26, Detective Dick Sanford went to Winslow and processed Ruckelhaus’s car. He found the bloody shoes Emily had removed during their flight to escape on the ferry. There was a large, very sharp buck knife in its case under the front passenger seat. It was similar to the buck knife arresting officers had removed from Ruckelhaus’s belt as they took him from his car the night before. He had been well prepared with backup weapons.
    On December 27, Emily Borden gave Sanford a taped statement about her life with Terry Ruckelhaus, detailing the romantic beginning that had disintegrated into an endless ordeal of beatings and terror. She recalled how many times she had tried to get away from him but had found it impossible. Terry told her continually that she belonged to him—in mind, body, and soul. He had told her he would always find her—and he had, tracking her down until the last, fatal trip to Seattle.
    Would she agree to testify against Terry in a murder trial?
    YES!
    There was an icy resolve in Emily now. It was as if she had become so completely terrified that she had passed over into a place where Terry could no longer make her afraid. He was locked up, and she intended to see he would stay behind bars.
     
    Florence Borden did not die. She beat all the odds and slowly recovered her strength. There would be some years left for her, but years without Papa, who had died before her eyes as she tried to save him. Still confused and unbelieving, she gave detectives a statement about what had happened. It coincided exactly with Emily’s.
    Terry Ruckelhaus underwent observation to determine if he was mentally competent to participate in his own defense in a court of law. He was found to be sane, and able to stand trial. That trial began on March 29, 1976, in Judge Jerome M. Johnson’s courtroom in King County Superior Court. Lee Yates, a King County deputy prosecutor, presented the state’s case in the nonjury trial.
    Terry Ruckelhaus had an exceptional defense team. Two of the area’s best-known criminal attorneys, Anthony Savage and Michael Frost, argued in his behalf. Many years later,