Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

opinion they voice. They brim with charisma, even when they may not be all that handsome. And if they are handsome, too, their feminine targets are that much easier to seduce.
    Raoul Guy Rockwell was definitely a charmer, as dangerous as he was compelling. Wealthy Seattle matrons and single women hung on his every word, and many of them secretly—or not so secretly—thought seriously about having an affair with him.
    Some of them ventured beyond the thought, captivated by his hypnotic stare and the sharp scent of his English lime cologne and the smell of the rich tobacco blend in his ever-present pipe.
    Rockwell’s story rose to the surface shortly before my own years as a police officer in the Seattle Police Department. The detective sergeant who tracked him was a man I had worked with on several sexual assault cases when he was a patrol officer and I was a very gullible and inexperienced investigator in the Women’s Division (as we were known then).
    I’ve never written this case before, but it has always been a big part of my memory of early days in the department. It is grotesque, baffling, fascinating, and frustrating. Later in my life, I had a writing studio in a houseboat on Lake Union, close by where the murder mystery happened. My neighbors had never heard of the mysterious Raoul Guy Rockwell and didn’t know of the massive police operation that took place in the fall of 1960. It seemed impossible to me that such a headline story could evaporate like the early morning fog over the lake when the sun penetrated it.
    And yet I’m sure there are many who will remember this story, and who have wondered for decades whatever became of the man who captivated his fans for a few years and then vanished, leaving hundreds of questions behind.
     
    When this mystery began in the spring of 1960, John F. Kennedy had just announced his candidacy for president, America’s first seven astronauts were learning to live in zero gravity, and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” topped the music charts.
    “The Twist” was the most popular dance in the country.
    It was another time. Still, revisiting the saga of Raoul Guy Rockwell makes one wonder how anyone aware of his crimes could forget him.

Raoul Guy rockwell, who was always referred to by all three of his names, suddenly appeared in the art and antiques world of Seattle in the late 1950s. No one was sure where he had come from, and later, even less sure of where he had gone. He wasn’t yet forty-five, although he seemed more mature. He opened an antiques gallery in a ramshackle three-story house close to a houseboat community on Fairview Avenue East, a structure repaired willy-nilly over previous decades with whatever was handy, so that part of it had cedar shakes and other sections plain board siding. The windows didn’t match, and some were covered with plastic sheeting instead of storm windows to keep out the rain. Rockwell decorated the entryway with stained-glass windows he had purchased when an old church was demolished, but he didn’t pain the exterior.
    Almost five decades later, the land he bought is well-nigh priceless, but he purchased the creaky structure, which had once housed a rug cleaning business, with relatively few funds. Somehow, he had the touch that made the weathered gray building look quaint and “interesting,” rather than junky.
    Rockwell filled the first floor with all manner of collectibles—large pieces of furniture, paintings, objets d’art, rare coins, Northwest Indian icons, and his claimed special area of expertise, Ashanti weights. He traveled often to buy items for his inventory, most often to Canada, but also to Portugal and Ghana, in Africa, to buy the precious little carved bronze Ashanti weights once used by natives as counterbalances to weigh both gold dust and salt.
    Rockwell often spoke of his amazing luck in being able to buy a collection of 152 such weights, more valuable each year as their number was limited. They had great religious and cultural significance to those who used them. Hundreds of the rare bronze icons were buried with those who owned them in life.
    When Raoul Guy moved into the barnlike house, he brought his family with him. His second wife, Manzanita, was thirty-nine, an attractive and vivacious redhead who favored scarlet lipstick. Manzy, as she was called, had a much more ordinary job than her flamboyant husband: she worked at a bank in downtown Seattle. Although Raoul Guy and