Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

upstairs.”
    Rockwell had been alternately accusing and confiding with Sparr. He told Sparr that Manzanita was following him, and had trailed him to the apartment of a woman friend.
    More and more odd things happened, Sparr said. Some weeks after Manzanita and Dolores left, Sparr had noticed that the heavy cement cover of the home’s septic tank had been shifted. “When I went there later, though, it was sealed tightly.”
    Some of the witnesses Gail Leonard and Herb Swindler talked to came close to categorizing Raoul Guy Rockwell as a Bluebeard, while others found him charming—if a little eccentric—a man caught in a marriage with a neurotically jealous woman. One couple even confided that Rockwell had told them that Manzy was seeing another man and that he was disturbed because none of their friends had told him about it.
    “How could we tell him?” the wife said. “We didn’t know anything about that. We never saw Manzy with anyone but Raoul. She adored him.”
    But Raoul Guy continued to describe his absent wife as a crazy woman, one who had made his life a living hell and then left him in disastrous financial straits.
    One very reliable source disputed that Manzanita Rockwell had been reduced to a “basket case.” In 1960, Dr. Sheldon Biback was a very popular and respected obstetrician-gynecologist with offices in the University District. Manzanita Rockwell was one of his patients.
    When Noreen Skagen talked to Dr. Biback, he recalled an office visit he’d had with Manzanita on March 30. She had come to him in a state of extreme agitation, so anxious that she asked him to prescribe a sedative. That was not how Biback had viewed her in their past appointments, and he sensed that she was dealing with a reality that would make most women upset. She told Biback that she had suspected her husband of being unfaithful for some time, and she had followed him to another woman’s house. There, she had confirmed her worst suspicions.
    “I can’t live this way,” she confessed to her doctor, “and I told Raoul that I knew about his affair, and I wasn’t willing to accept that and pretend it wasn’t happening. I’m going to have a showdown with him to force some kind of a decision. I love him and I’m going to fight for him because I believe our marriage can be saved.”
    Dr. Biback told Noreen Skagen that he had found Manzanita Rockwell a “rational and reasonable woman.” Even though she had been very distracted by her situation, calling herself “a basket case,” she hadn’t seemed at all crazy, or even vindictive. She was simply a woman who was ready to face a very real problem and try to do what she needed to to win back her husband’s affection.
    Biback hadn’t heard from her again. But then, apparently no one had, except for Karen’s brief sighting of Manzy as she came home from work the next day.
    Manzanita had been Biback’s patient for some time and he pulled her chart when Detective Skagen asked for her description.
    “Manzanita was five feet five inches tall,” he read, “and weighed 122 pounds. She had auburn hair and a fair, freckled complexion.”
    Dolores had been required to have a physical when she applied to the University of Washington, and Dr. Gilbert Eade had her chart in his office. She was five feet five and a half and weighed only 112 pounds.
    Who the other woman in Raoul Rockwell’s life was was anyone’s guess. It could have been Evelyn or Blake, or perhaps one of several other women. Apparently Rockwell had been adept at carrying on many liaisons at the same time without any of his paramours knowing about the others.
    By the time Detectives Noreen Skagen and Carol Hahn, and the Rockwells’ neighbor Karen Yanick, had finished their inventory of Manzanita’s and Dolores’s abandoned belongings, they had listed 640 items! Everything from clothing to makeup to treasured personal belongings filled three boxes, three trunks, and three barrels. These were delivered to the property room of the Seattle Police Department on the second floor of the Public Safety Building to await any further developments on the women’s disappearance or, less likely, instructions from Manzanita and her daughter.
    The missing women had obviously left with only the clothes on their backs.
    Without their purses.
    Without their makeup.
     
    As summer faded into autumn, 1960, Raoul Guy Rockwell was still missing. His home and gallery sat empty, a looming gray building that no longer