Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

attracted eager collectors but looked more dreary with every day that passed. Rockwell’s vibrant and charismatic personality had made it popular; now Seattle detectives sensed that it held some terrible secrets.
    It was probably fitting that the most popular movie at the time was in its first run at Seattle’s Paramount Theater. Psycho starred Janet Leigh (albeit briefly, as her character soon perished in the infamous bloody shower scene) and Tony Perkins as the Bates Motel manager. The mansion behind that motel hid Perkins’s character’s secrets.
    It was also a looming gray building. And Leigh’s character also disappeared completely.
     
    Herb Swindler and Gail Leonard were not optimistic about the safety of the women who had vanished so completely from Raoul Guy Rockwell’s life, and indeed from life itself. No one had heard from them. They had left no paper trail at all, hadn’t tried to cash checks, contact banks, written letters to their daughters/sisters. They hadn’t even taken their identification with them.
    But where were they? The investigators in the Crimes Against Persons Unit sent out requests to other law enforcement agencies in the Northwest requesting information about any women who might have been in accidents or checked into hospitals—perhaps suffering from amnesia—or, in the worst possible scenario, been found dead and were currently listed as Jane Does.
    Nineteen sixty, of course, was long before the high-speed communication of thirty to forty years later. There was no central clearing agency in the state of Washington or, for that matter, in the United States. Computer-generated fingerprint matching lay far in the future, as did DNA and other sophisticated blood and body fluid correlations to identify victims or link them to their killers. There were no computers in police departments, no Internet, no cell phones.
    Even so, Homicide detectives were successful in closing the vast majority of their investigations and seeing convictions in trials the old-fashioned way: with hard work, canvassing, and brainstorming.
    But this case was a challenge. It wasn’t going to be easy to find Manzanita and Dolores. Or Raoul Guy Rockwell himself.
    On September 1, 1960, the probers received information from a sheriff’s office far from Seattle, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains. Wenatchee, Washington, was the seat of Chelan County, some 150 miles east of Seattle, a small city known for its apple blossom festival each May and the verdant fruit-growing orchards that spread out endlessly in the region.
    Dick Nichols was the Chelan County sheriff in 1960, a genial man whose staff usually dealt with drunken fights in taverns and migrant camps, illegal marijuana patches, and the occasional homicide. The Columbia River roared close to Wenatchee, its banks crowded with towering poplar trees that protected the orchards from windstorms.
    Nichols phoned the Seattle Homicide Unit lieutenant on duty to ask if the Seattle cops were aware that the severed legs of a female had been recovered from the Columbia River in nearby Grant County in May and June.
    “Why don’t you contact Deputy W. E. Dunstan in the sheriff’s office in Moses Lake?” Nichols suggested. “They’ve got one of the legs, and the other is here in our county. Dr. Robert Bonafaci, our coroner, is a pathologist and he has it.”
    The floating legs were a gruesome find. They could have come from a woman anywhere in Washington, or even from the Canadian border cities just beyond Okanogan County, which lay north of Chelan County. The Columbia was a wide river, full of dangerous rapids, carrying all kinds of debris as it coursed south.
    Detectives Gary Honz and “Buzz” Cook drove to Wenatchee to pick up the severed legs and transport them to Seattle so that longtime King County coroner Dr. Gale Wilson could examine them. Along with the legs, they received photographs and slides that Dr. Bonafaci had taken, and four X-ray films.
    While Honz and Cook were in Wenatchee, Detectives Bill Panton and Vern Thomas found some fascinating news at Cook’s U-Drive, the car rental company Raoul Guy Rockwell patronized. A records search there showed that he had rented a GMC panel truck on April 6, four days after anyone had seen Manzanita and Dolores. He drove it away just before two that afternoon, and returned the vehicle on April 7 at 9 A.M. The odometer indicated that he had driven 319 miles. The round-trip distance to Wenatchee is exactly