Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

306 miles.
    On September 3, 1960, Dr. Wilson submitted his report on the two legs found in the Columbia River. In his opinion, they had come from the same person: a Caucasian female who had been approximately forty years old and about five feet five inches tall. She had probably weighed close to 130 pounds. Her feet had very high arches, and the second toe on the first leg was longer than the big toe, which had an obvious bunion on the outside surface; the little toe had a wide gap between it and the fourth toe, and turned under.
    One of the legs had been found in a wooden box. That limb had been sawed off at midthigh and then broken. The second leg had been cut and broken closer to the knee.
    There was a nylon stocking in the box, a Micro-Mesh, seamless type, sandy beige color, size 9 ½. That wasn’t much in the way of physical evidence but it was something. Perhaps they could find its mate or other hose of the same make and size.
    The Grant County Sheriff’s Office said that the first leg had been located by a family picnicking on the shores of the Columbia on May 30. A professor of anthropology at Washington State University in Pullman concurred that it belonged to a female of middle age, white, and possibly about five feet seven and a half. She had type O blood.
    The second leg had surfaced in the Columbia on June 22, two miles away—in Quincy, Washington—and been spotted by a man living in a trailer court there.
    The measurements of the disembodied legs seemed to fit the description given for Manzanita Rockwell. Manzanita had told one of her friends that her blood was type O, although that wasn’t noted in Dr. Biback’s chart.
    To get still another evaluation of the floating legs, they were packed carefully and sent to Dr. T. D. Stewart, curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology at the National Museum in Washington, D.C.
    He found that the radiographic detail of the two femoral ends (where the thigh bones ended at the knees) were so similar that they had undoubtedly come from the same individual. The bones were of a mature person, but still rounded enough at the joints, he said, to verify that the person was in “early adult life”—around thirty-five to forty.
    If this was all that was left of Manzanita—and there was no proof of that—Dolores Mearns was still missing.
    On September 6, Sergeant Herb Swindler and Detectives Bill Panton and Carol Hahn obtained a search warrant for the entire building at 2512 Fairview Avenue. It was the first foray of one of the most sweeping searches the Seattle Police Department had ever—or would ever—carry out.
    As they examined the walls of the kitchen, they detected several dark stains that appeared to be blood near the stairway that led up to the attic. Further investigation disclosed numerous suspected bloodstains on the stairway itself, the cardboard underliner on the steps and other cardboard attached to the walls, the wooden pillar at the bottom of the staircase, and a south wall made of plywood.
    These stains would prove to be human blood when they were tested in the police lab, and the type was O-positive. The manner in which the blood was smeared on the cardboard side of the stairway suggested that a person—or a body—had been dragged up the staircase shortly after a wound had been inflicted. Swindler spotted two small reddish brown hairs and one white hair caught in a large blood smear. They were not human hairs, but rather, they had come from a cow.
    That was an oddity in an already peculiar case. Swindler learned later from the missing women’s friends that the two had shared a favorite brown-and-white cowhide belt, one item of clothing not found with their belongings.
    Swindler did find a long reddish brown hair on the underside of the third step; it would prove to be microscopically alike in class and characteristic to similar hairs taken from Dolores Mearns’s pink hairbrush.
    Manzanita’s red hair was dyed, and some of it was found on the stairs and in her hairbrush. There were also pink and white woolen fibers, as if from sweaters, trapped in the swaths of blood.
    As the searchers reached the attic, they found a virtual abattoir there: drops, smears, stains, soaking blood. Only halfhearted attempts had been made to hide it. Rugs had been piled on top of some stains, and fabric with dark stains had been jumbled together, as if to hide them. Bizarrely, someone had tried to cover up bloodstains by swabbing blue paint over them. When