Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

the paint was still wet, scraps of wallboard, plywood, and tar paper had been stacked on top of it.
    If the effort was meant to permanently hide the evidence of massive blood loss, it failed. So much of the red stuff had been shed that the blood seeped through the floor joists onto paper covering the ceiling just below. Just south of the blue-painted area, Swindler found a white enamel pan, its bottom stained halfway up with brownish red stains. There was little question that a body or bodies had been dissected here in the dim attic; there were innumerable particles of dried blood, bits of human tissue, and bone fragments left behind.
    The blood and tissue was all type O.
    A broken tooth, a lower canine, lay near the stairwell. It would be identified as coming from someone about twenty years of age.
    There were empty packages that had once held large plastic bags, the remains of a roll of thick plastic, and some lengths of rope and twine.
    There was no way to look at the dreadful physical evidence except as the handiwork of a mad butcher.
    Friends had told the detectives that Raoul Guy Rock well had plunged into weeks of heavy drinking—unusual for him—during the prior April. Still, he hadn’t appeared to be drunk. Now, during a reinterview Detective Panton had with Karen Yanick, she commented on that. “Rocky said, ‘If I could just get drunk so I could forget it for a while,’ but he never explained what it was he wanted to forget.”
    Karen recalled that Rockwell had moved his bed from the kitchen area to a front bedroom in late April. “He used to use that for a place to refinish furniture, but he said he couldn’t sleep in the kitchen alcove anymore.”
    As Swindler, Panton, and Hahn surveyed the ghastly mess in the attic, they could understand Rockwell’s need to forget. Even if the man was a psychopath, whatever had happened here would give anyone nightmares. It certainly looked as though he had killed both his wife and his step-daughter and dragged them up to the attic, where he dissected their bodies.
    “But he went ahead with his divorce to bolster his alibi,” Swindler said sardonically, “and it didn’t slow him down when it came to romancing other women. He just went on with his life.”
     
    There was more evidence to find.
    Swindler and Leonard hadn’t forgotten the information that the Rockwell house’s septic tank cover had been ajar for a short time during the previous spring, and then sealed tightly. When they had collected the thousands of pieces of evidence inside the old house, they knew that the next step was to open up the septic tank, cutting through the freshly cemented seams.
    It was not a pleasant thought.
    But it had to be done.
    Deputy Chief Frank Ramon, who had taken over the intense probe into the fate of Manzanita Rockwell and Dolores Mearns, arranged to have a Seattle City Engineering sludge truck and a skin diver standing by as the septic tank was opened. As the contents of the tank were pumped out, what looked like human body parts came into view. Dr. Gale Wilson would later verify what they were:
A uterus with a small portion of the vaginal vault attached. It measured 8x5x4.5 centimeters, and it contained numerous small fibroid tumors. (These benign tumors are quite common in young women.)
The upper portion of the right ear of a human, which had been hacked off clumsily.
A kidney, with adipocere attached. (Adipocere is a soaplike substance that sometimes forms when human tissue is submerged in water or other liquid for some time.)
Five pieces of colon, and mesentery (the lining of the inner abdomen).
One section of lung.
One section of muscle.
One partial kidney.
Two sections of rib, one partially burned, with sawed ends.
An ulnar bone (one of two bones in the forearm).
A radial epiphysis (the growth ends of the other forearm bone).
Four phalangeal bones (hand bones).
    There were also numerous hairs, paintbrushes, and other household debris.
    Dr. Wilson said that it was his opinion that all of the tissue and bones had come from a human female approximately eighteen years old.
    This suggested, of course, that Dolores Mearns had never left the old gray house on Fairview Avenue at all.
     
    In the twenty-first century, given the amount of physical evidence and the massive circumstantial evidence the investigators had turned up, the case against Raoul Guy Rockwell would quickly result in an arrest warrant. But in 1960, the King County prosecutor’s office hesitated to