Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

charge him. Type O blood is the second most common type in humans, and the science of winnowing out sub-categories in crime labs was not done half a century ago. DNA hadn’t even been heard of.
    Hairs and fibers could only be classified as “microscopically similar.” Were the legs found in the Columbia River the earthly remains of Manzanita Rockwell? Were the pitiful bits and pieces of some female body found in the septic tank all that was left of Dolores Mearns?
    With DNA, a criminologist would have been able to say that they definitely were—or were not. But armed only with a common blood type, any prosecutor would face obvious attacks by a defense team, who would surely insist that there was no proof that they belonged to either of the missing women—or that they were actually deceased.
    While searchers continued to scour the Rockwells’ former home, other detectives questioned acquaintances of the missing couple in an ever-widening circle. They also reinterviewed those they had talked to before.
    In the weathered building that no longer had any charm at all, given the grisly things they had already located there, detectives wearing protective coveralls and rubber gloves bagged and labeled a mountain of evidence, much of which would be sent to the FBI lab for further examination: hairbrushes from each women (Manzanita’s held strands of her hair that were dyed auburn at the ends but were her natural brown at the roots); panties stained with menstrual blood (Dolores’s—she also had type O blood); a pair of Micro-Mesh nylons still in a package from the H. L. Green Company; women’s shoes sized 7 ½; a .22 caliber expended long-rifle bullet, apparently fired through the box spring of a mattress in the bedroom; a box of .22 caliber bullets; a pair of men’s slippers, size 13, soaked in dried human blood; and a meat-saw frame and two meat-saw blades.
    Human tissue, blood type O, was found in the recesses of the meat-saw frame. A check with the Seattle Blood Bank was lucky; Raoul Guy had donated blood there, and his blood type was the relatively rare type B.
    Detectives located the hardware store where the meat saw had been purchased, but the owner did not recall who had bought it. The district manager of the H. L. Green Company verified that the stores had had a special sale on the Micro-Mesh stockings after buying fifty dozen pairs from the Liberty Hosiery Mills in Gibsonville, North Carolina. The closest store to the Rockwells’ home and business was only steps from the corner where Manzanita transferred from one bus to another as she commuted from her bank job. She had probably bought several pairs of hose there in March.
    That information still wasn’t enough to secure an arrest warrant.
    There were no fingerprints—no intact fingers, for that matter, of the missing women. The phalangeal bones found in the septic tank were determined to be from the fingers of a young person—someone under twenty.
    All through the rainy autumn of 1960, the intensive probe into the disappearance of Rockwell’s wife and step-daughter continued. It wasn’t headline news, however. Rather, it meant dreary overtime hours put in by dogged detectives who found out fragments of information that might be helpful.
    The big news that fall was national: John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon had their first televised debate, with Kennedy winning it running away; Nixon’s image without makeup was that of a pale man who needed a shave badly.
    Ted Williams retired from baseball, hitting a 420-foot home run against the Baltimore Orioles in his final game and receiving a standing ovation.
    Nikita Khrushchev made his infamous shoe-banging speech at the United Nations General Assembly, and Clark Gable died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-nine.
    On that very day—November 16—Detective Panton contacted a couple in Vancouver who had been close friends of Manzanita Rockwell’s. Fortuitously, Jim Garner was an anthropologist for the Vancouver City Museum. He and his wife, Bea, had visited the Rockwells at the antiques gallery six months earlier on April 2, 1960. It had been a short visit—only a half hour—that took place about ten-thirty that night. It was a kind of pop-in visit and the Garners were testing the waters to see if the Rockwells would welcome company so late.
    “I could see that it wasn’t a good time for us to drop in,” Garner recalled. “Manzy and Rocky were having a squabble, and they both seemed upset