Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

even though they tried to hide it. We just made excuses, saying we had to get on the road north.”
    “Did you ever see Manzanita after that?” Panton asked.
    “Never. Rocky called me about two weeks later and asked if we had seen Manzy. When I said we hadn’t heard from her, he told us that they had had a fight that started that night Bea and I stopped at their place, that Manzy and Dolores left, and they stole a lot of money from him.”
    It was virtually the same story that Rockwell had told everyone who had known his wife. Rockwell had embroidered a bit more on it by saying that he had seen his wife talking in hushed tones to a strange man who had come into their shop, and he believed she had run off with him.
    Because Jim Garner was an anthropologist, he made an excellent witness who could describe Manzanita’s figure—particularly her legs.
    He remarked that they were unusually stocky for a woman with a slender torso and upper body. She had thick ankles, and a large muscular swelling that began on the back of her calf and continued downward.
    “She almost had what people call ‘piano legs,’ ” Garner said.
    Bea Garner nodded in agreement. “She always wore pointy-toed shoes that were too small for her feet, and her skin kind of puffed out over the tops.”
    They both agreed that Manzanita’s legs had been atypical, a feature that most people would remember about her. Jim Garner agreed to look at photographs of the severed legs found in the Columbia River, although Bea Garner demurred.
    Garner nodded. “I think those are Manzy’s legs,” he said. “See there? The thickening in the ankles? The feet are those of someone who wore shoes too small for her, and the toes curl under from wearing pointed shoes.”
    Panton talked with Bill Mearns, Manzanita’s ex-husband. Before he looked at the photographs, he too described her legs as having very thick ankles that hardly narrowed at all below the calf. And he also gave details of her deformed toes. “It looked as though she had bunions on the outside of her big toe joints, and her little toes looked bunched up.”
    When Panton brought out the leg photos, they were exactly as Mearns had described them, just as Jim Garner had described them.
    Until Panton’s trip to Vancouver, the Seattle detectives had believed that Manzanita and Dolores had probably been killed on March 31, on the evening after they had come home from work and college.
    But the Garners had visited them two days later. Bea Garner felt guilty, she said. “I had the feeling that Manzy wanted to tell me something that last night—but she never did.”
    Bea recalled that her friend had been wearing a rose-colored sweater, a light skirt, nylons, and black shoes. That was important because the search of the stairway up to the attic had turned up those odd pink and white fibers under a step’s edge that hadn’t been explained.
    Now, detectives suspected that Manzanita had been killed shortly after the Garners left on April 2, undoubtedly dragged up the stairs either before or after death, her sweater and skirt catching on the rough wooden steps.
     
    Charles O. Carroll, a onetime football great at the University of Washington, had been the King County prosecuting attorney for many years. It was an elective office, and Carroll had proudly maintained a conviction rate of well over 95 percent in all those years. There were times when detectives took cases to the prosecutor’s office, only to be disappointed because they were sent back to find out more. While they were willing to take a chance on an acquittal, the prosecutor hesitated to risk that; if a killer should be acquitted, double jeopardy would attach and he could never be tried again. And then there was the political angle, too: a winning prosecutor is more likely to get reelected.
    In the Rockwell case, there really were no bodies—at least not bodies that could be absolutely established as belonging to Manzanita Rockwell and Dolores Mearns. A murder conviction without a body had not yet been accomplished in Washington State. Indeed, it would be forty years or more before that happened.
    Instead of a murder warrant, Charles O. Carroll filed a grand larceny charge against the still-missing Raoul Guy Rockwell, on the evidence of the bunco scheme that robbed Mrs. Winkler of $10,000.
    If Rockwell should ever be picked up, that charge would hold him.
    There were times when Herb Swindler wondered if Rockwell was dead, perhaps a suicide