Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

to stop the interview at that point. I’ve never been so frustrated.”
    On December 5, Swindler and FBI special agents Joe Fox and Frank Donnelly had another shot at Rockwell. Once again, the suspect admitted to “moral guilt” for Manzanita’s and Dolores’s deaths. But he would go no further. “I’ll tell you all about it,” he promised, “as soon as I talk to a Jesuit priest in Seattle.”
    And then he shut up.
    Returned to Seattle in Swindler’s custody, Raoul Guy Rockwell met with a Jesuit priest on December 7 and December 9. Their conversation was, of course, privileged. What Rockwell said to the priest is unknown.
    After conferring with the priest, Rockwell spoke once again to Herb Swindler, this time in the Seattle Homicide Unit. He refused to talk about his probable crimes, breaking his promise to tell everything after he had talked with a Jesuit.
    What he did say to Swindler undoubtedly summed up who Rockwell really was, and his total lack of conscience.
    “They are dead,” he said forcefully, “and I’m alive, and that’s what’s important.”
     
    Raoul Guy Muldavin-Rockwell was never charged with the murders of Manzanita Rockwell and Dolores Mearns. Nor did he serve time for the theft of $10,000 from the woman who was his mother-in-law for a very short time. He disappeared from the Seattle scene, and few people who live there today even recognize his name. As infamous as he was forty-seven years ago, the winds of time have swept away his dilapidated buildings, his alleged crimes, and his memory.
    Public records show that a man named Guy R. Muldavin was married on February 16, 1974, to a woman named Teri in Washoe County, Nevada. And a man named Milo Guy Maltby married another woman named Teri in Clark County, Nevada, on May 4, 1981.
    Was it really Raoul Guy Rockwell, still charming women? Quite possibly. He would have been forty-nine in 1974, and fifty-six at the second civil wedding.
    Sylvia Muldavin, Rockwell’s mother, died on July 23, 1972, in Santa Clara, California, at the age of seventy. His brother, Michael, passed away in Ribera, New Mexico, on January 1, 2005.
    And unless he pulled off his own disappearing act, Guy Muldavin’s death at the age of seventy-six is recorded as having occurred in Salinas, California, on March 14, 2002. He took a lifetime of secrets with him to the grave, never to be revealed.
    Sergeant Herb Swindler rose through the ranks of the Seattle Police Department, eventually becoming the captain in charge of the Crimes Against Persons Unit. Before he retired, Herb gave me a hundred pages that detailed his work on the Raoul Guy Rockwell case.
    There, I found that every piece of evidence his team had picked up was listed carefully in Swindler’s own handwriting, all the overtime hours he had worked. The single-spaced typed summary of Case #60-495-379 that he wrote about the mysterious double-murder case is on lined paper, yellowing with age now, and curled at the edges, but it is all there, bringing back the grotesque horror of 1960. The detectives who searched the somehow-haunted building that housed Guy Rockwell’s antiques store marked the pages with their initials. I’m sure that all of them remembered this case for the rest of their lives.
    I promised Herb Swindler that one day I would write about Raoul Guy Muldavin-Rockwell, the killer who got away. And now I have. Sadly, Herb passed away in 2005 without ever seeing a truly satisfactory ending to the case he wanted so much to solve. But he gave “Rockwell” a run for his money, and the city of Seattle was rid of one of the most outrageous con men ever to settle there.
    And of course, neither Manzanita nor Dolores ever came home again.

The
Truck Driver’s
Wife

During the years I wrote for True Detective and several other fact-detective magazines, it sometimes seemed that I spent half my life in Homicide units around America. I attended the King County Sheriff’s Office’s Basic Homicide School for two weeks, and I went on many ride-alongs with various law enforcement officers: the Washington State Patrol, Seattle Police Department, Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, and even the Seattle Fire Department’s Arson Unit: Marshal 5.
    It was the best way I could understand what cops and investigators actually did when they left their offices and headed out into the field after Roll Call or Show-up. As any other civilian must, I had to sign forms that said I wouldn’t sue any of these departments if