Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

folded perfectly in a neat pile on the bed.
    Josh Nathan,* the neighbor who had called in the first alarm, paced outside, waiting to talk to the two investigators.
    “Me and the wife always look after Dorothy and Carl’s place while they’re away,” he said. “He’s a long-haul trucker, and he’s out on the road all but one or two days a month. Dorothy’s usually here alone.”
    Nathan said that he had picked up his parents at the Sea-Tac Airport earlier in the afternoon, and then picked up his wife on the way home. Shortly after they arrived home, he had glanced out the window and seen the flames.
    “I called 911 and my wife ran over there. She told me the front door was unlocked and I went in. I found the corn just starting to burn and I turned the stove off. The lights were on downstairs, but I didn’t see any upstairs. I didn’t go up because the smoke was so heavy.“
    The Nathans had seen Dorothy’s car outside her house, but no other cars nearby, and they were sure no one had left the house—at least not after they got home.
     
    Working in the front yard of the Joneses’ house on this increasingly chilly December night, Jim Reed and Detective Bill Berg carefully rebuilt the mattress from the fire room, sifting debris as they worked. They found the remains of a brassiere caught in there, too.
    The burn patterns on the mattress confirmed Reed’s first impression. He had thought that the fire had been caused by someone holding a flame under the bed at the center and near the foot. But that would have been a very tight squeeze for anyone who wasn’t really thin.
    Or who didn’t have exceptionally long arms.
    But why? Moreover, Dorothy Jones should have had time to jump out of bed and escape the inferno before anyone under the bed could wriggle out from the narrow space beneath it.
    But of course she hadn’t.
    Jim Reed, Jim Whalen, and Bill Berg worked far into the early morning hours on the baffling case. At eight the next morning, day-shift arson investigators took over. Marshal 5 veterans Jack Hickam and Gary Owens attended the postmortem on Dorothy Jones. King County medical examiner Donald Reay performed the autopsy, and he was a pathologist who always looked for even the smallest sign that signaled an unnatural death.
    Perhaps there was some preexisting condition that had rendered Dorothy helpless to escape the flames. Maybe she had suffered an injury not easily detectable the night before. She could have been strangled or suffocated, and the bruise marks from the killer’s fingers or the petechiae (broken blood vessels) could be hidden beneath her burned skin.
    But Dr. Reay found nothing beyond a small bump over her right eye, and there was no hemorrhaging beneath it. Reay opined there was a slight chance that the bump had come from a blow to her head that might possibly have knocked her out momentarily—but hardly long enough for her to lie there unconscious and die from smoke inhalation. And he didn’t really think she had sustained even that.
    Her flesh had no needle marks, and the blood tests would come back with negative readings on blood alcohol and a wide spectrum of drugs. Reay acknowledged that there were “dozens” of more obscure drugs that could have been administered and gone undetected.
    The blood from Dorothy’s heart chambers was bright cherry red, an indication of carbon monoxide poisoning. There was a 61 percent concentration of carbon monoxide in her blood, more than enough to kill her, but that was a result of the fire.
    The official cause of her death was “death by asphyxiation due to inhalation of products of combustion.” Her severe burns had been sustained after her death.
    In the end, her autopsy showed that Dorothy Jones had not been strangled, shot, knifed, beaten, or smothered. There was no obvious reason why she hadn’t fled the burning room.
    Yet she had not.
    Evidence of rape or recent intercourse showed on the vaginal swabs taken. A test for acid phosphates showed that there was semen present in her vaginal vault, which turned the swabs reddish purple. Dorothy had engaged in sexual intercourse shortly before her death. The man involved had no sperm cells in his ejaculate; he had had a vasectomy to render him sterile. According to criminalist Ann Beaman of the crime lab, intercourse had taken place the truck driver’s wife within two to four hours before Dorothy died; an active woman will not retain semen in the vagina longer than that.
     
    Jim