Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

on bedroom slippers. After that, she took her street clothes off in our spare bedroom and folded them real careful.”
    That was just as the arson detectives had found them.
    “How about in the house?” Jack Hickam asked. “Did she sometimes walk around without clothes—after she locked the doors?”
    “No way. She was a very modest woman. She never walked around naked!”
    The next questions were more difficult. Hickam and Owens tried to be tactful as they approached the question of Dorothy’s possibly having a boyfriend when Jones was out on the road.
    “I never suspected she had one, nothing like that—although we were separated so much of the time because of my job. I just don’t know. I’d hate to think that was true.”
     
    On December 28, Jim Reed received a call from Carl Jones. He said he had gone to his home at 8:25 in the morning and found the front door ajar and a back door wide open.
    Jones said he couldn’t stand to live in the house where his wife had died, and he was preparing to move. He had had the couple’s belongings packed by a commercial mover. All the nonfurniture items from the downstairs had been sitting in boxes in the living room. The upstairs rooms were not yet packed. Someone had entered the home—although not forcibly—and thoroughly ransacked it.
    “I locked the place up myself at six-thirty last night,” Jones told Reed, “and I don’t know of anyone else who has a key. Only me and Dorothy.”
    Oddly, Jones said, he hadn’t found anything missing.
    “I can’t be sure of everything Dorothy had, of course, but the only thing that seems to be gone are some wooden kitchen tools.”
    Criminalists from the Seattle Police Department dusted the living room and obtained some good latent prints from the underside of a marble coffee table.
    In the mid-seventies, unfortunately, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) didn’t exist. Most people didn’t know what a computer was, and there certainly weren’t state or nationwide clearinghouses where computers had huge banks of known prints. The FBI’s Crime Lab filed single fingerprints from their “Ten Most Wanted” felons on the run, but that was all. Unless the detectives found a suspect whose fingerprints could be compared to those retrieved from the coffee table, they were virtually useless.
    Beyond those few latent prints, they had no clues they could link to whoever had entered the home the Joneses had rented for nine years, or any discernible motive. If Dorothy Jones had been murdered, maybe her killer had panicked, remembering some item in the house that would point to him, and returned to retrieve it. It couldn’t have been a set of inexpensive wooden spoons and spatulas.
    And when Carl Jones first got home, he had searched the house and hadn’t found anything that didn’t seem to belong there.
    Jim Reed talked with the manager of the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise that was identified by the number on the receipt. He learned that the receipt found in the carry-out bag in the victim’s living room on December 20 showed that the food had been purchased in the fifty-fifth sale of the day.
    “According to our usual pattern that should have fallen somewhere between three and four-thirty,” the manager estimated.
    So Dorothy was alive at three, alive at five. Where had she spent the rest of her day? There were many facets of the investigation that didn’t fit with Carl’s aunt’s description of her as “a nice girl.”
    On January 3, Carl Jones came into the Marshal 5 offices that were located in Station 10 near Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square.
    His face looked strained as he told the arson investigators that he had been asking questions, and gotten some answers that he really didn’t want to hear. He had come to the conclusion that his wife hadn’t been completely faithful to him.
    “I’ve heard some rumors,” he said. “They say that Dorothy was seeing some guy—some businessman. His name is Dante Blackwell.”*
    At Jim Reed’s request, Jones looked over the address book found in the scorched bedding, and he pointed out other names there that he didn’t recognize. There were seven.
    As it turned out, they had no significance. Investigators traced those people and found them to be only casual friends of Dorothy’s.
    On January 5, Jim Reed and Jack Hickam called on Felicia Brown,* one of Dorothy’s oldest friends. Felicia the truck driver’s wife knew considerably more about