A Rage to Kill (38 page)

“Ralph woke me up,” he said. “He wanted to know Marcia’s telephone number.” Melvin said he would be happy to take a polygraph test to verify his movements at the time Marcia was murdered. Ralph Ditty took the polygraph test first, on June 14. He passed, although he appeared nervous on questions having to do with any possible guilt on the part of Melvin Jones. Detectives thought perhaps Melvin had told Ralph that Marcia was dead and Ralph had gone to her apartment on Saturday night and again the following Wednesday to assure himself that Marcia’s murder was not an alcoholic dream on Melvin’s part.

Jones himself had so little response to the lie detector leads that they might as well have been hooked up to a hollow log. All the polygrapher got were horizontal lines across the tracing paper. Melvin apologized. Without thinking, he had taken a drug to ease the pain of his bad back. That explained it. The drug he’d taken would effectively blunt responses enough to render polygraph readings useless.

Melvin denied that he’d ever had sex with Marcia or that he’d killed her. He did admit going to her apartment before six o’clock on the morning of May 29 after leaving Jeanie Easley’s apartment, but he said Marcia wouldn’t let him in, so he’d gone home. With every questioning session, his answers changed slightly, but he was adamant that he would never hurt a hair on Marcia Perkins’s head.

The friend who had gone to the dorm party with Melvin and his date, Jeanie, verified that Melvin had spent the entire evening with them at the party, and that Jones had left them sometime very, very early in the morning of May 29. Melvin had been so intoxicated that he’d passed out in Jeanie’s apartment. “Jeanie and I had to prod Melvin to get him to wake up and ready to leave her place,” he said.

By this time Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo had worked eighteen-hour days on the homicide investigation for two weeks, and all they had been able to do was eliminate one suspect after another. Most of the also-rans had started out looking promising. They had a gut feeling about Melvin Jones, but they had not one shred of physical evidence placing him at the scene of Marcia Perkins’s death. It was not from lack of trying, or skill: the detective partners had an enviable reputation as meticulous crime scene investigators, but someone had been clever enough to erase the very things they needed for an arrest.

Six days later, Seattle homicide detectives were called out on another sexually motivated murder. The name of the victim would shock even them.

At 4:33
P.M.
on Tuesday, June 22, a worried woman had knocked on the door of her daughter’s apartment on Bellevue Avenue East. She hadn’t heard from her since the weekend, which was unusual. Her twenty-one-year-old daughter was employed at the Seattle Indian Center as an Emergency Assistance adviser but, when her mother had called her there earlier, she learned that her daughter hadn’t come to work that morning, nor had she called to say she was sick. The young woman was a very dependable employee who never failed to report in before.

Her daughter’s name was Jeanie Easley.

When no one responded to her knocks, Jeanie’s mother looked toward the front windows. She saw that the drapes on Jeanie’s apartment were still drawn. Jeanie only kept her drapes closed at night. She pounded again on the door, but no one answered. Always careful about invading her daughter’s privacy, her concern now overrode any hesitancy to intrude. She tried the door and found to her surprise that it wasn’t locked. She walked into the foyer.

A horrendous sight greeted her, something no mother should ever have to see. Jeanie lay spread-eagled in the living room which was littered by the debris and the dirt from crushed and broken plants and pots. It looked as if a tremendous struggle had taken place. A mammoth split-leaf philodendron barely covered the girl’s near-naked body. Without any real hope, her mother felt for a pulse and found none; the skin on Jeanie’s wrist was cold to her touch. Her mother knew she had been dead for a long time. She walked leadenly to the phone.

Detective Sergeant Jerry Yates and Detectives Baughman and Marberg sped at once to the scene, a scene that would prove to be sadly familiar to them.

The lovely Indian girl was nude except for a pink bathrobe and a torn bra pushed up around her neck. Her apartment was in utter chaos: clothing had been dumped on the floor, food was mixed in with the garments, drawers stood open, and Indian jewelry and crafts were scattered around in piles. It was as if someone had torn through the apartment looking for treasure, heedless of the disorder he created as he raged. Even as the detectives surveyed the damage, a radio still played loudly and jarringly. The scene was very like that in Marcia Perkins’s apartment twenty days earlier.

Jeanie Easley had had a lovely face and figure; now her skin was marred by bruises and scratches and there were vicious marks around her neck where her robe’s belt had been tightened. Despite the disarray in Jeanie’s apartment, it was apparent that the place had been kept spotlessly clean. There was no dust, kitchen appliances gleamed and all the white walls were sparkling—except for the east wall where the detectives saw two discernible hand prints. A palm print to a homicide detective is like a glint of gold to a Forty-Niner; Tim Taylor, a forensic technician from the Latent Prints Section, took careful precautions to preserve the two hand marks that seemed so out of place on the clean wall.

Jeanie Easley had either been about to eat or to serve someone else when she was killed; two cooked hamburger patties rested in their congealed grease on a plate on the kitchen counter.

While Billy Baughman sketched the apartment,George Marberg took dozens of photographs. Then Jeanie Easley’s hands were encased in plastic to protect any evidence that might still cling beneath her fingernails, and her body was removed by King County deputy medical examiners to await autopsy.

They saved the dirt from the uprooted plants, too; there was a good chance some of it still clung to the killer’s clothes or shoes.

The similarities between the murder of Jeanie Easley and that of Marcia Perkins fairly shouted for attention: both victims were young, attractive women, both had worn robes that were pulled up around their shoulders, both had been strangled and beaten, and both women had been left staged in the classic rape position of widespread legs. Each of the women had been left close to the front door of her apartment, and both of the apartments had been ransacked and the victims’ wallets stolen.

Also telling was the indication that Marcia Perkins and Jeanie Easley had been preparing food or coffee for a guest: two cups with instant coffee for Marcia, and the two hamburger patties for Jeanie. They had lived in close proximity to one another, their drapes had been drawn, and in each case the radio had been left on at high volume.

Melvin Jones had known both young women. It was more than a grotesque coincidence that Jeanie, the second murder victim, had been Melvin’s alibi for the night Marcia was killed. It was Jeanie’s apartment where Melvin was seen last—inebriated and drowsy—after the party at the University of Washington on the final night of Marcia’s life.

The viciousness of the attack on Jeanie Easley was noted during the autopsy on her body. She was slender, five feet, six inches, and weighed 125 pounds, but someone far stronger than she had beaten her so severely that a dental bridge was lodged far down in her throat. Like Marcia, Jeanie had been raped and sodomized.

Jeanie Easley’s death was a great loss to her family and friends. They described her as a tireless worker for good, a young woman obsessed with bettering the life of her people. Beyond her work in the Emergency Assistance Program at the Indian Center, she had made weekly trips to the Monroe Reformatory to try to help Indian prisoners prepare themselves for the world outside when they were paroled. Her apartment reflected her pride in her heritage and her desire to overcome the oppression that Indians sometimes encountered. Posters, calendars and pictures of Indian leaders decorated her walls; one reading “The Earth and Myself Are of One Mind” depicted an heroic ancestor.

Jeanie had had a green thumb, too, and her apartment had been full of plants. It was ironic that her killer should have chosen to drape her body with the plant of which she’d been proudest. It was a new acquisition, according to her mother, who had given her the split-leaf philodendron a week before—on June 15.

Her mother told detectives that she had seen Jeanie last on Sunday, June 20, when she had driven her daughter home after a visit, a regular weekend routine. Her boyfriend, Linc Kitsap*, told Detectives Ted Fonis and Dick Sanford (who had taken over primary responsibility for the Easley case) that he last saw Jeanie on Monday night at five o’clock when he’d driven her home from work. As he dropped her off, he’d noticed a tall man who looked to be about twenty-five to thirty waiting near the front of her building. Jeanie had not spoken to the man, or even acted as if she knew him. She had just gone quickly into her apartment.

Kitsap said Jeanie had no enemies. The whole concept seemed alien when he thought of Jeanie; everybody loved her. She was a very careful woman, he said, and she’d always kept her doors locked. “She wouldn’t let anyone in unless she checked to see who it was first,” he said quietly.

“You have a key to her apartment?” Sanford asked.

The young man shook his head. “Her mother’s the only one who has a duplicate key.”

Everyone from Jeanie’s boyfriend to her landlord attested to her meticulous housekeeping. “She was the type who picked up an ashtray as soon as you finished a cigarette and took it to the kitchen and washed it,” Kitsap recalled. The detectives asked him what the apartment had looked like the last time he had been inside—on Sunday morning.

“Were the walls clean?”

“Always.”

“You didn’t see any hand prints on the walls?”

He looked surprised. Hand prints? He was sure he would have recalled if there had been any hand prints on the wall then. “Jeanie wouldn’t have allowed it,” he said. “There was nothing on that wall but a mirror, two posters, a macrame hanging—no stains of any kind.”

As they had in the Perkins case, the Seattle police investigators began a canvass of neighbors. A man in the apartment directly above Jeanie’s quarters told Sanford that something roused him from his sleep very early in the morning of June 22. Between 1:20 to 1:30
A.M.
, two short screams for help had burst through his dreams. “I thought they’d come from the street, but when I looked out my window, I didn’t see anyone out there. I listened, but everything was quiet, and I finally went back to bed.”

The couple who shared an adjoining wall with Jeanie’s apartment had heard nothing at all during the night of June 21–22.

Two young men came forward and told the police that they had spent several hours visiting with Jeanie on Monday night, June 21. It was the first day of summer, and the longest day of the year and, in Seattle, that meant it was light until well past ten. Lots of people in the Broadway and University districts were out that Monday night, visiting.

Detective Dick Reed interviewed the men who volunteered the information about being with Jeanie on Monday night. They told Reed that they had dropped in around 7:30 and had stayed until 10:30 or 11. Jeanie was busy around her apartment, talking to them while she cleaned. She told them she planned to leave on her vacation in a few days, and wanted to leave her place clean so it would be nice to come back to. She had also confided in them about a man she was “afraid” of. He wasn’t a complete stranger, she said, but she didn’t know his name.

“She said, ‘I told him not to come back again,’ ” the men told Reed, but she hadn’t gone into any more detail than that. No one had knocked on her door while they were there and Jeanie had no phone, so there were no calls.

A coworker at the Indian Center came up with a suspect’s name and a possible motive. He said that Jeanie had been instrumental in catching and convicting an obscene phone caller who had plagued the Center in January and February of 1976. He explained, “Jeanie kept the guy on the line for half an hour and he was trapped. She testified in court against him.”

The investigators checked and found that the man had been convicted of making obscene calls on the basis of Jeanie’s testimony, but he was reported to have left the Seattle area.

All of the detectives involved in the two murder investigations met to discuss the many commonalities in the two cases,
and
the fact that Melvin Jones’s name kept surfacing in each. Both Jeanie and Marcia had had very full social lives and many admirers, but at length, the investigators had eliminated every possible suspect
except
the husky ex-convict.

Jeanie Easley’s friend, the man who had brought Melvin along to the dorm party on May 28, was interviewed again. Although he worked with Melvin at an upholstery company, he said they had met originally at the Monroe Reformatory. They asked him about Melvin’s mood during the first part of June, and the man recalled that Melvin had been at work regularly the week after Marcia Perkins died. “He mentioned once that he had to take a polygraph because he had some friend who died,” the man said. “But it didn’t seem like he was upset about it or anything.”

“Melvin ever talk about wanting to date Jeanie, or about going to see her after you all went to the party together?” Sanford asked.

“No, not that I can remember. He never said anything about her after that night.”

While the circumstantial evidence was pointing more and more at Melvin Jones, technicians and criminalists at the Washington State Crime Lab were evaluating evidence. There was nothing from Marcia Perkins’s apartment. The scene had just been too clean. But the investigators were excited when Tim Taylor called with the news that he had “made” Melvin Jones’s palm prints.