A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

“Needed a tackling dummy, I guess,” he said.
    Although they didn’t say it out loud, the homicide detectives were both thinking the same thing: a man that big and powerful could easily have subdued Marcia Perkins and crushed her throat. He could have lifted her right out of her shoes with one hand. But that wasn’t enough to arrest him. There were thousands of other big, strong men in Seattle.
    A look at Melvin Jones’s rap sheet, however, did little to quell their gut feelings. Melvin had been convicted of Indecent Liberties in 1969 and sentenced to the state prison at Monroe for six years. That might well mean he was still obsessed with violent sex. On the other hand, it also could explain why he might be apprehensive about being accused of Marcia’s murder. He had served his time for the first offense, and so far he was clean.
    But Melvin Jones seemed to have a problem with alcohol. The day after his interview with the police, he called Marcia’s husband, and he was obviously drunk. “He told me that he wasn’t the one who killed Marcia,” her husband told the detectives. “And he said he didn’t want anyone to hang the rap on him.”
    Since no one was trying to hang a rap on him at the moment, the investigators thought Melvin was getting awfully skittish—especially for an innocent man. But they weren’t going to get any help from the man’s ring found on the sink in Marcia’s bathroom. “It’s mine,” her husband said. “I left it there a long time ago. Just forgot to get it back.”
    That made sense, considering that the sink bore no traces of blood either in the bowl or the trap; the killer would surely have had to clean up after the murder, but he hadn’t done it there.
    On June 5, DePalmo and Homan talked to Melvin’s cousin and asked him how he had happened to be asking for Marcia. He told them that he had been to her apartment house about midnight on Saturday night, but that no one would buzz the door to let him in. Then he’d called her repeatedly, but the phone was always busy. He had gone so far as to call the operator—who had told him that Marcia’s phone was off the hook. He had worried about it sporadically, until he finally went back on June 3 and learned from the manager in the apartment house that Marcia had been murdered.
    Asked if he were in the habit of seeing Marcia often, Ditty said he wasn’t. “I guess I hadn’t seen her for about two months. I just suddenly thought of her and dropped by at midnight.”
    Now they either had one man who had been back
twice
on one night to try to get into Marcia Perkins’s apartment, or two
different
men who had called on her between midnight and six A.M. on the Friday night/Saturday morning she had probably been murdered. Marcia was alive between four and six; the manager had listened in to the intercom and heard her voice. Ralph Ditty, Melvin Jones’s cousin, seemed sincere and volunteered to take a lie detector test if the detectives wanted him to do so. They did, and made an appointment with him for just that.
    They also had an estranged husband who seemed remarkably understanding about his legal wife’s boyfriends, but he seemed to be in genuine mourning and he was very open with the detectives. But most of all, he had a solid alibi for the early morning hours of May 29. He had been home taking care of their children. He told them what he had been able to put together about Marcia’s last “steady” boyfriend, whose name was Chuck Lyons.* He said that Lyons didn’t drink at all. He was a teetotaler whose main interest—beyond Marcia—was in cars. In fact, Lyons owned four, one a black Lincoln. Marcia had been fond of Lyons, according to her husband, but she had vacillated about her future with the car buff. “She thought he had no plans and no purpose in life,” her husband said, “and they didn’t have much in common. Marcia worked hard but she liked to party.” He described Lyons as being too much of a straight arrow for Marcia, even though he was very attracted to her.
    But still, questions arose. If Chuck Lyons thought so much of Marcia, why hadn’t he come around to see her? Why hadn’t he gone to her funeral? That didn’t make sense. The woman had been dead for a week, and no one knew if Lyons even knew it.
    None of the people the Seattle detectives talked to knew where Chuck Lyons lived, although the detectives were told that one of his relatives was supposed to own a barber shop on Rainier Avenue