A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

said. “When I talked to her by phone from Montana on Wednesday night [May 26] she said, ‘That damn Melvin is here again.’ I told her just not to let him in, and we continued to talk.”
    Marcia had apparently been having trouble with Melvin Jones. She told her sister that he’d come by her apartment four days earlier at three in the morning. “She said he was really drunk and he was pressing the call buttons to her apartment. She didn’t let him in because he sounded so drunk.”
    “What does Melvin drink?” Benny DePalmo asked.
    “Bacardi rum and Miller beer. He does weird things when he’s drunk.”
    “Was he involved with Marcia?”
    She shook her head. “No.
No.
He never had a physical relationship with Marcia. He always considered her his ‘sister.’ ”
    Sister
was the word they were looking for. Melvin Jones was emerging as the investigators’ best suspect. The man who had buzzed Marcia’s apartment the morning she was killed had referred to her as “Little Sister.” And the liquor found at the crime scene was a bottle of Bacardi rum and a can of Miller High Life beer. The detectives knew now that Melvin had tried before to gain entrance to Marcia’s apartment during the wee hours of the morning when he was drunk. It seemed now that she had probably given in to his pleas—and with tragic consequences—on May 29. The only thing they really needed now was some direct physical evidence that would tie Jones to the murder scene.
    If only the apartment manager had opened his door that morning to get a look at the man who stumbled toward Marcia’s door. But he hadn’t—and it looked as though the only eyewitness was dead.
    Benny DePalmo learned one more thing about the unknown killer when he talked with officials at the telephone company. Marcia’s phone had been busy when friends called during the first hours after her murder. That would have happened if it were simply off the hook. But he had witnesses who said it had rung normally later that morning and no one answered. Phone technicians said that could only have occurred if the cord was yanked from the phone itself or from the wall. Obviously, someone either had waited for hours beside Marcia’s dead body and yanked the wire as he left, or returned later to do it. DePalmo suspected that someone had returned to her apartment to clean it up several hours after the murder.
    But now Melvin Jones suddenly became elusive. He could not be found for further questioning. Days later, when the investigators finally located him, he was even more confident and self-assured than he had been when he talked to them the first time. He explained that he had spent the evening of May 28 (Friday) at a party at the University of Washington with a friend and the friend’s girlfriend, a pretty American Indian girl named Jeanie Easley. He had drunk a great deal of rum, he said, and returned home long after midnight.
    “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