A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

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