A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

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