A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

seemed to relax even more, as he told them about going to the party with Jeanie Easley and her friend, and then going back to Jeanie’s place, “You know, the one—the girl—that got did in,” he added. For the first time, Melvin looked away from DePalmo and Homan.
    “How did you find out about that?” Homan asked.
    “One of my cousins read about it in the paper and told me.”
    Melvin Jones suddenly realized that he had become a suspect in both murders, and he sat in his chair a little less easily. When Benny DePalmo reminded him that he’d often referred to Marcia Perkins as “Sister” and “Little Sister,” he acknowledged that was true, but he became very nervous when he was told that the building manager and other witnesses had heard the last visitor to see her alive use those words over the intercom. He continued to deny that he had any involvement with Marcia’s death, even though he seemed at the point of tears.
    “We made your print on Jeanie Easley’s wall,” DePalmo said quietly.
    And now, the hulking man suddenly broke into real sobs, but he insisted he had no guilty knowledge in either case. “I already told you I was in her apartment once,” he said. “I already told you I went to Jeanie’s place that once.”
    “Where were you on June 21st?” Homan asked.
    Jones said that he’d gone to Moses Lake with his girlfriend on a fishing trip over the weekend of June 19 and 20. “We must have got back about a quarter after four on Monday afternoon. I dropped off some of my relatives, and then I went to my friends’ house to give them some fish. They weren’t home—so I went to some other friend’s house.”
    Melvin had the time period carefully accounted for. He said he’d stayed at his friend’s for about two hours. Then he’d picked up his girlfriend and driven her to the house where she babysat.
    “I had some sherry,” he continued, “and arrived home about one to one-fifteen A.M. I went to bed. I haven’t seen Jeanie since the night of May 28th and 29th.”
    Melvin’s relatives had already told the detectives that he got home at 2 A.M. on June 21.
    “We know you got home about an hour later than that,” Homan said. “And Jeanie’s boyfriend picked out your mug shot from a lay-down. He says you’re the man he saw hanging around Jeanie’s apartment about five on that Monday afternoon.”
    It was odd to see a man big enough to scrimmage with the Seattle Seahawks and walk away without a scratch reduced to tears, but something was scaring Melvin Jones. He didn’t have an answer to Homan’s comments; he only cried harder.
    Homan and DePalmo backed off and allowed their suspect time to calm down. When Melvin stopped sobbing, they asked him to go over his recall of the vital Sunday and Monday again. But his responses were exactly the same. He could not have been the one who killed Jeanie Easley; he was fishing or with his friends and family the whole time.
    Benny DePalmo asked him if he remembered Jeanie Easley’s apartment well enough to draw a sketch of it that would show how she had arranged her furniture. It appeared that the questions would stop for a while, and Melvin was almost relieved to pick up a pencil and the pad of paper. He proved to be quite adept at drawing, and he slid his rendition of the apartment toward the detectives.
    They saw that he had placed every piece of furniture, every appliance properly. That surprised them since both Melvin and Jeanie’s friend said that he was “passing out” drunk when he was in Jeanie’s apartment on May 28.
    But Melvin made one fatal error in his floor plan.
    He had drawn in the split-leaf philodendron in its pot and a second large plant. Neither of those plants had been in Jeanie’s apartment until June 15. If Melvin had never had gone back to see Jeanie in her apartment after May 28, how could he know about those two new plants her mother had given her only a week before she died?
    When Homan told Melvin that the two plants had been recent gifts to Jeanie, he stonewalled, insisting that they had been there before. Only they hadn’t been; Jeanie’s mother was positive of that.
    Melvin Jones was placed under arrest for suspicion of both homicides and booked into the King County Jail.
    On June 24, detectives armed with a search warrant removed plaid pants, a green T-shirt and a pair of tennis shoes from Melvin Jones’s bedroom. They noted that there were multicolored fibers still clinging to the treads of the