A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

shoes.
    Chesterine Cwiklik is a criminalist whose speciality is hairs and fibers. With a spinarette to draw those fibers into the thinnest possible thread and scanning electron microscopes, there is little that Chesterine cannot determine about their origin. In the crime lab, she compared known samples of fibers from the murder scenes to those found on Melvin’s shoes. She was able to match fibers from the living room and kitchen carpets in Jeanie Easley’s apartment microscopically to the filaments that Melvin had carried away on his shoes. Chesterine also found that fibers in the weave of his plaid pants were identical to those retrieved from Jeanie’s living room rug.
    Every criminal takes something of the crime scene away with him—no matter how minute, just as every criminal leaves something of himself at the crime scene—no matter how minute. It is the oldest axiom of crime scene investigation, but not one that most killers think about. Melvin Jones had taken a plethora of infinitesimal bits of his victim’s home away from her murder scene without knowing it.
    Even the soil from Jeanie’s beloved plants had lodged in his shoes. Dirt may look like only dirt, but the components there, too, can be matched to one source.
    Melvin Jones was in a panic, but he continued to insist that he was innocent. Now, he switched to another story of where he had been the night Jeanie Easley died. Taking the lesser of two felonies, he recalled that he had been out stealing tires on June 21–22.
    He took another lie-detector test, and polygraphist Norman Matzke reported that he had given deceptive responses on several questions. The pens had moved in wide arcs on the questions, “Did you kill Jeanie Easley?” “Did you have intercourse with her?” and “Was she alive the last time you saw her?”
    Matzke reported, “His responses went right off the page. He blew ink all over the walls.”
    Although the similarities between the murder scenes of Marcia Perkins and Jeanie Easley were numerous, there was a basic difference, and that was essential. There was direct physical evidence in the latter case, but in Marcia’s murder, there was only circumstantial evidence. In Jeanie’s murder, the homicide detectives were able to take two palm print matches, a half dozen minute rug fibers, and a bit of potting soil to the King County Prosecutor’s office. In a court of law, the differences were magnified a thousand-fold. The jury could
see
the defendant’s connection to Jeanie’s apartment, even if they had to see it through a magnifying glass. With Marcia, they had to weigh a preponderance of circumstantial evidence.
    During Melvin Jones’s month-long trial, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Roy Howson gave the jury a crash course in understanding hair and fiber evidence and on the makeup of potting soil. He outlined the multiple connections between Marcia Perkins and Melvin Jones, and the similarities between the two women’s murders. Juxtaposed that way, the commonalities in the M.O. used in the murders was like something from a serial killer’s game plan. But no one could tell how the jurors were thinking. They listened to all the evidence and all the arguments intently. On October 26, almost exactly five months after Marcia Perkins’s murder, four since Jeanie Easley’s, they retired to ponder their verdicts.
    The principals in the case didn’t have to wait long. After five hours, the jurors signaled that they had agreed on a verdict. When they returned to the courtroom, the foreman announced that they had found Melvin E. Jones guilty of first degree murder in the death of Jeanie Easley. But they had found him not guilty in the death of Marcia Perkins.
    Later, jurors said that they could not come back with a guilty verdict in Marcia’s case because of the lack of physical evidence in her apartment. Although the Seattle detective team was disappointed in the second verdict, they weren’t surprised; they knew all too well the weight a tiny bit of direct physical evidence can carry.
    Melvin Jones hadn’t yet reached his twenty-sixth birthday, but he already had one prison sentence and a parole violation behind him. Now, his hopes to play professional football were gone. He was sentenced to life in prison for Jeanie Easley’s murder. He is currently incarcerated in the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe. His maximum sentence is still life, but his early release date is June 5, 2000.
    Marcia Perkins’s patients missed