A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

criminal cases. Many of these cases are indelibly stamped on my memory, coming back to play across my mind at unexpected moments. And, surprisingly, I had almost forgotten some of them until I started to poke through my archives. I never remember names, anyway; rather, I tend to recall the
circumstances
of a particular crime in minute detail, as if I researched it only yesterday.
    The cases in this book, my sixth volume of crime files, come from many different phases of my career. Some are drawn from current headlines, and others go back to the years when I visited one police department or another along the West Coast, asking detectives to tell me about their most memorable cases. In those days, I was raising four children on my own and I often wrote two articles a week to be sure we had grocery money. Along the way, I learned a great deal about criminal behavior,
and
about how good detectives solve cases.
    Many of you have asked me to write a book filled with these shorter cases.
A Rage to Kill
is my answer to your request. There were various reasons why I didn’t go on to write a complete book about these stories. A few were short, violent vignettes that made headlines for only a day or two. Others are from police files marked “Closed: Exceptional”—which means that the guilty person is
known
by detectives but, due to lack of physical evidence, has never been arrested. Sometimes, it was simply because the timing was wrong; I was already occupied with writing another book.
    I must admit that a couple of these earliest homicide puzzles occurred so early in my writing career that I was convinced no one would buy a book from a young mother who lived in a little town in the State of Washington. (These occurred well before the Ted Bundy saga that I told in
The Stranger Beside Me.
) Even so, I saved them because I knew someday I would want to retell them.
    The first case is called “A Bus to Nowhere,” an almost unbelievable tale of terror that reads as if it must have happened in an action movie. The newspapers that carried articles about this fatal bus ride are still quite clean and crisp; the story is current, and the wounds of the injured are still healing.
    “The Killer Who Planted His Own Clues” may make you feel that there is no safe place to hide, and “The Lost Lady” is a mystery about a beautiful psychic heiress that has stumped investigators for more than two decades. “Profile of a Spree Killer” is an in-depth look at a particular and unusual species of mass murderer, and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” will probably make you cry.
    Other cases in this volume are: “That Was No Lady,” “As Close as a Brother,” “To an Athlete Dying Young,” “Born to Kill?” and “The Killer Who Talked Too Much.” These ten cases demonstrate how wide the range of human emotions that can lead to homicidal rage really is.
    Because I have been fortunate enough to meet so many of my readers, I know that you wonder as I do about why seemingly normal people commit horrendous crimes. We also ponder the vagaries of fate that place people with apparently safe lives in the paths of killers. Sometimes their killers were complete strangers, and sometimes they were close friends or relatives. In many instances, I have been able to isolate the probable cause of homicidal violence. And then there are times when I simply cannot.
    Going back through my work is a little like reading an old diary. I cannot help but think, “Had
she
lived, she would be forty-five now; she was only a young bride when she died,” or “That case could have been solved so easily with the forensic technology of the nineties.” Today, I wince to see that I described a fifty-two-year-old woman as “elderly” and a forty-year-old victim as “middle-aged.” Our perspective certainly changes as we ourselves mature!
    Some of these cases did not have proper endings when I wrote them. Now they do. One is still a mystery. Too many of them were not the final cruel handiwork of a particular killer, and I have, sadly, had to revise them to add new crimes. The men and women convicted in these murder cases ranged from brilliant and manipulative to downright clumsy and stupid. The one trait they had in common was
a rage to kill.

A Bus to Nowhere
    This is a case that might well have come out of a bad dream. It demonstrates how little control humans have over their own destinies, and how disaster sometimes comes while we are involved in