A Rage to Kill (17 page)

“He told us that she didn’t need the rest of her clothes because she would be getting Army issue stuff.”

Mrs. Murphy told the Seattle detectives that she’d found her brother’s behavior peculiar and a bit scattered. First, he was going to stay in Cle Elum. He even found a job as a clerk at the local police department through a government funded program, but he stayed only one night and then moved on.

He didn’t seem to have a plan. He came back to Cle Elum again on November 21, and asked Mrs. Murphy if she had heard from Georgia. When told no, he replied, “She probably went to Canada.” On another visit, he’d advised her parents to “forget her.”

The rest of Georgia’s family was not about to do that, but they tried to convince themselves that she
had
reported to the Army and was in basic training somewhere. But she hadn’t written or called and that just wasn’t like her.

Suspicious of the uncle’s behavior, Detectives Fonis and Cameron talked to a number of people who knew him. He was younger than Georgia’s parents, and he was described as a pleasant enough man until he imbibed too much, and then he could be a “mean drunk.”

What the two detectives needed most was something to link Georgia Murphy to the nameless dead woman. So they checked military records to see if Georgia had had her prints taken when she applied to join the service. But her fingerprints hadn’t been taken. That would have happened when she reported for duty, but she had never shown up. There was no entry in the Army records that showed Georgia Murphy as being on active duty.

Most of all, the disparity in eye color between the body in the river and Georgia puzzled the investigators. How could bright blue eyes change to muddy brown? They wondered if it was possible that the pollutants in the Duwamish River had somehow changed the appearance of the dead woman’s eyes—so much so that they appeared brown? The detectives contacted plants along the river to find what chemicals were dumped into the Duwamish. The answers were startling if only from an ecological standpoint, and they could have great bearing on their investigation. Employees grudgingly admitted to getting rid of waste in the river: “Caustics, oil, oil sludge, sodium hydroxide, and hydrogen sulfide.”

The investigators called forensic pathologists all over the West Coast. Their queries were without precedent. Some thought that human eye color would never change; others thought it was quite possible.

The blood in the dead woman’s body had putrefied at the time of autopsy but even so a sample had been frozen. Although DNA testing was a long time away, there were fairly sophisticated techniques available to test blood in the sixties and seventies, and criminalists were able to type it. The blood samples proved to be the same type as Georgia Murphy’s, although the experts could not narrow it down to enzymes and RH factors.

The Timex watch was no help at all. The number etched on the back was a model number—not a serial number.

Detectives Fonis and Cameron tried another fingerprint check through the FBI. If Georgia Murphy had simply run away, perhaps she had had her prints taken somewhere over the past eighteen months.

No luck.

“We have to find something with Georgia Murphy’s prints on it,” Cameron said. “Let’s go back to Cle Elum.”

Again the duo crossed the mountains. They gathered papers and a cosmetic bag that had belonged to the missing girl. They also took hair curlers which still had strands of Georgia’s hair twisted in the rollers.

Criminalists using the Ninhydrin process with iodine fumes and heat can bring up fingerprints left on paper decades earlier. Some distinctive prints
were
raised from Georgia’s personal papers and her books. On January 7, 1972, the FBI confirmed that the prints taken from the woman in the Duwamish and those on Georgia Murphy’s belongings were the same. There was no question now that Georgia Murphy was dead.

The polluted river and inaccurate measurements of height and weight recorded in the missing reports circulated after Georgia’s disappearance had contributed to the tragic delay in identifying the lost girl from Cle Elum. Years had passed since a much beloved daughter had been buried as Jane Doe in a pauper’s grave.

Now, detectives were forced to confirm what Georgia Murphy’s parents had feared all along. On February 17, the Murphys came to the Seattle Homicide office and were briefed on the detectives’ work on the case. Georgia was no longer missing. But the truth behind her violent death was still unknown.

Georgia’s uncle became a prime suspect. The last place she had been seen alive was near his mobile home. According to witnesses, Georgia had had a date with a young sailor, his sister, and her boyfriend on November 4—the night she disappeared. Her date had told mutual friends that he let Georgia out of his car in front of the trailer park in the early morning hours on the 5th. The uncle had told everyone that she never came home at all.

Information came back to Seattle police headquarters in late March of 1972 that the uncle was in Dallas, Texas. Ted Fonis and Don Cameron requested an address check by Dallas Police. When the man was located in the Texas city, they sent a case summary to the Dallas department and asked that a polygraph examination be administered to Georgia’s uncle. Frankly, they believed he had murdered his niece; his skittishness and the way he traveled from place to place certainly made him look like a guilty man.

With a list of questions prepared by the Seattle investigators, Dallas Police Chief Frank Dyson instructed his lie detector expert to test Georgia’s uncle. On April 13, 1972, he was hooked up to all the leads on the polygraph: blood pressure, heart rate, galvanic skin response, respirations. They expected him to “blow ink all over the walls.”

But he didn’t. He passed the test. He passed so cleanly, in fact, that he was eliminated from suspicion. This was frustrating but not unusual in police probes. Some of the “best” suspects turn out to be clean, and some of the most innocent-looking are guilty.

It meant starting over. Now, the Washington investigators focused their attention on the young sailor Georgia had dated on the night of November 4, 1969. Apparently they had gone out several times. His name was Bernie Pierce, and he was just a kid, too, not more than twenty or twenty-one. The detectives learned that Pierce had left the Navy, and was reported to be living with a sister in Flathead County, Montana.

Don Cameron called Flathead County Sheriff Curtis Snyder in his Whitefish office. Snyder assigned Detective Britt Davis to talk with Pierce’s Montana relatives. Davis had no luck finding Bernie himself, but he quickly located the man who had accompanied Georgia Murphy, Bernie Pierce, and Pierce’s sister on the double date in Seattle on the night of November 4.

“We went to the Double Decker Restaurant,” the man recalled. “Georgia and Bernie were fighting as usual. About marriage. Georgia wanted to get married—and Bernie wanted to stay single.”

“Were they drinking?” Britt Davis asked.

The young man shrugged. “Georgia wasn’t. Bernie might have been. He usually drank heavily when he was on leave. Sometimes he was mean.”

The quarreling pair had left the Double Decker sometime after midnight, and Bernie Pierce had told the witness later that he’d taken her home. His friend said that Pierce had seemed genuinely surprised to hear that Georgia was missing.

The next question was,
Where was Bernie Pierce now?

His friend told Detective Davis he wasn’t sure, but thought he might be in the Seattle area. Bernie’s sister was no longer in Montana, and was rumored to be back in Seattle. The informant also suggested that detectives check out a man he knew only as “Sid” who worked in an auto-wrecking yard in Seattle. “I heard he raped a thirty-eight-year-old woman,” Pierce’s friend said, “and I know Georgia went out with him two or three times while she was in Seattle.”

It appeared that eighteen-year-old Georgia Murphy had dated or spent time with any number of dangerous men; her fate seemed almost preordained by the company she kept. As her family had said, Georgia trusted too many people. But she’d been only a teenager, enjoying the excitement in Seattle after growing up in a small town. Obviously, she hadn’t been as wise to the world as they had hoped.

By June 1972, Georgia had been dead for more than two and a half years, her body returned to the place where she was loved—but her killer was neither known nor arrested. If Bernie Pierce was in the Seattle area, Detectives Ted Fonis and Don Cameron could find no trace of him. They had checked all the reputed haunts of the elusive ex-sailor, all the pertinent city and county records. They had even checked with the welfare department records. But Bernie Pierce wasn’t listed anywhere. Chances were that he had long since left Seattle.

The man described as “Sid, the auto-wrecker” had evidently been a red herring; no one else had heard of him.

It looked as though the person who had bludgeoned Georgia Murphy and had thrown her away in the cloudy waters of the Duwamish was going to get away with it. Good homicide detectives hate a “loser” case more than anything so they work harder on them in their scant free time than they ever do on slam-dunk cases.

However, Don Cameron, Ted Fonis and Dick Reed agreed that they had gone as far as they could go without having some new information on Georgia Murphy’s last days.

Kent, Washington, is a small town in the southeast section of King County, a town once situated in the most fertile valley of the county. But by the seventies the valley floor was being paved over for an ever expanding Boeing plant and new shopping malls and businesses. Kent is a half hour’s drive at most from the Duwamish River where Georgia Murphy floated.

In Kent, on the evening of August 11, 1972, a young woman named Marjorie Knope was looking forward to the next day with great expectations. It would be her twenty-fourth birthday. Marjorie was temporarily unemployed and lived with her parents in a small frame house. She was finally getting over an event that would devastate most young women. The man she was engaged to had been suffocated and crushed beneath an avalanche at Snoqualmie Pass eighteen months before. After she lost him, nobody else quite measured up. Her old high school boy friend had wanted to renew their romance, but she couldn’t do it. A lot of men had asked the slender blond woman out, and sometimes she went—but with little interest or enthusiasm. Finally, only a few days before her birthday, she met a man named Jim. She couldn’t explain why, but she
knew
he was going to be special.

Marjorie stayed home deliberately on the Friday night of August 11, hoping that Jim would call. If he did, she planned to invite him to her birthday party.

She watched television with her parents, keeping one ear tuned to the phone. When “Love—American Style,” ended at ten, the elder Knopes said they were tired and headed for their bedroom. Marjorie said she wanted to watch television a while longer, so her folks shut their bedroom door to muffle the sound of the TV.

Her father slept soundly; he had to be up at six
A.M.
Her mother fell asleep too, but woke sometime later at the sound of a neighbor’s dog who was barking furiously. She saw a bright slice of light under the bedroom door and wondered why Marjorie was still up. Probably she was just excited about her birthday, or maybe she was disappointed because the call she expected had never come.

Mrs. Knope dozed off again, but it would be a restless night for her. Once more she awoke, too drowsy to know exactly what time it was. She heard voices in the living room, and assumed the television was still on. But then she heard someone walking across the kitchen floor with a heavy footfall. The shoes sounded as if they had rubber heels, and she thought that was odd; Marjorie was either barefoot or wearing thongs earlier in the evening.

Mrs. Knope heard the back door slam, and the roar of an engine revving up nearby. These were the sounds of a summer night, except they were louder than usual. There was a crunch of gravel and the sound of the car backing up and then accelerating toward the Kent-Kangley Road. She thought little of it, and half-smiled. That “Jim” that Marjorie was hoping to hear from must have come over instead of phoning. She was glad; her daughter had grieved long enough over her fiancé.

When Marjorie’s dad arose the next morning, he was startled to find the TV blaring and every light in the house on. More disturbing than that, the back door was ajar. But then they lived so far out in the country in such an isolated spot that they didn’t have to bother about locking doors. Mr. Knope figured that Marjorie had gone to bed and carelessly forgotten to secure the door.

But when her father checked her bedroom, Marjorie wasn’t curled up asleep in her bed. Nor had the bed been slept in.

Puzzled, and with the first flickers of worry intruding, he walked outside in the bright Saturday morning sunlight. Marjorie’s rubber thongs lay in the driveway beside some fresh tire tracks.

This wasn’t like Marjorie. This wasn’t like Marjorie at all. Mr. Knope didn’t go to work after all, and when there was no sign of or word from Marjorie by 9:30, the Knopes began to call her friends. Perhaps she had decided at the last minute to spend the night with a girlfriend. She had done that once before, but when she found out how worried her parents had been, she had promised never to do it again. She was a considerate daughter who would never worry them unnecessarily.

No one they called had seen Marjorie since late Friday afternoon. The next hour passed with terrible slowness. Marjorie had to be someplace close by, but they couldn’t find her. Filled with dread, her parents reported her missing to the Kent Police. Although she had been wearing baby-doll pajamas when they’d seen her last, a check of her closet led them to believe she was now wearing blue jeans and a “Captain America” shirt. “Some crazy thing with blue and white stripes,” her father told the radio operator, “and a big white star on the front. And she’s probably barefoot. Her shoes are in the driveway here.” He said his daughter was five feet, five inches tall, but weighed only a bit over a hundred pounds. She needed her glasses to see any distance at all.