A Rage to Kill (29 page)

Marcia’s marriage had not been serene, according to the Tarot cards; the couple had each felt bondage and restriction, frustration in the marriage.

As Barbara Easton had, Shirley Teabo saw violence on the last day of Marcia Moore’s known existence. She picked it up again and again. “Oddly, I don’t think she’s dead . . . but I don’t see her alive, either. It’s as if her mind isn’t hers any longer. If she is dead, she’s earthbound.”

A summary of Teabo’s reading has many points of similarity with Easton’s.

1. Trouble in the home.
   
2. A real estate transaction involving a lot of money.
   
3. Great success ahead in Moore’s career.
   
4. Concerns about another woman who was dangerous to her.
   
5. Hospitalization.
   
6. Violence.
   
7. A “death” state.
   

If Marcia Moore was alive, the cards of both psychics suggested that she was incapacitated to the degree that she couldn’t let anyone know where she was. If she was dead, her body had been secreted so carefully that it might never be found.

While Lieutenant Darrol Bemis and Detective Doris Twitchell worked the case from the scientific viewpoint of trained police officers, Dr. Walter Boccaci tried to reach his wife through less orthodox methods. After fasting all day and doing yoga, he injected himself with ketamine at midnight.

“The sole purpose of this is to reach my wife. We were telepathic. We were soul mates. Ketamine is the only way I can get out of my body. And I have been reaching her. I see her so clearly. She’s sitting in a lotus position, lovely and beautiful. But she doesn’t talk to me. I know why. She’s amnesic. That’s the only possibility, don’t you see. The only way that makes sense.”

Dr. Boccaci published one last issue of “The Hypersentience Bulletin,” the newsletter he and Marcia had mailed to their followers. He wrote a “Final Note” to Marcia: “When you walk along the beach and listen to the sound of the waves, listen also to the roar of my voice, reverberating, ‘Marcia, I love you. I’ll always love you . . .’ ”

Despite his protestations that his life was over now that his wife was gone, Boccaci remained a suspect in her disappearance—or death . . . or transformation, whatever had happened. He told Erik Lacitis, a
Seattle Times
columnist, about his troubles. “The tragedy of this whole thing is what’s happened to me. I am just hanging on by the skin of my teeth. I am destitute. I’m surviving by selling furniture and other personal possessions.

“I just spent a whole year of my life devoting all my energy to trying to find my wife . . . I tried everything. There’s nothing more I can do to find my wife. Now, I’m trying to pick up the pieces of my life. I am forty-two, and I have another forty-two years ahead of me. And I can’t get a job. I have been blackballed.”

Although Boccaci said he had never lost a patient because of anesthesia or even had one with an adverse reaction, he felt he had been unable to find work in his profession because of all the publicity about Marcia’s disappearance, and, perhaps, their ketamine research.

Boccaci left Washington State and took a residency at a Detroit hospital where his story was not so familiar. At length, he
did
find a job as an anesthesiologist at a tiny hospital on the Washington coast. Happy Boccaci wrote to Marcia’s friends that he was finally doing well, jogging five miles a day, and feeling much better.

Marcia Moore’s family members were divided in their opinions of what had become of her. Her daughter recalled how often Marcia had spoken of her dread of growing old. “It bothered her a lot. What do
I
think really happened?” she asked. “I would have to say that she committed suicide in some way.”

But committing suicide without leaving a body behind is not easy to do. If Marcia Moore had leapt from a ferry boat on its way to the San Juan Islands, her body might have sunk—but, more likely, it would have eventually washed up on some spit of land.

It would be two years after Marcia Moore vanished before those who loved her and those who sought her would have at least a partial answer to a seemingly incomprehensible mystery.

A property owner was clearing blackberry vines from a lot he owned near the city of Bothell on the first day of spring 1981. He reached down and almost touched a partial skull that lay hidden there. There was another bone, too. The site was less than fifteen miles from the town house where Marcia and Happy had lived. The skull had well-maintained teeth, and that would help in identifying the remains.

When the Snohomish County investigators asked a forensic dentistry expert to compare Marcia Moore’s dental records with the teeth in the skull, they knew, at long last, where she was.

A meticulous search of the area produced nothing more, however. No clothes. No jewelry. No hiking boots.

Could Marcia Moore have walked so far on the freezing night she vanished? Possibly. But she would have had to skirt a busy freeway and pass any number of areas where people lived, shopped, and worked, and no one had ever reported seeing her. Could she have been murdered, and taken to this lonely lot? Possibly. Although the detectives didn’t release the information, there was profound damage to the frontal portion of her skull.

One of Marcia’s close women friends made a pilgrimage to the spot where her last earthly remains had lain. She wrote to a mutual friend who also mourned for their dear friend, and it was both a comforting and a disturbing letter.

“I went over and saw the exact spot where the skull was located,” she wrote. “And it was a beautiful place, on top of a bed of soft, dry leaves, encircled by some very large trees. And growing all around the circle were trilliums beginning to come up. Of course not in bloom yet. My first thought was, ‘Marcia would have loved this place!’ It was almost like a gigantic fairy ring, those big trees in a circle. A little boy showed me the place; he is the son of the man who found the skull. The little boy said there was a hole right in the front of the skull, and I said, ‘That sounds like a bullet hole,’ and he agreed.”

But he was only a little boy, and the investigators were never convinced that Marcia Moore had been shot in the head; her skull was so fragile and it had lain out in the elements for more than two years.

To this day, no one really knows what happened on that Sunday night in January 1979—no one but her killer, if, indeed, she
was
murdered. Marcia had always longed for a glimpse into another, brighter, world. Once there, she sent no messages back to the friends who waited for some sign.

Had she lived, Marcia would have been seventy years old now. Her last husband is sixty-one, but no one has heard from Happy Boccaci for a long time.

Many athletes pursue
an inner radiance that comes only when they exceed what they believe their bodies can do. The young woman in the following case was a tremendous athlete, and she had realized many goals she had set for herself, often against great odds.

She had seen many dreams come true. But dreams can be addictive,
especially
when they come true. She wanted to crowd as many into her life as she could before time and fate ended them. The last dream seemed, in many ways, the easiest to bring to life.

Sadly, even though she accomplished the task she had set for herself, there was someone determined to smash her triumph even as she exulted in success.

It is a bleak commentary on society that city parks have become dangerous places for women. They may be safe enough in the daylight, or if one is accompanied by a large dog. But the isolated trails of city parks have gradually become off-limits for women when shadows grow long. Too often these parks are oases within the inner city, bordered by streets filled with predators. The next case deals with the dangers women face when they venture too far off the beaten path—even in cities.

The huge sprawling national parks of America once seemed safer than metropolitan parks—at least when it came to human predators. Although there have been horrendous headlines about women who were dragged off and mauled to death by grizzly bears, man remains the deadliest creature of all.

J
ane Costantino
was a beautiful, vibrant woman with masses of long blonde hair, and a perfectly toned body. She considered the world her home, particularly the outdoors. She had always met life head on, and never used the fact that she was a female to avoid hard work and daunting tasks, but sometimes it seemed that Jane almost dared the fates to challenge her. She was an adventuress not unlike Amelia Earhart, another independent woman who came of age in her thirties, and who broke barriers that most women were afraid to challenge. Jane would brook no fear in herself; she liked to say she wasn’t afraid of anything. Of course, that was an exaggeration. Like everyone, she had her fears, but when something frightened her, she set out to conquer it.

Jane was an easterner by birth. She grew up on Long Island, attended Fordham University in New York City, and worked for a few years as a social worker there. But she felt confined in the city so she went west. She sought hotter deserts, higher mountains, broader prairies. But before relocating to the west, she went first across the Atlantic to Europe.

During her tour of Europe, Jane Costantino met a Colorado man who seemed to share many of her interests. When he told her he owned a string of pack horses in his home state, she was hooked. She married him and moved with him to Denver. Their marriage survived only two years, but Jane loved Colorado and she stayed on in the Denver area. Still, she used the mile-high city only as a home base. She would always be a traveller at heart who couldn’t resist the call of the road.

Jane wasn’t wealthy, and she had to plan carefully to be able to afford the trips she took. She had to work seven days a week for most of the year as a waitress to save money for each new summer’s adventures. She lived, if not frugally,
sparely,
during the eight or nine months she was in Denver. It was a trade-off that she accepted gladly. The possessions that most people sought meant little to her and she happily drove a beat-up old Volkswagen bug. She lived in a tiny apartment in an old brick apartment house in Denver. Everything extra went to buy the best in hiking and camping equipment. In an era when many women were floundering to find their identity, Jane Costantino knew exactly what she wanted and she worked hard to make it come true.

She was a good waitress, “the best we’ve ever had here,” according to one Denver bartender. She was blessed with a great personality and a smile that went with her strong good looks. It wasn’t an act; she genuinely liked the people she waited on, and they rewarded her with generous tips that she kept in glass jars at home until she saved enough to add to her savings account.

There aren’t many people who can quote a poem or song that absolutely sums up their philosophies of life, but Jane could. She lived by the lines of her favorite poem—Robert Service’s “Rolling Stone.”

The mountains are a part of me. I’m fellow to the trees. My golden years I’m squandering. Sun-libertine am I. A wandering, a wandering. Until the day I die. Then here’s a hail to each flaring dawn. Here’s a cheer for the night that’s gone . . . And may I go aroaming on. Until the day I die. . . .

Despite her sunny disposition, there was a shadow that sometimes crept into the edges of Jane Costantino’s world. She had long had a premonition that she wouldn’t live to grow old. She wasn’t sure where it had come from, although it seemed an integral part of her, a kind of gut feeling that she didn’t fight. If she wasn’t meant to be an old woman sharing memories of her glory days as she rocked on a porch somewhere, that was the way the universe’s plan was designed.

Jane had lived with an awareness of her own mortality for as long as she could remember. Maybe it was because by the time she was thirty, she had already had ample experience at jousting with death; she had come so close too many times. She took chances and she knew it. She probably assumed she would die at the hands of a capricious Mother Nature since she was a risk-taker. In the nineties, studies suggested that those addicted to danger are programmed genetically to be that way—that there exists a spot in the DNA of the mountain climber, the ski jumper and the race car driver that propels them into life on the edge. But, in the seventies, Jane Costantino’s family and friends worried and cautioned her and finally shook their heads; she was who she was, and she seemed to be living a glorious life.

Jane was twenty-seven years old in 1974, when she was struck by lightning as she climbed the Grand Tetons. She was at the 14,000 foot level when it happened. She was hit by a powerfully searing jolt that would have knocked her off the mountain if she hadn’t clung tenaciously to her perch. Seriously burned and with her shoulder badly injured, she climbed and rappelled down the mountain and walked several miles to a ranger station. When the ranger on duty saw that the lightning bolt had burned her shoulder to the bone, he almost fainted. A lesser woman—or man—would have been dead, or at the very least, would have had to be airlifted off the mountain.

Jane was hospitalized for a month. When she was finally released from the hospital, she carried the blazing keloid of a huge burn on her shoulder. She called the scar her “badge of life” because it served to remind her to live life to its fullest; she told friends that she knew that any day might be her last.

There was only one thing that really frightened Jane Costantino, and that was water and her fear of drowning. So she forced herself to become adept at water sports—scuba diving and kayaking down white-water rivers—to overcome her phobia. Even when she nearly drowned while fording a river in the Katmai region of Alaska, she continued to risk her life in deep and raging waters, stubbornly refusing to give in to her terror.

Jane Costantino taunted Nature. While she was mountain climbing in Yosemite, she slipped and literally fell off a cliff. Fellow climbers watched in horror as a cascade of rocks plummeted down on her, almost burying her—and yet she survived with only a broken ankle and a concussion.

In 1979, Jane climbed Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, and Mount St. Helens all in one nine-day period, and then bicycled to Mexico for good measure. She missed the disaster that befell Mount St. Helens months later, and sometimes spoke a little ruefully about the fact that she hadn’t been there for all the fireworks. Jane was the kind of adventuress who would have happily camped in the shadow of Mount St. Helens even as the peak threatened to blow. If she hadn’t been so busy on her winter job, she would have been there when the mountain finally blew its domed top on May 18, 1980, spewing tons of lava and mud down its slopes, taking a number of victims. And, if Jane Costantino had died that way, no one would have been surprised.

Because she was in great shape, it seemed to her that she would be in her twenties forever, but one day Jane woke up and realized that she was thirty-two, and in eight years she would be forty. It was a sobering thought. She was still young at thirty-two, but she knew that she wasn’t “young-young” any longer. Already, old injuries ached when the weather was changing, and she sometimes thought that her lung capacity wasn’t what it was when she was nineteen.

Typical of her personality, Jane raised the bar, setting harder tasks for herself, willing her body to remain as trim and tautly muscled as a ballerina’s. As if she hadn’t already proved herself enough in 1979, she set off to bicycle alone from Nova Scotia to New York. Along a dark stretch of road, she collided with a truck and was carted off, bleeding and bruised, to a hospital. After a stay of several days, she insisted on finishing the trip.

If Jane Costantino had been a cat, she would have had five lives yet to go. But she was, after all, only a human, only a woman alone in a world fraught with dangers far more menacing than lightning or an unlit country road.

Jane Costantino’s carefully charted 1980 trip was the most rigorous adventure she had ever attempted. She and her brother bicycled from Denver to New York City. They had a wonderful time, their time together turned out to be everything she had hoped, and the summer season was far from over. She had pedaled her way to one coast, and intended to make it to the West Coast, too.

She flew back to Colorado and began another bicycle trip west, but this time she was all by herself. She liked her own company and she always met interesting and friendly people so she never really felt alone. There was no question at all that she could manage the second trip physically.

Jane’s plan called for her to go to the shores of the Pacific Ocean first. She would dip her bicycle wheels in the ocean at Cape Alava off the Ozette Indian Reservation. This was on the farther-most northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. After that, with her trip symbolically over, she would bicycle leisurely back to Seattle to meet with friends on Thursday, July 24.

As she knew she would, Jane made it to the Pacific Ocean all right. Tanned and healthy, she attended an archaeology lecture at the Ozette digs. She was a woman that people always remembered and several would recall seeing the lovely, blonde woman headed toward the beach. Although it didn’t seem that ominous at the time, they also remembered seeing a man walking on the trail behind her, also headed toward the ocean. He was big, burly, and had black hair.

It was early afternoon then. The sun was shining. In the forty-second year of its existence, the Olympic National Park had been a safe haven. It was a place for communing with nature, for renewing one’s soul after a long winter, and that was all Jane Costantino had on her mind. She was a short walk away from her goal; she was about to swish her bike’s tires through the salt water in the shallows of the Pacific Ocean. And then she would head toward Seattle. Seattle was well over a hundred miles and a couple of ferry boat rides away, but it wasn’t much of a challenge after she’d just traversed the entire country.

Jane Costantino didn’t know that another woman in the park had been approached by a hulking man in a black cowboy hat and a purple shirt, nor that the woman had been alarmed by the way the stranger acted.

Jane didn’t know that this man was just behind her on the trail, stealthily keeping out of range of her sight and hearing as the rugged trail fell away behind her. Even if she had known, she might not have been frightened. She was full of stories about eccentrics she’d met on her travels. She would be the first to say that most of them were harmless enough. Maybe just a little crazy or lost or lonely.

The afternoon sun grew warmer, but it wasn’t oppressive because the wind from the ocean was cool and fragrant with the special salty sea smell that cannot be duplicated. Wild roses and berries vines gradually gave way to sea grass. Beyond, there was nothing but wave after wave as the Pacific Ocean rolled on into infinity.

It was 3
P.M.
on that Wednesday in 1979: July 23. A group of hikers trudged toward the ocean; when they rounded a turn in the trail they came upon a woman who appeared to have fainted. She lay beside the beach trail two-tenths of a mile from the ocean. Moving closer and calling, their voices became hushed and then silent as they saw that her blouse was soaked in wet blood. Try as they might to find a pulse or to catch even a faint rising and falling of her breasts, they were unsuccessful.

Here, on a perfect day in a perfect paradise of a park, a woman was dead—and not by accident, but by violence. Her body was fully clothed, and there was no sign at all that she had been sexually assaulted.

Notified by a phone call from one of the hikers, three separate law enforcement agencies responded: Clallam County Sheriff’s deputies, tribal police from the Ozette Indian Reservation, and rangers from the U.S. Park Service. The Ozettes, the Park Service, and the Clallam County Sheriff’s office had worked together for nearly half a century to keep the park safe. Although the Clallam County Sheriff’s office was sixty miles away in Port Angeles, the sheriff’s detectives were on the scene within minutes. They had waited on a windy narrow finger of land named Ediz Hook, until a Coast Guard helicopter winched them up and shuttled them to the beach trail where the dead woman lay.

Park Rangers Gordon Boyd and Steve Underwood and Deputy Michael Lenihan saw that the victim had not died accidentally or of natural causes. She had multiple stab wounds in the chest, so many that she had probably died almost instantly. Either she had been part of an intensely violent argument with someone she knew, or she had been stalked by a maniac along the lonely trail.

Gingerly, they fished her wallet out of her backpack. It was pathetically easy to identify the tanned woman. There were numerous pieces of I.D. in the pack—listing addresses in Denver and Long Island. She was Jane Costantino, thirty-two. The description on her driver’s license and the photograph fit. She had come here from far away, but for what reason? Had she come alone or with a lover or husband?

The investigators organized a grid search of the vast national park, and they fanned out through the area, talking to other hikers and campers. Even though the murder had been discovered within a very short time of its occurrence, a national park is not an ideal crime scene to work. The killer might well have slipped away unseen, and already be headed back toward a city where he could lose himself. It had to have been a man—surely, no woman would have been able to overpower a victim who had been as ruggedly healthy and perfectly muscled as the woman who lay before them.

When the officers at the scene finished searching the sandy banks and the brushy areas off the trail, they released Jane Costantino’s body to the coroner.

Roads into the vast park were sealed off by deputies and rangers. Every car leaving the park was stopped and searched. Women hiking alone quickly joined up with other groups. It was still a long time until dark on a July day in the far Northwest, but every shadow cast in the forested area seemed threatening now.