A Rage to Kill (30 page)

The officers and rangers feared they were looking for a killer who might well strike again. Every male camper was suspect, even if he had a wife, a bunch of kids and dogs, and a picnic basket with him.

The probers were exceptionally fortunate in finding a witness who had an interesting—and chilling—story to tell them. She was slender and pretty, but shaken when she learned that a woman had been stabbed to death on the trail.

“This weird guy started following me,” she began with a tremble in her voice. “I tried to avoid him, but he caught up with me on the trail to the beach. He told me that he was a photographer for
Playboy,
and he offered me fifty dollars to pose for him in the nude. He sure didn’t look like any photographer for
Playboy,
and I didn’t see a camera, either. I told him to just go away.”

The woman looked down, biting her lip to keep from crying. She told them that she was feeling both frightened and guilty. “Just after that, another woman came along the trail. I’m afraid it might have been the woman who died. It
must
have been her—and he just stared at her, and then he turned around, and started following her.”

“What did he look like?” the Clallam County officers asked.

“Big. He was really big—probably over six feet, and kind of blubbery around the middle. Not real clean. He was wearing a purple shirt, and a cowboy hat, a dark hat. He gave me the creeps.”

The young woman told them she had hurried away, grateful to be free of the stranger. She hadn’t thought that anything was wrong because she had heard nothing. Certainly, there had been no screams, no cries for help at all.

“If I’d stayed, maybe I could have helped her,” she said somberly. “Maybe the two of us could have stopped him.”

“No. Maybe both of you would have been killed,” a deputy said quietly. “You couldn’t have known what he was going to do.”

The witness said that the man on the trail had appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties.

“You ever see him before?”

She shook her head. “Never—not until he came up to me on the trail.”

The deputies talked to other hikers, who gathered in quiet clusters in a clearing. Several of them remembered seeing a man who matched the first witness’s description. Two hikers had met him on the trail, but he had been in a great hurry, plunging past them. “He had dark red stains on his purple shirt,” a man said. “It looked as if he’d been picking berries, and wiped his hands on his shirt, at least at first. I realize now that wasn’t what it was.”

Park Rangers Gordon Boyd and Steve Underwood and Deputy Michael Lenihan headed down a trail that wound toward the beach. They came upon a husky man wearing a black cowboy hat, and a purple shirt. The shirt was soaking wet, and it clung to his beefy chest. But it didn’t have any stains on it at all. It was obvious to the investigators that the man had just washed it in the ocean.

They ordered the man to lean against a rock while they searched him. Lenihan pulled a hunting knife out of his belt and several lengths of rope from his pockets. The big man refused to answer any of their questions. He would only give his name: Dale C. Harrison, thirty-seven, from Othello, Washington. Othello is a farming community in eastern Washington, a ferry ride, a mountain pass and hundreds of miles away from Cape Alava. He refused to say why he was in the park.

They arrested Dale Harrison on suspicion of murder, handcuffed him and placed him in the back of a ranger’s car. Because Jane Costantino had been stabbed to death in a national park, her murder was a federal crime.

The FBI would continue the investigation. FBI Special Agent Paul Mack fed the name Dale C. Harrison into the computers to see if he was wanted. Surprisingly, he was not currently on any wanted lists, but he did have a record. His rap sheet showed a number of arrests for sex-related crimes dating back almost two decades. He had been convicted in 1962 of sexual molestation against two young girls. He had used a knife in that incident. He had served two years on yet another molestation charge and had been paroled from prison in 1965.

Yet Dale Harrison had apparently lived a “normal” life, too. In the fifteen years since he had been released from prison, he had married and fathered two children. He worked as a forklift operator and as laborer, and had a good employment record. Apparently, his predatory sexual fantasies had only been banked—until they erupted on a sunny day in July.

And Harrison had to have been a man consumed by lust and rage. The initial report from the Medical Examiner said that Jane Costantino had been stabbed six times in the chest with “hard, vicious thrusts.” The knife had pierced so deeply that the Medical Examiner believed Jane’s killer had to be a man of more than usual strength.

Dale Harrison fit that description. They believed he was the person who had shattered the forty-two years of serenity in the park. Forty-two years and never a murder.

The investigators doubted that Jane had known her killer. She was, almost certainly, a chance victim. Harrison had approached the other woman first. He hadn’t known her and he hadn’t known Jane either. When the first woman he accosted told him to “get lost,” he had turned around and seen Jane Costantino coming down the trail. When the agents and deputies checked on Jane’s background, they learned about her quest to ride a bike coast to coast. She had come so close to completing her journey. Just another fifth of a mile and she and her bike would have reached the ocean.

Instead, Jane had the tragic misfortune to cross paths with the man who pretended to be a
Playboy
photographer. She wouldn’t have believed that ruse for a minute. But a woman who had worked for years as a cocktail waitress would have become very adept at turning away men without offending them. Jane Costantino could think on her feet. She wasn’t a woman to panic and run. She would have tried to reason with an attacker—if he gave her a chance to do so. Why then had Jane Costantino been killed? Her clothing hadn’t been disarranged at all, so a sexual attack hadn’t even been begun. Had Jane said something to the man who approached her that had enraged him? It was possible that she had inadvertently made a remark that triggered terrible violence.

It looked more likely that Dale Harrison had been looking for a woman to kill. He had done it swiftly and violently. And silently. There was a great deal of both circumstantial and physical evidence that linked Harrison to the inexplicable murder of a stranger. His hunting knife matched exactly the wound measurements taken at Jane Costantino’s autopsy.

Tests of his wet purple shirt showed that the ocean had failed to wash away traces of human blood. The shirt fibers still held enough blood to test, and the blood matched Jane’s genotype.

A man whose appearance was as striking as Dale Harrison’s was not easily forgotten. Several people who had been in the park picked him from both a mugshot laydown, and from a line-up, positive that he was the same man they had seen on the beach trail. The first woman he accosted had no doubt at all that Harrison was the man who followed Jane Costantino as she hurried toward the ocean.

Dale Harrison was arraigned and held in lieu of $100,000 bail. When agents questioned him, he was adamant that he knew nothing at all about the murder of Jane Costantino. But then, faced with the hard evidence against him, he changed his story.
He
wasn’t the person who had killed her, he said confidentially. But he admitted that he had been a witness to her stabbing.

The suspect said that he had looked on helplessly as another man, a stranger to him, had grabbed his knife and plunged it into the woman with the bicycle.

The special agents glanced at each other. If ever they had heard a weak explanation, this was it. Here was a husky forklift operator, a man who should have been a formidable opponent. Why hadn’t
he
jumped to Jane’s defense? And even if he had been afraid to help her, how could he have turned his back on her as she lay bleeding to death? He could have at least gone for help.

They asked him what had happened to the “mysterious stranger.” It was Harrison himself who was found with a knife, the bloodied shirt, and the rope.

Dale Harrison insisted that he had run away because he was terrified of being falsely accused of murder. Yes, he admitted, he had a record for sex crimes, and that was what scared him.

“Who would have believed me—once they knew about my record?”

Who indeed? The investigators stared back at him. His story made no sense at all. They wondered if he was going for a split personality defense.
It wasn’t me; it was this guy who invades my body . . .

While Dale Harrison awaited trial for murder, he continued to insist that he was innocent. The investigators and special agents continued to check into his background, sure that they still didn’t know the entire story. They believed that Harrison had gone into the national park with a cruel mission in mind; he seemed to have no other reason for being there.

At length, they made contact with a man who said he was one of Harrison’s closest friends. Boyd Blaunt* nodded uncomfortably as they explained what they were looking for. Had Harrison ever talked about his former crimes? Had he ever spoken of something that might explain his vicious attack on a woman he had never seen before?

Boyd Blaunt said that he had. “He’s had some kind of fantasy—or obsession maybe you’d call it—for about a year and a half.”

There was another side to Dale Harrison, the hardworking, devoted family man—information that hardly surprised the FBI agents who had tried to categorize their suspect. Blaunt said that Dale had fashioned a very intricate and deadly fantasy. Once he first told Blaunt about it, Dale had brought it up many times—at least a dozen times, detailing every aspect of it to his friend.

“I didn’t take him seriously at first,” Blaunt said. Harrison’s plan was just too kinky and far out for anyone to really mean it. He had been turned on by the idea of finding a girl all alone in an isolated forest. Away from everybody else, he figured she would be helpless, and Harrison would have a rope handy to tie her up. Then, at his leisure, he would make a sex slave of her. His discipline and bondage fantasy included beating the captive woman with a belt.

The knife was part of it too, according to Blaunt. Dale Harrison said he would use a knife to force his victim to submit to “acts of degradation and rape.”

Boyd Blaunt said that Harrison had even gone so far as to urge him to join in the plan to find and attack a woman. “But I always refused. It was only after that girl died that I realized how serious he was.”

Blaunt’s information on Harrison’s compulsion was an exact blueprint of what had occurred on July 23. At least up to a point. But Jane Costantino had not been raped. Even alone in the forest, she wouldn’t have been helpless; she would have fought back when she realized that he was determined to tie her up. That must have shocked Dale Harrison, the investigators thought.

Instead of being passive and frightened, Jane would have argued and struggled with her captor. Panicked, full of rage and frustration, all of his planned fantasy in disarray, Dale Harrison had stabbed her with the knife that was supposed to be used only as a threatening tool. If she had submitted to the fantasy, would she have lived? No one will ever know.

There are no hard and fast rules on how to react to a rapist. Some will be scared off if a woman fights back and some will be enraged. Some will listen to quiet reasoning or to hard luck stories. More are turned off by women who vomit or claim to have AIDS, but there are no guarantees. Jane Costantino fell into a fatal synchronicity of time and place. She had the terrible luck to be on the same path that Dale Harrison was when he was acting out his fantasy.

Harrison went on trial in U.S. District Court in November 1980 for the stabbing death of Jane Costantino and a jury found him guilty. His defense team attempted to bring in a motion that would mitigate his sentence because he was mentally ill. According to defense attorney Dan Dubitsky, psychologists had indicated that “. . . something is there, but they can’t put their fingers on it.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney James Flush was adamant that Judge Donald Voorhees should not consider Harrison’s allegedly “exemplary life between 1965 and 1980 as an indication that he might be safe to be free. Either he has been very careful in committing crimes since 1965 or this is something that can occur [again] after a long period of time.”

On December 5, Judge Donald Voorhees denied the defense motion for a psychiatric study that might have allowed Harrison a chance for early parole, and sentenced him to life in prison.

Judge Voorhees spoke very firmly as he meted out Harrison’s life sentence, “In the light of his past history and this heinous crime . . . I am sentencing him to life imprisonment.”

Jane Costantino’s friends and relatives gathered at her funeral services for a last good-bye. An uncle from Long Island talked about her family’s continuing concern over the chances Jane had taken. “Naturally we worried about her, but you can’t dwell on those things. But we never thought of murder. Maybe being hurt in an accident, but not murder.”

Nor, quite probably, did Jane herself. She lived her short life to the fullest. And like Amelia Earhart, she took soaring chances and reaped many wonderful rewards before her life ended early; just as she had known it would.

Death is unexpected
for most murder victims, a small blessing, indeed. But at least they lived their lives without the sure knowledge that an angry executioner was waiting just around a corner. For one lovely young woman, her early death was as inevitable as the waning of the moon. She
knew,
but neither she nor any of her friends could stop it. She even knew who her killer would be, but that didn’t help her either.

It’s impossible to say just when the seeds of violence that threatened to destroy her were sown. The rage in her killer may have been a direct result of the war in Vietnam. Or it may have been a small kernel of hostility that had grown in him since he was a child.

Their story began as a love story, but it ended full of murderous hate and jealousy.