A Rage to Kill (36 page)

Senior Trial Deputy Jon Noll spoke for the prosecution, outlining an incredibly senseless and vicious crime and Brad Bass’s state of living death. There would be an agonizing question—a question that brought to mind the Karen Ann Quinlan case. The defense would certainly question whether twenty-one-year-old Brad Lee Bass had died as a result of an attack by the defendant, or because life support systems had been turned off.

The first witness for the prosecution was Brad Bass’s father, a man still wracked with grief over the inexplicable tragedy that had befallen his son. The agony of parents who have lost their children in a homicide is painful to observe, yet it is often necessary for them to go through the final ordeal of recalling their child’s life for a jury.

“Jackie” Emerson sat impassively at his trial as the prosecution presented its case. His whole posture was feminine and demure. He tiptoed daintily along on his three-inch high-heeled sandals during morning and afternoon breaks, seemingly oblivious to the stares he drew from startled onlookers. Occasionally, he patted his luxuriant wig with his painted nails or nodded to his friends in the gallery.

During the extensive newspaper coverage of his trial, the two major Seattle papers could not agree on how to refer to him. One called him “him” and “he.” The other referred to him as “her” and “she.”

Wes Hohlbein, a prominent criminal defense attorney, did not deny that Jackie had stabbed Brad Bass, but suggested he had done so only because he had been in fear of his life. Jackie took the stand in his own defense and explained his lifestyle to the jury.

He said that he had been raised as a female child and had worn girls’ clothes since the age of six. “All through life it has caused me difficulties but I can’t be no other way,” he explained.

As he had done for so many psychologists and psychiatrists, he detailed his plans for a sex change, and said he was taking female hormone treatments that made him feel more like a woman.

Emerson said he had lived in Seattle for about eight years, and had worked as a nurses’ aide during part of that time, but admitted under cross-examination that he had been arrested “a lot of times” for prostitution and also had convictions for grand larceny and shoplifting.

Regarding the morning of Friday, February 13, Emerson testified that he had stopped at Larry’s Take 5 at three
A.M.
to get food to take home and had met Brad Bass there for the first time. He said Bass had offered him $50 for an act of prostitution. He insisted that he never told Bass he was not a woman, and didn’t know why Bass became angry at him. He said that, when they got outside, Brad accused him of stealing money from him in the past.

Jackie fluttered his eyelashes at the jury as he said he had only been trying to avoid trouble and that Brad Bass had pulled off his wig, kicked him in the groin, and threatened him with a knife. He said he’d gone back into the Take 5 to try to get a knife or some weapon to protect himself but the cook stopped him. He returned to the fight, and twisted the knife out of Bass’s hand and “stuck it to him.”

“I was scared,” he testified huskily. “I was trying to defend myself. He was big. I was smaller than I am now,” Emerson confided.

Jackie’s testimony left gaping holes in the truth. His story that Brad Bass carried a knife differed from every other eyewitness’s testimony, and from the testimony of Brad’s father and brother, who had testified that Brad had never carried a knife in his life. And it differed a great deal from testimony that Brad Bass had tried to avoid a fight, had been reluctant to strike out at the enraged transvestite who was flailing at him.

It was very clear to those in the gallery that Jackie, a veteran of many mean streets and an expert at con games, had met a young man who was entirely out of his element. Only twenty-one, Brad Bass hadn’t even been experienced enough to recognize who Jackie Emerson really was, or the danger he was courting unaware. When he
did
recognize that Jackie wasn’t a woman at all, he had been disgusted and embarrassed and he’d wanted out. But Jackie wasn’t willing to shrug his shoulders and let it go. He had gone into a screaming, kicking tizzy. He had been “insulted” and he wanted revenge. Tragically, he got it.

The jury spent fifteen hours in deliberation pondering the case. When they returned with their verdict, it was clear they hadn’t believed Jackie’s version of what had happened that Friday the 13th. They found him guilty. As the jury was polled, three of the four women jurors brushed tears away. Later, one of them burst into uncontrolled sobs in the corridor outside the courtroom.

Beyond the guilty second-degree murder finding, the jury found Jackie Emerson guilty of using a deadly weapon in the commission of his crime. In Washington State, that meant a mandatory five-year sentence in addition to the sentence meted out for the murder charge.

The question naturally arose: where was Jackie Emerson going to be incarcerated? In a men’s prison or in Purdy, the Washington State facility for women? Jackie was neither fish nor fowl and a real puzzle for the Washington State Department of Corrections. Chuck Wright, District Administrator for that department, was the man who had to deal with this hot-potato decision.

Wright gathered all of Jackie’s records and studied the psychological profiles done earlier. He shook his head at the number of offenses and at the attempts to categorize a difficult subject. He could see the potential for problems. Jackie still had a complete complement of male equipment. How could he be put into a woman’s prison? On the other hand, could Wright recommend that Jackie be sent to a male prison—where he might well cause a riot?

After talking to Jackie himself and recognizing the sociopathic traits he had seen over and over again in prisoners referred to him, Chuck Wright turned to forensic psychiatrists and psychologists for help in his decision. Jackie was a transvestite, certainly, but he was first and foremost a murderer—or murderess—depending on your viewpoint, and Wright wasn’t taking any chances. He read Jackie’s statement to the court about Brad Bass’s murder many times, frowning at the lack of any compassion or insight there. “I’m sorry Bradley had to die,” Jackie had written, “but he became a threat to me when he pulled a knife on me and attempted to kill me. I also suffered cuts and whip lashes [
sic
] from this on my hand. I don’t feel guilty, but hate that my hand had to put a misorable [
sic
] man out of his missories [
sic
].”

One psychologist wrote after his examination of the peculiar prisoner, “Emerson fully identifies himself as a female . . .
Outline of Psychiatry
defines transsexualism as a deviancy where the person is physically normal but has a total aversion to his [or her] biological sex that dates from early childhood. Emerson began cross-dressing as a female at the age of six.”

After reviewing Jackie’s long psychological and criminal history, the doctor concluded, “Although well controlled most of the time, this individual is unable to tolerate frustration with respect to his sexual identity and has shown the propensity to react to the frustration with physical aggression . . . A history of deviancy such as evidenced by this individual would virtually preclude a sex change operation. For society’s protection, commitment of Emerson to . . . the Mental Health Unit at Monroe for further observation and evaluation regarding placement [is indicated].”

A highly respected forensic psychiatrist talked to Jackie Emerson next. Even he had to remind himself that it was not a woman he was evaluating, but a man. “This individual appeared to be quite convincingly feminine. Had I no information about his identity prior to the interview, my first impression probably would have been that this individual was a woman. Upon entering the examination room at the jail, he appeared to be somewhat flirtatious and attracted comments and glances from other inmates. His skin appeared to be smooth and relatively free of hair. The more subtle mannerisms during the interview were convincingly feminine. There was no evidence of severe anxiety or depression. There was surprisingly minimal fear regarding the ultimate disposition, although he was quite persuasive in presenting himself as a female and requesting the women’s prison.”

The psychiatrist had to decide whether Jackie suffered from primary transsexualism or merely a variant of the disorder. If the first was considered, Jackie’s active sex life as a
homosexual
made it doubtful. The doctor was more inclined to believe that Jackie had a secondary transsexual reaction. That is, that he was a homosexual with a long-standing cross-dressing fetish. There was no evidence that showed Jackie had any endocrine dysfunction. He was more likely to be a passive-role homosexual.

Such delineations might seem to be nit-picking. But they were vital when it came to selecting a prison for the man with the long eyelashes and sweet smile.

Jackie had been dumped by his male lover two years before Brad Bass was murdered, and the examining psychiatrist was convinced that his demands for a sex change operation had sprung from that rejection. “I think this is more of a transsexual reaction to severe rejection in a homosexual relationship,” he wrote. “This reaction is chronic, severe, and needs to be observed under psychiatric supervision to determine where the client eventually stabilizes. For this reason, I recommend that [he] be observed for an extended period of time in the mental health unit at Monroe Reformatory.”

He went on to surmise that—if Jackie turned out to be a true transsexual—he probably should be transferred to the women’s prison at Purdy. If Jackie proved to be only a man in women’s clothing, he probably should be kept in segregation at a male prison. “In no case,” the psychiatrist wrote, “should this individual be integrated into the general population of either Purdy or the male institutions.”

Whatever else Jackie Emerson might prove to be, he was clearly a man completely devoid of empathy or conscience. He had taken what he wanted all of his life, and Wright doubted that he would change. Armed with the suggestions of experts in deviant sexual behavior, Chuck Wright made his recommendation on July 14, 1976: “It is our recommendation that Mr. Jonathan Emerson be sentenced to the Department of Social and Health Services, and before he receives a specific institution, that he be evaluated at Monroe’s Mental Health Unit.”

Wright’s counsel was sound. But apparently no one listened to him. In less than two years, Jackie Emerson was a fixture in the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, the state’s largest prison for men. Although he could not wear his wigs and dresses in Walla Walla, Jackie managed to maintain his feminine persona with makeup, a velvet cap and sheer tank tops. He found a “husband,” and the two shared a cell. One of about a dozen transvestites in Walla Walla, Jackie was the most popular, and charged other inmates $30 for his “favors.” He had one protector after another, but, if he found himself in a tight situation, he used his own fists and muscles to fight back.

He no longer desired surgery, saying, “If God truly wanted me to be a female, he would have given me all the female equipment. I know I can be happy and loved without a sex change.”

Jackie Emerson’s sentence was akin to the old fable of Br’er Rabbit, who begged Farmer Brown not to “throw me in that cabbage patch,” which was, of course,
exactly
where he wanted to be.

Jackie served a long sentence in Walla Walla, and returned to western Washington when he was paroled. Today, he is an aging prostitute, nearly fifty years old, who continues to get into penny-ante scrapes with the law. Nothing has really changed in Jackie’s life, and the memory of a young man named Brad Bass is buried so deep in his consciousness that he scarcely recalls the rainy night in February twenty-three years ago.

Brad Bass would have been forty-four years old today. He left only a few bequests, but they still exist. The most important were the perfect kidneys and eyes he donated to help people he never knew. His father kept his 1957 Chevrolet pickup, testimony to the fact that Brad could do anything once he made up his mind to do it. What Brad might have accomplished with the rest of his life will never be known. He was fooled by an expert at disguise and he paid for it with his life.

“Show me a homicide
where we don’t pick up any meaningful physical evidence and I’ll show you a ‘loser,’ ” the Seattle police detective said vehemently. “It doesn’t matter how much circumstantial evidence we have, or what our gut feelings are, or even how much probable cause we have to arrest. You still have to show a jury something they can see.”

Although I have written articles and books about well over a thousand true crime cases, I have seen only a very few convictions on circumstantial evidence, and I know that detective was right. Homicide investigation has become a science involving physics, chemistry and ballistics, lie detector tests, computers, DNA, electronics and even laser beams. The world of television attorneys and their amazing courtroom coincidences is only fiction, after all. In real life, it’s more difficult.

One classic example of the need for physical evidence in proving a murderer guilty occurred in the courtroom of King County Superior Court Judge Stanley C. Soderland during a four-week trial in October 1976. Have a seat in the front row of the jury and weigh the evidence in this incredible case. What would
you
have decided?

O
ne of the most
disheartening cases Seattle homicide detectives ever faced began on Wednesday morning, June 2, 1976. True, there were moments when everything seemed to be going their way, but their successes were soon blunted. In the end, they would win only a
half
a victory, but it was enough to lock up a murderer who was infinitely dangerous to beautiful dark-haired young women.

Marcia Perkins lived in a unit on one of the upper floors of an apartment house on East Madison Street in Seattle, close to the funky and exciting Broadway District and Seattle University, and near what was known as “Pill Hill,” where many of the city’s hospitals were located. Marcia was twenty-four, beautiful and raven-haired. She was slender and tall, and she looked a lot like Cher with her waist-length hair and miniskirts, so much so that she got a lot of double takes—which amused her.

Marcia was a nurse at the University of Washington Hospital; she was estranged from her husband and in the process of beginning a new life. For the moment, her husband had temporary custody of their children and she was on very good terms with him. It wasn’t a bitter separation at all. In fact, they often dated. They had discovered that they got along better when they dated than they ever had when they were married.

Marcia had married very young, and, now, she didn’t limit her dating to her estranged husband. She had other friends, but she was in no particular hurry to get a divorce or to marry again. She was enjoying some of the freedom she’d missed as a teenager. She suspected that she might end up back with her husband, but first she needed some time to breathe.

Marcia’s husband attempted to reach her by phone many times over the Memorial Day weekend of May 29–30. At first, he’d gotten nothing but a busy signal; later, the phone had rung and rung and no one had answered. He hadn’t been particularly concerned because Marcia had told him she might take a trip over the holiday, but by Wednesday morning he still hadn’t found her home. He knew that she was supposed to be back in Seattle on Tuesday for her job at the hospital. He was beginning to feel a niggle of concern.

And so, on that Wednesday, he went to the apartment building where she lived before he headed to his own job. It was 7:30 in the morning when he knocked on the door of the manager’s apartment. “I’m worried about Marcia,” he said, trying not to be an alarmist. “I haven’t been able to reach her—I’m a little afraid she might be sick, or—”

The manager nodded, and reached for his passkey. Marcia was a pretty predictable lady, and it
was
strange that she wasn’t answering her phone. They knocked first, but got no answer. Still, they could hear a radio or television playing somewhere beyond the door. The manager put the key in the lock and turned it.

When the door swung open, and they stepped a few feet inside, they could see why Marcia hadn’t answered her phone. She lay spread-eagled between the kitchen and living room of her usually neat apartment. There was no question at all that she was dead. The shocked men quickly backed out and ran to call Seattle police.

The two patrol officers who responded confirmed that Marcia was dead—and that it looked as if she had been for several days, lying alone in the hot apartment. Along with their sergeant, the officers secured the premises with yellow crime scene tape, and stood by until detectives from the Homicide Unit arrived at 8:30.

Detective Sergeant Don Cameron’s crew—specifically Detectives Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo—were next up on call. They would do the crime scene search, a task that always took many hours as they gathered every possible bit of evidence they could find and photographed the scene. Ideally, they hoped to get to the scene of a murder as quickly as possible; time was their enemy. And, this time, they were running behind.

There was the faint odor of a death too long undiscovered in the apartment. Marcia Perkins lay just inside the entrance, her legs spread wide in the classic position of a rape victim. She wore only a short blue terry cloth robe and a bra, and both had been pushed up to her shoulders. Rigor mortis, the rigidity that comes soon after death, had come and departed, a natural process that took several days. They noted that there also was considerable skin slippage on the victim’s body because decomposition had begun.

Marcia had suffered a beating, although she had obviously put up a terrific fight against her attacker. Dark purple abrasions marred her face, throat and left knee. There were definite indications that she’d died of strangulation—manual strangulation—at the hands of a powerful killer. Her eyes showed the burst blood vessels (petechiae) that are characteristic of death from strangulation.

A pair of blue bikini panties lay crumpled in a nearby doorway, and oddly, a pair of women’s shoes with both straps broken—as if the wearer had been lifted forcibly out of them—rested close to the panties.

The motive for Marcia Perkins’s murder was apparent; she had clearly been the victim of a violent sexual attack. It would take an autopsy and laboratory tests to say whether rape had been committed.

There were signs in the apartment that seemed to say that Marcia had known her killer and had admitted him willingly to her home. Two cups with a teaspoon of instant coffee powder in them sat on the kitchen counter, and there was a pan of water on the stove, although the burner beneath was turned off. A partial bottle of rum sat on the counter. Since the kitchen was otherwise immaculate, it appeared that Marcia had been in the process of serving refreshments when someone had come up behind her, seized her boldly, and literally yanked her out of her shoes as the attack began.

Her killer had to have been a man possessed of tremendous strength. And cunning. The three homicide detectives noted that someone had made a concentrated effort to wipe away all traces of himself from the premises. There were no fingerprints on any of the smooth surfaces which ordinarily would be expected to reveal latent prints. Everything had been laboriously wiped clean. The killer had even swept up long strands of the victim’s black hair into a dustpan, although he hadn’t thrown them away. Maybe he’d realized there was nothing incriminating about the hair of a person who lived in this apartment. He had yanked the phone cord from the wall, although the phone was already off the hook.

All the drapes were tightly shut, closing the apartment off from the world outside, and the radio still played—loud enough to cover sounds in the apartment, but not loud enough to draw complaints from other tenants. It looked as if the killer had wanted to move around his victim’s home unseen and unheard.

A woman’s purse—probably Marcia’s—had been dumped on the floor. There was no wallet or money inside. For some obscure reason, the bedding from the victim’s bed was tangled on the living room floor. A steam iron and an empty Miller’s beer can were caught inside the bedding.

Benny DePalmo checked the only bathroom, and found the sink spotless, with bottles of perfume undisturbed on its ledge. But he
did
find a man’s ring on the counter behind the sink. That seemed strange; if the killer had gone to such efforts to wipe his presence away, why would he leave such a distinctive ring behind?

With so many questions, one thing was clear: Marcia Perkins had to have been been killed by someone she knew and trusted. The apartment house had an excellent security system. Marcia would have had to buzz open a downstairs lock to let anyone come up to her floor. Then, she had to let a visitor into the locked apartment itself. She was in her robe, and she had been preparing to serve coffee when she was attacked. A complete stranger wouldn’t have been so obsessive in wiping away his fingerprints. The killer must have had reason to believe he would be questioned and printed, and so he had tried to make certain he couldn’t be placed in her apartment near the time of her death.

But the investigators didn’t know enough about Marcia Perkins at this point to speculate who that might have been. Her estranged husband was outside with the apartment manager, and he seemed to be genuinely grieving. Who else was there in Marcia’s life whom she trusted enough to let into her apartment?

Duane Homan and Benny DePalmo attended the postmortem examination of Marcia Perkins. Their original supposition that she had died by manual strangulation had been correct: the cricoid cartilage was fractured and there were hemorrhages in the strap muscles on either side of her neck. There were no ligature marks that would have been left by a rope or noose, but there were bruises where fingers and thumbs had exerted intense pressure.

In addition, there were many, many scratches and lacerations on Marcia’s body; she had fought her killer like a tiger. But she had lost. She
had
been brutally raped and sodomized, and there were tears and contusions in her genital organs. Purple teeth marks encircled her right nipple. Her killer had been a man of great strength and, certainly, possessed with terrible anger.

The medical examiner pointed to the right portion of the victim’s forehead and explained, “This wound was administered with a blunt instrument. This was a stunning wound, but there is no fracture.”

The two detectives headed out to interview Marcia’s neighbors. Whoever had killed her had a running start. Even the time of death was not a certainty at this point, although it had been at least three days earlier. Along with Detectives Bill Baughman and George Marberg, they began a canvass of the apartment house where Marcia Perkins had lived and its twin adjacent building.

Some people seem to remember every strange noise or out-of-place person in their neighborhoods; others apparently go through life wearing earplugs and blinders. The quartet of investigators hoped to find the former.

The building next to Marcia’s was occupied by patients or families of patients receiving cancer treatment at the nearby Fred Hutchinson Cancer Clinic. Because that was why they were in Seattle, many of the occupants were away from their apartments most of the daytime hours, and the detectives would have to check back several times to make contact with them. Also, a lot of people had taken advantage of the three-day holiday weekend and left town for Memorial Day.

But there
were
some illuminating statements coming from the victim’s neighbors. The manager of Marcia’s building remembered now that someone had buzzed his intercom between four and six o’clock on Saturday morning, May 29. “It woke me up,” he said. “I answered and I talked to a man who sounded drunk. He asked for Marcia and I told him he’d made a mistake and to buzz the correct apartment.”

The manager had been annoyed enough to stay on the intercom to listen in on the ensuing conversation, and he heard the man talking to Marcia. He was pleading very insistently to come in. “He was saying, ‘Please, little sister, let me in.’ ”

“Did she buzz him up?” Bill Baughman asked.

“Not at first—but she finally agreed to unlock the door when the guy kept begging.”

He had apparently stumbled up to her apartment. That is, the manager had heard some faltering steps clumping up the stairway, but he hadn’t looked out to see who the man was.

The manager’s apartment was just across the hall from Marcia’s quarters, and he could have peeked out the door, but he wasn’t that curious; he was sleepy and went back to bed. However, he told Marberg and Baughman that the occupants of the building next door would have been in a better spot to hear what went on in Marcia’s apartment. “Their windows face the same breezeway as Marcia’s. It’s almost like being in the same room in the summer when the windows are open . . .”

And that proved to be true. One of the residents in the next-door building told the detectives she had heard a woman’s voice in a “loud argument” about 6
A.M.
“There were doors slamming and banging, all right,” she recalled. “It went on for about three minutes.” But she hadn’t gone to the window and looked over into Marcia’s apartment. This was a live-and-let-live neighborhood where people didn’t poke their noses into their neighbors’ business.

Still, one of the women who lived in Marcia’s apartment house had also been been awakened on the morning of the 29th by someone at the intercom just outside the front door. It was practically under her bedroom window. She told the detectives that the man had first said he was the police. “But then he laughed, and I heard him say that he was Marcia’s brother. I could hear him talking first to the manager and then to Marcia.”

As it happened, a number of people who lived in the apartment buildings had seen a stranger about midnight on Friday night. One occupant recalled seeing a stocky man in a blue denim jacket and cap at the entrance to the building where Marcia lived. “He was pushing all the buttons trying to get in, but it looked to me as though nobody was buzzing him up.”

The apartment manager said that Marcia Perkins had a number of visitors—men she dated or knew as friends, and a woman with three children who seemed to be a good friend. He thought Marcia was dating a quiet, well-mannered man on a regular basis, although he had not seen him at the apartment in the past week. He was not aware of any trouble between Marcia and her boyfriend, or anyone else for that matter. She was a good tenant.

On June 3, Detectives Benny DePalmo and Duane Homan got two interesting bits of information. The victim’s grieving estranged husband called to report something that seemed a little strange to him. A man named Melvin Jones had dropped in on him at ten o’clock the previous night to discuss Marcia’s murder. Jones had fervently denied any involvement in the pretty nurse’s death. In fact, it seemed to her husband that he was almost protesting too much. He went to great pains to explain that he hadn’t seen Marcia since Thursday, May 27, when he’d stopped by to pick up a stereo set that belonged to him. “He told me he hadn’t stayed longer than fifteen minutes,” the widower said. “He insisted on leaving me his phone number—just in case I needed him for anything.”